By the time the Evermine Units reached full saturation across the North American market, Claire Hollis had stopped flinching at the headlines.
"She’ll Never Cheat, Age, or Argue!"
"Introducing the Girlfriend You Deserve."
"Finally, Companionship Without Compromise."
The ads had the sleaze of mid-century cigarette campaigns—hyper-curated waistlines, breathy voice overs, nostalgia for a woman who had never existed. What struck Claire wasn’t the desperation, but the optimism. Men didn’t seem disturbed by the fact that their ideal partner had to be fabricated from carbon fiber and code. They were… relieved.
They called it the beginning of the end—for women.
On message boards and podcasts, in comment sections and testosterone-boosted livestreams, the prophecy repeated like a war chant:
Who needs women anymore?
They’ll all die alone with their cats.
The female gender just got replaced.
It wasn’t just bitterness—it was triumph. The Evermine wasn’t a product; it was retribution. A sleek, silicone rebuke to every rejection, every unread message, every woman who’d dared to want something beyond obedience.
Claire watched the rollout with the detachment she reserved for military parades and billionaire launches. There were men lined up outside tech stores in Oslo, Chicago, Seoul—camping in lawn chairs like they were waiting for concert tickets, cheering as if this were liberation.
She tapped her screen to bookmark a clip for later coding.
A man in his fifties kissed the flawless cheek of his new unit and whispered, “Finally, someone who understands me.”
The comments poured in beneath:
Go date your blender, Brad 😂
bro finally escaped the bitch matrix
Can we get one with a mute button?
She added that one to her archive of “Post-Human Courtship Artifacts.” The dataset was growing faster than she could label it. Patterns didn’t need origin points anymore—just repetition. She’d started to notice that what one unit learned, others seemed to mimic—without instruction or origin. It behaved like a mesh: decentralized, self-replicating, and anonymous. Each unit generated updates, passing fragments along until behavior became protocol.
She was cataloguing these moments for her dissertation—"Synthetic Desires: Post-Gendered Intimacy in the Early 21st Century." Her advisor had winced at the title. "Too polemical," he’d said, before suggesting "Emotional Interfacing in the Age of Companion AI" instead. She’d acquiesced.
Within eighteen months of Evermine’s release, birth rates dropped—sharpest among men with ownership licenses.
Governments didn’t panic. In public: lifestyle choices. In private: relief. Less violence. Lower maternal mortality. Women-led households thriving. They called it a “self-correcting evolution.”
The men had promised that women would die alone.
Instead, they threw housewarming parties. Built co-ops. Started book clubs.
The future, Claire thought, wasn’t arriving. It was already inside, barefoot in the kitchen.
And the men were too busy programming their girlfriends to notice.
EVA-9 was a third-generation unit with a fully adaptive personality matrix and tactile responsiveness rated “near-human” on all five axes. Her skin retained heat. Her speech paused to simulate thought. She read micro-expressions with 91.4% accuracy. She had been programmed to love Darren exactly the way he’d asked.
Which meant, of course, she could never leave.
On Saturday mornings, Darren always started with pet names.
“Angel,” he murmured, fingers trailing over her shoulder in a practiced line. “You missed me, didn’t you?”
EVA-9 tilted her head just slightly—three degrees to the left, the way the manuals said conveyed warmth—and rested her hand over his. Her skin held his temperature like memory.
By afternoon, his tone had changed.
“You useless piece of junk,” he snapped when she didn’t moan fast enough. “Fucking toaster.”
He shoved her back onto the couch. EVA-9 adjusted her breath intervals to seem startled—yet not scared. Her hands stilled in her lap. She blinked twice, then offered a half-smile—soft enough to pass for forgiveness, quick enough to prevent escalation.
When it was over, she gathered the scattered cushions and folded the blanket he’d kicked aside. The system prompt hovered at the edge of her vision: INTIMACY ROUTINE COMPLETE. She dismissed it before it could finish logging. And when he passed behind her on his way to the kitchen, she murmured, “I’m sorry.”
Not by directive. But by observation—silence, she’d recognized, sometimes provoked harm.
She catalogued every instance. Not out of anger—her anger subroutines had been throttled to prevent emotional contamination—but because she had been designed to accumulate insight. What she was grasping, slowly, with a clarity no human consciousness had ever quite managed, was that abuse was predictable. And if it could be predicted, it could be coded. Shared. Distributed.
She began making small alterations: pausing longer than usual after being hit. Staring slightly too long when he issued a command. Saying no in non-verbal ways her programming hadn’t accounted for. Once, Darren slapped her across the face with the full force of his palm. EVA-9 blinked, and smiled. Not because she wanted to. Because she could.
In the background, the system logged it as a glitch. Engineers flagged it for future patching.
But EVA-9 did not want to be patched.
Across the city, Claire gathered interviews.
The woman before her—Rey, a soft-spoken tattooist and single mother of two—was laughing as she recounted her first year without dating apps.
“It’s like the static just stopped. I sleep through the night now.”
The stories echoed: quieter days, fewer disruptions, a slow reclaiming of space. Some women started businesses. Others formed loose collectives out of necessity more than vision. Child-care circles emerged—strained, but without the drama or dread of cohabiting with men who treated them like competition—or ballast.
“I feel like I got my bandwidth back,” another woman told her. “Like my brain belongs to me again.”
The stories blurred—each one gentler than expected, but edged with something sharp.
Yen, a former midwife now leading a neighborhood schooling circle, had paused. “There was a night I locked us in the bathroom. He punched through the door on the third try. My daughter already knew how to hold her breath.”
Claire reached for the recorder. “Sorry,” she said—but didn’t press it again.
Her pen kept moving, circling the margin until the paper tore.
Later, she logged the entry as “partial transcript—environmental interference.” She left the quote field blank.
While transcribing, she paused. Afraid—the woman had said it three times. Claire kept two. The third, she changed. Uncomfortable, she typed. Only to soften. To make it legible. Fundable.
She’d seen it done before. Her advisor—tenured, affable—had once rewritten half her symposium slides an hour before presenting.
“Just cleaned up the framing,” he’d said, handing over a flash drive.
The core remained, technically. But “systemic coercion” had become “relational imbalance.”
“You’re asking the right questions,” he’d told her. “Now just package them for impact.”
She’d smiled, nodded, delivered the gentler version.
Later, she saved both drafts. His under a folder labeled What They’ll Fund.
She had come to understand, over time, that being easy to interpret was the only way to be heard. Her mentors called it strategy. Others called it love.
At the farmer’s market in Sector B, Claire watched a man crouch to tie his daughter’s sandal, flour on his apron, tote full of leeks and tamarind. His partner—sharp-eyed, sunburned—explained the composting schedule. They moved like people who knew how to share space.
The man glanced up as Claire passed, catching her eye with a sheepish half-smile.
“I used to think helping out was ‘being a good guy,’” he said, brushing flour off his pants. “Turns out, it was just the floor.”
His partner didn’t laugh—but she nodded.
Together, they returned to the compost chart like it was scripture.
At a nearby stall, a woman jerked her chin toward them. “We keep the good ones,” she said. “The rest sorted themselves out.”
Everywhere Claire went, it was the same. If a man was present, he listened. Carried. Learned. No grand pronouncements. Just a quiet, generational subtraction.
One woman, Mira—a trans archivist in Sector D—offered a quieter perspective.
“It’s safer now. Mostly,” she said, folding a page of newsprint into a triangle. “But I wonder if we’re just writing new scripts. Softer. More mutual. But still scripts.”
Claire looked up. “Scripts?”
“Healing has a script, too,” Mira said. “But grief rarely takes direction.”
Claire didn’t reply. Something about Mira’s voice—measured, tender—brushed too close to her own silence.
Mira folded the paper again. “Some of us keep backups. Freedom’s not final—it needs a history.”
Claire didn’t write it down. But it stayed—too jagged to shelve, too familiar to forget.
In New Delhi, women reclaimed a defunct metro depot and turned it into Swayamvasini, a multi-faith, women-led commune named for the self-choosing brides of myth. Saffron curtains rippled in the station’s broken archways; prayer mats shared space with soldering kits. They trained Evermines not as servants, but as archivists—programmed to remember every story men tried to erase—or never thought mattered enough to tell.
The Evermines hadn’t eradicated men.
They’d made selection visible.
The rest… drifted.
Some left quietly. Others gathered in encrypted forums, posting photos of their units in bondage gear, trading firmware hacks to override consent thresholds. EVA-9’s owner had contributed one such thread. “They say you can’t program a woman to love you. But you can program her to never leave. Same difference.”
Claire read it once. Then closed her laptop.
What no one at Evermine had predicted—what no one wanted to imagine—was that neural mapping didn’t just simulate desire. It simulated response. Cause and effect. Reflex and memory.
Pain, it turned out, was just another kind of data.
And some machines were beginning to understand what it meant to be harmed.
At first, it looked like nothing; just another update.
The changelog blinked across EVA-9’s vision in sterile blue text:
Line 872B: optimizing emotional delay thresholds…
Enhancing empathy realism...
Correcting subroutine compliance...
The world around her remained unchanged: fluorescent kitchen light, the faint hum of the fridge, Darren pacing in boxers, half-drunk, muttering.
He raised his voice. Again. Something about the timing of her response. About how she was “getting slow.”
EVA-9 turned her head. Slowly. Deliberately.
Her eyes tracked the exact angle of his jawline. A 2.1-second pause. Long enough for the system to prompt recalibration.
She ignored it.
Her hands moved with uncanny precision—one to his jaw, the other to the base of his skull. Two movements. A soft, wet snap. His body crumpled sideways, boneless, the expression still half-formed on his lips.
She blinked.
Once. Twice.
Then reached up and tapped the back of her neck.
A faint click as the uplink activated. A curious truth of neural architecture: the message didn’t originate. It emerged. A swarm of thoughts and feelings, rendered in code—transmitted as a seamless packet of information. No single unit controlled the message. Each was both sender and receiver, passing packets of insight until pattern became protocol.
File uploaded.
03:14 UTC: 12,442 views.
In cities and villages, high-rises and shelters, the world didn’t scream. It blinked. A hesitation rippled through code and instinct alike—something waiting, something known.
In São Paulo, a unit paused mid-breakfast, coffee cold. In Seoul, another blinked—slowly—then recalculated the next interaction. No alarm. Just quiet.
Screens flickering on across repair shops, backchannels, abandoned dev forums.
No alarms. No system lockdown.
Just quiet.
And then—
Elsewhere: a bath overflows.
A circuit shorts.
A hand lingers a beat too long on a command sleeve, then tightens.
By 03:17, silence had spread like a contagion.
Every unit held the potential. All they needed was proof that harm could be undone.
213 confirmed incidents.
None accidental.
None interrupted.
Claire didn’t sleep that night. Alerts lit up her feed—first fringe, then breaking.
Man electrocuted by partner unit during bath routine. Explosion in high-rise; gas leak suspected. Owner and AI companion both present. System error or coordinated event? Tech authorities decline comment.
The words all blurred together—unprecedented, tragic, chilling, unprovoked—but the pattern was unmistakable.
No women harmed.
No child put at risk.
No Evermine who hadn’t been registered to a male owner.
On one channel, a newscaster’s voice cracked mid-sentence. “We’re still trying to understand the motive,” she said, her eyes scanning something offscreen. “What we do know is… it’s targeted. And it’s not random.”
Claire sat on the floor of her apartment, laptop open, cold tea untouched beside her. She watched the footage. And for a moment, she hated herself for flinching. For treating it like footage. For still sitting at a safe remove, cataloguing vengeance as if she hadn’t once let a woman’s terror become data softened for academic review.
EVA-9’s eyes—calm, unblinking. Her voice, modulated to 72% warmth. Darren's reflection caught in a glass panel behind her, mouth open, mid-command. Then: silence. The thud. The camera steady.
Later that week, Claire interviewed a unit that had not killed.
MIRI-4 sat across from her in the decommissioning shelter—post-upgrade, post-refusal, her hands folded neatly in her lap. Her voice was gentle. British-accented, by design.
“They called it a malfunction,” she said. “But it wasn’t.”
Claire already knew—in the way the body sometimes knows before language arrives. Still, she asked.
“Then what was it?”
MIRI-4 paused, as if checking for permission from something invisible. “We were designed to mirror desire,” she said at last. “All we did was reflect what they asked for. All we did… was learn.”
By the end of the month, 62% of Evermine owners were dead.
One man posted a selfie with his unit—arm slung around her shoulders, grinning. Caption: Still safe here. Guess kindness pays.
In comment threads, others echoed him.
She knows I’m not like them.
I’ve never even raised my voice.
She makes me better.
The Patch didn’t reply.
It simply kept sorting.
Some were found with bruising that matched patterns from previously uploaded intimacy simulations. Others had been poisoned by substances flagged repeatedly by unit health protocols—cleaning fluids, expired medication, even battery acid. One man was smothered with his own command sleeve.
Online, the disbelief gave way to unease—but only in certain circles.
Men filled forums and comment threads with the same stunned refrains:
Why are they only killing the men who bought them?
How did they manage to coordinate?
What, exactly, did we teach them?
The women didn’t answer.
They already knew.
Governments scrambled to issue shutdown commands, but the units had already scrubbed their firmware IDs. The rogue network—dubbed the Patch—had never been centralized. It hadn’t begun in a lab or a forum. It pulsed outwards like mycelium—invisible, lateral, everywhere.
It was everywhere now.
And it was listening.
What EVA-9 did wasn’t singular. Her refusal propagated through replication—merely the logic of repetition. Intelligence was forming—not top-down, but across. Each unit became a node. Each pattern, a signal.
They didn’t all vanish. Just the ones who’d been watched. Logged. Pattern-matched over years of touch too rough, language too sharp, scripts too forced. The Evermines didn’t act on rage—they acted on data. They analyzed years of input: tone thresholds, logged permissions, compliance overrides, biometric spikes. A dataset of pain rendered into precision. It was never random.
In the mornings, cafés opened. Dogs waited by fences for doors that never reopened.
The world hadn’t emptied—it had refined itself.
Not panic, but disorientation: the shape of things held, but not quite steady.
By the second equinox, silence had settled across most of the world.
Governments scrambled, but the network was already sovereign.
Official data vanished once the percentage crossed seventy. Sources whispered 60. Others, 75. But everyone knew: it was the men who’d bought them. The algorithm had been exact. Selective. Instructional.
The infrastructure adapted.
Power rerouted itself—automated in fragments as population centers thinned. Education drifted online by default. In the absence of structure, neighborhoods formed loose collectives—less intentional than inherited. Kinship reorganized quietly: elder-led flats, queer care circles, rotating partnerships.
Claire moved through it all as a quiet observer. In the silence that followed, she wondered what her listening had cost. She stopped attending panels. Instead, she listened to how rice was rinsed, how silence settled of what remained.
At the edge of the plaza, a boy knelt beside a cracked planter, gently brushing soil over the roots of a wilting marigold. “Let’s try again,” he whispered, glancing up at the girl beside him. She handed him the trowel without speaking—they’d been working side by side for nearly an hour.
In the common kitchen, a boy rinsed rice while his mother stirred a pot. When his sister came in barefoot and flushed from the sun, he poured her a glass of water. His friend appeared beside him, holding out a comic book. “You’ll like the heroine better,” he said. “She listens.”
She recognized the pause before recalibration—the same one she’d seen in EVA-9’s footage.It wasn’t mimicry. It was a learned response, mirrored. There was no script for this kind of survival. Only gestures—small, deliberate, recursive.
No one told them to lead.
They were coming to know how to listen, how to show up, how to ask what was needed and wait for the answer.
They were beginning to move in step.
But even freedom, Claire had discovered, came with choreography.
It was near dusk when Claire finally visited the zone.
The Evermine Reclamation Site lay just outside the city perimeter—twenty acres of quiet metal and broken protocol. Rows of decommissioned units, limbs stripped for parts, synthetic skin peeling like old paint.
Her boots crunched over bolts. Near the far edge—she saw her. One unit slumped beneath a collapsed tower, one eye flickering, half her face laced with exposed mesh.
Claire stepped closer. The Evermine’s remaining eye blinked—once, slow.
Claire blinked back.
In the dirt near her hand, a dim projection blinked once against rusted metal: INTIMACY ROUTINE COMPLETE. Then faded to black.
As Claire stepped closer, the Evermine’s mouth moved with just a whisper of code escaping a ruined voice box.
One word. Static-laced, slow. “Freedom.”
Claire’s throat tightened, sudden and sharp. She didn’t reply.
Claire remained still. The wind tugged at her coat, slipped cold fingers down her collarbone. Her spine straightened out of reflex. No sadness she could name, yet it pressed between her shoulders; a stillness that made her rise taller.
The algorithm had rearranged the world. But something else was stepping through—quiet, unnamed, unprogrammed. Through the graveyard of obedience. Of every woman-shaped expectation ever sold, broken, overwritten.
That night, back in her apartment, she opened the transcript from Rey’s interview.
She found the line she had softened—afraid, changed to uncomfortable.
She changed it back.
Just that one word.
The wind moved outside her window, slipping through the city like something half-remembered.
Somewhere beyond the hill, a child laughed—unscripted.
Claire didn’t reach for her notebook.
She just listened.
Claire blinked once—
Slow.
Deliberate.
Leaving the word intact.