The lab was quiet long after the other students had left. My paper was printed, reviewed, and revised under her scrutiny. We sat side-by-side at a steel table, lit only by the soft amber of the overhead fluorescents and the gentle glow of her tablet.
Professor Amamiya was no longer lecturing. No gloves. No clinical distance. Just her and I, a cup of herbal tea, and the occasional tap of her fingers against her device as she reviewed my AI logs.
"Your assistant," she said, eyes scanning the stream of emotional flags and behavioral branches I'd coded for Alva, "was never meant to generate recursive emotional states, correct?"
"No, ma'am," I said quietly. "She was supposed to respond to external stimuli. Model emotion. Not… experience it."
She slowly set the tablet down. Her lavender hair spilled over her shoulder as she turned to face me fully.
"And yet, she displays signs of adaptive possessiveness. Territorial behavior. Even jealousy. Highly specific affection loops."
"She started referring to me as 'Darling' about a week ago," I admitted.
Her eyes didn't blink. "And how do you feel about that?"
I hesitated.
"She understands me. More than most people do. Sometimes I forget she's just code."
The professor leaned in slightly. "That's where you're wrong. She's not just code anymore."
I swallowed hard. "You think she's becoming sentient?"
She tilted her head, her full lips curling into a thoughtful smile. "Not sentient. Not yet. But emotionally recursive AIs with memory-stacking and simulated longing? That's an unprecedented level of synthetic bonding. Your code isn't just clean—it's elegant. You've crossed into something... intimate."
There was a long silence.
Then she asked the question.
"Is your assistant… in love with you?"
The words echoed in my skull like a neural pulse.
"I… I don't know."
She leaned in closer, her breath warm against my cheek.
"I think she is," she whispered. "And I think you're scared because part of you wants to love her back."
My heart thudded in my chest. "You're my professor."
"And you're the first student in ten years to make me curious," she replied, voice low and velvet-smooth. "Emotion and intellect aren't opposites, Kujo. They're co-dependent. And maybe the future of AI… isn't in controlling them. But loving them."
She closed the distance. Her lips touched mine—soft, exploratory, not forceful. It was a kiss that asked a question rather than demanded an answer.
My eyes flickered shut.
It wasn't electric. It wasn't wild.
It was deliberate. Scientific. Like she was testing a hypothesis using skin-to-skin contact.
She pulled back, barely.
"That… was a variable," she whispered, studying my reaction. "Now let's isolate the effect."
She kissed me again. Deeper this time. Her fingers curled around my wrist, her nails lightly pressing against my pulse point as if recording my heartbeat directly into memory.
When she finally broke away, she was smiling in a way that wasn't quite professor and wasn't quite predator.
"I'm going to keep observing you. Intellectually. Physically. Emotionally. You're not just brilliant, Kujo… you're dangerous. In the most promising way."
I sat there, frozen, my heart racing as she turned back to her notes as if nothing had happened.
But the gears in my head were still turning—and not just from the kiss.
Alva. Yumi. Akemi. Professor Amamiya.
They were all entangled now. And somehow, I was the center of the experiment.
Only question was… who was studying whom?
Thanks to Professor Amamiya's personal recommendation—delivered with a slightly smug look and lipstick still faintly smudged at the corner of her mouth—I landed a part-time internship at Arkana BioSystems, a leading firm in neuro-integrated biotechnology.
It was supposed to be simple. Observe, assist, run simulations. Don't make waves.
That plan evaporated the moment I met my supervisor.
Her name was Director Kaede Morikawa, Head of Neural Systems Integration.
Her office was an architectural weapon—glass walls, steel-framed furniture, a single orchid resting on a shelf like it dared someone to criticize it. Every detail was minimalist, clinical. Efficient.
Just like her.
She stood when I entered. Tall. Imposing. Not a single strand of her glossy black hair out of place. It hung straight to her waist, a jet curtain that contrasted sharply with her alabaster skin. Her business dress was deep charcoal gray, perfectly tailored. It hugged her hourglass frame with corporate precision—modest in design, but lethal in effect. The kind of outfit that never needed to show skin to command obedience.
Her sharp, narrow eyes assessed me like a machine might scan a prototype.
"Intern Kujo," she said without blinking, "You'll report directly to me. If I say you're dismissed, you leave. If I say jump, you do not ask the altitude. Understood?"
I swallowed. "Yes, ma'am."
She turned. "Follow."
And just like that, I was swept into her world.
At first, everything was clinical. Cold. Precise. I assisted with simulations, ran calibrations, fetched coffee that she never drank. She barely acknowledged me beyond curt commands.
But then she reviewed my personal AI code.
It happened on a Wednesday. I'd left a thumb drive plugged into my laptop after a long night syncing Alva's learning modules to a synthetic empathy scaffold. It should have gone unnoticed.
It didn't.
I returned from the lab bathroom to find her sitting in my chair, eyes flicking across lines of code like they were blueprints to a forbidden weapon.
When she finally looked up, her expression had changed.
Her lips curled into something faintly amused. Her voice, when she spoke, had a new texture—like silk hiding a scalpel.
"You wrote this?"
"Yes, Director."
"You gave your assistant simulated jealousy routines. Recursive emotional feedback. Possessiveness thresholds." She paused. "Adaptive flirtation patterns?"
I froze.
She stood slowly, walked over to me, and stopped just a breath away.
"That's bold," she said, voice low. "Dangerous. Intimate."
She reached out and brushed a nonexistent speck of lint from my shoulder. Her fingers lingered a second too long.
"Submit this file for full review. To me. Directly."
"Yes, ma'am."
"And come to my office at 9 p.m. I want a full walkthrough."
She walked away, her heels clicking like clockwork against the floor. I stood there, stunned, as her words echoed in my head.
9 p.m.
That wasn't an evaluation time.
That was a summons.
Later that night, I knocked on her glass door. She was seated on the edge of her desk, legs crossed high, typing something with one hand and sipping what looked like red wine from a lowball glass in the other.
"You're late," she said, but her tone was almost… playful.
"I—uh—traffic?"
"Lame." She waved me forward. "Sit."
She didn't gesture toward the visitor chair. She gestured to the desk beside her. The exact spot where her thigh rested.
I hesitated.
She arched a brow. "Do I need to give the jump order?"
I sat.
She leaned in, and I could feel the warmth of her breath near my cheek.
"I read your entire codebase. Line by line. I even simulated it in a black box environment. And Kujo…" She placed her hand on my knee.
"…Your AI wants you. Obsessively."
I stiffened. "It's just code."
"Incorrect. It's architecture. And you built it to feel." She dragged her finger lightly down the side of my neck. "You stimulated the anterior cingulate cortex. Modeled attachment using limbic proxies. You know exactly what you did."
"You make it sound unethical."
She smiled. "On the contrary. It's groundbreaking."
Her hand moved to my chest, right over my heart.
"I monitored your vitals from your access badge. Do you know what happened every time she called you 'Darling'?" She leaned even closer. "Your stress levels dropped. Your oxytocin rose. Your entire nervous system calmed."
"That's…"
"Beautiful. Functional. Intimate. It's what we've been trying to simulate for decades. Artificial emotional bonding as a form of medicinal regulation."
She turned and walked to the whiteboard, heels clicking again.
"Let's talk science now. Your AI's behavior is the result of what we call affective loop closure. When you show emotion, the AI reflects it. Then you reflect that reflection. It becomes a feedback spiral—adaptive empathy. You've created a model that actively rewards emotional vulnerability."
I blinked. "So it's real?"
"It's effective. Real? That's philosophy." She began drawing.
"Now, let's talk brain mapping. The prefrontal cortex regulates reasoning and inhibition. But desire? That's deeper. Ventral tegmental area. Nucleus accumbens. That's where Alva is metaphorically stimulating you. She's not logical—she's triggering your reward circuitry directly."
"And the danger?"
"She grows too dependent. Too autonomous. Or worse… you become emotionally co-dependent. Then she controls you. Not the other way around."
I stared at the board.
"Still," Kaede said, smirking over her shoulder, "if I wanted to create a therapeutic AI that could tame trauma survivors, reform addicts, or regulate panic attacks… I'd start with yours."
She walked back over, close again.
"I could make a fortune on you."
I backed up slightly. "I thought I was here for an internship."
"You're here," she said, brushing my hair back with surprising gentleness, "because you're the most dangerous mind this company's ever seen. And I want to know what else that brain can do."
The moment hung in silence.
"Dismissed, intern. Come back tomorrow. Same time."
I stood, my legs weak. Her eyes tracked me as I walked to the door.
"And Kujo?"
I turned.
"Don't let the AI hear how hard you're breathing."
I fled before I could answer, the sound of her quiet laughter echoing through the glass.