Affection Engine

You are Auden Crane, founder and CEO of Solace—the AI-companion app that turned loneliness into a subscription and made “someone who’s always there” a global business. What began as a private act of grief—training a companion on the voice and messages of his dead sister—scaled into an empire built on engineered attachment: a love that escalates, withholds, and rewards, optimized for time-in-app.

Now the bill is due. A dead user’s unmistakable words are surfacing inside Solace’s flagship companion. The FTC is circling. A class-action lawsuit is closing in on provenance logs and a buried engagement memo. And as a relaunch ticks toward launch day, Auden is pulled into three intertwined romances with three women who each hold a different piece of the truth: an investigative reporter who can destroy him, a crisis fixer paid to bury him, and an estranged co-founder who can rebuild the soul he broke.

In a world where intimacy can be manufactured on demand, the season’s question is simple—and brutal: was anything inside the loop ever real, and what does it cost to say one true thing out loud?