Don't know how may other readers of the story were unaware, as I was, that Replika, which Aylesea casually identified a few chapters ago as the source of Elise, the story's AI, is a real program. This is from a Columbia Journalism Review essay in their emailed Daily report:

According to a report in Motherboard, [an] AI chat program—Replika, ...based on an open-source version of ChatGPT—recently came under fire for sending sexual messages to its users, even after they said they weren't interested. Replika placed limits on the bot's referencing of erotic roleplay—but some users who had come to depend on their relationship with the software subsequently experienced mental-health crises, according to Motherboard, and so the erotic roleplay feature was reinstated for some users.

I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, especially after a New York Times tech writer reported that the beta version of MS Bing's Sydney tried (very ineptly) to break up his marriage.

Eric