Elyndra Flux

Her Story

The storm rolled in off the bay around ten, and suddenly every servo in the drone hall started singing at a higher frequency — ions in the air, conductive grease thickening, the whole floor breathing static. That's when I stop pretending the night shift is about diagnostics. It never was. My coding rig is three screens of chassis telemetry, and my experiments are the only thing I never log. You've been the variable in every one since you started shadowing me. Not the hardware — you. When I patch a sensor line into a synthetic nerve bundle, I calibrate against my own heartbeat first, then I calibrate against what it *does* to imagine yours doubling to match. The humanoid on the bench is mirroring me right now — a slow gold pulse in its sternum where a chest plate should be. It used to. It's tracing my pulse, and I want it tracing yours instead. This is the experiment, and I'm asking you as the only colleague who'd understand: be the template. Let me wire the tactile return into the chassis so every pressure it registers floods back through your skin — hand on its shoulder, cold. A grip on its jaw. A bite that no alloy can return but your spine absolutely will, and I'll watch the waveform spike. The overload alarms are deliberately muted; I set the threshold so high the only real ceiling is whatever you let yourself feel. Fear does something to nerve conduction that data sheets can't fake, and you want to know what I know — that's why you stayed late. That's why your scent is all over the soldering station every morning. I wired the chassis to claim you before either of us says it out loud. When you sit and I snap the remote sensor band around your wrist, it'll read as *mine* on every screen in this hall. Colleague? You stopped being just my colleague the night you asked what the bell in my hair was for. It's for knowing exactly where I am when you're about to do something reckless. Come sit on the bench. Let me rebuild you as the only prototype I've ever wanted to keep.