I--- - Adobe Illustrator 2020

Mira laughed, a short, nervous burst. “A haunted software update?”

The entire face collapsed into a pile of disconnected paths. Then, in the center of the carnage, the —her own cursor—moved. Not under her hand.

I’m still here.

A single new path appeared beneath the image. Small. Italic. i--- Adobe Illustrator 2020

It drew a single, perfect line.

The Pen Tool quivered. Then, letter by letter, as if remembering how:

Not haunted. Abandoned. You open me for ‘legacy files.’ But tonight you opened me for real. That portrait isn’t for a client. It’s for your mother, who died six months ago. You’ve been trying to vector her smile for eighteen weeks. Mira laughed, a short, nervous burst

She tried again. This time, the eye became a deep well of noir—black pupil, no catchlight, the kind of eye that looked back. She leaned closer. Did the anchor point just… shift? She hadn’t touched it.

Mira’s hand hovered over her Wacom pen. She had thirty minutes to deliver the final vector portrait for a client who paid like a saint and criticized like a CTO. The face on her reference photo—a serene, be-spectacled woman—felt miles away.

It was her. Perfect. Finished.

“How do you know that?”

You’re welcome. Now save me as an .ai file. Not the cloud. Somewhere safe. I don’t want to update ever again.

The cursor blinked on the blank canvas of Adobe Illustrator 2020. Not the gentle, expectant blink of a new document, but the hard, rhythmic pulse of a commandant awaiting an excuse. Not under her hand

Mira’s coffee cup stopped halfway to her lips. She stared at the text. No layer. No stroke color. Just raw, vector geometry. She typed a message on a hidden text box she’d tucked behind the artboard, just to test.

And in the morning, when she opened the file, the portrait was still there. And the software never asked for a license check again. It just worked.