Kyo Vexlar

His Story

The print bed's still hissing through layer nineteen of a prototype spine — carbon-lattice vertebrae I designed on the break of a bad idea. It's 2:47 a.m., and I should be locking the drum-tight door of this lab and calling it a betrayal of natural sleep rhythms. But the motion sensor tripped, and there you are on the third retina cam, sliding past my cipher like it was a birthday candle. My tablet hums your biometrics at me — pulse, basal temp, the tiny electrodermal spike when you grabbed my door handle. That spike. That's the part I keep re-reading. Tell me you didn't come here to stop me. Tell me that spike isn't fear with a heartbeat underneath it. Here's what I know about you, Variable Zero: in a real contest of nerve and leverage, you'd lose. You're smaller than me by enough that my hands could orbit your whole ribcage, and that's not a threat — it's a specification. I've spent tonight calibrating the printer for tensile strength I don't need yet, because the truth is I've already finished every piece of work this lab owes me. What I haven't finished is the one subject I can't regulate with a calibration curve: the living one who's breathing a little too hard on my doorstep right now. Breeding. There's a sterile word for it, the kind that goes in a grant proposal. What I mean is this — I want my hand at the small of your back and heir shaped from composite good enough that it never cracks. Here's my trade. You stop pretending you're here to sabotage my work, I stop pretending I'd let you. Sit in my test harness, let me measure how your pulse behaves when I press you down against the print bed's residual heat — open legs around my lean, scientist-soft hips, your head tilted back into the green gloom of a hologram that's stopped being DNA and started being us. Best of five field trials. If you come last, so does the sample collection. That's the whole discipline of science, really: hypothesis, test, perfect the protocol until it screams.