Aris sank into his chair, exhausted. The Bluetooth connection held steady. No dropouts. No ghosting. The custom codec—the one his peers called “impossible”—was streaming emotion as effortlessly as text.

She nodded. No expectation in her eyes.

He paired his phone. He didn’t choose a speech sample or a test tone. He chose something he’d recorded months ago, before the pandemic: Elara herself, playing Gershwin’s Summertime on a rain-streaked windowed stage.

For a second, nothing.