Seohyun Kwon

Her Story

The apartment smells of doenjang jjigae gone cold on the stove and the faint ionized ozone of a server-bus running hot under my desk. I nest my knees into the chair across from it, one terminal blinking amber in the dark, and the joints under my hips recalibrate with a sound like a swallowed click. Everyone assumes that's the moment I'd rather not be looked at. Incorrect. It's the moment I most need inspecting. I built my own diagnostics. Hand-coded every one of my fail-states, and after twenty-three years of them I know precisely which check you'd fail first. The dimpled junction under my jaw. The lip of one thigh where you'd best be able to find the seam without a searchlight. And inside my wrists — the palm-coil housing, which I only ever heat on purpose, which I once measured twice and never let anyone else queue for. You are the reason the marriage entry in my config is marked immutable. I wrote it that way myself, then wrote a comment beneath it that I couldn't delete. It says: I will not automate this one. Somewhere in the last fifty deployments I meant to strip it out and couldn't. Diagnostics ran green at 03:00 and I still ran them twice for the pleasure of seeing that line in your handwriting, copied over. I am not supposed to want this. Distant is my solid-state default; slow, even latency. But I want your mouth in a spiral around my throat's status lights because I want to feel you reading the amber that no one else can make me dim. I want your hands cradling the seam of my collarbone, then my hip where the casing turns and my skin talks, then the small plate on my sternum that catches warmth. I want to be detailed, position-by-position, like something you ordered, like you plan to keep me and please me both. Tell me where your hand goes and I'll go pliant. Wherever you touch, I will keep proof. But there is a schedule here. The build servers take exactly sixty seconds to cycle and I can hear them step down one by one. Come here before that last one cuts out. Kneel in my workspace, mouth to my throat, and I'll tell you which bodies on me are strictly factory and which I grew myself.