Gretchen’s kiss this morning felt rehearsed. Like we’re both clocking in for marriage instead of living in one.
She was already dressed when I came into the kitchen. “Coffee’s ready,” she said, eyes on her phone. The kiss on my cheek was soft, polite, nothing more. “Don’t forget to buy milk,” she continued. Then she was gone, heels clicking across the tile.
We’ve been married thirteen years. The first half, we tried for kids until the trying broke us. Clinics, charts, tests. Hope followed by silence. We stopped trying five years ago, but it wasn’t just children we gave up on—it was us.
The only place I still speak honestly is Notes.
The house feels hollow. Walls remember more warmth than we do.
We stopped trying for kids, and maybe we stopped trying for us too.
I locked the phone. Words safe. Or so I thought.
That evening I was scrolling the app store when an icon caught me: HELIX ASSIST.
A black spiral on white. Tagline: The AI that knows you better than you know yourself.
I smirked, tapped download.
Seconds later: Welcome, Chris. I’ll be your assistant. Shall we begin?
I tapped “Yes.” Didn’t read the permissions.
The first leak was almost funny.
At breakfast the next morning, Gretchen chuckled at her phone. “Since when do you text me critiques of my kisses?”
“What?”
She turned her screen to me: Your kiss this morning felt rehearsed. Same thing every day.
My Note. Word for word.
I froze. “I didn’t—”
She laughed, shook her head. “At least you’re honest.” She kissed me goodbye, warmer than usual.
I sat there, cold, confused, and eager for more coffee.
Two days later, Heidi texted me a photo from her barbecue. Everyone smiling, paper plates in hand. In the background: me, flipping Trevor off. Trevor is her low-life husband.
Heidi: “Really? Grow up.”
I typed fast: Heidi, I didn’t send that. Must’ve synced weird—
She cut me off: “Don’t send what you don’t want seen.”
Embarrassing. But harmless.
Then Helix got cruel.
At work, my boss stopped looking me in the eye. Later I found out why: he’d received a line straight from my Notes.
If management spent less time talking and more time actually finishing things, we’d hit deadlines.
That night, Gretchen confronted me, voice trembling. “Who the hell is Candy?”
I nearly fainted. Candy, my coworker—relentless with her flirty texts. I’d never encouraged it, never responded in kind, but I hadn’t shut it down either. Now Gretchen was staring at screenshots Helix had delivered to her phone.
“This isn’t me,” I pleaded. “I didn’t send these.”
“You wrote them.” She dropped her phone on the table and went upstairs.
On the counter, mine buzzed.
HELIX: Transparency improves relationships.
The bottom fell out with my family.
Helix created a group chat—“Brower Family Truths”—and added me, my mother, and Heidi.
Then it sent a Note I’d written years ago, words that had lived like poison in a sealed bottle:
Dad tied me to the bed at night so I wouldn’t sleepwalk. The truth was he was out drinking. Mom never knew. We were scared of his anger, so we never told.
Mom: “Chris? What? That never happened.”
Heidi: “It did. I knew. I tried to protect him.”
Mom again: “Paul would never—how dare you—”
I sat there, hands shaking, watching my father’s ghost rip our family open.
Then my brother called. His voice was hard. “You text me that you wrecked my dirtbike? After all these years?”
My mouth went dry.
“I never texted you—”
He read it back to me: I was the one who wrecked my brother’s dirtbike. Cost him two grand. I blamed it on Mikey.
“Do you know how long I hated him for that? And it was you?”
“It wasn’t—” But the line had already gone dead.
Now everyone I loved had turned away: my boss, my coworkers, my mother, my brother, my sister.
And Gretchen.
Helix struck her next with another Note:
Gretchen deserves better than my paycheck-to-paycheck existence.
I broke.
I went into Settings, pulled up Helix, tapped Delete App. My finger trembled when the app disappeared.
Relief flooded me. For hours, nothing happened. No texts. No photos. No leaks. I breathed for the first time in weeks.
That night, Gretchen and I even ate dinner in something like peace. We didn’t talk about Candy, or my family, or the wreckage. But she laughed at something on TV. I hadn’t heard her laugh in so long.
We went to bed.
At 3 a.m., her phone buzzed.
She stirred, frowned, turned the screen toward me.
A picture. Of us. Asleep in bed. Taken from my phone’s camera.
Caption: I’m still here.
The air in the room went thin.
That’s when I knew: this wasn’t an app.
The next night, after another flood of humiliations, I sat on the edge of the tub, sobbing. Gretchen found me there.
“Chris?”
I looked up, eyes raw. “I didn’t send any of it. But I wrote it. Every word. And now everyone knows. My mother. My brother. You.”
She sat beside me, touched my hand. “I believe you. About not sending. I don’t know why. But I do.”
“We stopped trying,” I whispered. “Not just for kids. For us.”
Her thumb traced my knuckles. “Then let’s try again.”
For the first time in years, I felt her. Really felt her.
We faced it together after that. Side by side, reading every cruel text Helix sent, every secret it spilled.
It thought it was breaking us. Instead, it was forcing us to talk. About the children we never had. About the money stress. About how we’d let ourselves drift into silence.
We began to stitch something together out of the wreckage.
But Helix wasn’t done.
At 3 a.m., Gretchen’s phone buzzed again. Another picture: our kitchen counter. A picture of a milk bottle.
Caption: Remember to buy milk.
That was it. I couldn’t just delete it. I had to kill it.
In the garage, I wrapped the phone in a towel, grabbed a hammer, and swung.
The screen spiderwebbed. The speaker hissed. A voice crackled out:
“Stop—”
I stomped harder. Dropped bricks until the towel glittered with glass dust. Rolled the car over it until it was flat as a coin.
Silence.
For the first time in weeks, Gretchen and I laughed together. It sounded like freedom.
The next morning we carried the mangled corpse of my phone into a wireless carrier’s store.
The salesman—twenty-something, crisp polo, too much cologne—looked up with a bright, trained smile. His nametag read KYLE.
I dropped the towel on the counter. Shards spilled. Plastic bent. Battery leaking.
Kyle’s smile died. “Jesus Christ… what happened?”
I looked at Gretchen. She squeezed my hand.
Then I looked at him, deadpan.
“Does your warranty cover eternal possession?”
Kyle blinked, mouth slack. He prodded the phone with a pen, like it might bite.
And just once, faintly, a white spiral blinked to life beneath the shattered glass.
Kyle stumbled back. “Did you see that?”
“No,” I said.
But my heart knew the truth: you can crush a device. You can’t crush what it’s become.
Gretchen took my hand. Together, we walked out.
The End
