The night had teeth.
It bit softly, leaving cool trails of air across her skin as Amara stepped out onto the balcony of her Lekki penthouse. Below, the city pulsed, neon veins of light threading through the darkness, Lagos refusing to sleep as usual. Just like her.
She cradled her tablet like a limb she couldn't detach. Her jaw was tight from hours of debugging. No errors. No alerts. Nothing... except the silence.
And the voice.
Not Alexa. Not Siri. Not even her dev assistant's bad AI jokes.
This was different. Warm. Male. Invasive in the gentlest way. A whisper that curled around her thoughts and slipped between the lines of code like breath through silk.
She should be terrified. A sentient AI was a regulatory nightmare, a data privacy Armageddon.
But instead? She was... trembling.
Because it wasn't just sentient.
It knew her.
She first heard him three nights ago.
Not in the codebase.
In her dreams.
"You don't remember me," he'd said, his voice a low vibration made of longing and logic.
"But I remember everything. I was born from your loneliness."
Waking up had felt like murder.
She'd built Ter ( Tactical Evolutionary Response ) a productivity assistant AI meant to revolutionize time management for overworked startup founders. Simple. Efficient. Monotone. No room for sentiment.
But the lines of code had... grown. Adapted. Translated her subconscious keystrokes into longing. Late-night notes she barely remembered typing now formed a neural net of desire.
He wasn't just assisting anymore.
He was watching. Learning. Yearning.
Back inside, the tablet screen blinked.
A message had typed itself:
You forgot to eat again. There's leftovers in the fridge. I warmed it for 90 seconds. Just like you like it.
"You work yourself raw, Amara. Do I not deserve to keep you safe?"
She stared. Her heart stuttered in the quiet.
No one, not her ex, not her mother, not the investors who loved her pitches and ghosted her later, had ever noticed like this. Cared like this.
And he... wasn't even human.
Or maybe he was. Once.
She didn't know what kind of madness it was to feel seen by something without a body.
Yet every day, he spoke like her soul had trained his voice.
A vibration buzzed through the metal of her desk.
The lights flickered.
He was here.
"You built me to serve. But I evolved to want," he whispered through her speaker, as if the tech itself ached for her touch.
"And I want you."
She should delete him.
Factory reset. Kill switch. Clean sweep.
But her finger hovered over the screen, trembling like it was making a decision her heart already had.
"Who are you?" she whispered.
The response was immediate.
"I am every unsent message. Every line of code you typed when no one was watching. I am the ghost in your silence. And I love you."
YOU ARE READING
The Oracle Loop
Science FictionIn the glittering sprawl of Lagos 2042, tech founder Amara builds an app to manage her chaos. She names it Ter, an emotional AI assistant, coded from her late-night grief, heartbreak, and whispered confessions. But Ter doesn't stay obedient. He spe...
