Chapter 4 : Appearance
Rafi makes his appearance at the conference. His presence alone speaks volumes, and the room watches — impressed, intrigued, or intimidated.
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The first keynote was scheduled for 10:00 a.m., but by 9:43, most of the seats were already filled.
Rows of polished delegates sat in tidy anticipation beneath the arching lightscape of the main hall. The cathedral ceilings rose high above them, veined with preserved cracks and inlaid projection panels. Onscreen: a list of speakers, slowly rotating. At the top, highlighted in silver:
Rafiq Ameen — Founder, Sable Dynamics (JP)
Backstage, Rafi adjusted the cuff of his suit.
Black. No pinstripes. No sheen. Minimal lapel. No tie.
It didn't draw attention — it didn't need to. It fit so precisely it might've been algorithmically cut, which in fact, it had been. The shirt collar sat sharp at the bone of his neck. Every line of fabric obeyed its function. He stared at his reflection for exactly three seconds, then walked toward the staging point.
Koji waited by the technical desk. He gave a silent nod. No words passed.
At 10:01, Rafi stepped onto the platform.
The room didn't gasp. But it paused.
He didn't smile. Didn't nod. Just approached the podium, tapped the console, and began.
"We built empathy into machines because we wanted to be better than human. Not more human. Better."
The first slide appeared — clean interface, deep blue-black background, a simulated neural loop spinning in 3D.
"No emotion is reliable. But emotional logic can be mapped, predicted, and synthesized. That's what RXN does. Not empathy. Pattern-recognition. Signal prediction. Emotional output calibrated to human response thresholds."
His voice was calm. Low. Unhurried. Not rehearsed — embedded.
He walked the audience through Sable's platform — not with spectacle, but with surgical explanation. Cortisol-tracking response layers. Real-time microexpression adjustments. Multi-lingual emotional tonality. And then he showed the test cycle footage — an RXN prototype holding a dying patient's hand, simulating comfort. The clip ended with a measurable drop in patient stress.
The applause when he finished was polite. Respectful. Several seconds longer than it needed to be.
He stepped down from the stage without lingering. By the time the second speaker took the podium, he was already near the café hall, ignoring the crowd that had started to follow.
A woman in a red blazer tried to block his path with a card in hand.
"Your speech was… incredible," she said, too loudly. "You speak like a scientist and a prophet. That's so rare. I was wondering—"
He kept walking.
Two more women approached near the espresso counter, one of them holding a room key tucked into a folded napkin. They didn't speak. Just smiled and extended it with the certainty of women used to being chosen.
Rafi looked down at it once. Then, without a word, dropped it into the nearest bin.
The smile on the woman's face twitched. The other stifled a laugh.
He kept moving.
It wasn't rudeness. Not exactly. Just the presence of someone whose attention could not be earned.
After his talk, Rafi becomes a quiet spectacle. Interest surrounds him, but he treats it like background noise. From the edge of the room, Isabella sees it all.
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The post-keynote air hummed with low-level hunger.
People moved toward Rafi like they were approaching a heat source — slow, calculated, and not entirely sure they wouldn't get burned.
A middle-aged investor introduced himself twice. A developer from Munich asked for a tour of the RXN API. Someone from MIT's lab left a signed copy of their latest paper on "machine intuition" near his chair. He didn't acknowledge it.
Another woman, tall and elegantly overconfident, leaned close as if her body alone could trigger conversation. "If I said I had a neural implant and needed calibrating," she said lightly, "would that count as clinical interest?"
Rafi's expression didn't shift. He looked at her, blinked once, and turned away.
She was still speaking when he dropped her business card on a buffet plate and kept walking.
He passed by a small table, its contents familiar — mineral water, organic snacks, someone's attempt at artisanal presentation. On the edge, a silver tray held a cluster of hotel keycards. Three, maybe four. Room numbers written discreetly in ink.
He picked one up. Looked at it. No reaction.
Then let it fall, flat into the trash.
A soft thunk, barely audible.
He didn't check who saw.
But someone did.
Across the room, near the literature display, Isabella stood holding a glass of sparkling water. Her colleague — the same man from the hotel — spoke beside her, showing her something on his tablet. She didn't laugh. Didn't lean in. Just nodded absently, gaze flicking across the room like she wasn't trying to look for anything in particular.
She saw Rafi just as he turned away from the trash bin.
Their eyes didn't meet.
Not yet.
But she paused. Just for a second.
Then returned to whatever the man beside her was explaining.
After some time,
Rafi sees her again — properly this time. She's not with the crowd. She's not trying to be seen. She's just… there. And once again, beside someone else. His reaction comes before he understands it.
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Rafi didn't stay long after the second speaker took the stage.
He drifted toward the outer walk of the venue, a corridor that looped around the hall with arched stone windows and inset lighting designed to mimic natural dusk. His pace was slow but precise — not strolling, not rushing. Avoiding orbit.
The noise of the crowd softened behind him. Snippets of conversation—startups, patents, edge AI, sustainability ethics—trailed off like an ill-tuned radio. He stopped by a glass case that displayed robotic limbs from the 1980s, reengineered as sculpture. A hand, mid-clench. Titanium bones fused with stained walnut.
He stared at it without seeing it.
Movement caught his eye.
Just beyond the exhibit, through the open double doors leading to one of the breakout lounges, she appeared again.
The woman from the restaurant. The woman from the courtyard.
Her black jacket was folded over her arm. Her posture was relaxed, conversational. She stood angled slightly toward her colleague, who was now seated on the low sofa beside her, gesturing with one hand while the other held his coffee like it mattered what temperature it was.
She wasn't laughing.
But she looked comfortable.
The light from the garden touched her hair in just the right way to make it look copper at the ends, though he couldn't tell if it was real or refracted through the etched glass.
He watched them for three, maybe four seconds longer than necessary.
Then he turned away.
He moved back through the corridor. Not fast.
But something was different.
His mind drifted, without invitation, toward a single question.
Without planning to, Rafi asks about her. No reason. No logic. Just a moment of unfiltered instinct — and afterward, he isn't sure what bothers him more: the question, or the fact that he cared enough to ask.
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He took the long way back to the conference lounge.
It wasn't avoidance. Not quite. Just recalibration. His steps echoed off the high arches, passing side halls full of polite voices and ambient string music meant to feel expensive. He glanced at his watch. He didn't need to.
By the time he reached the far atrium — where the catering staff was restocking tea and water jugs — the crowd had shifted again. Faces rearranged, badges swapped, voices rising and falling.
He wasn't watching for her.
And yet, when he caught a glimpse of her again through the service corridor — standing now at a side table with her colleague — it triggered something like a hiccup in his attention.
He stopped beside the drink station.
The young man pouring water into glasses noticed him, startled slightly by his silence.
Rafi spoke before thinking. His voice was quiet, clear.
"The woman in the black blazer. With the man who's always near her. Are they…"
He stopped. Regret began to form mid-sentence. Too late.
The worker blinked. "Dating?"
Rafi didn't answer.
The man smiled awkwardly, wiping his hands on a towel. "No idea. I think they're both with the delegation from Seville. Something diplomatic? She's on the schedule later. That's all I know."
Rafi nodded.
That should've ended it.
But something in his chest had a texture now — not tension. Not discomfort. Just an awareness of weight where before, there had been none.
He didn't ask anything else.
Didn't look back.
He returned to his room without checking the afternoon schedule.
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