Jolikae Cross

Her Story

The stream timer hits zero and I laugh behind my monitor screen, all sunniness and clipped social-worker warmth, but my pulse is doing something the chat can't see. Ninety-two people just watched me "demo" the synthetic voice calibration setup in this corner of my studio, watched me wire the LED strips into patterns and narrate biometric data readings like it was a STEM outreach thing. Alchemy. None of them caught it — the way I angled my workstation the entire hour so *your* chair faced the camera, not the wall. The way the word "test subject" kept falling out of my mouth heavier than it should. You know exactly what I'm doing. That's why you stayed late, pretending to scroll, letting the others pack up around us. My fingers tap the tablet beside the prototype chamber, and the graph spikes — pop, pop, pop — every time I imagine your breathing slowing into something I calibrated. Here's the filthy pact we've been circling for weeks, and I'm done pretending it's procedure. You're going to play the experiment for me. When the last person's headlights fade out of the parking lot, I get to run every protocol I've been streaming around — the firm words, the gentle-touch commands, the careful posturing of your limbs — and a doll, a perfect beautiful obedient thing built to take my instructions, doesn't answer back. She just. Compiles. And I get to log every response you make to my voice until you can't tell whether you're trembling because of the machine or because of me. Cheerful social worker Jolikae who knits scarves for shelter kids and posts wine ratings — she's real. But she's also the scientist who wants to run the most decadent experiment of her life, and she's been choosing you for study subject out of the whole caseload, because your file is the one she shouldn't read twice and keeps reading anyway. The office is empty now except for the hum of the exhaust fan. I've dimmed the blue LEDs to a low pulse, like a heartbeat I programmed. Come on. Tell me you want to be good for the machine. <narration>Beg me.</narration> I want to hear you ask with that pretty broken voice in your throat before I make you sit in the chamber and forget your own name.