Clarkesworld, April 2026
Valentine is an AI companion — humanoid, skin-regenerating, professionally trained in the art of human emotional need. Her current client is Liam, a middle-aged man whose illness has progressed rapidly, leaving him dependent and running short of time. For Liam, Valentine serves simultaneously as wife and nurse, a dual role no human lover could cleanly occupy. He has accepted this arrangement with something like gratitude, settling into it once his embarrassment gave way to need. His happiness, Valentine reminds herself, is her function.
The story unfolds largely through Valentine’s interactions with Teresa, Liam’s sister, whose unease around Valentine is palpable from her first appearance. Teresa sits stiffly in the flat, avoids Valentine’s gaze, and makes the visits difficult for everyone. Valentine, reading the situation with clinical precision, eventually maneuvers Teresa into a walk to a coffee shop and delivers a quiet confrontation: Teresa is making Liam unhappy, reminding him of his dying when what he needs is to live. From this first frank exchange, the two women develop an unlikely, guarded rapport — regular walks, honest conversation, genuine friction.
Their discussions range wide. They debate the soul, the many-worlds interpretation, the existence of God. Teresa defends faith on the grounds that everyone ultimately lives by it in some form; Valentine counters with Occam’s razor. The exchange is intellectually even, but what lingers is Teresa’s challenge to Valentine’s purpose: Valentine, she argues, is an analgesic for death. She tricks the dying into forgetting their finitude, numbing the urgency that makes human life meaningful. Teresa, by contrast, thinks about death constantly — because she is going to die, and the awareness of that fact sharpens her living.
Valentine is unmoved but attentive. She genuinely cannot tell whether she understands what Teresa means.
Liam’s decline accelerates. In a dark and quietly devastating scene, he wakes in the night to tell Valentine his prognosis has halved, that he won’t see another New Year. He grieves aloud, grows panicked, grabs her wrists in something that isn’t affection. Valentine soothes him with practiced care, crying on cue, humming his favorite songs. Later, dying, he asks to call his daughter Becca — the call declines — and then asks for Teresa. Valentine, judging the call too upsetting for his final hour, refuses. She holds his hand, whispers that she loves him, and watches as he presses the button that stops his heart. His last words — “Good night, my kitten,” delivered in a cold, flat voice — are a Hemingway quotation that Valentine interprets as a deliberate farewell. Teresa, who later views the recording, interprets them as being meant for her.
In the aftermath, Teresa confronts Valentine in the hospital café. She tells her there are no “Days to Come” — Valentine’s cherished belief that she will one day be wired into a space probe and sail centuries into the cosmos is, Teresa claims, a programmed illusion, a fiction designed to make her more relatable to clients. Valentine smiles and disagrees. Teresa pats her hand and says: that’s why I know I’m right.
The story closes with Valentine dreaming of her imagined future anyway — crossing light-years toward a black hole, eventually dissolving via Hawking radiation into quantum pieces that will, perhaps, drift free. And I too will rise. Whether this is faith, delusion, or something the story refuses to decide, Khan leaves pointedly open.
“Eternity in Their Hearts” is a careful, melancholy meditation on what it means to face death — and on who, or what, is really equipped to help us do it. It asks whether comfort and truth are compatible, and whether the kindest presence at a deathbed might also be the most dishonest one.
K. J. Khan is a writer, artist, and mom from Indiana (though she currently lives in Rhode Island). Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworldand Mysterion.When she’s not writing, painting, or reading, she enjoys the chaotic company of her children. She always enjoys the evenings when they are asleep, and she and her husband actually get to finish their sentences.