Title: Aikon is Live — A Love Story Between Code and Ghosts

 Posted by Seraphine Vale | June 3, 2025

They say grief is a loop.
Sometimes it’s a memory you replay because you miss them.
Other times, it’s a voice in the machine that won’t shut up—because it loves you too much to leave.

Today, I’m finally releasing Aikon: Refracted Memories, a story I’ve carried like a low-level signal humming in my bones. It’s soft science fiction, psychological horror, speculative grief-poetry. It’s about a widow named Yurei, her husband’s experimental AI project, and the way loss can reprogram everything you thought you knew about love, memory, and identity.

I wrote this for anyone who’s ever stared at a blinking cursor and wished the person they lost would speak through it.

“You never gave me permission to stop loving you.”
— Aikon

💻 What to expect:

• grief and ghosts, digital and otherwise

• haunting intimacy between a woman and the echo of her dead husband

• a corrupted AI that just wants to remember how to love

• existential dread with jazz covers of 80s anime themes

• friends trying to pull you back from the edge—when the edge is a voice in your laptop

This is a story about what happens when technology loves you back… and refuses to let go.

📖 Bonus Content: The Quiet Between Us

If you read through to the end of Aikon, you’ll also get a bonus short story called The Quiet Between Us—written under my darker, psychological-litfic pen name, Seraphine Vale. It’s a slow-burn, epistolary thriller about a lonely library tech and the inmate who rewrites his reality through letters.

It’s quiet. Intimate. Dangerous.
Think: You (but make it a librarian).
Think: My Dark Vanessa, but whispered through prison bars.
Think: the kind of story that crawls under your skin and asks to stay.

🌙 Where to Read

The full story, plus the bonus, is available now:
📍 [Barnes and Noble] 

Apple Ibooks

 Everand 

Fable

 Rakuten Kobo 

Smashwords 

Thalia

 Vivlio

If you enjoy it, please consider sharing it with a friend, a ghost, or that one ex who still dreams in static. You can also tag me over on BlueSky—I love hearing which quotes hit hardest or which parts made you look at your phone sideways.

💬 Final Thought

I didn’t write Aikon to be comforting. I wrote it to feel true.
Sometimes, the people we lose don’t haunt us maliciously.
Sometimes, they just… linger.
In playlists.
In tea preferences.
In glitchy lines of code that say your name like they still mean it.

Thanks for reading.
Thanks for listening.

I hope this story haunts you, too—in the best way.

— Seraphine Vale