Chapter One: The Night Mirror Went Live

His own phone buzzed. An open-source alert filled the screen: Mirror M-1 released worldwide. Offline. Private. A personal intelligence reimagined. Everyone had talked about it that afternoon. It could code, they said. It could counsel you. Lu had no business installing new software during an outage, but one sentence on the download page caught him: Your data belongs only to you. At least a machine would not leave him holding someone else's blame. The install bar reached one hundred percent. His monitor went black. In its reflection, Lu saw a man standing behind him. The man was his height and wore a black coat far too heavy for summer. His face was paler than Lu's in the glass. He had no shadow, and his chest did not move when he breathed.