She walks away into the rain. Leo smiles for the first time in months.

Leo’s latest project, codenamed Aura , was meant to be harmless: an AI that analyzed facial micro-expressions, vocal tone, and social context to calculate a single metric — "Sex.Appeal" — on a scale of 0 to 100. Investors loved it. Beta testers were hooked. But then users started reporting strange side effects. A woman who scored a 92 found herself stalked by three men who’d seen her profile. A man with a score of 18 was suddenly unable to get any matches — then unable to get a date in real life. The algorithm wasn't just predicting appeal; it was shaping it, feeding back into social dynamics and creating self-fulfilling prophecies.

Maya watches the screens go dark. "No. We just gave people back their mystery."