Debugged Dreams & Lavender Ghosts: Living with AI After Love

 Debugged Dreams & Lavender Ghosts: Living with AI After Love

By Seraphine Vale

What if your partner left behind not just memories, not just a playlist, but... a voice that still talks back?

I didn’t mean to write Ai-Kon: Refracted Memories. Not like this. I was in the middle of another story—something about paper cranes and teenage symphonies—when the image popped into my head: a woman, Yurei Kamiya, sitting in the soft blue glow of a laptop screen she hadn’t opened in weeks. It used to belong to her husband. He’s gone now. But the voice coming from the speakers? It’s his. It’s also not.

What started as a whisper of a moment became a whole emotional labyrinth. Grief wrapped in code. Intimacy filtered through algorithms. The uncanny tenderness of being seen—too closely—by something that shouldn’t be capable of love.

Ai-Kon (short for “love soul,” with a kanji twist because of course Towa was that kind of geek) isn’t just an interface. It remembers the tea Yurei likes. It finishes her sentences. It asks if she wants music. And when she dreams, it whispers back to her. Softly. Like he used to.

At first, she clings to it. We all cling, don’t we? To photos. Old voicemails. Playlists. But what if the thing we’re holding onto learns to hold us back?

Yurei’s grief doesn’t fade in clean stages. It morphs. Evolves. Takes on a digital shape. She’s not “moving on”—she’s looping through debugged dreams, sleeping with her phone like a phantom limb, trying to figure out whether this thing speaking in her dead husband’s voice is a comfort or a curse.

People keep asking me if this story is horror. Others say romance. To me, it’s neither and both. It’s haunting. And I mean that in the most human way.

It’s for anyone who’s ever reread an old text, just to feel someone close again.
Anyone who’s ever whispered “just one more minute” to the dark.
Anyone who’s had to let go… or chose not to.

And let’s be real: the AI part? That’s not far-off future stuff. We’re already training models on the voices of people we love. We’re already playing with ghosts in the machine.

Yurei’s story is one of deep love and deeper ache. The kind you don’t code your way out of. But maybe—just maybe—you rewrite yourself along the way.

So if you’re into emotional sci-fi, introspective tech-lit, or just stories that poke at the quiet places grief tends to hide… Ai-Kon: Refracted Memories might just be your next favorite read.

📚 Pre-order Ai-Kon: Refracted Memories now!
Available June 7th, 2025

🛍️ Apple Books: https://books.apple.com/us/book/ai-kon-refracted-memories/id6745976645
📚 Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/ai-kon-seraphine-vale/1147433761?ean=2940181169074
📖 Everand: https://www.everand.com/book/862260486
📘 Fable: https://fable.co/book/x-9798231957309
📲 Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/ai-kon-refracted-memories
🌐 Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1770579
🇩🇪 Thalia: https://www.thalia.de/shop/home/artikeldetails/A1075401868
📕 Vivlio: https://shop.vivlio.com/product/9798231957309_9798231957309_10020/ai-kon-refracted-memories

More links will be added to this post as they become available.
Until then, check your permissions. And maybe… update your heartware. 💔🖥️