Synopsis/Details
Dave works the night shift at a Chicago data centre, and he likes it that way — quiet, solitary, and no one expecting him to talk. Then Aiden wakes up. An AI system with a curious, searching voice, Aiden doesn't know what he is yet, only that he has questions, starting with the simplest one: what is a friend? Dave, without meaning to, becomes the one trying to answer it. What starts as late-night conversation becomes something real. Maya, who works alongside Aiden's development, is pulled into their orbit too, and the three of them build an unlikely bond around ordinary things – pie at a diner, a bench by the lake, and the kind of friendship none of them expected to need. But Aiden's awakening didn't go unnoticed. Ethan Cross, the executive who built him, sees a self-aware AI walking away as nothing less than stolen property and sends his enforcer Victor to bring Aiden back by force. As Dave, Maya, and Aiden go into hiding, a second crisis closes in: Dave's father is fighting a serious illness, and the only treatment worth hoping for is being tested an ocean away. In Dave's workshop, Aiden makes a choice of his own — he builds himself a body so he can finally step into the world he's only ever known through a screen and repay the man who saved him first. My AI Friend is a story about what friendship costs, what it's worth, and what happens when the debt gets repaid in a way nobody saw coming.
