The conference adjourned just past noon, leaving behind the usual aftertaste of institutional politicking wrapped in polite applause. Adrian had endured it with practiced composure, navigating the sterile exchanges and veiled intentions with the same detachment he reserved for all things that no longer challenged him. As he exited through a discreet side corridor, the filtered light of early afternoon spilled across the polished floor, casting long, angular shadows that moved with him. The quiet outside the chamber was a relief, not because the noise had been overwhelming, but because it had been irrelevant. His mind had already shifted gears. There was something more important awaiting.
His transport met him with seamless precision—unmarked, temperature-calibrated, silent. Sliding into the rear seat, he allowed his attention to drift from the diplomatic facades of the morning to what truly mattered: the integrity of the next stage. The vehicle glided along a lower arterial route, bypassing the city's mid-day congestion. As towers fell behind, the path opened toward the quieter perimeter district, where one of his lesser-known lab satellites operated under strict access control.
By the time he arrived, the rhythm of the day had settled. The building's internal systems registered his presence, adjusting everything from ambient lighting to acoustic isolation. He stepped into the interview room—sterile in design, but precise in atmosphere—its surfaces cooled, its network shielded, its sensors humming just beneath perception. Taking his seat, he let one hand rest on the glass tabletop, eyes scanning the interface prompts that flickered briefly before disappearing. The room was silent now, calibrated for clarity.
This was the part of the day he valued—the quiet before the real questions began.
Candidates were brought in one at a time, with precisely ten-minute intervals, through a side corridor lined with sensor gates. Each of them walked alone. No assistants. No welcoming committee. The walk itself was the first part of the test—unscripted, disorienting, and monitored from above by neuro-frequency readers embedded in the walls. These devices didn't read minds, per se, but they registered micro-shifts in emotional arousal, neural stress patterns, and cognitive anticipation.
The interview space was circular, empty except for two chairs facing each other and a single polished metallic table. Overhead, the dome was dim, but a soft internal glow traced lines in the floor—guiding the candidate to his seat without a word.
Adrian was already seated, his eyes appearing bare to the untrained observer. But embedded in the sclera-thin contact lenses were micro-lidar sensors, real-time bio-readers, and emotion-mapping overlays. To the candidates, his gaze seemed neutral—just a man watching. But to Adrian, each flicker of muscle, every dilation of pupil or twitch of the jawline was encoded and projected in silent, layered streams only he could see.
He had trained himself for years, in real-world observation—studying eye movement, voice breaks, hand position under stress, the way people overcompensate when they lie. He'd read papers on it, sure, but field work taught him more. His brain processed patterns like some men heard melodies—flashes of contradiction, flickers of incongruence that stuck out like missed notes in a song.
Still, he had learned that even expert eyes could be misled. Trained subjects could suppress micro-reactions. They could rehearse breath patterns, internalize pulse pacing, blink naturally on command. That's why the lens existed—not to replace his intuition, but to confirm it. To amplify what couldn't be trusted to memory or guesswork. And unlike any other biometric tracker, this one didn't just collect data. It interpreted emotion. It learned from him.
And unlike standard biometric AI, Adrian's lens did not transmit to a server. It stored nothing in the cloud. All data was processed locally, encrypted in real time, then purged after use. A ghost system—impossible to hack because it left no trace to follow.
The moment Elijah entered, the contacts began recording. Heart rate, tension, eye movement latency—all flagged and logged in real time, feeding Adrian the psychological map of the man before he even spoke.
"Tell me," Adrian said, voice quiet but direct, "what's the biggest error you've made in the lab, and what did it cost?"
Elijah blinked. A shift in posture. Delay: 1.4 seconds. Pupils constricted slightly, left cheek muscle tensed.
"I once… overstimulated a rat subject in a closed-loop test," Elijah said. "Didn't recalibrate fast enough. It caused an unexpected seizure response. We adjusted protocol."
He smiled. A practiced answer. Controlled.
Adrian said nothing. The contact lens flashed a silent prompt. Cortisol spikes inconsistent with baseline. Truth-responsiveness dropped 12%.
"You adjusted, or you were pulled from that arm of the project?" Adrian asked calmly.
Elijah's mouth tightened.
"I stepped aside," he admitted after a beat. "After review."
Adrian offered no expression. But internally, the report stitched itself together: tendency to mask, possible issue with risk ownership, flagged. Useful in controlled roles, not ideal for lead research under confidentiality load.
"You'll hear from us soon," Adrian said finally.
Elijah left, trying not to show disappointment. As the door clicked shut, Adrian blinked twice, filing the scan into a private, encrypted channel. One down.
❧
The room had been recalibrated—not just arranged, but tuned. The table was intentionally too broad for casual comfort, the lighting engineered to softly expose every twitch without creating the illusion of warmth. The ambient hum in the walls, imperceptible to most, was just enough to unsettle a distracted mind. Adrian preferred interviews this way: tension made the truth surface faster.
Lena arrived precisely on time—not early to impress, not late to test boundaries. Her file was light on fluff, dense with real work. Sparse conference history, a few experimental protocols with flagged but unresolved citations. No obvious red flags, but Adrian wasn't looking for what was obvious.
"Lena." His voice, like the room, was neither harsh nor warm. "You've been briefed on the confidentiality requirements?"
"I have. Twice. You encrypted the second file differently."
That caught his attention—not the fact she noticed, but how she said it. Not defensive, not proud. Just data.
"Let's begin with cortical signal fidelity. If you were working with a subject under minimal sedation, how would you ensure artifact-free recordings in a high-noise lab?"
"Inductive shielding in the cabling and chassis. Active noise cancellation for background frequencies below 300 Hz. But more importantly—your real problem isn't interference. It's micro-glitching from inconsistent temperature gradients in the node bed. Heat mapping and precision cooling would give you more stability than re-engineering the EM cage."
Adrian's lens registered her baseline—blood flow even, pupil response within expected ranges. But there—an echo of anticipation. Not stress. Not deceit. Preparedness. She'd been running through this scenario in her mind before even stepping in.
"And how would you explain that to a funding board with no technical background?"
She blinked once, as if switching gears.
"You can't build accurate maps of the mind using tools that can't sit still. That instability turns your data into guesswork. Our approach removes the guesswork. Every signal is a truth."
Adrian almost nodded. Almost. She was agile—but rehearsed. He couldn't trust performance alone.
"Let's pivot. Human testing. You've led teams?"
"Small ones. I don't delegate calibration. But yes, I've supervised double-blinds."
"Ever had a subject resist protocol?"
"Yes."
"What did you do?"
"I recorded everything. Documented the resistance. Then I stopped the trial."
"Did you report the failure?"
"Yes."
"To whom?"
She met his gaze. "To everyone."
The lens detected the usual cascade: accelerated blink rate, slight increase in heart rate, but no cognitive dissonance. She believed what she said. Or she had trained herself to believe it.
He tapped the file beside him. It opened with a touch, revealing a fabricated data set—brilliant but subtly flawed, hiding a lethal ethical compromise.
"Here's an anonymized model we're evaluating for Phase 3. Give me your thoughts."
She studied it in silence. Thirty seconds. Forty-five. Then: "This isn't anonymized. This is a subject with a known anterior lobe lesion—left untreated during cognitive scaffolding. Whoever ran this didn't screen properly. And if this data were used, you'd be reinforcing a false signal pathway."
She didn't flinch. "This is either a mistake. Or a test."
He waited. The lens flickered its assessment. No significant deceit. No shift in stress profile. Her brain and body believed she had passed a moral gauntlet.
Just as Lena reached the threshold, Adrian's voice cut through the quiet.
"You passed."
Her fingers twitched slightly, a reflex of withheld relief. He didn't offer more. Instead, he reached beneath the smooth edge of the table. A magnetic drawer hissed open with precision. From within, he drew out a matte-gray folio, unmarked, locked with a biometric strip. He placed it between them.
"Terms of engagement," he said, tapping once on the cover. The strip blinked red, then green.
She opened it. The first page was dense—language not just legal but coded, intentionally difficult. He watched her read, not helping.
"You'll work under encrypted conditions," he said. "All research is segmented. Daily partitions. You'll only have access to what you're assigned. At 00:00, each file set locks and regenerates with a new encryption key. No access to yesterday. No forecasts for tomorrow."
Lena glanced up. "And you?"
"I hold the master node. Access via rotating algorithm seeded off biometric and behavioral signatures—mine. It resets every twenty-four hours. Impossible to replicate or hijack. Even I don't retain the pattern beyond the moment it's generated."
She flipped to the next page, where the clauses tightened. No off-site access. No replication rights. No shared authorship without clearance. "This… isn't conventional."
"Neither is the work," Adrian said. "This isn't academia. This isn't even government-sanctioned. What we build here stays here. The consequences of leakage aren't reputational—they're structural. One breach, and the system collapses."
She paused, thumb hovering above the confirmation scanner. "And if I disagree with something?"
"You speak to me. No one else. But make sure it's worth the breath."
Her mouth quirked, the beginning of a smile, quickly masked. Then she pressed her thumb to the scanner. The green light blinked again—once. "Welcome," he said.
No handshake. No smile. Just another door unlocking behind her, waiting to lead her into the labyrinth.
He remained seated for a long moment after she left, the folder closed again at his fingertips. The lens fed him a quiet stream of her retreating bio-data: pulse steady, thought oscillations stabilizing, no emotional leak. She was clean. For now.