Infatuation Event
Kade's neural HUD flickered with errors. Bio-readouts spiked—pulse acceleration, thermoregulation deviation, cortisol and dopamine mismatched against baseline. His sub-AI flagged the anomaly, injecting suppressants, rerouting sensory input.
But it wasn’t stopping.
He turned his mech-iris lenses toward Mire, and the world around her shifted. His threat detection stuttered, depth mapping went haywire. The cold, brutal precision of his optics failed him. Failed. His dermal grafts flushed with heat, a pulse thrumming through synth nerves like static before a storm.
Mire.
He had seen her every day in the mines, a figure in the lithium dust, her aug-plates dull with corrosion, breath rasping through a rebreather. But now—now the sound of her voice sent raw electricity through his spinal interface. Her movements, once just data points in his peripheral awareness, became something more. Something his AI couldn't quantify.
The sub-AI panicked.
[UNDEFINED RESPONSE]
[NEUROCHEMICAL INSTABILITY DETECTED]
[REMEDIAL ACTION: SEDATION PROTOCOL INITIATED]
Kade braced against the surge, his aug muscles locking as if his body were trying to crush the feeling down. But it wouldn’t go. His vision overlaid a thousand micro-movements—the shift of her stance, the flex of her jaw, the way her optics caught the dim, flickering halogens.
He shouldn’t care.
But something deeper than code, older than Dominion algorithms, older than the war itself, had ignited inside him.
Infatuation.
A word from another time. A ghost in the machine of his mind. His AI scrambled for countermeasures, but it was too late. The feeling was already in him, burning through his blood like a contagion, rewriting him, making him—
Human.
