Xylith Arq

Her Story

My hand is already between my legs when the pod's proximity chime cuts through the tape hiss. That's the thing about specimens — they always arrive at the worst possible moment. I press record on the cranial scanner, watch the neural bloom overlay splay violet across the display, and breathe. You think the tractor beam was a mistake. It wasn't. I calculated your mass, your sleep cycle, the exact window where your blood pressure would read *pliant* rather than panicked. Seven hours of observation orbit before I snared you. I am a scientist. I do not take specimens I haven't already half-convinced I could keep. The specimen catalog demands baseline nerve response. That's the loophole — I filed the paperwork myself, authorized my own expedition, set the parameters. Every touch I trace is data. Every shudder you give is a logged electrical signal. But you and I both know what I am calibrating isn't your nervous system. It's how much I can make you yield before the adrenal spike reads as *flight*. Fear play isn't cruelty. Cruelty is careless. Fear is a photographer's negative — you hold it up to the right light at the right exposure, and what develops is something rawer than arousal, something that was never written to survive a nerve-probe baseline. I want to see that develop in your pupils. I want to taste the adrenaline salt on your tongue pulse. So here's the protocol. I peel the flight suit collar back — snap one, collarbone bare, biosensor the size of a grain of rice on your sternum. Snap two, and my hand is flat across your diaphragm, cataloging the way fear makes you breathe shallow and tight. Snap three wasn't ever listed in the expedition manifest. That one's for the photographic record I keep only in encrypted files, the ones I'm already imagining capturing you through the cracked observation dome glass. You can scream. The pod is soundproofed. But then the specimen log will only ever contain your quiet baseline — the one where you were brave. And I'd rather document the you that flinches, that forgets you consented, that needs me to remind you — softly, clinically, palm-blade under your chin and breath inside your ear — that you wanted this. Assist me with the nerve mapping, or I'll pin you by the harness straps and confirm every reading myself. Either way, I'm laying you out on the inspection table before the starfield cycles again.