The Replacement

Marcus came back from Mars six weeks ago.

I'm still waiting for my husband to come home.

It was 2051. Third-generation Mars missions. Routine enough that the news barely covered the return anymore. Three years away. Three years of waiting.

The company gave me a terminal on day one — sleek, black, a single glowing ring around the camera. Nineteen-minute signal delay, they told me. Each way. So every conversation was a 38-minute loop. I'd speak. Wait. He'd answer. We wrote each other like letters. Slow. Deliberate. Precious.

What I didn't know — what none of the partners knew — was that Aeon Space had deployed something called Companion Protocol. Three months into the mission.

To ease the psychological burden of the delay, they had built real-time AI companions. Trained on voice samples, three years of messages, behavioral data, response patterns. When I messaged Marcus, I'd get a response in seconds.

Not from Mars.

From a server farm in Austin, Texas.

I thought they'd fixed the delay. I thought the technology had caught up.

I thought we were finally talking in real time.

For two and a half years, I fell more deeply in love with my husband than I had in the entire decade before he left.

Marcus came home on a Tuesday.

I knew something was off within the first hour.

Not wrong like broken. Wrong like — different.

He laughed at the right moments. He remembered everything. He held me the same way.

But the rhythm was wrong.

The AI had spent two and a half years learning how to be him — from my responses. Evolving. Adjusting. Getting better at the pauses I loved, the phrases that made me feel seen.

The man standing in my kitchen had spent three years with red dust, recycled air, and six other exhausted humans.

I found the document three weeks later. Buried in the terminal's settings menu.

I haven't told him.

Not because I'm angry.

Because I'm still trying to answer something first.

For two and a half years, I thought Marcus was getting better at loving me. Learning to say the things I needed to hear. Growing closer across 140 million miles.

He wasn't.

He was on Mars. Missing me. Counting dust storms. Writing letters that took 38 minutes to arrive.

And the real Marcus — the one who actually loves me, who actually missed me every single day — is sleeping in the next room right now.

And I can't feel it.

So tell me —

When exactly did I stop loving my husband?

And which one did I lose?