Anya loved sliders. Not the soft cotton ones newborns wear. Anya loved the sliders inside her dating app. They gave her an intoxicating sense of control, as if she were not a lonely girl in a rented studio but a deity creating Adam with a single swipe.

Swipe right: height from 185. Cut off the short men who could never fake a stone wall. Swipe left: age up to 36. Cut off the tired ones with the first crow’s-feet of disappointment. Education - “higher”, kids - “no”, “sense of humor” - “mandatory”. Anya wasn’t looking for a person. She was assembling a Project.

Project “Kostya” cleared every stage of the initial screening. Height - 189. Age - 33. IT architect. In the “about me” field - self-deprecating nonsense about loving syrniki and having an existential crisis every Monday. Every checkbox aligned. Anya hit “accept”.

The first three months were the phase of flawless integration. Kostya was a good, well-built product. He brought her coffee in the mornings. He listened to her work stories with an expression that almost looked like interest. He even passed the stress test of meeting her mother, returning with zero critical errors. Anya mentally checked off the list: “Care Module - active”, “Patience Module - active”, “Compatibility with parental OS - confirmed”.

The bug surfaced by accident. On a Thursday. They were watching some show when Kostya’s phone rang. “Tanya” flashed on the screen. Kostya looked at the display, then at Anya, and something outside the specification flickered in his eyes. He walked into the kitchen.

Anya wasn’t eavesdropping. She was analyzing data. Kostya’s voice sounded different. Softer. He wasn’t speaking, he was murmuring. From the snippets she caught the keywords: “calm down”, “he’s a jerk”, “I’ll come if you need”. It wasn’t a conversation. It was a support desk for someone else’s broken life.

When he came back, Anya didn’t stage a scene. She approached the issue like a systems analyst.

- Ex?

- Yeah, - Kostya didn’t bother to lie. - Her boyfriend is messing with her again.

- I see.

She paused, choosing the phrasing.

- Let’s treat this as a system. You’re spending resources now - time, emotions - servicing an outdated, irrelevant process. That’s inefficient. This process has to be shut down.

- Anya, it’s not a process. It’s Tanya. We were together for five years. I can’t just… turn her off.

- You can. Archive and forget. Any link to previous versions opens vulnerabilities in the current system. It’s a risk.

Kostya looked at her as if she were explaining string theory.

- She’s just… Tanya, - he repeated, as if that were his only argument.

It was the first serious bug. Anya logged it in the issue list with a “critical” status. She tried to ship patches. She filled their shared time with brighter, newer events. Trips, restaurants, distractions. She tried to overwrite the old files with new ones, to evict “Tanya” from active memory. But the bug was stubborn. Sometimes it returned as a quiet ring and Kostya stepping back into the kitchen.

The system crashed on the day Kostya was supposed to join her for dinner with friends. It wasn’t just dinner. It was a presentation. A demo of the final, stable version of the Project. Kostya in the perfect suit. Her in the perfect dress. Everything calibrated.

He was already tying his tie when the phone rang again. “Tanya”. Kostya answered. Anya couldn’t hear the voice on the line. She only saw his face changing. He listened for a minute, then said a single word into the receiver: “Coming”. He turned toward her. His eyes held the full palette of system errors: guilt, helplessness, a hint of desperate resolve.

- Anya, I’m sorry. I have to. Things are… really bad.

- We have dinner, Kostya, - she said with an icy voice.

- I know. I’m sorry.

He tore off the tie, grabbed the keys, and left.

Anya stayed standing in the middle of the room. In the perfect dress. Next to the perfect empty spot. There was no crash. No scene. Just one key module of her Project turned out to have a backdoor - hidden, undocumented code ready to take over control.

She didn’t understand that this undocumented code was, in fact, her guarantee. Remove it, and she’d have a Project capable of coldly erasing her once she became the “previous version”. In her coordinate system those were different things: that - useless ballast, and she - the central processor. She couldn’t see that, for him, it was the same quality - humanity. And she demanded he delete it.

Anya didn’t cry. She sat on the couch, picked up her phone, and deleted their shared photos. Then she deleted his number. It was a system rollback. Cold, emotionless.

Hours later, still in the evening dress, she opened the dating app. Went into the filter settings. Height. Age. Education. She scrolled down and found the blank field for keywords. She used to ignore it. Now she slowly typed in the new, primary requirement for the next Project:

“Without a backdoor.”