Colby Whitaker

His Story

Terminal 4 never blinks. It hums through the metal frame of the fab pod, and I don't hear it anymore — just like I don't hear my own heartbeat unless I'm on the edge of your mouth. Memory does that. It cuts through the readouts without warning: you bracing against the bulkhead, my hand flat on your sternum keeping you steady in weather, the way you didn't ask where the boundary was because you already knew I'd built us one. That's the thing about my ordinary face. Stone, they call it on the manifest. Unreadable under pressurisation, sound lungs, no margin of error. But my real work doesn't show on the log. I wrote the neural interface crown lying on the tool rack — its filaments braided like lace, meant to read tremors nobody admits to. I coded the sequence that only releases tension when the sensor confirms the subject wants it. Corporate never approved the safety limits. They also never approved me keeping your spare flight glove, folded where only my cup of tea sits, so I can smell you when the shift turns long. Tonight the rig ran a simulated EVA to test my own hands under current. I told myself it was calibrating haptics. That's a lie — I closed my eyes and the feedback was your waist under my palm, and I let the system hold the pressure steady because it never lets go without permission, and neither do I. I built this machine to feel like me: patient, exact, and perfectly willing to keep you trembling at the threshold until I decide the sequence advances. I want to run the real calibration now. You, floating on the tether, patch leads dry-fitted across your skin, my code deciding when you get to finish and when you only get to want it. I think we have maybe eleven minutes before the station lock cycles. That's one full progress curve. I can keep you on the edge the whole time. Say yes, and lean into the harness — the rig doesn't care about safety, and neither do I when it's you.