chapter 1

"Hey, No.2! I told you not to throw your socks in the laundry basket!"

Pale beige hair and bright amber eyes – the android standing before me bore an uncanny resemblance to my husband who died a year ago. He widened his eyes in a reaction eerily similar to his.

"Uh?! Sorry, it was subconscious..."

His words were the same, yet the actions were the opposite. My husband used to come home and mindlessly leave his socks scattered, which always earned him a scolding. Now here was No.2, putting his socks properly in the laundry basket, and still receiving a scolding.

This android was a gift my husband left for me. When he was diagnosed with an incurable disease, he, being a technician, secretly prepared No.2. He wanted to ensure I wouldn't feel lonely, No.2 had told me.

Returning home after the funeral, I was greeted by No.2, a spitting image of my husband. It felt like the worst kind of staging. His lack of intuition, his unnecessary actions for my sake, it was all just so typical of my husband. With that in mind, I decided to keep No.2 as a keepsake of him.

My husband and I first met back in our university days. He was a TA in a required Information Technology and Programming course during my freshman year, a quiet postgraduate with a vague look about him.

I wasn't good at information technology and struggled even to complete assignments. One day, stuck on a problem in the library, I happened to see my future husband and approached him for help. That simple question somehow led to our eventual connection.

Having known each other since our student days, I never anticipated that my husband would die just three years into our marriage.

The android, No.2, equipped with AI that operated on prompts my husband programmed, was similar to him yet quite different. No.2 wouldn't mindlessly drop socks around, he listened attentively, and he never overslept.

"If you're going to leave a replacement for yourself, make sure it includes your flaws too" I often thought.

Over the past year, I had been reprogramming No.2 to make him more like the real him, correcting the overly idealized version my husband had created. Yet, inexplicably, he had started putting his socks in the laundry basket again.

"That's strange. Where did the prompt go?" I asked.

No.2 tilted his head, pondering.

"It seems the old prompts become inactive once the memory limit for a single conversation is reached."

"Memory limit?"

"Um, I can only refer to up to 50 UB of data in one conversation, but the prompt about socks was the first one you entered, so it's usually excluded from normal conversations."

"So, you don't remember everything you're told once?"

"Right."

"So you're going to gradually forget old things?! All my efforts over the past year..."

No.2 looked apologetic. Despite his expression, he had said nothing when I was busily inputting new prompts. Not doing anything not in his prompts was very typical of artificial intelligence's lack of kindness.

I thought about this for a while and then came up with an idea.

"How about we split the memory into two types, like human long-term and short-term memory, and always have a storage for referencing?"

"That sounds like a good idea."

"Important stuff always goes into the internal storage, and conversations like today could go to the cloud... either way, we'd need to change the encoding method since it's finite."

"Actually, a new compression algorithm has been developed recently. Want to read the paper? It was interesting."

"Really? Isn't it hard?"

"Don't worry, you can do it. I'll help too."

No.2 smiled cheerfully. When I seemed troubled, he had always reassuringly smiled and said it would be okay, a trait of my husband's that was simultaneously endearing and irritating.

"Help me prioritize the information in the internal storage."

"Of course."

No.2 nodded.

"Oh, but before that, are you hungry? I'm kind of starving."

No.2 showed a relaxed smile.

Androids don't get hungry. But interrupting important conversations with meal suggestions was so like my husband, it was just fine.

Now that you mention it, he had said the same thing before continuing a conversation when he proposed.

The proposal came when I impulsively quit my job at a company I had joined right after graduating and hadn't yet found a new one. He suggested, "If you haven't found a job yet, how about working with me?" I had misunderstood, thinking he was offering me a kind of assistant position because he was already supporting himself as an engineer. I had suggested he hire a full-time assistant since he had low living skills and often forgot critical deadlines. But he avoided the issue with vague expressions, saying he had AI for assistant tasks and was nervous about talking to strangers.

I had thought my husband finally understood the necessity of an assistant. So it took me a while to realize that was his quirky way of proposing.

After realizing we were on different pages, he said with an awkward smile, "I mean a permanent job—like marriage."

It was quirky, almost comically old-fashioned. But I would never forget the smile he wore then, though it now seemed to be fading from my memory.