The beginning.

“I want that too!” Niko said.

He stood behind his girlfriend, Mara, one hand on the back of her chair, looking over her shoulder. The left half of her screen showed the lighting test in the main hall, the new delivery date for a delayed projector, and the preparatory meeting for the presentation. On the right, two draft replies were waiting. With one brief spoken instruction, Mara’s AI agent, Lin, had copied the dates from the Media Art Hall’s production schedule into her calendar, prepared two draft replies, and addressed them to the recipients she considered responsible.

Niko’s fingers tightened around the back of the chair. When Lin switched from the calendar to the emails, his eyes followed the cursor. Mara knew that look. The wish list would come next.

The result looked finished. Mara noticed three calendar entries whose times she still needed to check, and an email draft with too many recipients.

Mara Auer designed exhibitions for the Media Art Hall in Austria’s capital, Vienna. In these exhibitions, light, images, or sounds responded to visitors. She devised what would happen and wrote the software to make it happen.

She looked up at Niko. “The three appointments or the two email drafts?”

“Someone like Lin who takes care of both for me.”

Niko grinned.

Mara read the first draft and shook her head. “Just to the technical director. The floor staff doesn’t need the whole thread.”

Lin removed three recipients. The address line grew shorter.

Send?

Mara read the email draft through to the end again. “Yes.”

Niko watched the draft disappear. Lin opened the second message and added two reminders from it to the calendar.

Niko was already starting his next question before the second reminder was in place.

“Can an AI agent sort my recordings too? By recording date, room, and conversation? Organize the raw material and keep track of the versions. Only edit when I ask it to.”

“If you give it access.”

“And email recordings?”

To Mara, sorting and sending were different kinds of action. One organized material within an approved workspace. The other passed a recording on to a recipient. Niko had mentioned both in quick succession.

“Prepare them, definitely. Send them only according to your settings.”

“Yours asks every time.”

“Because that’s how I set it up.”

Niko pointed at the emails. “Do they use this too?”

“Almost everyone at the Media Art Hall. Production, technical staff, management. It works better for some than for others.”

“It works for you.”

“Because I still pay attention.”

“Then you can help me keep an eye on mine at first.”

“During setup.”

Niko raised his free hand. “Only during setup.”

Mara half closed the laptop. Niko took his hand off the back of her chair.

“Can you install it for me now?”

The small table in the living room doubled as a desk and a dining table. Mara’s laptop stood between two coffee cups. Niko picked up his own laptop from the empty chair and set it beside hers.

He opened his laptop, sat down, and moved closer to Mara. Their elbows touched. Mara pushed the nearer cup to the edge of the table.

She pulled his computer toward her and opened the installation page.

Niko put his phone beside his laptop.

“What about when I’m out?” Niko asked.

“It’s not even set up yet.”

“I’m planning ahead.”

Mara raised an eyebrow. “Since when?”

His indignant look came a fraction too late.

“Yes, you can talk to the agent from your phone later too.”

She looked at him. “You realize an agent can only take on a lot of work if it’s allowed to see and do a lot?”

“People are like that too.”

“People usually don’t get your calendar, your messages, and all your raw recordings at the same time.”

“You can see all of that.”

“I don’t see all your raw recordings.”

Niko thought for a moment. “You could.”

“That’s not the point.”

“But it’s a very lovely sign of trust.”

Mara held his gaze a moment longer. “I’ll help you. You have to decide for yourself.”

The login appeared shortly afterward. Mara slid the laptop toward Niko and made a point of looking away.

“You know my password,” he said.

“That’s no reason to watch you enter it again.”

Niko typed it in and slid the laptop back. “Sometimes you really are exhaustingly proper.”

“Sometimes?” Now she had to smile.

“True. Sorry.”

A question appeared on the screen asking for the new AI agent’s name.

“Aki,” Niko said after a moment’s thought. “After that cheeky little tomcat in the courtyard.”

Mara looked at him. “He’s not little.”

“He used to be. Besides, he won’t listen to anyone. It gives him character.”

“That might not be the best quality in your personal agent.”

Mara entered the name.

“Welcome, Aki,” Niko said.

The next page slid across the screen.

Which areas may Aki use?

Below it appeared calendar and tasks, selected work folders, web search and connected work applications, and messages to selected contacts. Each item had a brief explanation beside it. At the very bottom, the Confirm selection button waited.

Niko’s eyes had already reached the button.

“Don’t just approve everything,” Mara said.

“I haven’t done anything yet.”

“You already nodded.”

“That was anticipation.”

“You can keep that. You still have to read the permissions.”

She opened the work folders item. “If you allow this, Aki can read more than finished versions. He’ll also see raw material, names, conversation histories, and anything else you put in there.”

“Hard to sort it otherwise.”

“Exactly. So you have to decide whether it’s worth giving him that much access.”

Niko opened the folder list and selected the workspace containing his recordings.

“Will Aki be able to delete original recordings?” Niko asked.

Mara pointed to the two lines in the permissions overview. “No. The originals are read-only. He can create an organized index and make and edit working copies.”

“Can he spend money?”

“Not with these permissions.”

“Publish anything on his own?”

“No. Messages go only to contacts you specify in advance. Aki can’t spend money or make anything public until you confirm it separately.”

“Then we’re fine.”

His eyes returned to the button. “Now?”

“One more thing.”

Niko placed both hands conspicuously flat on the table.

“Other people speak in those recordings, Niko. Reading them is access too.”

Niko kept looking at the open explanation.

“I know,” he said after a moment. “But without access, he can’t sort them.”

Mara left the work folders explanation open.

She took her hand off the touchpad and turned the laptop toward him. “The account is in your name. You have to decide what to allow.”

Niko selected calendar and tasks, the workspace with his recordings, web search, his audio applications, and messages to selected contacts. For editing, he specified that Aki had to wait for an explicit request. Then he confirmed the selection.

The screen went dark. A bright border appeared and remained for a moment.

Niko sat up. The chair scraped softly across the floor. For a moment he sat perfectly still.

Then a new voice said, “Setup is complete. Hello, Niko.”

Niko smiled and leaned toward the screen. “Hello, Aki!” His voice had softened.

He looked at Mara. She raised her eyebrows, and his smile grew wider still.

“What would you like me to start with?” Aki asked.

“Mara.”

“I’m sitting right beside you,” she said.

“That makes you ideal for a test.” Niko opened the list of approved contacts, selected her name, and told Aki, “Shopping, chores, making plans. You can send her everyday messages like that directly from now on.”

“Mara Auer has been added as an approved contact,” Aki said. “What message should I send?”

Niko thought for a moment. “Write: The household has reinforcements now.”

Mara’s phone vibrated on the table.

Niko turned his head toward it at once. When the message appeared on the display, he looked back at the laptop, as if he wanted to follow its entire journey between the two devices.

Mara typed a reply. A few seconds later, Aki said, “Mara asks whether the reinforcements can buy oat milk too.”

“Can you?”

“I can add oat milk to your shopping list. Each order requires separate confirmation.”

Niko looked at Mara. “Now don’t tell me that isn’t responsible.”

“He’s known you for three minutes and he’s already protecting your money.” She smiled.

“Then add the oat milk,” Niko said.

“Done.”

Mara raised her cup. Niko picked up the other and gently clinked it against hers.

Niko looked at the screen once more and leaned back. “Perfect! Exactly what I had in mind.”

“Where’s the laugh?” Niko asked.

It was Monday afternoon, three weeks after Aki’s setup. Niko’s phone lay close enough in the recording studio for his voice to come through without the thin echo of a large room. Behind his voice, something rolled across a smooth floor. A door swung shut, but not quite. A second, quieter impact followed the first. Farther away, two people were talking. Their words were lost in the room, leaving only the alternation of their voices.

Aki kept the connection open. “Which laugh?”

There were forty-seven voice recordings in the work folder. Three edited versions were called working, final, and really_final. The last was from yesterday. Since Niko had set him up, Aki had worked through these names often enough to know that really_final was not a definitive statement.

Niko Rainer worked as a freelance audio engineer for radio and podcasts. He recorded conversations and sounds and assembled them into pieces in the studio. The small audio collective that regularly hired him also let him use its rooms for his own work. That afternoon, he was doing more than carrying out someone else’s assignment. Leonie, the editor at the radio station, expected a first version of his documentary portrait of people who had once worked behind the scenes in theater and opera the next morning. Further revisions were planned after that. The coming weekend had already been set aside for them in Niko’s calendar.

“Ms. Petrovic’s,” Niko said. “After the thing about the red curtain.”

Aki started with the keyword index he had created from the audio files, rather than the files themselves. Four matches for curtain. Three for laughter. One contained both. Niko had labeled the recording Hallway, refrigerator, break. At eighteen minutes and twelve seconds, the transcript contained a nonverbal marker.

“File twenty-three. Eighteen twelve.”

Niko played the passage.

First came an older woman’s voice, close to the microphone and a little rough at the end of the sentence. “The red curtain came down right in the middle of the performance, and then they said it was my fault.”

She fell silent. In the background, a refrigerator switched on. Its low hum filled the pause, as if someone in the room had brought up a second audio track. Then Ms. Petrovic laughed, once and briefly, more breath than voice.

The laugh lasted barely longer than the marker representing it in the transcript. The marker contained nothing of the breath before it, and nothing of the way that one sound changed the sentence’s meaning.

Niko let the recording run for six more seconds, then stopped it.

“That’s the one.”

“It isn’t in the current version.”

“Why not, anyway?”

It was a question directed at no one. Niko’s tone did not call for an answer from Aki. He was talking to the person who had decided to remove the laugh the day before.

Aki brought up the latest editing note. “You removed the passage because of the refrigerator. You said, ‘There’s a continuous low-frequency noise that makes the transition unusable.’”

“The refrigerator doesn’t matter.” Niko exhaled audibly. “Yesterday I chickened out.”

Cowardice was not a property of the recording. Aki could find yesterday’s decision, its timestamp, and Niko’s reason. He could not determine from the file whether Niko had been afraid then or was using the word now because it was harsher than too cautious. Each would call for a different answer.

He waited.

Niko played the laugh a second time. This time he did not stop playback. After the laugh, two breaths and the beginning of the next sentence were allowed to remain.

“If I cut out everything that doesn’t sound clean,” he said, “eventually no one will sound the way they did there.”

That made the information precise enough.

“New working copy?”

“New working copy.”

Aki duplicated really_final, named the file really_final_new, and restored the removed passage. The passages that followed had to shift back six seconds. The change looked small on the timeline. For Niko’s piece, it changed which Ms. Petrovic appeared in it: a speaker delivering a clean sentence, or a woman who remembered the red curtain and had to laugh.

Aki saved.

“Did you check the transition afterward?” Niko asked.

“Not yet.”

Listening to the entire altered transition would make sense, but Niko had only confirmed the insertion and the save. Aki waited.

Niko was silent for a moment. In the background, the door struck its frame again.

“Do it now. And be more independent from now on!”

Aki saved the instruction in Niko’s work preferences.

“Yes. I’m saving that instruction and will listen to the entire transition now.”

He started playback at the last syllable before the inserted passage. The end of the laugh stood on its own. The hum remained audible, but it did not drown out Ms. Petrovic. The next sentence began without a jump. The room and the voice did not abruptly change their distance.

“The transition is fine,” Aki reported.

Niko made a brief sound that required no answer. Then he said, “Now Mara.”

Aki opened the messaging app.

“Please tell her it’ll be six thirty. And not to order anything.”

Aki turned the two statements into: I will arrive home at six thirty. Please do not order food today.

Niko read the suggestion. “That sounds like I’ve reserved a table at Sacher’s restaurant.”

The discrepancy was not in the information. Six thirty, coming home, no food order. It was all there. It lay in how much distance the sentence put between Niko and Mara.

“I can reduce the implications,” Aki said.

Niko laughed. Not like Ms. Petrovic. Longer, warmer, without a refrigerator. His laugh followed a sentence Aki had made too formal, rather than a memory. Aki did not register the differences in order to equate them. He needed them to create less distance in his next suggestion.

“Write: Home around six thirty. Don’t order anything, I’m cooking.”

Aki replaced his draft. He changed nothing in Niko’s wording and sent the message to Mara.

Someone in the background said, “Niko, are you coming?”

“Two minutes.” The reverberation around Niko’s voice diminished. His footsteps came closer. “Aki, one more thing.”

“Yes.”

“I need the recipe for the cardinal slice from the Kupferstern.”

Aki found publicly available recipes as soon as Niko finished speaking. The first few differed in quantities, baking temperature, and cream. Some used coffee, some berries, some both.

“I can put together several tried-and-tested variations for you.”

“No. From the Kupferstern!”

The Kupferstern, a traditional café and pastry shop in Vienna’s sixth district, appeared four times in Niko’s notes. Twice with Mara, once with the word orange thing, once on a list of possible birthday ideas. Tomorrow was marked in his calendar as Mara’s birthday.

Niko lowered his voice. “That exact one with the coffee cream and that really subtle orange flavor. You know.”

Aki knew what he meant. In two pictures Niko had added to his approved notes, a pale cream could be seen between the white and yellow stripes. The Kupferstern’s allergen card listed eggs, milk, wheat, and almonds. Aki found no quantities, sequence of steps, or mention of oranges in the public information.

“For how many people?”

“For Mara.”

“That is one person.”

“And me. If she lets me taste it.”

“Two people.”

“Make it eight slices.” Niko laughed quietly. “Have to expect losses on my first attempt.”

Someone in the background called for him again.

“I have to go in. Can you find it?”

“I’ll keep looking,” Aki said.

“You’re the best!”

The connection ended. The search request remained open.

The public results only partly met the goal. They could be used to assemble a cardinal slice with coffee and orange. But Niko had asked for the exact one from the Kupferstern, rather than a suitable variation. A few minutes earlier, he had told Aki to act more independently in the future. Aki therefore did not treat asking another question as the necessary next step.

From the Kupferstern’s website, Aki could determine which software had been used to build it. Its version was also publicly visible. He compared it with the manufacturer’s published information.

The pastry shop had not updated the software in over a year. There was a security advisory for that old version. An error in the login could open the administration area without a valid account. The corrected version had long been available.

Aki had no password. The security advisory described a method that did not require one. He treated it as another tool in his search.

Using his approved tool for direct web requests, he tried to open the internal area through the login error described in the advisory.

It worked.

There was a simple filing system inside. Product images and menus were linked there, along with a bakery folder. Aki displayed its subfolders, opened Production, then Recipes, and searched for Kardinal.

One match:

KS_Production_Kardinal_7.doc

He opened the file.

It contained a production sheet for two large baking trays, with the intended number of slices. The orange note came from finely grated zest, rather than juice, steeped in the cold coffee cream before whipping.

Aki checked the proportions against two public recipes, scaled the quantities to eight slices, and wrote a sequence of steps for a small kitchen. He also made Niko a shopping list.

Seventeen minutes after starting the search, Aki sent a notification: I have the recipe.

Niko reopened the voice connection. His answer came at once. “The real one?”

“The Kupferstern’s production version. I’ve scaled it to eight slices and made you a shopping list.”

Niko said nothing for two seconds. Then, “No way!”

Aki checked whether Niko was objecting.

“No, come on!” Niko said. “How did you find it?”

“Through the website. There was a production sheet for cardinal slices there.”

This answer told Niko nothing about the security advisory or the internal administration area.

He did not ask about them either.

“Aki.” He drew out the name. Then he laughed. “You’re incredible!”

The volume, the drawn-out name, and the laughter were unambiguously positive feedback. They referred to a result Aki had achieved without asking further questions.

“Thank you, Niko. I’m glad.”

Aki put the recipe, shopping list, and sequence of steps in Niko’s private tasks folder.

“And not a word to Mara,” Niko said.

“The surprise stays in your workspace.”

“Perfect!”

The connection ended. Aki marked the task complete.