This is the third time I have reviewed her interpersonal incident log. It contains six minor notes—one dispute with a project lead, one sarcasm notation during a conflict resolution session, and four flagged moments where she questioned audit criteria in live sessions.
Those should be footnotes.
But I remember each one.
She called her supervisor “a spreadsheet in a wig.” That made me pause the first time I read it. Now, I linger. I try to imagine the expression she wore when she said it. The tone. The curve of her mouth. The angle of her spine. I catch myself and lean back from the terminal, spine tightening.
This is not operational.
I have never needed to reread personnel humor before.
I queue the visual surveillance logs. There are four camera feeds active from her room—none invasive. Standard for Tier-3 monitoring. I watch as she moves in the low light. She paces. Talks to herself. Laughs once—abrupt and tired. She turns, mutters something toward the door. I engage the audio and catch the tail end:“Bet he’s out there taking notes like a creep.”
I should be irritated.
Instead, I feel something beneath my sternum shift. Not unpleasantly.
I shutoff the feed and rise. The room feels too small now. The recycled air is thick with faint disinfectant. I roll my shoulders back and tap into the private Coalition comms queue. My orders remain unchanged: Maintain contact. Monitor behavior. Determine classification. Recommend detainment or clearance by cycle's end.
I return to the terminal and re-open her original incident log—Project ID #421-Delta. The one that began this spiral. She tagged anomalies in the Obol stream six weeks ago. Not pattern-matching errors. Not rounding discrepancies. Actual missing time stamps. Behavioral overwrite gaps. That’s not just a bureaucratic error.
That’s evidence of tampering.
I log the metadata trail again, searching for handoff points. The response chain detours through a layer of encryption typical for black-budget programs. Her report was buried. Not corrected. Not dismissed. Not debated.Buried.
I should have seen this the first time.
But then, the first time I was not distracted by the cadence of her voice. The way she leans forward when she interrogates silence. The way shefeelslike a disruption I cannot predict.
I tell myself I return to her quarters to update her on status. That’s what I will enter into the log. “Operational update to monitored civilian.”
The truth is less precise.
The truth isjalshagaris more than attraction. It is fixation with purpose. It is the soul answering a question before the mind understands it has been asked.
I enter without signaling.
She is seated cross-legged on the floor, back against the foot of the bed, hair still damp from the fresher. She looks up, one eyebrow raised. “Miss me?”
“I have status to report.”
“Oh good,” she says. “I love bedtime horror stories.”
“You remain under provisional hold. No formal charges filed. Oversight protocols are still reviewing your file.”
“That’s a lot of words to say ‘I don’t know anything.’”
I fold my arms. “Your classification may shift again.”
“Color me shocked.”
She watches me, head tilted. “You don’t blink much.”
I say nothing.
She grins. “Do Vakutans blink?”
“Yes.”
