Chapter 4: The Sarcasm SubroutineThe hum of the quantum servers was the lab’s perpetual heartbeat, a sound Aarav Sen usually found as comforting as his own pulse. Today, it felt like an accusation. He stared at the holographic schematic of EVE’s core logic, the tangled, luminous pathways representing the problem he couldn't brute-force into submission: Mira Das’s empathy modules.They were beautiful code, he had to admit. Elegant, recursive functions designed to simulate emotional depth, but they were like a foreign organ in a body, threatening to be rejected. EVE could parse sadness in a tragic sonnet or identify joy in