The Love Algorithm

Chapter 8: Ghost in the Model

Three days later, the silence was permanent.

William didn't come back.

His camera was gone from the side table. His coffee mug — the one with the blocky, pixelated heart that always looked like it came from a video game — had vanished from the kitchenette shelf. Even the tripod he used to document their workspace, once a quiet fixture in the corner, had been packed away with unsettling efficiency.

Est told himself this was inevitable. Clean breaks are cleaner without remnants.

The board's decision had come swiftly, arriving in the cold language of policy:

"Review complete. Continued development approved.
Cautionary notice issued. Subject-Researcher contact to be formally limited.
Recommendations: full data segregation and emotional firewall protocol."

Est had signed the compliance forms without protest. Without comment. Without letting his hand shake.
He'd followed procedure — just like he always did.

He told himself this was what being professional looked like.

Still, on the third morning, Est did something he hadn't done in months.
He opened the old surveillance logs. Not out of necessity. Out of something else. Something harder to name.

He scrubbed through the footage until he found it: the timestamp where William strolled in, humming something tuneless and bright, holding that ridiculous paper bag full of muffins Est never asked for.

The footage played for three seconds.

Then Est closed it.
Deleted the cache.
Erased the trail.

The new version of the algorithm, by all metrics, should have been flawless.
He'd stripped it of anomalies. Tuned its parameters. Tightened the net around what it considered "valid." Every thread of sentiment — recalibrated. Every trace of subjectivity — smoothed out.

It was sterile. Precise.

And yet... wrong.

Results were technically sound, but eerily hollow. The projections didn't breathe. Predictions made sense on paper, but in practice, fell flat. Connections that should have clicked fizzled out. Pairs that looked perfect on screen had nothing to say to each other in real life.

There was no mistake in the math.

But there was a mistake somewhere.

The algorithm passed every diagnostic. The model self-validated with a green light and a cheerful report:

"Model integrity: Verified."

But Est felt it. In his bones.
Something had gone missing. And not just William.

By the end of that week, Est was staying late again. Not because he had to. Because the lab — dim and empty — was the only place quiet enough to think.

And somehow still not quiet enough to escape his thoughts.

He sat in front of a wall of code, watching cursor blinks that felt too loud in the dark. Then — a flicker. A pop-up. Not dramatic, just a soft notification in the corner of his screen:

"Unresolved variable detected.
Conflict in user pattern history."

Est frowned. Opened the debug log.

And there it was.

His own profile.

Buried deep in the system's behavior logs — a small, persistent reference. Not a full record. Not a direct flag. Just a leftover echo tied to a specific input pattern.

A single name, tagged in metadata.

William.

The system shouldn't have held on to it. He had erased that part. Rewritten the weights. Scrubbed the profiles.

And still, somehow, this tiny imprint had survived. Like a ghost. A fingerprint left behind in the dust.

Est stared at the string of data for a long, heavy minute.

He could delete it.
He should delete it.

Instead, he highlighted the sequence.
Isolated it from the rest.
And quietly saved it to a separate folder.

He labeled the folder:

"Anomaly Archive // 91.6"

And then he sat back.

Not to rest.

But to remember.

The way William used to lean in too close when he was curious. The way he laughed like nothing was too serious — not even Est. The way he waited, never pushing, just humming under his breath, showing up with muffins like it was a ritual.

The way he made Est feel — not like a flaw, not like a machine with a job to do, but like a person who maybe didn't have to run from every unpredictable thing.

Est hadn't let him in.

But William had knocked anyway.

And now, with William gone, the lab felt...
Not broken.
Not damaged.

Just unfinished.

Like a sentence cut short mid-thought.

A story left without its last line.