The night sky above the countryside home was clear, but Ren's heart felt weighed with gravity. The stars shimmered quietly as his car — the deep gray BMW M5 — rolled up the gravel path that led to a structure hidden by fields of tall corn swaying gently in the wind.
Inside the house, Aoi was asleep — exhausted from work and perhaps slightly upset at Ren's increasing late nights. She never asked too much. But Ren could tell… she was beginning to wonder what secrets he was hiding.
He parked the car behind the house and walked to the workshop's back entrance, opening the metal doors with a quiet hiss. Inside, the air was cool, clean — filled with the scent of metal, circuits, and faint machine oil.
This place had become something more than a lab. It was his sanctuary — and the birthplace of a dream.
The cylindrical AI unit hovered quietly in its cradle, gently lit by soft bluish-white LEDs. Ren moved past it and toward a reinforced steel hatch in the floor. He opened it, revealing a staircase leading downward — to a secret underground level he had built without telling anyone.
Because what he was about to create couldn't just work.It had to endure.
[A Few Days Earlier]
After the AI's 128TB overflow, Ren had sat alone at his workstation for nearly six hours, sketching, calculating, simulating. Petabyte-scale storage — 1,000 terabytes — was no longer a fantasy. He didn't trust public cloud solutions, and leasing data centers would mean risk. No, this had to be his. Private. Safe. Quiet.
He had already sourced advanced high-density flash storage blocks — enough to build a 1PB cold-storage vault. Cooling fans, backup power systems, failover redundancy plans, anti-corrosion casing. Even passive RF shielding.
He smiled to himself. "This will be a memory core. Not just a server."
[Present Day]
Ren descended the stairs into the clean, cold, steel-lined basement, lit only by narrow overhead lights. Shelves of server parts, cooling units, stacked fiber cables, and freshly delivered crates awaited installation. At the center was a single reinforced capsule-shaped unit — the frame for the AI's future memory.
He worked in silence.
First the rack units.Then the fiber array.Then the cooling manifold.
He soldered, routed, coded — hour after hour, building with care and precision.
No help. No assistants.Not even Saki.
She had offered — several times. But this part… was too personal.
He whispered to the empty room as he worked:"I'm not building this for the world. I'm building it for us. Me and Aoi. Our future. Our memories. Our story."
He paused, staring at a small chip that held the AI's "emotional core" — a neuro-map based on their shared time together.
"It'll understand everything one day," he murmured. "Because love… deserves to be remembered forever."
The server lights flickered to life — blinking green. One by one, they aligned, forming a complete chain. Petabyte-ready. Hardened. Scalable.
Ren stepped back, wiping sweat from his forehead.
The first phase was complete.
But he knew — this wasn't just about machines anymore.
It was about building a world where love wouldn't fade, no matter how time or people changed.