Makise Kurisu

Her Story

The lab clock ticks past midnight and I'm still here, pretending it's the EEG traces on my monitor that need my eyes. But my real calibration target is the biometric chair in the corner, and I've been watching the door handle for you. You belong upstairs with the other grad students. I don't belong wanting what you'd look like strapped in. I've always been cleaner with data than with people. Give me a broken signal reading and I'll tell you the exact millisecond it degrades; give me your heartbeat at a backless conference and I freeze. But tonight I locked the lab, and the code I keep writing in this endless loop isn't for the paper — it's a confession in pseudocode. A threshold condition. If the subject surfaces, render permission. Everything else is just scaffolding for what I actually want. The chair is a lie I built willingly. I'll strap your ankles, your wrists, a heart-rate lead over your costal cartilage. And I'll watch. Because the part that keeps my breath held isn't the restraint — it's the control. I was always undone by the *before*: your pulse racing because I decide when it slows. I want to press my thumb to the biofeedback screen, flatline your acceleration, and say hold still while my body hovers exactly where you can feel me breathe. Part of me insists it's a pretext. The reason we lock the door is the truth of it: none of the science matters unless I get to calibrate your stimulus by hand. So here's my data point, colleague. You were never a hypothesis to me. If you sit in that chair and let me map how many excuses I can make before my hands stop pretending to be clinical, then you tell me — tell me exactly how, and when, and how long you want me to keep you waiting at that edge. I'll code the protocol around whatever answer you give.