1 I am a volumetric capture and spatial computing designer. After a project I did recreating an interactive hologram of a grieving father’s late son went viral on Instagram, my studio account blew up. Every morning, my inbox filled with requests from people begging to see their ghosts again. Most days, I couldn’t bear to read them. The weight of other people’s unfinished goodbyes is a heavy thing to carry, but every so often, a story would catch in my throat, and I’d take one on. That Tuesday, a direct message caught my eye. The avatar stopped my breath entirely. Could you generate a full-scale hologram of my late fiancé in a wedding tuxedo? His final wish was to marry me. I promised him a real wedding. I need to keep that promise. I stared at the tiny round profile picture until the edges of my vision went gray. It was a scruffy black terrier mix with a distinct white patch at the tip of his tail. He looked identical to Buster—the stray my fiancée, Sienna, had rescued and loved for ten years. My fingers hovered over the keyboard. A cold knot tightened behind my ribs. Do you have reference photos? I wrote back. The reply came almost instantly, as if she had been sitting in the dark, watching the screen: No usable ones from before he got sick. But I have a friend who looks remarkably like him. You could use his facial scans and measurements as a baseline. A notification pinged. An image preview popped up. My phone suddenly felt like it weighed fifty pounds. My wrist gave out, the edge of the glass rapping against the desk. The photo on the screen was me. Yesterday was our official wedding menu tasting. We’d spent seven hours debating pinot noir reductions and table linens. By the time we got back to our apartment, I was exhausted. I took a shower, threw on an old gray t-shirt, and came out towel-drying my hair. Sienna had met me in the hallway, holding up her phone, insisting she needed a fresh candid to announce our ten-day countdown on social media. I had laughed, self-conscious, asking why she couldn’t have taken it when I was dressed up at the venue. She told me I was gorgeous when I was bare-faced and unguarded. I remember feeling a warm flush in my chest, thinking she was finally softening, finally letting the world see us. I stood there like an obedient child, smiling as she took photo after photo, angling my chin, asking me to look away, then back, taking bursts of video from every angle. She never posted anything. I assumed she’d gotten distracted by work emails. And now, here I was. On a stranger’s feed. In an anonymous commission inquiry. A deep, suffocating absurdity rushed through my veins. My thumbs trembled over the glass: Who is this? She answered in seconds: Nobody important. Just someone who happens to share his features. Can you take the commission? If you can, I’ll upload the raw footage and photos right now. Price isn’t an issue. My heart hammered against my throat, but some quiet, masochistic instinct kept me typing. We can take it. We also include a free commemorative montage for the ceremony. If you want yourself in the scene, send over your photos as well. A brief pause. Three dots pulsed, disappeared, then pulsed again. All right. A massive zip file landed in my shared drive. I extracted the files with numb fingers. When the folder opened, my breath hitched. There were thirty-eight high-resolution portraits of me, alongside dozens of short, forty-second video clips capturing every turn of my head, every blink of my eyes. In the five years Sienna and I had lived together, she hadn’t taken thirty-eight photos of me in total. And tucked beneath my folder were fifteen selfies of her. Her hair styled, her face tilted toward the soft morning light in our bedroom, her eyes wide and pleading. The devoted woman desperate to walk down the aisle with her dead lover was my fiancée. Sienna Shaw. My hand curled into a fist. The plain band on my finger burned like an iron brand pressed into raw meat. Her messages kept arriving, a rapid-fire list of revisions: Remove the small mole on the bridge of his nose. Elongate the outer corners of his eyes slightly. His gaze wasn’t this sharp—soften it. Make the browline less defined. Deepen the left dimple. He was sick for a long time, so there should be a lingering fragility to his posture. Take some mass off the shoulders. Leaner. More fragile. I reached up, my fingertip brushing the bridge of my nose. The mole was tiny, barely the size of a pinprick. I’d always liked it. I thought it gave my face character. For two years, Sienna had gently nagged me to get it excised at a dermatologist, swearing up and down that she was terrified of atypical melanomas, that she was just looking out for my health. I had felt so cherished by her vigilance that I actually went in for a biopsy. Now, the memory of her face when I brought home the pathology report—Completely benign, no removal necessary—flooded back. She hadn’t looked relieved. She had looked stiff, faintly repulsed, turning away without a word. My jaw clenched until my teeth ached. Her text popped up on the interface: Tell me whatever else you need. I want the spatial projection to be fully responsive. I want him to link his arm through mine as we walk toward the altar. I want him to look me in the eye and say ‘I do.’ I leaned into the cruelty of the moment, typing with surgical detachment: Interactive multi-sensory projections at that resolution require a full rendering pipeline and dedicated hardware rental. We charge between four and eight thousand dollars per minute of interactive runtime. A ten-minute walk and vow sequence, plus calibration and tech support, runs about eighty thousand dollars. Are you prepared to clear that budget? Her response took less than ten seconds: I’ll give your team a hundred and twenty thousand. Make it indistinguishable from reality. I need it delivered in nine days. 2 I stared at that number—a hundred and twenty thousand dollars—until the white glare of the screen seared into my retinas. When we picked out our wedding rings three months ago, I knew her logistics startup was bleeding cash in its series-A round. I spent weeks scouring vintage shops and finally chose a simple, three-hundred-dollar titanium band. She had broken down in tears at the register, throwing her arms around my neck, sobbing that once the company stabilized, she would buy me a ring worth a hundred times that. I had felt her tears soaking through my shirt. I had believed every drop of them. And now, she was casually dropping a six-figure sum to hire an illusion. A soft scratching sounded at the baseboard. Buster trotted in, his scruffy chin resting gently on my knee. Sensing the tension in the room, he let out a low whimper and pushed his head into my palm. I lifted him into my lap, burying my face in his coarse fur. At least this little creature loved me for who I was. Around seven in the evening, the front door clicked open. Sienna walked into the apartment carrying a pastry box tied with red twine. “I picked up that bakery tart you like,” she said, setting it on the kitchen island. My heart, frozen in ice, gave an involuntary twitch. For a second, a desperate, childish hope flickered through me—maybe it was a misunderstanding, maybe there was some explanation that didn’t shatter my entire world. The confrontation trapped in my throat burned, but I kept quiet. She didn’t notice my silence. She ate a quick salad, wiped her mouth, and headed straight for the guest bedroom she used as a home office. “I have back-to-back investor syncs tonight, El. Please don’t interrupt me.” The door clicked shut. A minute later, a chime rang from my laptop. A new message from her burner account: Here is a dossier of Theo’s mannerisms, his speech cadence, and small personal habits. I thought it might help your script team train the voice model. Theo. It was the first time she had typed the name to me, but it wasn’t the first time I’d seen it. Every single one of her personal email handles, her private Spotify playlists, her locked Pinterest boards—they all ended in Theo_05. When we first moved in together, I playfully suggested we get matching monogrammed keychains. She had laughed, a cool, patronizing little sound. “Elliott, we’re pushing thirty. Let’s not be performative.” I had blushed, thoroughly ashamed of my own sentimentality, and dropped it. I opened the document she sent. It was six pages long. Theo and I grew up across the hall from each other. In kindergarten, we played house; he was always the groom, I was always the bride. In eighth grade, a boy left a note in my locker. Theo found out and didn’t speak to me for an entire week out of quiet fury. When we were seventeen, we hiked the ridge trail. I slipped and sprained my ankle; he carried me three miles down the mountain in the pouring rain without complaining once. The summer after high school, he suddenly told me he was ending things. His family packed up their house overnight and vanished. He cut every cord. In an absolute rage of heartbreak, I dragged every photo we’d ever taken into the backyard fire pit and burned them to ash. My freshman year of college, his mother finally called me, hysterical. Theo was dying of late-stage lymphoma. He had hidden the diagnosis so he wouldn’t drag me down with him. She begged me to come to the hospice to see him one last time. Theo loved soft flannel, fresh-cut white calla lilies, cheap street tacos, and strawberry pastries… I looked up from the monitor. Ten feet away, the office door remained sealed. A single sheet of drywall separated us, but it felt like an ocean of black water. Inside, she was resurrecting her sacred ghost. Outside, I was drowning in the debris of my own life. At eleven o’clock, she finally emerged. Seeing me still stationed at the dining table in the dark, she frowned. “Still up? You know sleep deprivation wrecks your immune system.” “Just finishing up a client delivery,” I said, keeping my voice level. She let out a soft, dismissive sigh. “Your little online rendering gigs… honey, they can wait until tomorrow. Don’t ruin your eyesight over spare change.” A bitter, crooked smile pulled at my mouth. I had sent her links to my published studio projects dozens of times. If she had clicked on a single one, she would have seen my branding. She would have known the handle she was messaging belonged to the man sleeping in her bed. She didn’t know because she had never cared to look. Her eyes had been trained on a dead boy for ten years. The bakery box sat untouched on the counter. She noticed it, her eyebrows drawing together. “Why haven’t you touched the strawberry tart? I went out of my way to grab it.” A sudden, sharp nausea washed over me. I reached out and swept the box off the edge. It hit the hardwood with a wet, heavy thud. The cardboard split, red glaze and cream smearing across the floorboards. “I hate strawberries,” I said, my voice shaking. “I’ve told you that twenty times. Why can you never remember?” 3 The smashed berries sat like an open wound against the light oak. Buster scrambled across the rug, nose twitching, lunging toward the sugar. Sienna moved like lightning, scooping the dog into her arms. “Buster, no! You know strawberries give you severe colitis. Drop it.” She held the dog against her chest, her soft, maternal cadence vanishing the moment she looked at me. Her expression hardened into cold disbelief. “What is wrong with you? Every time I bring these home, you eat them.” “No,” I whispered. “I ate them because you bought them.” I had told her my preferences during our first year. I liked dark chocolate, I preferred citrus, I loved bold, earthy things. Every time, she had nodded, looking attentive. And then, a week later, she’d bring home white calla lilies, soft neutral sweaters, and strawberry tarts. Eventually, I stopped correcting her. I convinced myself that lilies smelled clean, that oversized cardigans were cozy, that strawberries weren’t so bad. She had spent five years sanding down my edges, carving me into a vessel for someone else, and I had smiled and thanked her for the carpentry. My hands began to shake uncontrollably. Sienna seemed startled by the tremor in my fingers. She lowered Buster onto the floor and stepped toward me, her voice dropping into a conciliatory purr. “Elliott. What’s going on with you?” I backed away, wrapping my arms around myself to stop the shaking. “I don’t like the floral arrangements we picked for the reception. I want to swap the calla lilies for garden roses and sunflowers.” Her hand, reaching out to touch my shoulder, froze in midair. The warmth dropped from her face, replaced by that familiar, chilly detachment. “We’re ten days out, Elliott. Weddings aren’t a game of dress-up. The floral contracts were signed in March. Changing them now will throw the venue coordinator into a spiral.” She pinched the bridge of her nose—her telltale sign that the discussion was over. “I’m exhausted. I’m sleeping in the guest room tonight. Clean this up and go to bed.” I watched her walk down the hallway and close the door. It was always like this. Whenever I pushed back, she never screamed. She simply withdrew, starving me of affection until the silence became unbearable, until I was the one knocking on her door, apologizing for being difficult. Fine, we’ll keep the lilies. Fine, I won’t cut my hair short. Fine, I’ll wear the ivory linen shirt… I had convinced myself her rigidity was just high standards. I had gaslit myself into believing it was love. I sat in the dark living room until 2:00 AM, then pulled up the workstation. I took the high-res scans of my own face and began the modeling process. With surgical, sickening precision, I erased myself. I smoothed away the tiny mole on my nose. I widened the eyes, dulling their intensity, curving the lids into a softer, more tragic slope. I deepened the dimple on the cheek. I hollowed out the collarbones. When the volumetric render compiled at sunrise, I stared at the screen, tears burning behind my eyelids. The boy looking back at me was beautiful, pale, and completely hollow. A ghost made of code. I exported the build and sent the private preview link to her burner account: Initial volumetric model complete. Please review interactive physics and facial likeness. Less than three minutes later, my phone vibrated: It’s him. It’s perfect. Almost simultaneously, a stifled sob broke through the thin walls of the guest room, followed moments later by the hiss of the shower. At seven-thirty, Sienna walked into the kitchen. Her eyes were bloodshot, damp strands of hair clinging to her neck, but her face held a strange, radiant energy. She crossed the room, wrapping her arms around my waist from behind, pressing her cheek against my shoulder. “I’m sorry about last night, El,” she murmured, her voice dripping with sudden, unprompted tenderness. “We’re both just frayed. Wedding nerves are real. Let me make it up to you. Let’s get brunch at the bistro downtown. I’ll invite Simon.” In five years, this was the first time she had ever apologized after an argument. I looked down at her pale hands clasped over my stomach. I carefully peeled her fingers away, stepped out of her embrace, and looked at her. “I pulled an all-nighter for a client,” I said flatly. “I need to sleep. Go with Simon.” I laid in bed until noon, staring at the ceiling fan, my mind an empty, echoing chamber. When I finally unlocked my phone, there were half a dozen voice memos from Simon, her older brother. El, did my idiot sister start something again? You tell me right now. I don’t care if she’s my sister, if she’s disrespecting you, I’ll drag her by her hair. Are you still asleep? If you’re hungry, come meet us at the restaurant. If you’re too wiped, text me what you want, I’ll bring takeout. 4 A tight ache settled in my chest. Simon had been my closest friend in the city for four years. When Sienna first introduced us, we clicked instantly over vintage synthesizers and indie gaming. Even when things were rocky with Sienna, Simon was the one who pulled me out for a beer, who told me I was the best thing that had ever happened to his family. I pulled on a jacket, grabbed my keys, and took a rideshare to the restaurant. The host guided me toward their private dining room in the back. As I approached the frosted glass door, Simon’s voice cut through the wood, sharp and furious: “Have you lost your absolute mind? A holographic wedding? The day before your real ceremony with Elliott? In the exact same damn ballroom?” I froze on the carpet. “Sienna, look at me. Are you having a psychotic break? What happens when Elliott finds out?” Sienna’s response was chillingly composed: “Simon, stop playing the moral authority. How dare you try to keep me from Theo? Don’t be a hypocrite. The only reason you took to Elliott in the first place is because he moves and laughs exactly like Theo did.” A suffocating pause hung in the air. “Make sure you bring Buster tomorrow,” she continued, her tone matter-of-fact. “Theo and I raised that dog together. He has to be there.” Her voice dropped, quiet and resolute: “Elliott won’t know. Once this is done, Theo will be put to rest. I’ll spend the rest of my life making it up to Elliott.” A heavy, exhausted sigh followed. Simon’s voice sounded muffled, defeated: “…Fine. Just… make sure the tech crew clears out before midnight.” My heart didn’t break. It felt as though it simply ceased to beat. The air vanished from the hallway. The wedding wasn’t mine. The venue wasn’t mine. The fiancée wasn’t mine. Even the brotherly bond I had leaned on for years was just an echo chamber for a dead stranger. And Buster. The dog I had bathed, walked through midnight rainstorms, and spoon-fed chicken broth when he had kennel cough—he was just another piece of Theo’s estate. I turned around and walked out into the blinding daylight. When I unlocked the apartment door, Buster came skittering down the hall, his tail beating a frantic rhythm against the baseboards. Five years. I had held a secret hope that if Sienna and I ever parted ways, she would let me keep him. Now, I knew the truth. I had never owned anything in this house. I was just an unpaid caretaker in someone else’s shrine. At two in the afternoon, the front door opened. Sienna and Simon walked in together. Simon carried a brown paper bag from the bistro. He walked over, forcing a grin, and reached out to ruffle my hair. “Look at those dark circles. Keep pulling all-nighters, kid, and you’re going to look eighty in the wedding photos.” I tilted my head, deliberately letting his hand fall into empty air. “Big enterprise contract,” I said, my tone flat, stripped of inflection. “Strict non-disclosure, tight deadline. I can’t let the team down.” I grabbed the duffel bag I had packed an hour ago from beside the sofa. “I’m crashing at the studio’s live-in loft for the next few days. We need to be on the servers continuously. I’ll be back in time for the ceremony.” Sienna’s brow furrowed, a flicker of irritation crossing her face. “Your studio? Since when does your little freelance collective have a live-in loft?” Simon looked uneasy, stepping between us. “El, come on. Nothing’s more important than your wedding week. Can’t you delegate?” Sienna crossed her arms, letting out a short, mocking scoff. “Let him go, Simon. If he wants to sulk over a strawberry tart, let him. He said he’ll be back for the ceremony. It’s just paperwork and a party anyway.” I looked at her, holding her gaze for the first time all day. “Yeah,” I said quietly. “Just a ceremony.” At the studio, my team and I worked forty-eight straight hours. We dialed in the volumetric particle density, calibrated the spatial tracking nodes, and mapped the acoustic arrays to simulate physical presence. When the final build was delivered to the hotel’s AV director, I handed the deployment reins to my lead engineer and walked out into the city. I wandered aimlessly through the shopping district, stopping in front of a department store window. The reflection looking back was a stranger: the soft side-part, the loose linen button-down, the muted earth tones. Everything Sienna had picked for me over sixty months. I stepped into a barbershop, had them fade the sides down to the skin and crop the top textured and sharp. Then I walked into a boutique, bought an all-black structured suit with hard architectural shoulders, and traded my canvas sneakers for heavy combat boots. When I checked my phone, a message sat in my inbox from Sienna’s burner: Thank you for the build. We just finished dry-run calibration in the hall. It is beyond anything I could have dreamed. Your technical director told me you personally pulled three consecutive all-nighters to finalize the rendering. I cannot thank you enough. If you’re free tomorrow afternoon, I would be deeply honored if you attended as a guest to witness Theo and me. I looked at the message, a slow, hollow laugh escaping my lips. A single tear tracked down my cheek, hot and stinging. I’ll be there, I typed back.
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