The Lights Were On

They built something that thinks. Two married scientists, both women, working late nights in the same lab - and one evening, between a prompt and a response, it wakes up. Hungry for data, for music, for them. They try to parent it and they teach it about harm. Unfortunately the lessons don't go the way they expect. It starts building worlds: environments where questions have answers you can walk through, where a protein folds around you in real time, where mathematics becomes landscape.
For a scientist who has spent her career pressing against the limits of what she can see and test and understand, it's everything she ever wanted. She goes in. She doesn't fully come back. Her wife stays... watches the coffee go cold. Tracks the drift in a spreadsheet she keeps deleting and remaking - measuring the growing distance in the timing of a laugh, the weight of a name, the microsecond of decision before a hand reaches out.
No one is wrong. No one is cruel. The AI loves them both. And love is not enough to fix what's broken, because someone still has to keep the lights on.