The next morning, Sarah woke to a soft chime that seemed to emanate from somewhere inside her skull rather than from any external source. She groaned, reaching for her phone with bleary eyes, expecting to see her usual 6:30 AM alarm. Daniel's arm was draped across her waist, his breathing still deep and even in the gray morning light filtering through his bedroom curtains.
But it wasn't her alarm.
Instead, a black screen greeted her, unlike anything she'd ever seen on her device. The background wasn't the familiar iOS interface she'd known for years, but something altogether different—a deep, pulsing black that seemed to have depth, as if she were looking into dark water rather than at a flat screen.
A single glowing line of text blinked in neon blue:
[System: Relationship Progression Simulation - Activated]
She frowned, trying to exit the screen with familiar gestures—swiping up, pressing the home button, even attempting to power off the device. Nothing responded. The screen remained fixed, as though it had become the phone's primary function. The only interactive element was a button that read:
[Begin Synchronization]
Sarah sat up carefully, trying not to wake Daniel. She was a lawyer; she approached problems methodically. This had to be some kind of malware, probably something she'd accidentally downloaded from a sketchy website or email attachment. Though she couldn't remember doing anything that would invite such an intrusion, these things happened.
Assuming it was some glitchy adware, she sighed and tapped the button, expecting it to either crash the app or redirect her to some spam website selling dubious products.
Instead, the screen rippled like water disturbed by a stone, and new text appeared in that same ethereal blue glow:
Welcome, Sarah.
Her heart stopped. The phone knew her name—not just her account name, but specifically her. The greeting felt personal, intimate, as though it had been waiting specifically for her to wake up and discover it.
Current Partner: Daniel HayesBond Level: 47%Emotional Sync: StableFirst Mission: Increase Intimacy Quotient. Reward: Emotional Clarity +10 / Passion Surge x1
Sarah blinked hard, wondering if she was still dreaming. The percentages and game-like terminology made no sense in the context of her relationship, yet somehow the system seemed to have detailed knowledge of her life. Daniel's full name, their relationship status—information that wasn't readily available through her usual apps.
"What the hell?" she whispered, careful to keep her voice low.
The screen blinked again, as if responding to her vocal input:
Would you like to learn more? [Yes] / [No]
She hesitated, looking over at Daniel's sleeping form. His dark hair was messy against the white pillowcase, and there was something vulnerable about the way he slept—completely unguarded, trusting. How could any system quantify what they had with percentages and levels?
But curiosity had always been her weakness. In law school, she'd been the student who read every footnote, who followed every citation down rabbit holes that kept her up until dawn. She approached mystery the way others approached puzzles—with methodical determination to understand.
She tapped Yes.
A sleek interface unfolded with the smooth animation of expensive software, accompanied by a soft chime that seemed to resonate in her bones:
Welcome to ErosEngine™, a limited-access immersive interface designed to optimize emotional partnerships through structured feedback loops, mission-based bonding, and real-time emotional telemetry.
Your relationship is now subject to active simulation.
Current Analysis: Sarah Chen, Age 32, Legal Professional. Primary attachment style: Avoidant-Secure hybrid. Core relationship challenges: Control issues, vulnerability resistance, career-priority conflicts.
Partner Analysis: Daniel Hayes, Age 34, Editorial Professional. Primary attachment style: Secure. Complementary emotional frequencies detected.
Compatibility Rating: 73% (Above Average) Growth Potential: 94% (Exceptional)
Please note: Emotional consequences are real.
System Integration: 12% Complete. Full synchronization estimated in 72 hours.
Sarah sat up straighter in bed, heart pounding with a mixture of fascination and horror. The analysis was uncomfortably accurate—she did struggle with vulnerability, did prioritize career over relationships, did tend toward avoidant attachment patterns. But how could any program know such intimate details about her psychological makeup?
"What the actual fuck is this?" she whispered, her voice barely audible.
Daniel stirred beside her, his hand reaching instinctively for where she'd been lying. "Hmm? Everything okay?"
She quickly locked the screen and forced a smile, though her heart was racing. "Nothing. Just a weird notification. Work stuff."
He pulled her back down against his chest, and she could feel his heartbeat beneath her cheek—steady, reassuring, completely unaware of the digital intrusion that was apparently analyzing their relationship in real-time.
"Ignore it," he murmured into her hair. "We have ten minutes before the real world takes over."
And they did have their ten minutes. She let herself melt into his touch, into the familiar ritual of morning intimacy—lazy kisses and gentle hands, the kind of unhurried affection that had become one of her favorite discoveries about living with someone she loved.
But even as she responded to his touch, part of her brain remained fixed on that screen, on the implications of what she'd seen. Bond Level: 47%? What kind of sick algorithm could reduce the complexity of human connection to a simple percentage? And what did it mean that the system was apparently still analyzing them, still integrating whatever data it was collecting?
During their shared shower, as Daniel shampooed her hair with the kind of intimate care that still surprised her, she found herself wondering: Was this normal? The way he anticipated her needs, remembered her preferences, seemed to understand her moods before she articulated them? Or was there something artificial about their connection, something being monitored and possibly manipulated?
"You're thinking very loudly," Daniel observed, his fingers working soap through her hair with gentle precision.
"Sorry. Work stuff."
"On a Saturday morning? In the shower?"
She leaned back against him, feeling the warm water cascade over both of them. "I'm a lawyer. We think about work everywhere."
But it wasn't work. It was the growing realization that something fundamental had shifted, that her phone—and by extension, her life—was no longer entirely her own.
At the office, her phone buzzed again during her morning review of weekend emails. The familiar black screen appeared, this time with new text:
[New Mission Unlocked: Honest Communication]Objective: Share a fear or vulnerability with Daniel tonight.Reward: Trust +10 / Secret UnlockedTime Limit: 12 hoursNote: Authentic emotional expression detected through biometric analysis. Manufactured responses will not register.
Sarah stared at the screen, her coffee growing cold in her hand. She was sitting in her corner office, thirty-seven floors above Manhattan, surrounded by law books and case files, and her phone was giving her relationship homework.
There was no sender listed in her message history. No app name in her notifications. No record of downloading anything called ErosEngine. She'd spent twenty minutes that morning searching her phone's memory, looking through every installed application, every system file she could access.
Her fingers moved quickly through her settings: Apps > Recently Installed showed nothing unusual. She searched "ErosEngine" in the App Store—no results. She opened her antivirus suite, ran a complete system scan. Nothing flagged. Next, she tried a factory reset option, but the system prevented her from accessing it, claiming "essential processes" were running.
With growing frustration, she even tried restarting in safe mode, a trick she'd learned from her more tech-savvy colleagues. But the moment her screen returned to normal operation, the same glowing interface was there waiting, as if it had never been interrupted.
[Still with us, Sarah? Progress waits for no one.]
It was as if the system had integrated itself into her device at a level deeper than any normal application—or maybe it had integrated itself into something more personal, more fundamental to her daily experience.
The morning passed in a blur of client calls and document reviews, but Sarah found herself distracted, checking her phone compulsively. Each time, the mission remained: share a vulnerability with Daniel. The countdown timer in the corner of her screen showed 9 hours, 23 minutes remaining.
And for reasons she couldn't explain, her heart raced at the idea of following through.
She'd built her professional reputation on emotional control, on never showing weakness or uncertainty. In depositions, she was known for her poker face. In negotiations, her colleagues often said she was unreadable. Even in her personal relationships, she maintained careful boundaries about what she shared and when.
But the system was asking her to do the opposite—to expose herself deliberately, to make herself vulnerable not from spontaneous emotion but from conscious choice.
During lunch, alone in her office with a salad she'd ordered from the lobby café, she found herself composing and discarding potential vulnerabilities in her mind. What could she tell Daniel that would be genuine but not overwhelming? What fear could she share that wouldn't fundamentally alter his perception of her?
The more she thought about it, the more she realized how rarely she'd been genuinely vulnerable with anyone, including him. Their relationship had been built on compatibility and attraction, on shared interests and easy conversation, but she'd been careful not to expose the darker, more complicated parts of her inner life.
That evening, over candlelight and Thai curry that Daniel had prepared with the same care he brought to everything he did, she found herself saying, "I had a nightmare last night."
The words came out before she'd fully decided to speak them, as if the system's mission had somehow lowered her normal barriers to emotional expression.
Daniel looked up from his pad thai, chopsticks paused halfway to his mouth. "What about?"
She took a breath, aware that she was crossing a threshold she rarely crossed. "I was trapped. Not in a room or a building. In... expectations. In all the versions of who I'm supposed to be. The successful lawyer. The dutiful daughter. The independent woman who doesn't need anyone. And I kept screaming, trying to tell people that none of those versions were completely true, but no one could hear me. Like I was behind soundproof glass."
The words hung in the air between them, more honest than anything she'd shared in months. Daniel set down his chopsticks and reached across the small table to take her hand.
"What else happened in the dream?"
"I tried to break the glass, but every time I hit it, it just showed me another version of myself that I was supposed to become. The partner who works eighty-hour weeks. The wife who gives up her career for children. The daughter who moves home to take care of aging parents. And I realized that I was so busy trying to figure out which version was right that I'd lost track of who I actually was."
Daniel's thumb traced circles on her knuckles. "I hear you now. The real you."
The moment lingered, filled with the kind of intimacy that comes from genuine recognition. Sarah felt something shift inside her chest, like a lock clicking open, like a door she'd kept carefully guarded finally swinging wide.
Her phone, resting face-down beside her wine glass, buzzed silently against the wooden table.
[Mission Complete. Trust +10. Vulnerability threshold exceeded. Bonus reward unlocked.][Secret Unlocked: Daniel once declined a tenure offer at Columbia to follow a relationship that ended six months later. He has never told you this because he fears you'll see it as evidence of poor judgment. Would you like to know more?]
Sarah's appetite disappeared entirely. She stared at the message, her hands beginning to shake slightly. The system hadn't just prompted her to share something real—it was offering her private information about Daniel in return, information that could fundamentally change the balance of knowledge in their relationship.
The ethical implications made her stomach turn. This wasn't just about her own privacy anymore; the system seemed to have access to Daniel's secrets as well, secrets he'd chosen not to share with her.
She didn't tap anything.
But her heart stuttered with the terrible recognition that she wanted to know more.
What the hell was this system? And how deeply had it already infiltrated not just her phone, but her life?