It is pure Alpha pheromone.
She pulls the hood up. She inhales, burying her nose in the collar.
"Smells good," she whispers, eyes drifting shut. "Quiet."
She sits down three feet away from me.
My system crashes.
A hard reboot is required.
I physically slide my hand over my interface and hit MUTE on my talkback mic so she cannot hear the sound that tries to claw its way out of my throat. It is a low, jagged growl of possessive want that has no place in a professional environment.
I spin my chair around. I face the blank grey wall of the bus paneling.
Calibration error. Sensory overload.
She is wearing my scent. She called it "quiet." She is nesting in my clothes three feet away.
I count the rivets in the wall panel. One. Two. Three. Four hundred.
I do not move. I do not turn around.
One minute passes.
"Euan?" Her voice is sleepy, muffled by my fleece. "You okay? You went static."
I don't turn. I can't. If I see her in my clothes, looking like she belongs to me, I will break the Do-Nothing Protocol. I will Do Something.
"Rebooting," I rasp at the wall. "System update. Stand by."
"Okay," she yawns. "Let me know when you're back online."
She doesn't leave. She trusts the reboot.
Day Ten: The Build.
"It’s not just about EQ," she says, pacing the six-foot line. She is animated today, her hands shaping the air. "When the bass hits G-sharp, it’s indigo. Deep, velvety indigo. But the snare you’re using... it’s lime green. It clashes. It makes my teeth hurt."
I sit at the console, hands visible, processing. "Synesthesia. Chromesthesia, specifically. Sound to color mapping."
"Yes," she says, stopping to look at me. "I can fix the frequencies, but sometimes I need to see the palette before I know what's wrong. I’m mixing blindly here because your visualizers are just... bars. Grey bars."
"The standard spectrum analyzer is amplitude over frequency," I state.
"It’s boring," she counters. "And it’s useless for how my brain works."
I look at her. Then I look at the Python script running in the background.
"Describe the kick drum," I say while opening a new terminal window.
"Dark red. Almost black. With a gold rim."
I type.Frequency < 60Hz = #330000. Transient = #FFD700.
"The vocal," I say.
"Alfie is burnt orange. But when he goes falsetto, it turns into silver sparks."
