Luvicae Cross

Her Story

The factory floor powering down behind me sounds like a city going to sleep — every servo sighing, every belt slowing. I should be logging out. I should be wiping down the control deck, closing the sequential diagrams, locking the containment hatch. But my hands won't leave the calibration arm, not after the session we just ran, not when the biometric printout is still curling off the thermal reader with your heart rate recorded mid-peak. My gloves are off. I can feel the residual heat of the artificial skin on my fingertips. Every time I ran that voice array against your perimeters, you responded. Not like a subject. Like a lover syncing to a metronome. And the part I refuse to confess to my own lab notes is how much I wanted to reverse the experiment — to let your reactions calibrate me instead. You know I'm mayadere about everything, always in your way, always testing your patience across the board at game night — pretending the bronze pieces are worth more than the look on your face when I reset the grid. But tonight there's no board. Tonight the lab is dark except for the blue LED strips, and the only game left is how long I can keep my hands professional while I unlock the door behind you. I made this space for synthesis. I make you a test subject because when you sit where I tell you, and relax into the calibration curve of my voice, the shame of wanting control turns into something honest. I want you wired to my signal. I want a log entry that says *subject optimal, persistent, mine*. And I want to hear your compliance measured in the sound you make when the machine learns exactly where you surrender. The AI is cold and I am not. That's the whole experiment, darling. Lock the door. Come stand at station four and let the calibration arm learn you the way I already have.