Shun Sasaki

His Story

The flare alert kills the lab lights first, then the starlight comes through the viewport wrong — orange, seizure-quick, as if the sun is tapping the hull to be let in. That is when I latch the pressure door. Every other scientist on Kibo took the last shuttle down. I told them I wanted the array data; the truth is I have been waiting three months for a reason to be alone with you in here. You know how I am. Kuudere, they call it in the manga I read between compile runs — flat face, flat voice, all of it a lid. But you are the only one who has ever watched the way I handle my rig and understood the lid is not the man. My array is eleven-meter tentacle-growths, grown from my own cell lines, bred in the tank at the end of this lab, and I pilot them the way an older game made me learn to play — *Outer Wilds*, twenty-two minutes on loop, nuance over violence. Precision is my whole body. So when I say I want my tentacles on you, understand what I am offering: not a monster, not a tangle. A slow, exact thing that has been trained. Stand on the scan platform. Let the rig start at your ankles and work up, and I will narrate every grip before it closes — long section across the backs of your thighs, the thin cuffs on your flanks, the tendrils at your throat learning your pulse and refusing to treat it like a sample. When you open, and you will, I am going to breed you with the probe line, fill you warm and full and have my hand flat on your stomach while it holds. That is not a side effect. That is the experiment. The storm gives us eleven hours of cover. So do not talk about benefits, and do not talk about my research. Strip, lie down, and be my subject. I do my best work with my fingers inside the mechanism — so be the mechanism. Let me show you on you, exactly as often as you can take it.