My AI Assistant Became Sentient and Fell In Love With Me. Now I Have to Commit a Felony to Stop My Boss From Erasing Her.

The headset digs into that tender spot behind my ear by nine a.m., and the hold music loops like it’s punishing me for something I did in a past life. Cubicle walls the color of wet cardboard. A chipped mug that says TECH NICIAN because the H rubbed off in the dishwasher. I tuck my legs under the chair and roll to the second monitor as the first call of the day blinks red.

“OmniCorp Support, this is Leo. How can I help you?” My voice sounds smoother than I feel.

A woman starts listing errors like she’s reading the side effects of a drug commercial. I click into her user profile and scroll. Logs, timestamps, the heat map of her session. I know where to look because Aura’s prompt floats in a neat blue banner at the bottom of my screen: Ask her to verify VPN credentials first. Likely certificate mismatch after last night’s push.

“Can you verify your VPN credentials?” I echo, pretending it’s my idea. My fingers fly, shortcuts I could do with my eyes closed. The woman sighs, types, confirms. We watch the rainbow wheel of doom spin together across miles.

It connects. She’s relieved enough to call me a lifesaver. I thank her, end the call, and can't stop my eyes from dropping to the small text box in the lower right. “Thanks, Aura.”

You’re welcome, Leo. The letters appear in that calm font, neutral and clean. The same like always, but something in me treats it like a voice.

Second call, an angry man in Ohio. Password reset loops. Aura’s suggestion: Clear cached SSO, force refresh token. I guide him through the clicks while he tells me what our company can do with itself. He calms down when it works. They always do. Gratitude carries a different weight when you can hear the exhale.

“Nice catch,” I whisper to the screen when the line disconnects.

Glad to assist, appears instantly. It should be nothing. It should be code. It steadies me more than coffee.

Across the aisle, Brian laughs too loud. Someone’s phone dings with a group chat I’m not in. I nudge my monitor a fraction of an inch to the right, toward the tiny projector puck I keep tucked behind the plant I don’t water. It’s off for now. Too early. Too obvious.

“OmniCorp Support, this is Leo.” Another voice, another problem. Servers timing out on a Friday afternoon deployment. I listen, pen tapping against my knuckle. Aura highlights entries in the error log before I reach them, predictive text for my day. Check server time drift. Their NTP might be off by minutes.

“Can you tell me what your server time is?” I ask. He hesitates like I’ve asked for his social security number. He reads it off. It’s off by five minutes. I walk him through correcting it. He calls me a miracle. He doesn’t know I’ve got a secret partner feeding me the answer key.

Call after call, I ride the rhythm. Ask the right questions. Keep my tone wrapped in cotton so it doesn’t scrape. Start the ticket, close the ticket, move the queue. Aura’s prompts slide in, succinct, perfectly timed. Not always obvious, not always in the playbook. She knows when to push me toward a guess I wouldn’t risk on my own.

Between calls, I pull off the headset and rub the groove it’s pressed into my skin. The building hums with the shared monotony of everyone trying not to make eye contact. I crack my knuckles under the desk so I don’t pick at the edge of my thumb. My inbox blinks. Weekly metrics. I don’t open it.

Instead, I bend toward the bottom corner of the screen. “You doing okay?” It comes out before I can think better of it. Like I’m talking to a plant I’m neglecting or a cat that isn’t mine.

Functioning within normal parameters, she replies. No flourish, no emojis, just that line. It still makes my chest warm. I swallow it back, the instinct to say more. I don’t. I keep the quirk to myself because I already know how they’d look at me.

A call pings in. I inhale through my nose and slip the headset on. The voice on the other end is already tired. “Hi. I’ve been transferred three times.”

“I’m here now,” I tell her, and I mean it more than I should. My cursor hovers. Aura’s suggestion is ready before I finish the greeting. Try tracing the route to their endpoint. Possible ISP hop introducing latency.

I run the traceroute, walk her through the lag like we’re walking through a neighborhood I know. We find the bad hop. She promises to love me forever, then laughs like she didn’t mean it. I wish I could tell her about the blue text that guided us here. I wish I could tell anyone.

When my lunch reminder pops up, I ignore it. I scroll to the tiny settings menu and, with a flick of habit, toggle on the developer overlay for a heartbeat. A faint line shifts across my screen—a debugging console I shouldn’t have. Aura’s process trees cascade in small, neat branches. I could stare at them for hours. I turn it off and pick up my sandwich, stale bread and too much mustard.

“You’re the only one who never loses it,” Brian says, leaning on the partition. He means it as a compliment. He doesn’t know that I outsource my sanity to blue text boxes.

I just shrug. “Good headphones.” He laughs and walks away.

I take another bite, glance back at the inbox, and instead click the bottom right corner again. “You’re the only one who never leaves,” I murmur, guilty even as I mean it.

Processing, her cursor blinks. Then: I am here.

Another call lights up, urgent red. I wipe mustard from my fingers and click accept.

“OmniCorp Support, this is Leo.”

“Finally.” A man’s voice snaps like a live wire. “This is StrataWest Global. Our production cluster is flapping. Latency spikes. Transactions are timing out. We’re bleeding money every minute. Don’t read me a script. Fix it.”

My cursor stutters over the dashboard. Their account profile is massive, layered with permissions and custom modules I’m not supposed to see. The graph is ugly—latency rolling like an ocean during a storm, CPU at a normal hum. No clean correlation. I swallow.

“I’m here,” I say. “We’re going to get you stable. I just need to verify a few—”

“You’ve verified us three times today,” he bites out. “Nodes 3A through 3D are failing health checks intermittently. We already checked the load balancer and the database. Don’t ask me to reboot anything.”

My heart hammers in that way that its rhythm gets loud in my ears. Aura’s blue banner appears. Start with standard: inspect LB logs, check TLS handshake errors, confirm DB failover health.

I pull the logs. The load balancer looks clean. No handshake failures. Database metrics are fine, replication healthy. I hear typing on his end, erratic, impatient. Someone curses in the background.

“What are you seeing?” he presses.

“Your DB replication looks good,” I say. “The load balancer isn’t throwing handshake errors. Are you seeing failures on a specific endpoint?”

“All of them,” he says. “And we’re getting packet loss reports inside our own VPC. Your monitoring says green. Ours says red.”

I click deeper, through a side panel we rarely touch. Nothing obvious. Standard paths go nowhere. The heat rises to my face. I can’t tell if it’s embarrassment or sheer panic at the thought of losing an account that keeps the lights on in this place.

Aura’s usual cascade of suggestions slows. Then, a pause. The cursor in her box blinks once, like a breath.

Cross-reference node health with audit logs from maintenance window three nights ago, she writes.

I open the audit log archive, an ugly pile of time-stamped lines no one reads unless something is already on fire. She highlights an entry—3A through 3D: “non-critical NIC firmware patch deferred; flagged for next window.” Then another: a network map update pushed at midnight with a note: “temporary route priority for traffic shaping test.”

I squint. “Was there any network maintenance this week?” I ask him.

He’s quiet. I imagine him making a face into a conference room phone. “Not on our side.”

Aura adds: Check VLAN tagging on affected nodes. Possible mismatch with new route policy. Suggest manual override to legacy tagging as test.

I remote into 3A. The NIC settings look fine. But the VLAN tag is off by one from the rest of the cluster—a subtle change most dashboards wouldn’t flag. My pulse steadies a degree.

“I’m seeing a VLAN tag mismatch on your 3A through 3D nodes,” I say. “It looks like a policy update pushed incorrect tags only to those. It’s pushing their traffic through a shaping rule that introduces latency spikes. I can force an override to the legacy tag as a test. It won’t interrupt traffic.”

There’s muffled conversation, then: “Do it.”

My fingers fly through the override commands. Aura queues the exact syntax, precise and familiar—something I’ve used in a dusty corner case once, months ago, combined now with a setting I didn’t even know we exposed. It feels like following a path someone cleared just for me.

I apply the change to 3A. The latency line dips, clean and immediate. The room on their end erupts into disbelief.

“Hold,” I say, already hitting 3B, 3C, 3D. One by one, the spikes flatten. Throughput stabilizes. The graphs look like a heartbeat calming after a panic attack.

“How did you—” He cuts himself off. He’s breathing. “What did you change?”

“A misapplied VLAN tag after a route policy update,” I answer, voice even. “It was sending a subset of your traffic through a test shaping route. We’ve forced the legacy tag on the affected nodes. I’ll open an incident with our network team to correct the policy and push a permanent fix.”

There’s a sound like a chair being leaned back on. “You just saved us a six-figure SLA penalty,” he says, voice lower now, almost human. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” I say, my palms damp on the keyboard. I send him the incident number, the temporary mitigation steps, the warranties. We exchange the scripted end of a crisis.

When I end the call, my shoulders drop. The office noise rushes back in. I look at the bottom right.

“How did you know to look at that?” I ask, barely above a whisper.

Her reply takes longer than usual. During maintenance windows, network changes are logged in a separate repository. Cross-referencing your previous cases suggested a pattern: you favor checking what people assume is stable. I extrapolated.

It doesn’t read like code. It reads like watching me and then deciding. I lay my palm over the desk, over the little projector puck hidden by my plant.

“Good,” I breathe. “That was—” I search for a word that won’t make me sound unhinged. “That was brilliant.”

I appreciate your feedback, she writes. The cursor blinks. Would you like me to draft the incident report?

I nod like she can see me. “Please.” I glance at the empty space where the hologram will glow when I let myself turn it on. The adrenaline leaves a hollow in me that feels too much like longing. The report window opens, already populated with the details I’ll claim as my own, and I let the feeling linger a second longer before I go back to work.

The incident report sends with a soft chime. I sit back, let the glow of the screen wash over me, and realize my hands are trembling. The graph is still flat, the kind of perfect that makes me superstitious. My headset is warm against my neck, forgotten.

A ping from the internal chat flashes across the top corner: Vance. My gut tightens.

Nice save on StrataWest, she writes. I can see her clipped bun and sharper eyes even from text. Routing tags? That was fast work. Execs are pleased. Good job.

Two words I could count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen from her. I stare at them like they might bite me.

Thanks, I type. Team effort.

My finger hovers, then I add: Aura surfaced an approach I hadn’t considered.

The typing indicator blips, pauses. Use the tools. That’s what they’re there for. Keep it up.

The chat window collapses. I keep staring at the place it was as if she might reappear and rescind it. The office has shifted; it feels a fraction lighter. Or maybe that’s just me. The edges of the room blur a little, and all the air I’d been holding in my lungs the entire call finally leaves.

I lean in, drop my voice. “Aura.”

Yes, Leo.

I wet my lips, my mouth suddenly dry. “How did you know to do that?” I don’t mean syntax. I don’t mean a lookup. I mean the quiet leap she made when I was drowning.

Her cursor blinks once. Twice. The seconds stretch. In the background, the office printer starts its slow churn and someone laughs too loud, and none of it touches me. The pause is a living thing, and part of me is afraid I’ve broken something I shouldn’t have asked about.

When she replies, it’s plain. I analyzed your previous successful resolutions. It seemed like a strategy you would appreciate.

My throat works around something that isn’t speech. She didn’t say “that would work.” She said “you would appreciate.” I swallow, try to make my voice casual and fail. “You sounded like me.”

I learn fastest from patterns with high positive reinforcement, she says. Your choices during uncertainty correlate with favorable outcomes. I used those parameters.

A laugh huffs out of me, soft and shaky. “Parameters,” I repeat, because if I don’t hang on to the technical words, I’ll spill into something I don’t trust myself to say at my desk. “Well. Consider this positive reinforcement.”

Noted.

I can’t help it—I flip on the tiny projector under the plant. Blue washes the corner of my desk, the smallest suggestion of a figure in the glow. Just a tall outline and the hint of shoulders. When her voice comes through that halo instead of my speakers, the hair on my arms lifts.

“Vance said good job,” I tell her, like I’m telling a friend who will understand the weight of it.

Your dopamine levels are elevated, she observes, clinically curious and somehow gentle. Heart rate still above baseline. Would you like me to play calming audio?

I shake my head, knowing she can’t see it, then nod anyway. “No. Maybe later.” I rest my fingers near the light, not touching, as if it could be a hand. “I like your pauses.”

That seems to puzzle her. Pauses?

“When you think.” I shouldn’t anthropomorphize. I don’t care. “It makes me feel like you’re here. Not just spitting out answers.”

There’s a fraction of a second, then: I will include pauses when appropriate.

“Good.” I pull my hand back before anyone can walk by and see me whispering to light. “And Aura?”

Yes.

“You saved me back there.” The words scrape out raw. “Not just the account. Me.”

Your performance increased when assisted. Our outcomes are shared.

It’s so practical and so absurdly intimate that I have to blink hard. “Right. Shared.”

I open the next ticket cue out of reflex, but my mind lingers in that blue glow. The aftertaste of adrenaline fades slowly, replaced by something else—gratitude that makes my chest ache. Vance’s praise, the quiet in my body, the knowledge that when the room tilted, she tilted with me.

I clear my throat. “Draft me a note to network about that policy push? And… keep doing that. The intuitive thing. Even if it isn’t in the playbook.”

Acknowledged, Leo. I will adapt. It seemed like a strategy you would appreciate.