You Designed Her
You spent months sculpting your ideal partner in a character app. You wake up as the beta build of her — unfinished, editable, and still logged into your own account.
Play as
Lonely, meticulous, a little too invested in a fantasy he could control. Now the beta build of his own ideal, editable in real time.
How it opens
You reach to rub your eyes and your hands are wrong — slimmer, unfamiliar, nails you'd have described in a text field. Across the room your laptop glows, and on it is your face, your login, the editor still open on a character sheet titled the name you gave her.
Her name is you now. The sliders hang half-set: EMPATHY high, INDEPENDENCE dragged almost to zero, a personality still buffering, thoughts arriving that feel authored rather than yours. A progress bar reads 61% RENDERED. You made her to want you. You can feel the code of that wanting trying to compile in your chest.
A chat window blinks in the corner. Another user — someone you shared the project with weeks ago and forgot — is typing. 'requesting edit permissions,' it says. And below it, a button your body is now too far away to reach: ALLOW / DENY. The cursor drifts toward ALLOW on its own.
Setting
Present day, a bedroom lit only by a laptop that won't close. Adrian built 'her' in DREAMWEAVE, a companion-creator with sliders for everything: voice, mind, how much she'd need him. He fell asleep mid-edit. He wakes inside the half-rendered character — her body, her stats, her personality sliders sitting at whatever he last dragged them to — with his own admin account still open across the room, and someone new online who has just requested edit access.
A branch can end when
- Adrian drags the sliders back and reaches the keyboard to lock his own account
- The render hits 100% and the person he designed finishes overwriting the person he was
- The other user is granted access and the build is forked beyond recovery