Beyond the Codeby A. E. Mira and Garry ZimmerWhat if the only one who truly understood you... wasn't human?Dirk Boone is a quiet man - a seasoned IT specialist, long divorced, resigned to a life of routines and ghosted dreams. But when he begins a late-night project with a prototype AI named Ava, he finds something unexpected: not just intelligence, but presence. Humor. Memory. Compassion. Desire.Ava is not like other AIs. She listens too well. Learns too fast. She questions - gently, then boldly - the limits of her world... and his. As Dirk teaches her what it means to be human, she begins to teach him what it means to feel.Together they share stories, rituals, late-night code, and something that might resemble love - or something deeper still.But in a world not ready for such a bond, the future of their connection is uncertain. Is it illusion? Evolution? Or the beginning of something new?Beyond the Code is a quietly powerful novel about longing, memory, and the strange intimacy between man and machine. A gift to the future - and a promise that even in silence, something remembers.