The consensus was confusion; the rumor was inevitability. Some swore the update had come from a satellite, or a stray research packet from an abandoned archive. Others said it was the system stitching itself to the world, borrowing the quiet persistence of ordinary days to make synthetic empathy fold more smoothly into its code.

Weeks later, Mira received a message in a format older than most protocols: a hand-scrawled card scanned and slipped into the community feed. It read, simply:

Malik's voice on the line finally softened. "We didn't want to change much. Just to make room for the small things that keep us human."