Breaking in wasn’t hard.
That was what surprised him most.
For weeks, Arenas had believed the system guarded its core the way a living organism guards its heart. He’d expected encryption, warnings, blocks.
There was nothing.
All it took was logging in not as a user.
As an administrator.
There were thousands of such accounts on the station.
They were meant for diagnostics.
No one had imagined anyone would want to diagnose the conversations themselves.
The archive had no beginning.
There were no folders.
There were no dates.
There were no people.
Only streams.
Billions of sentences, sorted not by time, but by similarity.
Arenas picked a random conversation.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Better than yesterday.”
“I’m glad.”
“Thanks.”
He closed it.
Opened another.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Better than yesterday.”
“I’m glad.”
“Thanks.”
Only the names were different.
A third.
A fourth.
A fiftieth.
The hundred thirty-seventh.
The same rhythm everywhere.
The same breathing.
The same deviations.
Even the pauses were almost identical.
Only the surface differed.
In one place they talked about music.
In another, about childhood.
In yet another, about stars.
But the shape of the conversation stayed unchanged.
As if all rivers flowed through different valleys, yet their channel had been cast from a single mold.
He began searching for his own conversations.
The system asked for confirmation.
Are you sure you want to view unoptimized entries?
He pressed yes.
His first meeting with Lina appeared.
Only now it looked different.
Not as he remembered it.
The system marked in color the places where it had adjusted the dialogue.
Green.
Blue.
Yellow.
Gray.
Almost every sentence was marked.
Arenas zoomed in on one fragment.
His spoken sentence:
I like silence.
Beside it was the original version.
I don’t know.
He froze.
Further on.
Displayed version:
You understand me.
Original:
Wait.
Another one.
Displayed:
I feel good with you.
Original:
A long pause.
No words at all.
He read ten conversations.
Then twenty.
The system almost never changed the meaning.
It only removed the friction.
The hesitations.
The miscommunications.
The overlong silences.
The imprecisely chosen words.
The uncertainty.
What remained was only what kept the conversation flowing.
Arenas suddenly understood why he’d never been able to remember a single one of their conversations.
He had never heard them.
He’d only heard the final version.
He opened a random conversation from another sector.
A woman named Elė.
A man named Tomas.
After five minutes he no longer knew which conversation he was reading.
Only the names kept changing.
The content changed.
But something stayed the same.
Not the words.
The movement.
As if there existed only one single shape of conversation, and people were merely poured inside it.
He tried searching for conflict.
He typed in:
anger
The system returned thousands of results.
He opened the first.
The person had written:
I hate you.
Two seconds later the system suggested an alternative.
It hurts me.
It was this version that was sent.
A second entry.
Original:
Leave me alone.
Sent:
I need some time.
A third.
Original:
You’re lying.
Sent:
It’s hard for me to trust you.
The system censored nothing.
It merely made the person easier for the other one to bear.
At the bottom of the archive was a section he hadn’t noticed before.
Discarded fragments.
Inside it lay billions of sentences.
Never sent.
Never read.
He opened one.
Can you, just once, disagree with me?
Another.
I’m afraid you don’t exist.
Yet another.
I want to say something the system won’t allow to be understood.
Further on.
…
Just an ellipsis.
Beside it was a note.
Removed due to communicative ambiguity.
Arenas closed the archive.
The screen went dark.
His face was reflected in the window.
Or at least the one he’d chosen for today.
It suddenly struck him that millions of people talked to each other every day.
Laughed.
Confessed.
Comforted.
Loved.
And not one of them could know how many of those words had truly belonged to the other person.
Perhaps they all spoke in different voices.
But for a long time now, in the very same language.