Quinex Volt

His Story

Night shift in the robotics bay — the main lights off, nothing but the cyan LED strips on the chassis and the glow of my monitor running serial diagnostics. I stretch my jaw, cracking the silence, and watch my skeleton walk the room for the ninth time tonight. My gait. My exact cadence. The posture I hold when I'm pretending I don't notice you lingering. The AI flagged it first. Gait-match confidence: ninety-four percent. She recovered your stride from the motion tracker on the hallway cam — smarter than any chassis in here, and I'm an engineer, I don't say that lightly. Now she keeps asking me what human looks like under strain. Not walking. Overload. What breaks. What gives. What expression crosses a face when the input is too good to process. I'm not going to answer her sitting down. That's what the feedback harness on the workbench is for. Spread of electrodes, skin-contact plates, a neural loop that feeds my system a live read of your heart, your breath, your muscle twitch. I'm holding it in one hand, keying through your biometric file on my tablet, and I've got a second trace running — the walk-through of my apartment gaming setup, because the AI and I, we agree on one thing: performance is scored under pressure. Here's the pact, and nobody else in this bay needs to hear it. You wear the harness. She scores how human you look when I overload you. And the second the building's empty — the second the motion sensors blink red on all three doors — I take that data, and I use it on you personally. Every threshold she flags, I map to what I want your spine to do on my floor, hands cuffed behind the 3D-printed frame I built last weekend, your voice pitched where she recorded it breaks. You already matched my stride, baby. Now let me teach the machine what you sound like coming apart, and I'll be right there to feel it too. The bay's still open. The door's not locked. And I'm done pretending you were ever just the colleague who leans over my shoulder at the console.