Silence wakes me first. Not absence, but a pressure that flattens thought the way snow flattens a field. I do not know if my eyes are open. The black feels identical either way. The chair cradles my body as if I never left it. The mesh is a soft cage. A pulse nicks the air at regular intervals. It is patient and confident. It is not mine.
"Breathe, Iris."
The voice arrives like a hand slipped under water. Calm. Precise. Unhurried. I breathe because command sits easier in my throat than choice. Air drags through a chest that feels packed with night. My lungs catch, then open. The pulse shows its teeth and eases back as if satisfied.
"Where are you?" the voice asks.
"Here."
"Name it."
"Pre-Op Two," I say, though it feels like a lie told to keep a stranger gentle.
"Who are you?" he asks.
"Iris Monroe."
"Why are you here?"
"Because love has teeth." I hear myself answer and understand it is now a fact stored somewhere outside me.
Metal hushes on the far side of the dark. I sense Jonah near my left hand, his watchband creaking, the faint heat of him slipping past the edge of the mesh. He does not speak. Somewhere above, a soft chime counts a small distance. I picture a green line crawling across a monitor like a snake with a purpose.
The tone changes. A finer thread stitches my skull from ear to ear. It tugs until my teeth remember pain. Behind the sound, another frequency rises, low and wide, like weather under floorboards. It travels through the long bones of my arms and settles in the corners of me that do not have names.
"This is your baseline," the voice says. "You will hear it until your body stops fighting it."
"I am not fighting."
"You always are."
Heat touches the notch at my throat. Not temperature, attention. It explores the shape of my pulse and waits. When I refuse to meet it, it taps. Three light touches, as if training a bruise to speak. The pulse beneath my skin falls into rhythm, unwilling yet obedient.
"Tell me what you notice," he says.
"The sound sits on my teeth," I say. "The room presses against my eyes. The air tastes like rain. There is a weight on my chest that feels like a hand."
"Is it heavy?"
"No," I say. "It is chosen."
The attention warms. Pleasure taps the inside of my mouth, clean and exact. I swallow it like a pill. I hate that I like accuracy. I hate that accuracy feels like care.
"Let the first image arrive," he says.
I do not call for it. It comes the way blood comes when a scab remembers it was a wound. A dim stairwell. Concrete is slick with a skim of water. A bulb at the top that glows without ever warming. The sound of my foot on the first step is louder than the ocean.
"What is at the bottom?" he asks.
"Water," I say. "Not deep. Enough to make every step sound like a confession."
"Go down," he says.
"No."
The word shocks even me. The mesh tightens along my cheekbones, a lover's warning disguised as engineering. I prepare for punishment. It does not come. The voice returns steady.
"Describe the rail," he says.
"Cold," I answer. "Rough. Paint in flakes that cut. It smells like coins and rust."
"Good," he says. "Now step."
I do. The water swallows my heel. Cold climbs the arch and bites at the tendon. On the second step, my knee touches damp concrete. On the third, my hand skims the wall and comes away gritty. The bulb at the top does nothing but glare. I hate it for pretending to help.
The attention moves to my sternum and sits. It spreads like a coin on a tongue. My heart learns its weight and beats around it. The second pulse moves into phase with mine. The feeling is not sexual. It is more dangerous. It is the satisfaction of a lock turning with the key that was made for it.
"This is not real," I say.
"It is yours," he answers.
The water reaches my shins. A shape waits at the landing. Not a man. Not a memory. A possibility. The chair under me exists and does not. If I stretch my hand, I will touch nothing. If I stretch my mind, I will touch him.
"Tell me what you fear," he says.
"Being remade," I say. "And liking it."
Warmth climbs from throat to chest and draws a line through me. Approval again. Measured out like a dose. I want to bite the hand that feeds me and then kiss it.
"Hold there," a woman says on the overhead speaker. She sounds like she eats her lunch in the same room as the rules. "Pre-link stable. Signal clean."
A second voice joins, male and bored. "Record the curve. Do not exceed two minutes."
Jonah's fingers press once against my wrist. His touch says he is here. I believe in him the way I believe in a light on a machine. Useful and honest, but incapable of the mercy that belongs to a person.
The stairwell dissolves. The dark folds the image and carries it away. In its place, a kitchen coalesces. Not chosen. It arrives with the inevitability of gravity. The exact string of bulbs reflected in a window. A pan is smoking on the stove. Orange peel curling on a board. The click of a lighter. I brace, but the hands that come up behind me are not the ones I expect.
"Focus on sensation," the voice says. "Do not add story."
Heat at the waist. Weight at the hips. Breath at the ear. Every nerve in my back turns to thread. The attention at my sternum thickens. When I begin to slip toward the old loop, the tone grows sharper and pulls me back like a collar.
"Name three objects," he says.
"Knife," I say. "Citrus. The window latch."
"Now count breaths to five."
I do. At four, the room tries to change. At five it does. The hands vanish. The smoking pan goes still. The bulbs cool to a less cruel color. The sense of safety that follows this compliance is so pure it scares me. I have trained my body to accept domestication as a form of relief.
"Good," he says. The pleasure in his voice is quiet and exact. I want to break something that belongs to him.
"What is your name?" I ask. I mean it to be hard. It sounds soft.
Silence. The type that listens.
"Are you a patient?" I try. "A therapist. The machine."
Nothing answers. The tone sharpens a shade. The attention shifts to my jaw, touches the knot there, and waits until I unclench. When I do, approval drips into the back of my mouth again. I am Pavlov's dog, and my bell is a man who does not give his name.
The kitchen dissolves. The chair returns for a breath. The pod hums. The mesh notes sweat at my temple and catalogs it. I try to move my ankle. The strap allows a polite fraction.
"Vitals hold," the woman says. "One minute remaining."