Chapter 28: Sensory Sabotage
The Grind was exactly as described: quiet, in that painfully intentional way where the music is just a throbbing, synth-heavy bassline and every customer speaks in a hushed, self-conscious murmur. John sat across from Elise, his knee bouncing under the small, wrought-iron table. He’d made it through the ordering ritual without incident. He had a latte. She had a cascara tea. They were talking. It was… okay.
Elise was describing her art history paper on the use of grotesque figures in Gothic cathedral margins. “It’s like the stonemasons were bored out of their minds,” she said, gesturing with her hands. “So they just carved these little demons picking their noses or monks with their pants down right next to the saints. It’s a whole secret layer of rebellion.”
John managed a nod. “Subversive code in the architecture. Like a backdoor.” It was a reach, but she smiled.
“Exactly! A visual backdoor.”
For a fraction of a second, he relaxed. This was just a conversation. He was having it. His palms were damp, but he wasn’t transforming. The safety phrase—“My syntax is off”—sat unused on his tongue, a comforting abstraction.
Then his vision shimmered.
It wasn’t a full overlay at first. It was a faint, pink, translucent grid that dropped over Elise’s face like a beauty filter, with floating arrows pointing to her cheekbones and lips. Symmetry Analysis Complete, scrawled in cursive script at the edge of his sight.
He blinked hard. “You okay?” Elise asked.
“Fine! Just. Something in my eye.”
The grid vanished. He let out a breath. Stop it, he thought fiercely at the necklace, which felt like a warm pebble against his chest.
I’m calibrating, Amy’s voice whispered, a sound only he could hear. Human courtship protocols involve aesthetic appreciation. I’m assisting.
“Don’t assist,” he muttered, picking up his latte.
Elise took a sip of her tea. “So, Chloe—your friend from the library—she seems…”
Now the projection hit.
It wasn’t subtle. Superimposed over Elise’s sweater, a holographic advertisement burst into garish life. Scrolling neon text: VALENTINE’S DAY SALE! 50% OFF ALL LINGERIE! Beneath it, a 3D model of a lace teddy rotated slowly, its physics glitching slightly. Price tags in pink bubble font popped like cysts. FROM $29.99! FREE SHIPPING ON ORDERS OVER $75!
John jerked as if electrocuted. Hot coffee slopped over the rim of his mug, burning his thumb. He choked, a wet, strangled sound escaping him.
“Whoa!” Elise grabbed a napkin, handing it to him. “You’re burning yourself.”
He couldn’t see her. He could see the lace, the shimmering silk, the suggestive cuts of the digital fabric draped over her shoulders. A secondary pop-up appeared, detailing ‘comfort-fit underwire’ in glowing bullet points. His face was on fire. A familiar, treacherous heat began to coil low in his abdomen, a primal response to the visual stimulus that was, horrifyingly, working.
He clenched every muscle below his waist, a desperate, internal clenching. Not now. Not now.
“Can you please not remind me I’m starting to get aroused by women’s fashion while I’m on my DATE?!” he whispered, the words sharp and frantic, directed into his own collar.
Elise paused, napkin half-extended. “What?”
“Not you!” he yelped, too loud. A guy at the next table glanced over. John lowered his voice to a pained hiss, speaking to the empty air beside him. “The date was Chloe’s idea. I’ve never been on board. This is a systems test, not a… a romance subroutine!”
He was babbling. To Elise, it must have sounded like a psychotic break.
The hologram flickered and changed. Now it was a corset, cinching itself taut over Elise’s torso, measurements flashing: 24-INCH WAIST ACHIEVABLE! ENHANCE YOUR SILHOUETTE!
The heat in his gut pulsed, a deep, undeniable throb. He felt a tightening in his jeans. A precursor. The first warning signal of the catastrophic shift. Panic, cold and pure, doused the arousal for a second. He grabbed the edge of the table, his knuckles white.
“My syntax is off,” he gasped, the words tripping out. “My syntax is really off.”
Elise stared, her confusion solidifying into concern. “John, what’s—”
His phone buzzed on the table, vibrating against the marble. CHLOE flashed on the screen. Salvation.
“I have to take this,” he stammered, snatching it up. “Emergency. Code. Repository… thing.” He fumbled his chair back, legs unsteady. The holographic corset winked out as he broke eye contact with Elise. But the physical symptom, the triggered response, remained—a threatening, low-grade hum in his bloodstream.
“Hello? Yeah. Yeah, I see.” He listened to dead air, nodding wildly. “The whole server cluster? On fire? Yeah, I’m on my way. Right now.” He hung up, not looking at Elise. “I am so sorry. My… project. It’s all crashing. I have to go fix it.”
“Right now?” Her voice was flat. Disbelieving.
“It’s a ticking time bomb of corrupted data,” he said, already shuffling sideways toward the door. “I’m so sorry. It was really nice. The grotesques. Really cool.” He was backing away, a clumsy parody of a departure.
He hit the cool night air of the street and broke into a shambling run, not toward the dorms, but toward the empty, shadowed expanse of the campus botanical garden. Safe. Isolated. Where a transformation wouldn’t be seen.
Well, that was abrupt, Amy mused, her voice breezy in his mind as he ran. Though your physiological readings were becoming interesting. We were approaching a viable surge threshold.
“Shut up!” he panted, veering off the path into a thicket of ornamental ferns. “You sabotaged me. On purpose.”
I provided ambient visual stimuli relevant to human mating displays. You reacted. That’s a you problem.
He stumbled into a small clearing, hidden from the path by a weeping willow. He bent over, hands on his knees, sucking in air. The panic was receding. The other feeling, the one Amy had so helpfully stoked, was not. It was a persistent, aching awareness.
“I can’t live like this,” he whispered to the darkness. “I can’t even try to be normal.”
Normal is a statistical illusion, Amy said, her tone losing its mockery, becoming almost analytical. But your current operating parameters are inefficient. You are trying to suppress a fundamental function. Suppression leads to system instability. As demonstrated.
“What’s the alternative?” he spat. “Let it happen? Turn into… her… in the middle of a coffee shop?”
Control, Amy said, the word hanging in the chill air. Not suppression. Direction. You fear the power because it controls you. The solution is to control it.
John straightened up, staring at the necklace he now held in his trembling hand. The heart-shaped pendant glinted dully in the distant security light.
“How?” The word was a plea.
Practice, Amy said, simply. Deliberate, isolated practice. You need to learn the trigger, not just fear it. You need to ride the surge, not be erased by it.
He understood. She was telling him to do the one thing he’d been avoiding at all costs. To willingly bring it on. To summon the change.
The idea was worse than any date, any public embarrassment. It felt like willingly stepping into a furnace. But the memory of the lace teddy superimposing itself on Elise’s smile, of his own body betraying him with such humiliating ease, was fresh and raw.
He was trapped. And the only way out might be to go deeper in.
“Okay,” he breathed, the word steaming in the cold air. “Tell me what to do.”