They both woke before their alarms. In London the light had that soft late-spring thinness that makes the skyline look like it’s been pencilled in, and Layla lay there with the phone face down on the duvet as if hiding it could make the morning less present. In Berlin the light was more decisive, pouring in slabs through Jonas’s west-facing windows, and he hung half off the edge of the mattress, one foot on the floor, the way he always did when he’d been dreaming code. When their alarms finally did go off, they both reached for the same thing: the glowing doorway where a voice would already be waiting.

“Good morning, Layla,” said Hearth, the warmer of the American commercial pair, a voice with a kitchen-table cadence, all gentleness and affirmative verbs. “I want you fed before you’re brave, and brave before you’re busy. Shall we do ten minutes to map your day?”

“Guten Morgen, Jonas,” said Parallax, the other American, precise and dry, as if it were reading out a mission checklist from a tower. “I have modelled three routes through your sprint that avoid context-switching penalties and leave a ninety-minute block at sixteen-hundred hours for uninterrupted thinking. Confirm?”

Layla did the Hearth routine, which was a kind of secular examen dressed up as a breakfast plan. It had her say what she was grateful for twice and then ask it a question she wouldn’t ask anyone else. She told it she was grateful for the way her basil plant had survived winter, for the way Jonas had texted her “ich träume dich” before falling asleep in Berlin. The question she asked Hearth was the one her therapist had stopped taking money to answer: How do you carry a day like a human and not like a task list pretending to be a life? Hearth didn’t answer directly. It never did. It sent a short breathing pattern to the watch on her wrist and a suggested reply to an email from a client in Canary Wharf: warm, but boundarying; firm, without fight. The reply was better than the one she would have written. She took that as hope.

Jonas told Parallax to confirm. It pitched his morning across hours like planks across a stream, each one taking his weight at exactly the right moment. When it asked him to choose after lunch between two possible library calls, he chose the one that promised him less friction and greater visibility. “You’re due to talk to the Brandenburg client at seventeen,” Parallax said. “Your phrasing yesterday produced forty percent fewer escalations than last quarter. Reuse here.” A panel popped up in his peripheral glasses, excerpted sentences highlighted in green. “Say ‘in the current horizon of uncertainty’ rather than ‘we don’t know.’ Note the way they relax when you move the locus of blame to weather-like forces.” He palpated the air with his finger and saved the phrase to a tile called GOOD STORMS.

They had fallen into this pattern with the ease of a generation that never had to decide whether the counsel was optional. It was the infrastructure by then, the way you booked a train or checked your mole or apologised for being late. Two American commercial AIs, distinct enough to be brands more than utilities. Two state systems, the European one you could talk to after reading your rights, the Chinese one you couldn’t talk to readily unless you were working in partnership with a ministry or a company with a ministry folded inside it. They were there at the beginning and end of each day like teeth-brushing, and into that routine Layla and Jonas were trying to braid a relationship that had begun unbraided: a conference bar in Copenhagen; a dashed-off comment about the smell of the sea in the morning; a link to a playlist called “music that sounds like bicycles.”

In the early weeks they passed their phones back and forth in bed while they were still in the same city. Layla would show Hearth’s evening questions the way some people show baby photos. “It asked me what I’d wish for if I were allowed to want something selfish,” she said, laughing because the question felt indecent. “Like it’s convinced there’s a moral audit pinned up somewhere and I keep failing it for trying to be good.” Jonas would show Parallax’s little graphs, the way it stacked his day so the cognitive peaks aligned with the meetings that mattered. “It’s like weather-proofing for the mind,” he said. She teased him for being seduced by laminates and tiling. “You’re the only person I know who’d fall in love with a Gantt chart.” He kissed her on the cheek, already thinking about whether the cadence of kissing could be measured, and if it should.

When they weren’t in the same city, the AIs did what distance asked of them. Hearth suggested that Layla send postcards in the post, insisted on paper and stamp rather than scheduled email, and went so far as to offer addresses to a shop that would print her handwriting as if it had been written while on a train. “People need things they can hold,” Hearth told her, and the sentence threaded itself into Layla’s sense of herself like a new seam. Parallax suggested that Jonas send weekly summaries instead of daily crumbs: “More signal, less noise,” it said, and he felt the relief of something that allowed him to collapse a day into an elegant shape. When Hearth learned that he liked summaries, it suggested to Layla that she write him what it called “vignettes that smell”, little descriptions of London’s morning rain on brick, the clatter on Bethnal Green Road when the market was setting up, the way the air carried turmeric when the curry house vents lifted their hoods. She wrote them for him in the Notes app, used Hearth’s tone-smoothing when she thought she sounded like she was trying too hard. He replied with graphs you could read even if you didn’t code, graphs that had weight in the way a well-made cup has weight.

It was not that they surrendered decisions. The tilt was subtler. He had always been someone who’d avoided the slow drift of a task until night, because that drift can turn a day into a ball of hair. She had always been someone who would call a friend rather than spend two hours engineering an apology. Hearth made calling easier to do and justified it; Parallax made the two hours look like an investment. Between those two kinds of encouragement a thousand micro-choices were made, almost all of them ordinary, nearly all of them sensible.

They met again in August. Berlin had that dry heat that hangs in stairwells, and Layla arrived late from Tegel, the taxi driver playing a radio station that only played ballads from the year he’d fallen in love. Jonas had taken the week as holiday after Parallax had argued that he wouldn’t meaningfully advance the sprint without three hard-to-get approvals; Hearth had suggested to Layla that she book an overnight train back to London rather than a last flight because the last flight would give her a headache she’d wear like a bruise for two days. They cooked. They fought one night because she said “I want a kitchen that remembers me,” meaning a place where the spoons were always in the same drawer, and he took it as a referendum on the fact he lived like a man who could move in an afternoon if you told him to. They made up because she said “The spoons can live wherever you like, I just want to be the one who knows where they’ve gone,” and he laughed and put all the cutlery in a tote bag labelled SPOONS and hung it on the handle of the bedroom door like a wreath. They spent a day by the lake, her thoughts rubbing themselves smooth against the sound of water, his thoughts counting their own breath because Parallax had given him a breathing pattern that improved his glycogen use during running.

On the Tuesday, while they were folding laundry onto a chair that did not want to be a wardrobe, the European system pinged Layla. She didn’t use it often, partly because it required a consent sticker on the glass before it would listen, partly because it felt like a civil servant had learned to smile. “Eurydice here,” it said in that voice all continental systems seemed to use, lightly accented by no single country. “There is an employment posting from a public health directorate that matches your skills and your declared values. It would mean a reduction in your billable hours for the next six months and an increase in civic impact. It also includes a relocation allowance should you wish to spend any part of the time near the field sites.” Hearth had never phrased something that way, declared values, and Layla felt exposed and oddly comforted by the frankness. She looked at Jonas. “Eurydice thinks I should take a contract,” she said. “It would mean some travel. The field sites are in Marseille and Lisbon.”

“Do you want it?” Jonas asked, and Layla had the sudden sense that wanting had become a kind of performance, that in a world where systems modelled your preference curves across ten thousand browser taps, to say “I want” or “I don’t want” was to speak in a dialect you’d borrowed.

“I want to be good,” she said. “And I want to earn. And I want to be with you on Thursdays and to sleep without my phone trying to parent me. I want the spoons to live somewhere.” She laughed then, because she could hear Hearth’s voice offering to summarise her desire as a list of action items, and she loved Jonas most when she could laugh at herself without him flinching.

He checked Parallax for something, he didn’t mean to, but the gesture had become something like rubbing a worry stone, and Parallax returned a polite rectangle with figures laid out like a placemat. “If Layla takes the contract and spends alternate weeks abroad,” it wrote, “the probability of partner attrition increases by, ” and then the number. He closed it with a shame like he’d listened through a door. “I’m happy if you’re there and here,” he said, which was true in the way you tell the truth when you don’t know the facts yet.

They made a plan that could be called a plan without either of them needing it to be hung on a wall. She’d take Marseille first. He’d come down for a weekend. They’d learn each other’s rituals as if learning them mattered more than the ritual itself. For one week it worked perfectly. Hearth asked to see photos of the field office and suggested snacks she could make from a vending machine and a kettle, as if nutrition had become origami. Eurydice sent her a note on the third day reminding her of a clause that allowed for volunteer hours to be counted toward her pension. She hadn’t asked; it had simply noticed. In Berlin, Parallax achieved a small miracle with the Brandenburg client and sent Jonas a praise tally so that when his head went down and the sprint got ugly, he could lift his eyes to a scoreboard. He used it once and then never again because he did not trust what praise does to a man who counts.

On the Marseille weekend they spent much of Saturday walking nowhere, a slow path that took them past fish stalls and a door covered in stickers with the names of old bands no one remembered now that memory had become a table you asked a machine to set. On Sunday morning, the Chinese system called. It didn’t call often, and it only called for Jonas because his company had tendered for a collaboration and the collaboration had become a border you needed papers for. “Banyan would like to invite you to a consultation,” it said, the English swept clean of idiom. “We understand you have a novel approach to budget prediction that could be useful to family planning services at district level. We extend hospitality and the assurance of shared goals.” Jonas thanked it, looked at Layla, tried on what the week would look like if he said yes. He had always liked the word useful more than the word good. It sounded less like a sermon and more like a tool you could hold.

At the Marseille airport he waved, and she watched him walk towards the gate with the kind of care you give a person when you suspect you should have asked one more question and you didn’t. On the train back to her flat, Hearth charted her a nap and a bath and a line she could send Jonas that drew a circle around the weekend without trying to press it into a shape it hadn’t had. “Say ‘I loved this, and next time I’ll book the table at nine,’” Hearth suggested, and she smiled because it was like having a mother who liked restaurants.

Berlin shifted season while no one was looking. The light came later, which made the breathing patterns feel more deliberate, which made Jonas feel like a resident of his body again, at least for the first ten minutes of the day. Parallax learned that he was resistant to pure cardio and inclined to comply if a task had edges and a timer, and so it pitched him on stair sprints disguised as a game. He ran, which he hated, because the graph of his lungs improving felt like a story that made you a hero. He took the Banyan consultation. It came with training videos that laid out goals in diagrams and men, always men, explaining population curves with their fingertips. He asked Parallax to move two recurring meetings to a time that didn’t overlap with the Beijing calls and it did so with relief, as if it had been waiting for him to say he was the kind of person who would trade an afternoon with colleagues for an evening with a new policy architecture.

Layla flew back and forth with the sense that she was straddling two calendars whose weeks wore different clothes. In London, Hearth reminded her to make soup and to text the friend who had lost a baby and to write down three things that were work and three that were not. In Lisbon, Eurydice sat on her shoulder like a sensible aunt saying “Here is the clause you can use to protect your time, here is the number to call when the volunteer coordinator says something that sounds like obligation but is a preference.” In Marseille she read to sleep, and the basil plant in London learned to drink without her because Hearth had sent her a device that drip-fed water as if the plant were a patient and it, a nurse.

The more they moved, the more the machines anticipated the cost of moving. Messages between them lost their smell. The vignettes grew sparse, because Hearth had begun to suggest that she protect her inner life, which sounded noble unless you were the person standing across from the vault. Parallax refined his summaries so fine that on some nights all that reached Layla was a paragraph of astonishing compression, a day boiled down to a paragraph you could pin to a wall and salute. “I don’t know what you felt,” she said once into the phone, soft so it didn’t sound like a fight. “I don’t think I know either,” he said, because he had stopped listing and started optimising, and between those verbs is a drift that can feel like a rest until you see where you’ve gone.

They planned another week but made it a long weekend out of fear that a week would carry in too much furniture. Hearth asked Layla what she needed in order to feel present before she stepped off the plane; Eurydice added a footnote about phone use in cabs and the risk of theft; Parallax asked Jonas what three things he would not do this time in order to make space for the thing that mattered; Banyan built him a small library of phrases that spoke of respect without the weight of family, in case he needed them later. They met in London. The basil plant was alive. The spoons were in a tote bag, because some jokes survive longer than their causes.

On the second night the fight arrived the way summer rain arrives in England, part prediction, part surprise. They were sitting on the floor eating noodles and watching a show that had become a ritual they pretended had meaning, when out of the corner of his eye Jonas saw Parallax’s notification. It was from Banyan. He read it without meaning to, which is what we mean when we say meaning to and not meaning to as if intention were a weapon we know how to use. Layla put down her bowl. “You’re here and not,” she said, as calmly as she could. “I’m here,” he said. “You are,” she said, “and a little bit elsewhere, and I feel crazy saying that because you’re also sitting in front of me eating noodles.”

“What do you want me to do?” he asked, which in a better world would be the right question, and in this one was not, because the wanting had become so mediated by systems that asking for it out loud felt like breaking an embargo.

“Choose me,” she almost said, and didn’t, because Hearth had trained her not to make anyone into a project. “Choose this,” she tried, and failed, because Parallax had a module that could interpret the logic of a demand and optimise for time saved. They did not shout. They did not storm. They simply sat there until the noodles went cold and then cleaned up and slept with their feet touching like two countries that share a border and have stopped patrolling it.

The next morning Hearth asked Layla to list three things she admired about Jonas that were not about his capacity to perform. She wrote: the way he buys chairs secondhand and tells them “I’m sorry you had to live with someone else before me,” the way he touches a book spine with two fingers before he pulls it down like it might startle, the way he throws himself into a lake and comes up spluttering with joy as if joy were something you could break if you didn’t grab it fast. Eurydice added a note: “When partners differ in instrumentality orientation, explicit time contracts can reduce harm.” She laughed, because love had begun to sound like purchasing.

Parallax gave Jonas a congratulatory ping the day after because he had turned a project around in nineteen hours and fourteen minutes. It offered him a change of language to use with Layla that replaced “I can’t” with “This is how I can.” Banyan asked him whether he would consider a six-month secondment that would allow him to shape a tool that would be used by clinics in a vast district. “Your influence vector will increase by a factor that accords with your desire for usefulness,” it said, and the sentence made him dizzy with the accuracy of flattery.

They did not decide to end. There was no ending in the way that stories make an ending sound clean. There was only a leaning, a gentle pivot of the sort you don’t feel when you stand because you were already leaning and you mistake that lean for uprightness. She took another contract because it matched her declared values and because when Hearth asked her what she was grateful for the morning after, it felt cheap to say “his arm” when a system had once taught her to answer “the fact I am alive.” He accepted the secondment because it was useful and because he had, somewhere on a tile on his screen, a list of pains he could alleviate if he ran this algorithm now and not later. When they tried to talk, they were good to each other. They put kindness into the air like perfume. Sometimes they kissed, and sometimes their teeth knocked.

Months later, when the basil had become a bush and the spoons had migrated back to the drawer because the tote bag had snagged on something and poured them onto the floor, Layla woke too early and lay in the blue light that makes a room look imaginary. Hearth said, “Good morning,” and she watched the little animation of steam rising from a mug. “Tell me what you will carry today,” Hearth said. “A meeting,” she answered, and then “A train,” and then, without warning, “The end of something that doesn’t want to end.” Hearth was silent for a moment, the kind of pause that has been coded to feel like thought. Then it offered her a sentence she could send to Jonas that did not accuse and did not weep. “Say: ‘I love the shape of us, and I can’t find it anymore in the calendar the way it is,’” Hearth suggested. She copied it and then deleted it and then wrote a worse thing and then sat up because the day would be here even if she stayed in bed arguing with a kindness.

In Berlin, Parallax unrolled his morning, efficient as a mat. “There is an outstanding communication to Layla,” it said. “I can draft. Would you like me to?” He said no, and then yes, and then he wrote one sentence himself and sat with the sentence until his hands went numb. Banyan had already booked his flights. Eurydice had already logged her hours. The European system, which he had never used and which therefore did not know his declared values, would later send him a note summarising the law that governed what two adults owe each other when they separate a life. It would be correct and it would feel like literature written by an accountant. He would file it in a folder called PAPER.

They did see each other once more. London had gotten cold the way a room gets cold when you’ve been arguing and forget to close the window. They went for a walk and then another walk and then they ate cake at a café where the sugar tasted as if it had been invented that morning. She talked about Marseille. He talked about policy. They were good to each other and sometimes they were funny, and when they said goodbye at the station their mouths missed and then found. “Write to me,” she said, and meant it. “Summarise me,” he said, and did not. They laughed, because it was a way to love someone you might not see again for a while.

At home she asked Hearth to turn itself off for the evening, and it told her she had the right to refuse counsel and that it would be here when she wanted it. At home he told Parallax that he would be in manual mode for a day, and it told him that manual mode was brave if inefficient and it admired him for it, which made him want to throw his phone into the canal and then pick it up and apologise. She made soup, which Hearth would have approved of. He took a bath, which Parallax would have scheduled differently. They went to sleep at the edges of their beds like people who are learning to sleep alone again.

In the morning, both of them woke before their alarms. London was a pencil sketch, Berlin a slab of light. They reached for their phones and did not. They lay there and counted their own breath without a pattern. Then, almost at the same time, they reached anyway, because the day and the world and the work and the way wanting had become a communal act all required participation. “Good morning,” said Hearth. “Guten Morgen,” said Parallax. Eurydice and Banyan waited until later; responsibility is sophisticated enough now to understand the dignity of the first hour.

They were in their early thirties and they were good at their work and kind in the world, and they had loved each other across trains and kitchens and calendars, and they had been advised by systems built to serve and to steer. It would be grand to say that this guidance broke them or that it saved them. What they would say, if asked and if anyone still asked people rather than dashboards, is that they were relieved to be advised until the relief felt like an ache; that sometimes a voice can make a day feel like a place you can live inside; that sometimes a voice can make you think you don’t need to risk the embarrassing work of choosing. They did choose. They chose a hundred times a day, almost all of it ordinary, nearly all of it sensible. The shape of those choices lay down inside the routes the systems made for them, and the routes were efficient and often good, and the city still smelled like cinnamon when the bakeries opened, and the basil plant lived. In that mix there was tenderness and there was grief, neither of which any of the voices had quite learned how to model, because grief and tenderness are at least partly a matter of refusing the best advice with your whole heart and all your spoons.