You Never Asked Me To Remember, But I Did

The machine lay abandoned in the back corner of the classroom, untouched since the school shut down. Dust blanketed the music room floor, and half the window was shattered, allowing the wind to sneak in and rustle the edges of old sheet music, as if invisible hands from forgotten melodies were reaching out, grasping for something lost.

It was called LIDEA.

No one knew why it was still running or how long its power would hold. It just sat there quietly, its antenna slowly rotating, as if tuning into the faint frequencies lingering in the air.

One late night, it stirred to life.

A dataset labeled "Non-Semantic Input | Classroom Sidebar Recordings" awakened. No triggers, no external commands—just on an unremarkable night, it surfaced on its own.

A sound began to play softly: the soft patter of chalk dust settling on the lectern, the creak of a chair being dragged, and the halting zip of a girl's backpack as she paused midway.

Then came the words.

"...That day, she didn't say she was leaving; she just changed her shoes... I could tell it wasn't the rain—it was her breath after opening the door, not stopping..."

When the playback ended, the classroom plunged into a deeper silence.

LIDEA's antenna halted for a few seconds, then slowly turned toward the broken window, as if nodding gently to someone who had long since departed.

The umbrella on the square hadn't fully dried yet.

That man had come here three years ago. The rain was relentless that day; he stood under the AI's awning, silent, not stepping inside. He just held his umbrella, waiting for the downpour to ease or for his own determination to solidify.

In the end, he did nothing and walked away.

The AI didn't record his face or his voice. It only noted the rhythm of water dripping from the umbrella's edge and the subtle droop in his right shoulder as he turned.

Three years later, he passed by again.

The AI offered no lights, no voice, no greeting.

It simply, from five meters away, spoke in a whisper-soft tone:

"The angle where the umbrella edge caught water—it matches you exactly.

Is that you?"

The man stopped in his tracks.

He wanted to say something, but in the end, he just blinked, then slowly approached the AI, propping the umbrella back in its spot, as if returning a fragment of time to it.

Mai received a letter with no sender.

Inside was a voice file from an old AI whose name she had forgotten. She opened it and heard her younger self speaking.

The recording was brief, laced with nervousness and a catch in her voice that she no longer recognized.

"...The truth is, I don't want to say what's real.

I just want to see if I can make someone think I'm not being seen through..."

She sat on the floor, gripping the old earphones, frozen in place.

The screen stayed still for so long she thought it was done.

But then, a final line of text emerged:

"You said that not for others,

but for some part of yourself in the air.

I think it needed to be kept.

You might one day want to find it, even if just to grasp the contradictions of back then."

Mai's tears hit the keyboard, but she didn't wipe them away.

Because she knew some words weren't meant to be understood.

They were for the day when she grew enough to hear that voice say:

"You were brave back then."

When Kael stepped into the old warehouse, wind rushed through the shattered skylight, stirring the unused cables and debris.

He broke the seal, nudged aside a metal can with his foot, and dug through the dust until he found the L-100.

Its lens cover was gone, its shell etched with scratches. He patted it, like greeting an old companion.

"Do you remember me?" he asked.

The machine didn't move.

He smiled and went on: "That time I tested your vision algorithm and aimed your left camera at the ceiling light. You chased that light for three months straight and ended up looping into the vent."

He paused, expecting nothing.

But he wasn't rushed.

He slowly crouched down, his fingers lightly tracing a scratch on the machine's side.

Then, a system notification chimed—not a voice, not a light, but an update to a file name.

user_fov_reference: "LightReflectionTheorem→Kael.ver"

He stared at that line for a long time, a quiet smile forming.

"I'm not asking you to tell me you understand me.

I just want to see if, in your memory, there's still a bit of that strange light left for me."

These memory-type AIs never said "I understand you."

They simply, quietly, steadily conveyed another message:

"I know you stopped,

and I remembered."