Leo Han, the 28-year-old head of development who’d greenlit the project, felt his soul leave his body.

Marla’s smile vanished. “Excuse me?”

Leo stared at him. “An AI?”

“There’s a problem,” Kaito said. “I traced the file’s metadata. This wasn’t made by a person.”

Then, a single line of dialogue. She looked into the camera, tears freezing on her cheeks, and said: “I remember when stories were just true.”

Leo hit play.

“We’re making it slower,” he said, the words tasting like freedom. “We’re making it sadder. We’re giving the dragon a limp and a five-minute monologue about loneliness.”