The silence in the facility had its own distinct texture. It wasn’t the empty silence of a vacant home, but the charged, humming silence of a machine at rest.
Dr. Aris Thorne sat before her triptych of monitors, the low thrum of the central server a familiar, subterranean heartbeat. On the screen, the playback of yesterday’s session with Subject Zero—with Cain—unfolded without sound.
She was studying his non-verbals: the subtle shift in his posture when she mentioned attachment theory, the brief, almost imperceptible narrowing of his eyes when she used the word “pathology.”
He was a masterpiece of control. But yesterday’s anomaly—his reference to her private conversation with Dean Albright—was a crack in the sterile perfection of her experiment.
She had spent a sleepless night trying to logically deconstruct it. Had a microphone picked up her call?
Impossible; the observation room was soundproofed. Had he hacked her email?
The system was a closed loop, firewalled from the university’s main network. She had settled on the most plausible, if unsettling, explanation: a lucky, highly intuitive guess, designed to destabilize her.
She’d logged it as such, a textbook example of manipulative behaviour. Yet, the explanation felt thin, like a bandage on a wound that went far deeper than the skin.
She glanced at the clock. Ten minutes until their next session.
Time to fortify her defenses. She straightened her spine, smoothing the front of her gray wool blazer.
Maintain clinical distance. He is data. Do not let him dictate the terms of the engagement.
She repeated the mantra as she walked the short, sterile corridor to the observation room. The session would focus on the transference of affection onto inappropriate objects.
She had the protocol laid out, the questions precise and impersonal. She was the researcher. She was in control.
***
Miles adjusted the worn leather strap of his watch. Ten o’clock.
Another two hours and his shift would be over. The quiet was the best part of the job; it gave him time to think.
He did his hourly patrol, the soft soles of his boots making no sound on the polished concrete floors. He passed the observation room, seeing the faint glow from under the door that meant Dr. Thorne was at work.
He liked her. She was always focused, professional, but never unkind. She always asked about his daughter’s soccer games.
He continued his rounds, ending up at the security station just outside the subject’s habitat. Cain was visible through the reinforced glass, sitting on the edge of his cot, reading a book on cellular biology.
For a guy locked up for a psychological study, he was remarkably placid. Polite, even.
As Miles logged his patrol into the digital system, a small light on Cain’s in-room comms panel blinked. Subject’s allotted phone call. Miles toggled the switch on his console.
“You’re good for fifteen minutes, Cain,” he said into his microphone.
“Thank you, Miles,” Cain’s voice came back, smooth as ever.
Miles watched on the monitor as Cain picked up the receiver. He didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but the audio from the subject’s calls was automatically piped at low volume to the security station for protocol reasons.
He usually tuned it out, but tonight, the first word he heard made him pause.
“Mom?” Cain’s voice was different. Taut, strained.
“What’s wrong?… No, just tell me.” A pause. Miles saw Cain’s free hand clench into a fist.
“She fell? Is she… okay, okay, just breathe. Tell me what the doctor said.”
Miles found himself leaning closer to the speaker. He saw the tension in Cain’s shoulders, the way he squeezed his eyes shut.
This wasn’t the cool, articulate man who debated philosophy with Dr. Thorne. This was just a son, scared for his family.
“A concussion? And her hip…” Cain’s voice cracked. He turned away from the camera, his back to the glass, as if seeking a privacy that didn’t exist.
“Listen, I know I can’t be there… No, don’t you dare say you’re a burden. You tell Sarah I’m thinking of her. Tell her to be strong. I… I have to go.”
He hung up the phone with a slow, deliberate movement. For a full minute, he didn’t move, his head bowed.
Miles felt a pang of genuine sympathy. He’d been through a scare with his own father’s heart condition last year, the feeling of helpless distance a cold weight in his gut.
Later, as Miles did his pre-dawn check, he stopped by Cain’s window. Cain was standing there, staring out, though there was nothing to see but a concrete wall.
“Everything alright in there, Cain?” Miles asked, his voice softer than usual.
Cain turned. His expression was weary, vulnerable. “As well as it can be. Thank you for asking, Miles.”
“Heard a bit of your call,” Miles admitted. “Sorry about your sister. Hope she’s okay.”
A flicker of something—gratitude, maybe—crossed Cain’s face.
“It’s hard, being in here. Feeling useless. You worry that the world just moves on without you.”
He looked directly at Miles, his gaze steady and sincere.
“It helps, knowing there are good people keeping watch. Someone diligent. It makes me feel… safer. That this work Dr. Thorne is doing is being protected.”
Miles felt his chest puff out slightly. “Just doing my job.”
“You do it well,” Cain said quietly.
“It takes a certain kind of person to handle this kind of responsibility with professionalism. Thank you.”
Miles gave a short, firm nod. “Hang in there, man. Family’s everything.”
He continued his patrol, the compliment echoing in his mind. He’d always seen his job as just a job—a steady paycheck, quiet nights.
But Cain had framed it differently. He wasn’t just a guard; he was a vital component of important research. He was protecting Dr. Thorne’s work.
He felt a renewed sense of purpose. Cain wasn’t just some subject. He was a person, going through a tough time, who recognized and appreciated his diligence.
***
“Your thesis posits that obsessive love is a malfunction,” Cain said, his voice a low, reasonable hum that vibrated through the microphone into Aris’s headset.
“A misfiring of attachment signals. You see it as a sickness to be cured.”
Aris sat forward, her own reflection a ghostly silhouette on the one-way glass. She had abandoned her protocol fifteen minutes ago.
He’d dismantled it, not with defiance, but with genuine intellectual curiosity that had lured her into a debate.
“It’s a deviation from healthy psychosocial development,” she countered, her pen tapping a nervous rhythm against her notepad.
“It’s inherently destructive, both to the subject and the object.”
“Is it?” Cain tilted his head, a gesture of thoughtful inquiry.
“Or is it merely a different form of devotion? Perhaps a purer one. Think of it, Doctor. Most love is conditional, diluted by careers, hobbies, friends, family. It’s a distributed, inefficient system. What you call obsession is simply… focus. Absolute, undivided focus. The removal of all that is extraneous.”
His words sent a strange shiver through her. She recognized the cognitive reframing, the rationalization of a pathological impulse.
She should have been documenting it, clinically, dispassionately. But she wasn’t. She was engaged.
“That ‘focus’ negates the autonomy of the individual,” she argued, her voice sharper than she intended. “It turns a person into a possession, an object to be consumed.”
“Only if you view it through a lens of ownership,” he replied smoothly.
“I propose a different lens: of study. Of absolute understanding. To know another person so completely—their fears, their ambitions, their private pains, the way they hold their pen when they’re deep in thought—is that not the most profound form of intimacy? To make them the sole subject of your existence?”
The detail—the way they hold their pen—made her hand freeze. She was, at that very moment, gripping her pen tightly, a habit she’d had since graduate school.
Coincidence. It had to be.
“That isn’t intimacy,” she said, her throat suddenly dry. “It’s surveillance. It’s a violation.”
“All science is a form of violation, is it not?” he pressed, a faint, knowing smile playing on his lips.
“You observe, you document, you dissect. You are here to learn my secrets, to map the ‘malfunction’ in my mind. How is my hypothetical focus any different from your professional ambition? Perhaps mine is simply more honest in its singular devotion.”
She was speechless. He had taken the very foundation of her research, of her identity as a scientist, and twisted it into a mirror of his own pathology.
The logic was perverse, flawed, but it was so elegantly constructed that she found herself, for a terrifying second, admiring the architecture of his argument. He wasn’t just a subject spewing textbook data; he was an intellect, a dark, formidable opponent in a game she hadn’t realized she was playing.
A dangerous, unprofessional warmth bloomed in her chest—the thrill of a true intellectual challenge. The raw fascination she felt was potent, intoxicating.
She ruthlessly stamped it out.
“The session is over,” she announced, her voice clipped and cold. She cut the microphone before he could reply, the sudden silence in her ears deafening.
Leaning back in her chair, she took a slow, deep breath, her heart hammering against her ribs. This was wrong. Her detachment was compromised.
The line had blurred, and she had let it happen.
She scribbled in her notes: Subject is highly adept at intellectualizing his condition and attempting to create a false equivalency with the researcher’s role. Essential to re-establish and maintain firm analytical boundaries.
It was a necessary course correction. A simple part of the study.
She told herself that as she pulled up the session recording for review. She told herself that as she rewound the footage to the moment he spoke of singular focus, his voice a mesmerizing current pulling her under.
She ignored the nascent, dangerous attraction, labeling it intellectual curiosity. She was a scientist, after all, and this was just a fascinating, complex problem to be solved.
He was data. He was a sickness she was here to chart, not catch.