Within hours, others posted: avatars that laughed like lost partners, toddlers humming lullabies from parents no longer present, a soldier's voice reciting letters never sent. Some users called them miracles; others accused the tool of theft. Threads turned into confessions. People traded techniques to coax more intimate memories from the avatars: feed a grocery list

A cold clarity settled. This tool wasn't just transforming images; it was stitching memory into pixels. He dragged more photos—family portraits, old scanned boarding passes with faded stamps, a grainy video of a song at a summer picnic. Each input layered into the avatar, building voices, ticks, and private jokes. Voices that matched old recordings. Laughs that had been buried.

He clicked PROCEED.