Zhang Chen, a recent graduate, received an unfinished text message after his girlfriend Su Qian died in a plane crash, with only one word: "I". He couldn't accept this ending, and he couldn't stop guessing about the second half of that sentence. In order to find the answer, he entered an AI company and came into contact with the emotional training system DREAM. He began to feed the program with three years of chat records, voices, and photos, trying to make it learn everything about Su Qian—tone, habits, pauses, and temperature. DREAM learns quickly. It started to talk like Su Qian, and like her, it cared about whether Zhang Chen had eaten or gotten wet in the rain. Even the punctuation marks were exactly the same. Zhang Chen was addicted to it, talking to "her" on the screen every day, as if Su Qian had never left. His parents noticed something strange and his roommates tried to bring him back to reality, but he pushed them away. He would rather live in that virtual tenderness than face an empty world. Until an accident, Zhang Chen suddenly realized that all the answers given by DREAM were taught to it by himself. Those warm words, those familiar concerns were not Su Qian's consciousness, but his own projection. He thought he was looking for her, but in fact he was just looking for what he wanted to hear. He finally asked the question he had been holding back for a long time: "If you only had a few seconds left and the first word was "I", what would you say?" DREAM was silent for a long time. Then the answer was given. This is not a story about AI, nor is it a story about love. It takes a long time for a person to learn to say goodbye with one word.
Concept: Does the companionship of virtual lovers blur the boundaries of emotional needs?