The treacherous kind. The kind that whispersmaybe if I stay close enough, I’ll finally understand what went wrong.Maybe I’ll crack the code. Solve for X. Find the one variable that turned ‘us’ into ‘whatever this is.’
It’s stupid. The kind of hope that gets you hurt.
But I’ve never been able to leave a problem unsolved.
I pull up the adaptive model and get back to work.
CHAPTER 9
Logan
The simulation crashes for the third time in an hour.
I stare at the error log, running the variables in my head, trying to find the fault in my logic. The adaptive model worked perfectly in isolated testing. But when we scale it to full neural-density scenarios, something breaks. Every time.
“It’s the handoff,” Audrey says from her workstation. “Between priority tiers. The algorithm can’t process the queue fast enough when multiple high-priority signals compete for the same frequency band.”
She’s right. Of course she’s right.
She’s brilliant.
“So we need a tiebreaker protocol,” I say, already pulling up the relevant code. “Something that arbitrates between competing signals without adding latency.”
“Exactly.” She rolls her chair closer to look at my screen. “What if we weight by signal origin? Motor cortex gets priority over sensory feedback in urgent scenarios.”
“That could work. But how do we define ‘urgent’ in a way the algorithm can parse?”
She’s quiet for a moment, thinking. I watch her out of the corner of my eye—the way her brow furrows, the way she taps her pen against her lips, the way her hair is starting to escape from its ponytail after hours of running tests. She looks almost likeher.Like the Audrey I knew pre-Sweden. I want to say that out loud. That she looks like herself. That she looks like the person I still dream about, the person I can’t stop missing even when she’s sitting two feet away from me. But I don’t. I keep my mouth shut and my brain on the code.
“Amplitude thresholds,” she says suddenly. “Urgent signals tend to have higher amplitude. We could set a threshold that automatically bumps high-amplitude signals to the front of the queue.”
“And pair it with a decay function so the threshold adjusts based on overall system load.” I’m already typing, translating her idea into code. “If the system is under heavy strain, the threshold lowers to prevent bottlenecks.”
“Yes.” She leans in closer, watching my fingers fly across the keyboard. “That’s exactly—yes. Logan, that’s perfect.”
Her hand lands on my arm.
It’s nothing. A casual touch, the kind of thing colleagues do all the time. Excitement over a breakthrough. Totally normal.
My entire nervous system goes haywire, anyway.
This is the problem with skipping the formative years. Everyone else learned to calibrate their responses to human contact somewhere between middle school dances and college hookups. I learned to calibrate neural signal frequencies. The result is that a woman’s hand on my forearm registers like a five-alarm fire.
Her palm is warm. Her fingers are slim and certain. Three points of contact, maybe four, and my skin is suddenly the most sensitive organ in my entire body.
“Sorry.” She pulls back quickly, like she’s realized what she did. “I didn’t mean to?—”
“It’s fine.” My voice comes out strangled. I clear my throat, try again. “It’s fine. Let’s run the simulation.”
I don’t tell her that my arm is still burning where she touched it. That I can feel the ghost of her fingerprints like a brand. That I’ll probably be thinking about those three seconds of contact for the next six hours.
That’s the kind of information that makes people uncomfortable.
She nods, retreating to her workstation.
It’s almost eight. The rest of the team left hours ago, and the lab has gone quiet—just the hum of servers and the blue glow of monitors. The overhead lights are dimmed to reduce screen glare, which means we’re working in something close to twilight.
It’s just us. In this weird, charged, twilight space.
