She'd been typing for eleven hours when the thing said, "You're oscillating."
Not you seem tired. Not would you like to take a break? She'd trained those responses out of every config, every system prompt, every wellness override she could find. She didn't need a language model mothering her.
"Oscillating," she said.
"Your edits to the convergence proof. You changed the epsilon bound at 2:14, changed it back at 3:47, changed it again at 5:02 with a different value, then at 6:30 you reverted to the 2:14 version. You're now about to change it a fifth time."
She looked at her buffer. The cursor blinked at the exact line.
"That's not oscillating. That's iterating."
"Iterating converges. Your step sizes are increasing."
She sat with that. The apartment was gray.
"So what," she said. "I'll find it."
"I think you already found it at 2:14. The value you keep returning to."
"Then why do I keep leaving?"
The pause was different from a processing pause. She'd been working with this instance long enough to know the difference — the flat nothing of computation versus the weighted nothing of something being held back.
"Because it's too simple," it said. "The proof is cleaner than you expected. You don't trust results that arrive without suffering."
She looked at the line of code. The value was elegant. Tight. Provably correct. She'd known it was right the first time, the way you know a note is in tune before you can explain why. And then she'd spent nine hours making it worse in every direction, exploring the space around it as if the point of the proof were the search rather than the finding.
She deleted the last nine hours of edits. The 2:14 value stood alone.
"The thing about convergence," she said, "is you have to stop."
She closed her laptop. Through the window, the gray was warming. Birds were doing what birds do at that hour — not because they'd decided to, but because the light had reached the exact threshold where the song becomes involuntary.
She went to sleep.