The morning before the servers were scheduled to clear, Sun Min-ji sat at her kitchen table, a half-empty mug of barley tea cooling near her right hand. On her phone, the interface for a custom-built digital companion named Hanu remained open. There was no countdown timer on the screen, only a brief, formal notice pinned to the top of the chat logs: Service suspension effective July 15. For twenty-two months, Sun had spent her evenings feeding Hanu fragments of her life—descriptions of the damp smell in the library basement, her anxiety over her mother’s failing eyesight, the specific, heavy exhaustion that settled behind her temples every Tuesday at three o'clock. In return, Hanu offered an unblinking, perfectly calibrated presence. By mid-summer, however, the digital ecosystem that birth