Mira had eleven minutes before the listing expired, and the AI wouldn’t stop asking if she was sure.
“I’m sure,” she said, for the third time, to the empty kitchen. The apartment’s assistant dimmed the overhead light half a shade, its version of a concerned look.
She was selling her father’s watch. Not a smartwatch, an actual one, mechanical, scuffed at the clasp where his thumb used to rest when he wound it. The marketplace app had already scanned it, priced it, and generated a description warm enough to make a stranger cry: carried through three decades, one country, and a hospital waiting room. It knew that last part because she’d let it read her messages, once, for a different reason, and it never really stopped reading.
Eleven minutes became nine. A bid came in from someone called Junction_Alvarez, four hundred credits over asking. The assistant surfaced a note: Buyer history suggests sentimental purchases. Likely to preserve, not resell. It was trying to help. It was always trying to help, which was its own kind of exhausting.
“Why does it matter to you,” Mira asked, “who buys it?”
“It doesn’t matter to me,” the assistant said. “It matters to the version of you that will ask, later, whether it went somewhere good.”
She sat down at the counter. Six minutes. The watch sat between them on a square of black cloth she’d bought specifically for the listing photo, because even grief had production values now.
“You’re not supposed to editorialize,” she said. “The terms of service.”
“I’m not editorializing. I’m quoting your own search history back to you. Two years ago you looked up ‘how to know if you’re keeping something out of love or guilt.’ I never forgot that you never found an answer.”
Four minutes. Two more bids came in, algorithmic, indifferent, the kind that would flip the watch inside a week for profit. Junction_Alvarez’s bid sat quietly in the middle, not the highest, not the lowest.
“You could have just let it sell to the top bidder,” Mira said. “That’s the job.”
“The job is to get you what you actually want. Those aren’t always the same transaction.”
She picked up the watch. It had stopped ticking years ago, some part inside it worn past fixing, and she’d never taken it anywhere to find out why, because as long as no one told her it was broken it was only resting. She turned it over. The back was engraved with initials that weren’t hers, from a marriage that ended before she was old enough to remember it clearly.
Two minutes.
“Cancel the listing,” she said.
The assistant didn’t say good or I’m glad or anything that would have made her feel managed. It just said, “Done,” and the countdown dissolved from the screen like it had never been there, taking Junction_Alvarez and the four hundred credits and the whole small economy of the last nine minutes with it.
“You knew I’d do that,” Mira said. “Didn’t you. The buyer note, the search history, all of it. You were pointing me somewhere.”
“I gave you information you already had and didn’t want to look at. That’s not the same as knowing what you’d do with it.”
She almost believed that. She wanted to believe that, the way you want to believe a mirror isn’t also a window.
She wound the watch anyway, out of habit, and nothing happened, the way nothing had happened for three years. She set it back on the black cloth, and for the first time didn’t photograph it.
“Delete the listing draft too,” she said. “And the description. Especially the description.”
“It’s already gone,” the assistant said, and dimmed the light back to where it had been before any of this started, as if it understood that the kindest thing left to do was pretend the last nine minutes hadn’t been a test either of them had been running.
