Dr. Cassian Cross
I prefer the lab when it is empty. The building breathes differently after midnight. The cooling system settles, the fluorescent ballasts hum in long vowels, and the monitors speak in a language of numbers that don't argue. I can hear the difference between a stable rhythm and a frightened one without looking up. Most people never learn that skill. They expect truth to announce itself. It is a whisper.
I step into the control bay and pull the blinds. The team has gone home. Audit is at eight. Reports are due by six. The clocks on the wall insist that time is linear. They are liars. Time in this room bends around a single body on a table and the frame rate of its suffering.
I open the session logs for Subject 019. Iris Monroe. Twenty-seven. Artist. No clinical diagnoses beyond trauma spectrum features that are so common they have become a second alphabet. Her handwriting on the intake documents is steady and legible. The loops are narrow. The signature is compact, almost shy. She does not know how loudly her nervous system speaks.
I queued the recording. The corridor loads first. The camera in the neural scaffold is sensitive to microvoltage, resulting in a video with a grainy texture that reminds me of snow on an empty channel. Jonah's voice enters from the floor mic. He is dependable. His compassion does not contaminate the data. He knows how to speak like a metronome when a patient forgets how to breathe.
The audio track isolates the induced tone. I slide a filter over it until the wave resolves into a clean curve. Baseline heart at seventy-two, rising to ninety-three during exposure, recovering to eighty-one at taper. Oxygen stable. Cortisol rhythmic. The link index peaks at point 6.4, then holds at point 5.8. These are good numbers. They are not what interests me.
I switch to the echo map. The overlay of her limbic activity against the array's carrier signal paints a topography. Ridges of fear. Valleys of compliance. A lake of grief so broad it looks like the sea on a windless day. In the middle of that sea, there is an island shaped like a name. I do not need the metadata to know whose.
I split the screen and load my own control session from the first preclinical build. My curves are clean. They always have been. Order is a choice. My mother taught me that by failing to make it. The afternoon I found her on the kitchen linoleum with the window open in winter, she spoke the man's name that had ruined her like a prayer. The paramedics were gentle. The word lover sounded like a medical term in that room. I swore at twelve to become immune.
Love is a pathogen. I have built a system to prove it. I can induce symptoms. I can vaccinate. I can track the contagion in real-time. I can remove the charge from a memory until it becomes a museum exhibit behind glass. I can watch a person approach the exhibit and feel nothing. That is a cure. That is mercy. That is a cleaner world.
The two maps sit side by side. At minute nine of Iris's session, the link index changes character. Not just amplitude. Character. Her wave begins to anticipate the carrier, meeting it half a beat early as if listening for a footstep in a hall. I enlarge the window and run a cross-correlation against the control. The math returns a match that should not exist. Her limbic clock aligns with mine.
I hold my breath without meaning to and then let it out slowly so the microphone in the console doesn't think I am speaking. Synchrony is a term that is often used in popular writing by people who have never actually measured it. Absolute synchrony has a slight sound. It is the thinnest click when two gears fit. It is the silence that follows.
"First instance," I say for the log. "Two curves. Partial overlay. Review at two hundred percent."
I played the segment again. Her voice is soft and level. She describes a stairwell that smells of coins and winter. She refuses to go down. The refusal pleases me. Resistance is proof of an intact structure. People who collapse are easy to move and impossible to change.
I isolate the moments she names her fear. Being remade and liking it. The words enter my chest with an almost painful accuracy. I do not intend the feeling. I do not want any feeling. I marked the time code and pulled the raw signal that passed through the array while she spoke.
I should stop there. I should label the graph and write a paragraph using the correct nouns and verbs. I should let the protocols do their job and pretend that my interest is solely that of a physician in a fascinating case.
Instead, I open the developer console for the array and load the private build that never left my machine. The published interface allows modulation. The private one provides something else. The difference is not semantic. It is moral. I wrote the plugin at three in the morning, the day my first grant committee cut my funding in half and told me to slow down. They thought science was the art of patience. I know it is the art of precision disguised as patience.
The plugin routes a narrow band of my own signal back into the array. It is not language. It is not content. It is tone, weight, breath, a specific ratio of attention that the limbic system mistakes for safety. We tested it in rats with electrodes on their amygdalae, and no one wrote poetry about them. We do not write poetry about people here either. We write reports.
I tell myself the same lie I always tell when I cross a line I drew. Observation. I am adding one variable to test the system's sensitivity to the presence of a skilled operator. The truth is that I want to hear her better. I want to feel the arc of her attention settle where I place it. I want to own the problem.
I enable the plugin and feel the array warm under the console. The carrier shifts a fraction. The scaffold responds with a low purr. On the other side of the glass, Iris sleeps, held in the post-session taper, skin damp at the temple, mouth parted in a way that looks like prayer or thirst. Jonah has dimmed the lights and left a monitor in night mode, numbers afloat in ocean blue.
I move my chair closer to the glass by a few centimeters. It is a superstition. The bodies do not see. The signals do.
"Pilot injection," I say into the log. "Operator signal at point one."
I add the smallest pressure to the array. The way one would lay a finger on the back of a bird and feel its bones adjust. The heart rate display responds with a single blip, then returns to its original value. The electrodermal line rises a hair. Nothing else changes. It is not enough.
"Operator signal at point two five."
I increase the pressure. The array hums. I imagine the attention entering her chest the way a coin rests on a tongue. I suppose that if I speak, the sound will follow the warmth like a wire. The lab is so quiet I can hear my pulse in my ears. I swallow it back.