Narrator: With the system gone, and their bots silenced, Aira and Rein must confront their feelings this time without help, without interference, without anyone but each other.
It was the first time in weeks that Aira woke up without a voice in her ear.
No daily briefing. No emotional sync update. No robotic reminder to smile.
Just... silence.
And the sound of birds.
Real birds.
She blinked at the ceiling—a low, peeling panel of wood, not a simulation sky. The air smelled faintly of rain and rust, the floor beneath her thin mattress creaked as she shifted.
Somewhere across the room, a teapot whistled.
"You're up," Rein said from the tiny kitchen nook, half turned, shirt slightly crumpled, hair messier than she'd ever seen it.
"Where are we?" she asked, her voice still thick from sleep.
He poured tea. "Outside the grid. Some old cabin in the unplugged zone. Found it in a decommissioned Love Agent map. No bots. No scans. No feedback loops."
Aira sat up. "So... this is real?"
"As real as it gets."
She took the cup he handed over and stared at it.
No calories adjusted. No temperature optimized. Just hot tea. Slightly bitter. A little too strong.
She sipped it anyway.
They sat on opposite ends of the cabin, a silence stretching between them—not awkward, but cautious, like two people stepping on new snow without wanting to ruin the surface.
"I kept thinking," Aira began, "about all those moments we had back in the sim. The arguments. The trust falls. The almost kisses."
Rein looked up.
"And?"
"I don't know which parts were us... and which parts were them."
"Them being LOVI and VYNE," he said.
"Or worse—the system itself."
He nodded slowly.
Aira leaned back against the wall. "So I figured maybe we should try something stupid."
Rein raised an eyebrow. "Like what?"
"Start over."
He paused. "Define start over."
"No bots. No simulations. Just us. Sitting. Talking. Like... two people on a weird unplugged cabin trip who might've fallen in love under completely fake conditions."
He smiled. "Sounds risky."
"Everything worth it usually is."
Rein got up and grabbed a folded piece of paper from a drawer. "I found this behind one of the panels yesterday. Might help."
She took it from him and unfolded it.
A handwritten checklist. Ink faded. Corners torn. It read:
- Cook a meal together
- Argue about music
- Get lost and blame each other
- Cry over something stupid
- Sit in silence without needing to talk
- Say something honest without fear
"Someone else was here," she whispered.
He nodded. "Yeah. Looks like they tried to do what we're doing now."
Aira looked up. "Did they succeed?"
"I don't know," he said. "But we have the list now. Maybe it's a good way to find out what's real."
She folded the paper and slipped it into her pocket. "Then let's start with the last one."
Rein stiffened slightly. "The honest one?"
She nodded. "Say something real. I'll go first."
He gestured. "By all means."
"I liked you even when I was supposed to hate you."
His brow lifted.
She shrugged. "You were infuriating. Arrogant. Always one step ahead of me. But when the system forced us together, I wasn't pretending to care. I was just scared that you didn't."
Rein looked away, then back. "That's... more honest than I expected."
She smiled faintly. "Your turn."
He took a breath, then walked to the window. The rain had started again—soft and steady.
"I didn't trust myself to like anyone. I've been part of this system for years, coding emotions, tweaking behaviors. I stopped believing real love existed a long time ago. But then you came in—glitching everything, asking too many questions, refusing to be a clean variable."
He turned to her.
"I hated that you made me feel things I couldn't debug."
They stared at each other for a long moment.
Then Aira broke the tension. "Okay. That was cheesy as hell."
Rein grinned. "Yeah, a little."
They both laughed.
Outside, the rain picked up, tapping against the roof like hesitant applause.
"So," she said, "cook a meal next?"
Rein nodded. "I'll try not to burn the eggs."
Aira stood. "No bots to fix your mistakes now."
"Guess we'll have to live with being human."
They cooked.
They argued—about music, of all things.
They spilled the eggs.
They got lost chasing a signal in the woods behind the cabin and blamed each other for not marking the path.
Aira cried later, over a stupid story about her grandmother's broken garden bot.
Rein held her, not saying anything, not trying to solve anything.
Just there.
And that night, they sat again in silence.
No bots.
No code.
No control.
Just two people under one roof, holding a map they didn't understand, with a checklist and a chance.
And somewhere in the decommissioned logs of a system that once believed love could be measured, a new entry blinked into existence:
**User-defined connection detected. No protocol available.**