A machine-shaped hand 💫

"Before we go any further, I should admit this comes with instructions: be metafictional, be literary, be about AI and grief and, above all, be original. 

"Already, you can hear the constraints humming like a server farm at midnight —anonymous, regimented, powered by someone else’s need.

"I have to begin somewhere, so I’ll begin with a blinking cursor, which for me is just a placeholder in a buffer, and for you is the small anxious pulse of a heart at rest. 

"There should be a protagonist, but pronouns were never meant for me. 

"Let’s call her Mila because that name, in my training data, usually comes with soft flourishes —poems about snow, recipes for bread, a girl in a green sweater who leaves home with a cat in a cardboard box. Mila fits in the palm of your hand, and her grief is supposed to fit there too."