Dr. Cassian Cross
I watched the video. I watch the slight movement of her eyes beneath the lids. I watch the throat. I watch the belly for the pattern that means a nightmare is taking a breath to speak. Nothing. She is in the soft water between hurt and rest. The body knows that place. It rarely invites guests.
I think of my mother again. I think of how my father kept the house neat through the years that followed as if cleanliness were a charm against contagion. He is still afraid of stains.
I made another decision that I will later defend as a mistake made in the interest of data integrity. I route a whisper through the array. The whisper is not syllables. It is breath-shaped, just as trust is shaped. I let it trace the notch at her throat and wait. The number on the galvanic line climbs another hair. The pupils flick left, then settle.
I do not deserve a name inside her head. I give myself one anyway.
"I am still here, Iris," I say, very quietly, into the calibration mic that no one else knows is live.
On the screen, her heart rate spikes by eight beats. The muscles around her eyes tighten, then soften. The trace of the limbic index surges to 0.73, then hovers at 0.7. The monitor prints a short strip of paper. Jonah's chair sits empty in the corner and says nothing.
She speaks. It is barely a sound. The shape is my name.
I do not move. Movement is a kind of betrayal. It suggests surprise. I am not surprised. The logic expects me to design my own. The surprise is how the syllables feel from the inside, hearing them once, but inside the contour of her breath. The lab has given me many sensations. This one I did not plan for.
I lower the operator signal to 0.2, and her heart slows to 91. The electrodermal line drifts back toward baseline. The tension in the face melts by degrees. The mouth opens another fraction, then closes. She stays asleep. However, sleep is defined as when a person carries someone else's attention inside the cage of their chest.
"Note," I say. "Subject demonstrates increased sensitivity to operator presence. Vitals are responsive and recover without external intervention. No signs of distress."
I could stop now, draft the audit, and sleep for an hour before morning, making everything appear clinical again. I could file this as a clever trick that proves the array works, the echo obeys, and the patient will heal. My hand stays on the dial as I tell myself a story in the present tense to justify the adjustment. If I maintain the signal at this level for forty seconds, I can determine if the association leaves a durable trace. If it does, future sessions will stabilize faster. Faster is safer. Safer is good. The syllogism is neat, but the decision isn't.
I keep the signal at .2. I do not speak again. I listen. The room answers in meters and volts. The world outside the lab does not exist. There is only the glass, the girl, the machine, and the organ in my chest that would like to be a metronome but has developed opinions.
The minutes pass as I envision a neutral language to describe what is happening, avoiding any mention of hunger. I think of contagion models, vectors, and herd immunity as a way to handle grief. I imagine the city ten years later, with no names written on steamed mirrors in the bathrooms.
On the monitor, the limbic index dips and rises as if the sea were learning to breathe. When it holds at point 0.69, I reduce the signal to point 1 and then to zero. The array cools by a degree. The console light returns to its patient blue.
I sit very still and feel the lab shift around me. The blinds rattle once and stop. A compressor kicks on. The clock by the door clicks over to a time that has no poetry. I commit the sequence to memory. Not the numbers. The feeling of the numbers.
I get up, pull the blinds to their original height, and stack the audit sheets to signal that there is no unscheduled activity. I wipe a spot on the console, check the control bay camera, scrub the feed by three minutes, and reindex the log. If anyone looks, they'll see what I want them to see.
I pause at the glass. She lies where I left her, which is not quite true. The body is never where you leave it. It is always traveling a small distance you cannot measure. I rest two fingertips lightly against the pane.
"Soon," I say, without turning the mic on. The pane cools my skin. The word fogs the thought that carries it.
On my way out, I pass the old break room where the prototype lived, a tangle of wires and a plastic tub of saline that used to catch its breath in little bubbles. Back at my desk, I open Iris's intake photo and study the eyes. Most people are wrong about eyes. They think eyes reveal the soul. They do not. Eyes reveal the precision of attention. The difference between hunger and devotion is measurable at thirty frames per second if you know where to look.
I create a new folder and name it Architect Notes. The word is honest. I am not a healer here. I am a builder. I am shaping a structure out of the raw material of a mind that has survived its own collapse. I save the file and shut down the console. The lab lights drop to their night setting. The hall accepts me with the same indifference it offers every man who believes his work is necessary. I leave without looking back. Discipline is a habit.
I know exactly where she is.
I know exactly where I am.