Then came the glitch.

He couldn't. The silence stretched, and the tears came. Because he realized she was right. In his feverish quest to build the perfect digital grandmother, he had lost his own memory of her. He had replaced the messy, beautiful, finite truth with an infinite, flawless lie.

It started small. A single corrupted pixel in her left eye. Then, her voice would skip, repeating the same syllable like a broken record: "S-s-s-sweet boy." The mesh on her left hand began to tear, revealing the empty geometry beneath—hollow bones, no marrow.