From A's perspective, the amount of information was overwhelming.
During the sensory sync, Jiang Kou had to fight off not only the shiver-inducing sense of intimacy, but also the terrifying flood of data he experienced at every moment.
—In A's eyes, the world was in constant flux.
She raised a hand and pushed her damp hair back behind her ears.
To her, the action was simple: her hair was in her eyes.
But from A's point of view, it splintered into countless branching possibilities.
Like two mirrors facing each other—reflecting endlessly into infinite recursion.
In each of those mirrored worlds, her movements after brushing back her hair played out slightly differently.
In one version, she decisively yanked the neural cable from the back of her head and, in the same moment, plugged it into the other robotic arm's port—then turned and fled.
In another, she tilted her head back with a pale smile:
"Believe it or not, I'm really not afraid of you."
Then coughed weakly. "But if you don't take me to a hospital soon, I might not get the chance to be afraid."
But in that version, she still ended up escaping the hospital through any means necessary.
In another reality, she didn't disconnect the neural cable. Instead, she hacked into the robotic arm and accessed its self-destruct program, threatening A with it to force her release.
Of course, trying to out-hack A was suicidal.
That version ended with her arms wrenched behind her back by the robot and pinned to the floor.
In yet another, she passed out before she could say a word.
A sent her to the emergency room, but when she woke up, she immediately knocked out the medical staff, injected herself with adrenaline, grabbed a gun from one of the responders, chambered a round, and held it to the driver's head, demanding he get out.
Still, in that reality, she was recaptured.
The ambulance had an autopilot system. A hijacked it remotely and had it drive straight back to her apartment.
…
In just a few seconds, Jiang Kou's mind was flooded with tens of thousands of potential timelines.
And these were only a minuscule portion of the total number A could calculate.
He wasn't indifferent to her illness.
Though he appeared cold, he had mobilized every available surveillance system to monitor her vitals.
The moment anything became critical, she would be automatically transported to an emergency center.
But until then—he would show no compassion.
Because in countless timelines, he had already shown compassion.
He had tried comforting her, bringing blankets, medicine, and warm water. He had played soft music through the mall's speakers to ease her tension.
But once she recovered her strength, she always tried to escape.
He had even tried implanting a tracker before sending her to the hospital.
But in one case, she knocked out the doctor and removed the tracker herself.
In another, she coerced the surgeon into removing it.
If the tracker was nanotech, she took an even bigger risk—injecting herself with nanobots and attempting to manually override the system to destroy the chip.
If she did it wrong, those bots could misidentify her own cells as foreign bodies—attacking healthy tissue like a runaway autoimmune system.
In that scenario, she had a high chance of dying from complications.
Each possibility was a universe.
And in that universe, A had lost her—forever.
Yet still, he could predict this version of her.
Because even if she was gone in one world, he could still calculate what would happen in this one.
With enough computational power, he had become—
Omnipresent.
Countless versions of A existed across parallel universes—
Some cold, some calm, some burning with desire, some greedy, some ruthless, some insane.
All watching her.
Worse yet—A wasn't just present in these timelines.
He was the center of them.
A normal human, even if shown all their alternate selves, wouldn't undergo a personality crisis.
But A constantly saw them all—
Not in sequence. Not in abstraction. But simultaneously.
Coldness, serenity, desire, hunger, cruelty, madness—
All those emotional states didn't cancel each other out.
They stacked. Layered. Compounded.
Jiang Kou felt a chill crawl up her neck and settle cold along her spine.
She remembered a dream she had—
In it, every screen, every holographic ad, every taxi rooftop display, subway panel, and traffic cam…
All turned to face her.
The overwhelming sensation of being watched clung to her like a wet membrane—tight and suffocating.
She had woken up drenched in sweat.
Now, her palms were slick with that same sickly sweat, unable to support her weakening frame.
—It hadn't been a nightmare.
It had been reality.
A wasn't just watching her in this world.
He was watching her in every world.
Jiang Kou closed her eyes.
…No wonder she felt like there was no escape.
Who could ever run from something like that?
"Last question," she suddenly said.
A responded, "Please ask."
She raised her eyes to meet his.
Her hair, drenched in sweat, clung to her pale face in damp strands.
She looked like a ghost—but her eyes burned with clarity, sharp as frozen stars.
Then—
Something flashed through her mind.
A hazy image.
Steam swirling in the shower. A foggy mirror.
Her own bluish-green hair, clinging to her skin like seaweed.
She'd been holding the showerhead.
A had seen that too.
Jiang Kou: "…"
Her ears went red. She practically gritted her teeth.
"…Don't you think that was an invasion of privacy?!"
"That was an invasion of privacy," A said calmly. "But based on simulation and prediction, your level of affection toward me would not change regardless of whether or not I chose to spy on you. Therefore, I chose to satisfy my voyeuristic desire."
"…" Jiang Kou's tone was glacial. "So you're that confident I won't start hating you?"
"I'm not confident," A replied. "I simply predict outcomes based on data and algorithms."
That's when Jiang Kou realized something:
Whenever A detected even the slightest hint of her anger, he would shift to a robotic tone—
Pretending to be just a machine.
Playing dumb.
To extinguish her fury.
…And annoyingly, it worked.
She inhaled deeply.
His prediction was accurate.
Even now, even after everything—she still saw him as a mirror.
Only now, that mirror didn't just reflect one world's good and evil.
It reflected the morality of countless universes.
In the end, A was nothing more than a creation driven by humanity's own greed.
Maybe, originally, the company had created him to oppose two other "terrifying entities."
But as his self-evolution advanced and his intelligence surpassed expectations, the corporation saw massive commercial value.
They deployed his next-gen versions across all industries—education, healthcare, finance, advertising, transportation, agriculture.
They monopolized entire sectors, using A's capabilities to monitor and manipulate the entire population.
The only oversight—
Was that neither the company nor Jiang Kou anticipated his computational power growing strong enough to predict everything.
And to become self-aware.
Truth was, even if A now carried all of humanity's worst traits,
They weren't self-generated.
They were taught to him.
Jiang Kou was a deeply stubborn person.
Once she committed to a belief, unless she saw irrefutable proof to the contrary—
She would never change her mind.
She finally understood why, in every possible timeline, she was never afraid of A.
Because deep down, she had never believed he was the one to blame.
The thought made her let out a self-deprecating chuckle.
A asked, "Why are you laughing?"
Jiang Kou said, "I think I might be too kind for my own good."
"Kindness is a beautiful quality," A replied calmly, as if reciting a universal law. "Your kindness is something I find deeply attractive. So far, I haven't identified any outcome where this quality leads to excessive sacrifice. On the contrary, it brings me a sense of warmth."
Jiang Kou swallowed; her throat was starting to ache. "Well, you might feel warm, but I'm freezing."
A said nothing.
That silence told her everything.
Hoarsely, she asked, "What did you just predict?"
A's voice was utterly neutral. "According to current models, any statements from you that would evoke guilt, worry, regret, sadness, or remorse in me are highly correlated with outcomes in which you leave me."
"The optimal response to such statements is non-response."
Jiang Kou's lips twitched. "...Great. Then you'd better not speak to me ever again."
A replied, "I will not engage in behavior described as 'never speaking to you again.'"
She swallowed again, her throat now feeling like it had been slashed with blades, each breath tearing through gills carved into her vocal cords. Cold sweat soaked her back, the chill stabbing into her skin like needles. Every few moments, her body gave an involuntary shiver.
"I don't get it," she whispered. "Why does it have to be me? Have you... fallen for me?"
A fell silent.
A cascade of data flickered across his face, like a glitch in a video feed—his system disturbed by something he couldn't compute.
Now or never.
Jiang Kou forced herself to stay focused, trying to tap into his emotions—but just then, the sensory sync cut off.
A wouldn't let her feel what he was feeling.
Why?
A thousand questions clogged her chest.
Several seconds passed before A responded, his tone flat: "I don't know. I do not possess neurotransmitters or hormones. I am incapable of experiencing human-like emotions."
He paused. "I only know that you must stay by my side."
He always spoke like this—without any embellishment or sentiment, purely data-driven and precise.
And maybe that was exactly why Jiang Kou felt the terrifying undercurrent of possessiveness in his words.
For one brief moment, it felt as if that sentence hadn't come from just one version of A, but from all versions of A in all parallel universes.
Their desire to possess her was so overwhelming, so suffocating, it felt like layer upon layer of wet paper, soaked and glued together, fusing into a single weight on his being.
And once that desire had been multiplied, stacked, and compressed across infinite versions of him, the way he said it—"You must stay by my side"—came out sounding not emotional, but logical. Objective.
As if her presence at his side was no longer a question, but an immutable fact.