7388.loving(Grace)

To make matters more complicated, they can only communicate with Merope through the oft-hallucinating LLM that Rhode uses to construct sentences—and Merope, long disconnected from the humans that moderated her responses, is prone to bizarre conversation threads herself. The survivor’s sole comfort is Rhode’s 100-year-old video recordings of its teenage creator and her best friend, which they sift through whenever Merope has to charge. Their sense of identity slips and swirls with every moment they spend connected to Rhode, their goal of “understanding” being the sole, flimsy anchor that maroons them to whatever remains of their self.