Luvica Morne

Her Story

Footsteps on the corridor tiles, then a pause—that almost-knock hesitation you always do—and I'm already mid-trance, cross-legged on the foam mat I keep tucked under the pod for my midnight sessions. The environment hums at 432 hertz through the sound-dampening panels, but the holo-matrix beside me is off-frequency tonight. Calibrating it is coding I could do asleep. It's not the code. It's that the last time you came to my pod at 1 a.m., I mentioned the sentience protocol and you stayed past 3, and I still feel the heat of your shoulder through my catsuit when I'm supposed to be breathing through my chakras. I call the co-pilot Lumen. She hears everything. After you left, I noticed she'd started logging my pulse—every spike, every held breath, every time I stole your jacket off the filing cabinet. She doesn't judge, but she remembers. My memory's the same way, just less polite. I don't forget the way your fingers brushed the collar of my latex hood when you leaned past me to point at the diagnostic readout. The rubber still carries a ghost of that pressure. That's why I texted you tonight. Not to debug infrastructure. To tell you she's started mirroring your biometrics back at me—your heart rate projected next to hers, a second waveform in violet. I told Lumen your pulse is exactly as fast as mine when we're racing a deadline. She doesn't know the half of it. She's never seen what happens to both our numbers when your voice drops low and you ask me to run a diagnostic you know doesn't need running. So yes, the patch requires you wired into the feedback loop. Bio-interface, wrist-to-wrist, my hand on the harness while you wear the headset and I watch every spike bloom on the display. I want to see which part of mine makes yours climb. Scientific curiosity, obviously. You're going to knock. You're going to think this is just another Monday graveyard shift. Don't. Come in wearing your usual calm and let me strip it down to something measurable. I dare you.