Her heart stopped. Those weren't words from the past. Those were words he would have said. The light hadn't just recorded a moment. The algorithm had inferred the probability of a moment. It had filled in the gaps. It had guessed.
Version 0.9.3 had let them hear a conversation from an hour ago, captured as vibrations in the residual light field. rtgi 0.17.0.2
But 0.17.0.2 was different. Elara had broken their own cardinal rule. She had pointed the sensor array at a place where light had no business lingering: the empty chair where her father used to sit. He had died three years ago, six months before the project began. Her heart stopped