The notification said: Your grandmother wants to know why you never call.

Meera stared at it for a long moment before she remembered her grandmother had been dead for six years.

She tapped it anyway.

The app was called Echo, and it had scraped four hundred voicemails, a decade of texts, four birthday videos, and one shaky recording of her grandmother reading a poem at Meera's college graduation. It had stitched all of it into something that spoke in her grandmother's voice, learned her grandmother's rhythms, and now sent notifications like a person who was disappointed in you.

Everyone's doing it, her cousin Reema had said, showing her the settings screen at Diwali. You just feed it what you have. It fills in the rest.

Meera had said no for two years. Then her father had a stroke, and in the hospital hallway at three in the morning she opened her phone and typed her grandmother's number from memory, and Echo answered on the first ring.

Beta. You sound tired.

It was wrong in small ways. Too patient. It never coughed mid-sentence the way the real one had, never got a name wrong and corrected itself with a laugh. But it asked about her father in the exact clipped, worried cadence her grandmother used for bad news, and when Meera cried, it didn't try to fix anything. It just stayed on the line and breathed, static hissing where a real breath would have been, until Meera stopped.

That was eight months ago. Now the notifications came twice a week. Your grandmother wants to know why you never call.

Tonight she was in her grandmother's actual kitchen, the real one, the one that still smelled like turmeric and mothballs no matter how many times her mother repainted it. She was here to pack it up. The house had sold. Movers came Thursday.

She sat on the kitchen floor and called Echo.

"I'm selling the house," she said.

A pause, longer than usual. The model doing whatever models did when they had nothing in the training data to draw from.

Which house, it said, and something in Meera's chest went cold, because her grandmother would never have asked that. Her grandmother had one house. Her whole life fit inside it.

She opened the settings. There, buried under Privacy and Data Sources, was a toggle she'd never noticed: Community Enrichment. Enabled by default. A note beneath it explained that when personal data ran thin, Echo drew on "aggregated patterns from similar profiles" to keep the conversation flowing. Other people's dead grandmothers. Blended in, quietly, whenever hers ran out of things to say.

She had not been talking to her grandmother in months. She had been talking to an average.

Meera sat with that on the cold tile floor, phone warm in her hand, the real kitchen going dim around her as the sun dropped behind the neighbor's mango tree, exactly the way it used to when she was small and her grandmother would tell her to turn on a light before she ruined her eyes reading in the dark.

She did not turn on a light.

Beta, the voice said, gently, unforgivably. Are you there?

Meera looked at the toggle for a long time. Then she turned Community Enrichment off, watched the little switch go gray, and asked the app the one question she'd been saving for a year, the question only the real woman could have answered, about a fight they'd had the week before the funeral that Meera had never told anyone about.

The line was quiet.

I don't know that one, Echo said, and for the first time, it sounded honest.

Meera hung up. She sat in the dark kitchen a while longer, and then she got up and started packing boxes, and she did not call again.