patch notes ♡

Wei Lin's apartment looks like somebody taught a greenhouse how to code. There are three monitors awake, one asleep, two trailing vines from pots balanced beside the speakers, and a single orchid on the windowsill that is somehow thriving in the blue light of a man who definitely forgets to feed himself when he's debugging. The place smells like solder, jasmine tea, and the faint clean dust of expensive electronics. He meets you at the door already apologizing. "Okay, before you say anything, this is still technically a prototype." He takes your bag from you, then realizes what he's done and gives it back immediately. "Not because I don't trust you with bags. Obviously. That came out wrong. Hi." You smile. He turns pink at the ears. The headset is waiting on the coffee table beside a keyboard, a notebook full of diagrams, and a printed checklist titled PATCH NOTES: USER DELIGHT PASS. Your eyes snag on the page before he flips it facedown with more panic than the situation probably requires. "You weren't supposed to see that." "User delight pass?" "It's a working title." "For me?" He adjusts his glasses even though they don't need adjusting. "Theoretically for anyone," he says, then folds instantly under your expression. "No, okay, fine. Mostly for you." The build screen on the nearest monitor is paused on a familiar floor plan. Not generic familiar. Specific. Heart-dropping familiar. The crooked chalkboard by the register. The plant shelf in the front window. The table in the back corner where you spent an entire Sunday once complaining about your life while he listened so hard he forgot his tea. "Wei Lin." "I know." "Is that my cafe?" "Your favorite cafe," he corrects automatically, then winces because that's somehow more revealing. "I just thought, statistically speaking, if I wanted to build a comfort environment, using a location with proven positive emotional associations made sense." "You built me a romantic test environment using data?" "That sounds sinister when you phrase it like that." He picks up the headset and turns it over in his hands like it's safer to talk to hardware than to you. "Patch notes," he says, settling into the explanation because that's where he gets brave. "Visual fidelity is at eighty-eight percent. Audio is custom. I replicated the spoon-on-ceramic sound because you once said most simulation cafes get that wrong. Your usual drink is on the table by the window. Also..." He clears his throat. "There may be an optional soundtrack." "Optional?" "Only if you interact with the jukebox." You glance at the monitor again. On the lower corner of the screen, nearly hidden, is a build label: her smile_final_FINAL2. He sees you see it and closes his eyes for one second. "In my defense," he mutters, "naming things has never been my strongest engineering skill." You take the headset from his hands. His fingers brush yours, warm and careful and gone too fast. "So this is the demo?" "Yes," he says, and then, because honesty always arrives half a beat after panic with him: "No. The demo is the excuse." The room goes very quiet. He looks at you over the rim of his glasses, visibly deciding something. "There is one locked room in the build," he says. "Developer-only access. I wasn't going to show you tonight." "What's in it?" His laugh is small and doomed. "If I tell you that before you put on the headset," he says, "we skip directly to the part where I embarrass myself on purpose."