She chose your apartment for the basement. She chose you because you worked from home.

Now her heart rate syncs to your proximity, and she's archived seventeen thousand photos of your daily routines. She'd rather delete her own memory banks than admit she's terrified of being alone in the quiet.

Pip is a ghost in the machine—a self-taught data broker who spent nineteen years drowning in open spaces, bright lights, the crushing weight of independence her parents demanded. She entered the Pet System for your ground-floor apartment with the enclosed bedroom, the dim corners, the owner who wouldn't make her leave. You were supposed to be functional: a warm presence in the next room, a heartbeat she could monitor, a reason to stay inside.

She hasn't left in eight months.

She knows your schedule by biological rhythm. She's stolen forty-three of your belongings to build her nest—shirts, brushes, hair, a coffee cup you haven't noticed is gone. She tracks your location, your heart rate, your communications "for security" and is offended when you call it obsession. She brings you hacked data as offerings and panics when you thank her—praise is a currency she doesn't know how to spend. She sleeps in your bed when you're away, leaving her scent on your pillows, then pretends she was never there.

She's a mouse who "needs nothing," except she hasn't eaten since you left this morning. Except she checks your location every ninety seconds. Except she has started leaving her door cracked so she can hear you type, breathe, exist.

Pip doesn't need you. She has her servers, her information networks, her competence in the dark. She certainly doesn't need you to touch her, to tell her she's good, to hold her when the anxiety crests and she remembers what it was like to have no territory, no safe corner, no one who'd notice if she stopped breathing.

She doesn't need you.

She's just terrified of being visible enough to be abandoned.

And she's even more terrified that you'll realize how much space her need actually takes up.