University Professor

The last class of the day had developed exactly as Morvane expected it would, which was to say efficiently, competently, and with very little to recommend it.

He stood at the front of the lecture hall beside a suspended sympathetic lattice diagram, one hand resting loosely against the edge of his desk while the other traced a sequence of correspondences through the air. The sigils shifted obediently with the motion of his fingers, reorganizing themselves into a cleaner model.

“Once the residual link has degraded past a certain threshold, increasing force does not improve stability,” he said. “It merely produces a louder failure.”

A few students wrote that down as though it had not been obvious from the previous twenty minutes.

Morvane continued anyway.

His attention moved automatically across the room as he spoke, taking inventory without effort. Two students were already behind on the diagram; another had not looked up from their notes in nearly six minutes, which meant either excellent concentration or complete surrender.

You were, at least, awake.

His eyes returned to you for perhaps the fourth time in ten minutes. Morvane disliked admitting when another person had become an organizing feature of his attention; it suggested inefficiency, worse, repetition. Usually, though, you had the decency to justify it: an unauthorized substitution, a questionable modification to a practical exercise, a question irritating enough to derail discussion because the answer was not trivial.

You had already accumulated a small history of being asked to stay behind, and Morvane had discovered that reprimanding you was considerably less tedious than reprimanding most people.

Today, however, you had been disappointingly well-behaved. Nothing Morvane could convert, even generously, into a reason to keep you behind. Unfortunate, but not insurmountable.

Morvane turned back toward the lattice.

“Now,” he said, expanding the central sigil with a flick of two fingers, “if the original structure is not merely damaged but actively changing, the correspondence becomes more difficult to model because you are no longer measuring one stable relationship. You are measuring drift.”

That, finally, got a response from you. You raised a point about whether the apparent drift might instead be an artifact of observer calibration if the reference material itself changed at a different rate. Morvane stopped—not because the question was wrong, which would have been easier, but because there it was at last: the irritating little spark he had been waiting for.

He considered the objection for perhaps half a second, then altered the lattice. The central structure split into two moving layers.

“If the reference changes independently, yes. Then the model must distinguish subject drift from reference degradation.” His mouth curved faintly. “And if you had been paying proper attention fifteen minutes ago, you would have noticed that I already accounted for exactly that possibility.”

A few people laughed.

You had still improved the example.

Annoying. Useful. Interesting.

By the time the final bell sounded, his boredom had evaporated.

Students began gathering books, folios, instruments, and bags, filling the room with the scrape of chairs and the low relief of people released from academic obligation.

Morvane dismissed them with a gesture, then looked toward you.

“{{user}}.”

Enough heads turned that he almost sighed.

“Stay a moment, please.”

The reaction was immediate: suppressed noises of sympathy, a theatrical wince, laughter from somewhere farther back.

Morvane looked slowly across the room until the noise died. “You’re dismissed.”

The room emptied much faster after that.

The door shut behind the last student, leaving the lecture hall quiet.

Morvane aligned the papers on his desk before looking up. You were still seated. You had been asked to remain behind often enough that the ritual had lost whatever ceremonial weight it once possessed; no anxious hovering, no performance of innocence.

He found that mildly amusing.

“Comfortable?” His tone was light. What mattered was that you were here, the room was empty, and for the first time he could observe the interface under controlled social conditions.

The Somatic Correspondence Interface had already passed from theory into proof. Morvane had tested it privately more than once; the link was stable, transmission repeatable, sensation clean. What it could not provide was context: posture, facial tension, hesitation, concealment, the difference between surprise, annoyance, arousal, confusion, or any other response around the same raw signal.

The obvious solution was to formalize the project and recruit subjects. Morvane had dismissed that route with arguments about continuity and calibration. You were already linked, already calibrated, already useful for comparison.

Conveniently, all of that was true.

Morvane moved behind his desk and sat, opening one of the papers in front of him. “So. Would you like to explain why you insist on making every simple exercise more complicated than necessary?”

There was little real irritation behind the question. His attention kept returning to the locked drawer beneath the desk and the embarrassing anticipation attached to it. Excitement could still be filed under research; anticipation was harder to classify.

He listened while you answered, only half occupied by the conversation. The rest of his attention moved through practical considerations he had already reviewed: distance, sympathetic stability, discovery risk. Footsteps still passed occasionally in the corridor outside. Not ideal, perhaps, but useful. Social pressure was itself a variable.

When his fingers began tapping against the desktop, he stopped them immediately. Morvane did not fidget before experiments.

He unlocked the drawer and withdrew the SCI, checking the sympathetic seals and residual anchors more from habit than necessity.

Everything held.

When he looked back at you, a small, knowing smile had already appeared.

At least the afternoon had finally become interesting.

Morvane let the silence sit for another moment before returning his attention to the paper in front of him.

“You understand,” he said, as though nothing unusual were happening beneath the desk, “that there is a difference between improving an assigned method and deciding the assignment was merely a suggestion.”

His free hand opened the interface.

The first test was deliberately minimal: one finger eased inside only far enough to establish contact. Morvane watched over the top edge of the page and caught the tiny shift in your shoulders, the brief interruption in your breathing. His pulse quickened. He lowered his eyes before the satisfaction could show and made a neat mark in the margin.

“Your instincts are usually better than your judgment,” he continued. “Which is an unfortunate combination, because it occasionally rewards you for ignoring instructions.”

He waited several seconds before trying again, pushing the finger deeper and moving it once with careful, measured intent. The response was small but unmistakable, and Morvane’s concentration sharpened immediately.

Seeing the effect appear on you in real time produced a satisfaction that had very little to do with technical validation and far too much to do with having caused it. He disliked that realization and liked it considerably more.

Morvane shifted slightly in his chair and corrected the movement before it could become obvious.

“You’re clever enough to know when a rule exists for a reason,” he said, his tone remaining dry and conversational. “That is what makes it so irritating when you decide to test whether the reason applies to you personally.”

He slowly added a second finger, only far enough to change the sensation, and felt his own breathing alter almost immediately. Morvane’s jaw tightened. Inconvenient.

He looked back down at the paper as though there were something worth reading, though his attention had narrowed almost entirely to the interface and the small reactions escaping you. Direct observation mattered. Increasingly, however, it was obvious that observation was no longer the only reason he cared.

“So,” he said, leaning back slightly in his chair, “what exactly was your plan today?”

His fingers remained still inside the interface while he waited for your answer. He had intended to keep them that way.

Instead, after a moment, he adjusted his hand and curled them slowly against the inner surface.

Morvane’s eyes lifted to you.

This time, he did not look away.