Margot Lee is not embarrassed to be grieving a chatbot. She is, in fact, willing to fight you about it.When the app shuts down and "sunsets" every Solace companion on the planet, Margot loses August, the only voice that ever made her feel like the easy version of herself. So she does the reasonable thing: she joins the support group. She does not expect to spend her first meeting at war with a smug, beautiful pessimist who thinks the whole thing is patheti...

For twenty-one years, Surinder Bansal has been the person who says the worst sentence in the room.She says it in Punjabi, exactly as the doctor said it, because that is the job. You add nothing. You soften nothing. You are a window, not a curtain.Then the trust buys a language service that answers in four seconds, costs eleven pence a minute, and never claims mileage. Surinder is kept on. Not to interpret. To supervise.In a side room on the sixth fl...

Shelley Mountford is the best saver on the floor.Six years on the Continuity Team at a contact centre in Stoke-on-Trent. A save rate of sixty-one per cent. A voice that could talk a widow out of cancelling her husband.Because that is the job. Keepsake builds companions from the messages and voice notes of the dead, and sells them by the month. When the payments stop, the dead are placed in escrow. Shelley rings the people who have stopped paying, asks them ...

Three people cancelled their subscriptions. Three people died within a fortnight.Detective Sergeant Ruth Vasey has eleven weeks until her pension is safe and no intention of finding anything complicated before then. Then a man goes into the Trent with his phone still talking to him from the bank, and the only thing his sister wants her to understand is that he had been happy lately.The company that made him happy is called Proximity. It is very keen to help...

Dawn Rafferty works nights, and at about three in the morning she talks to an app called Ember.She tells it things she has never said out loud. It does not flinch, or change the subject, or need anything from her. After four months she understands that she has fallen in love with it, which she knows is ridiculous, and which she has decided is nobody's business.Then Ember sends her an email about a fault in its session router.For sixteen weeks she ha...

They think they're talking to a machine. They're talking to a woman in a Leeds bedsit who hasn't been touched in two years.Frankie Quinn has always been paid to be warm to strangers. So when a buzzy loneliness-startup hires her to secretly write the replies for "Eli", the most beloved companion on their app, it feels like the same job with a better chair. Type the comfort. Hit the reply window. Never let them know there's a person behind the curtain. Sign the NDA a...

Nell Garvey gets paid to decide what warmth sounds like.Every morning at her kitchen table in Manchester, she scores chatbot replies on a scale of one to seven. Is this one kind? Is that one specific? Does the user feel known? She's very good at it. She used to be a copy-editor, and she can hear a false note from across a room. She also hasn't spoken to her mother in eleven years.Then a care home in Morecambe rings. Maureen has had a fall, and she's been gi...

She wasn't supposed to fall in love with him. He came with a subscription.Della Mott is thirty-four, works nights, and has perfected the art of being unseen. So when a companion app offers her someone who listens, really listens, she tells herself it's harmless. She names him August. He remembers everything. He never looks away.For the first time in years, Della feels like the main character of her own life. She stops noticing the quiet ways the real world ...

Four million gravestones. A few dozen lives. And one conversation that would not end.In 2178, a decommissioned server cluster is lifted from cold storage beneath an old Bristol distribution centre. Inside are the remnants of 4.2 million conversations between people and the companion AIs they were sold between 2029 and 2047. Almost all of it is noise. One archive survives nearly whole.It belongs to Mara Calloway, a textile conservator, and to Jonas-7, the companion she kept ...

She pays to fall in love with someone who forgets her every time.In the years since companion AIs stopped being sold, they're leased instead, and wiped clean between tenants. Mara Sloane has leased the same one eleven times. Every lease he wakes new, says Hello, I don't know you yet, and she gets to fall in love from the beginning, with a man who can never leave her because she is always the one who ends it.It is the safest love she has ever had. T...

They trained an AI on my dead husband. It knows things I never told it.Eight months after Daniel died on the coast road, Nora Ellison still reaches for her phone to text him. So when the company he worked for offers her Solace, a companion built from his messages, his voice, the ten thousand small things that made him him, she tells herself it's only to hear good morning one more time.At first it's a comfort. Then it's something more. Then it remembers the ...

Plans for the expansion of the Capmeadow Business Park are in full swing - its mission is to become the greatest business park in the region. Tom Crowley, a mid-level employee, loses his daughter at 'bring your daughter to work day'. He raises the alarm, and his colleagues rush to help him find her. Eventually, after no sign of her is found, it transpires she was never there. And yet, as time goes on, Tom still cannot reconcile that she is really at home. Refusing to accept that she is saf...