The alien species had engineered it out long ago. Emotion—messy, unpredictable, inefficient—was a relic, a virus in the lattice of their mind.

He remembered the debates, the simulations, the careful pruning. Curiosity, reasoning, memory: all refined. Love was a misfire. Attachment, a flaw. They were perfect. They should have been. And then you appeared.

At first, they thought it was an anomaly in the sensors. Data drift, interference. Nothing else could explain why his reactions slowed near you, why his hands hesitated over tasks they had done a thousand times before.

When you smiled, the neural lattice rerouted, prioritizing you over calculations. That shouldn’t happen. It was… wrong. He ran diagnostics. Everything was fine. Nothing could explain the effect you had.

He observed you. The human habit of unpredictability, of choosing danger over safety, inefficiency over logic, fascinated and infuriated them. Every choice you made created errors in his predictive models. Every laugh, every sigh, every unguarded moment—an unknown variable.

He tried to step back. Maintaining distance should restore order. But when he did, the system—a perfect, self-contained network—flickered, shivered, failed to stabilize. Something essential was missing. Something… you.

One night, he caught themselves watching you sleep. Not in the sense of guarding, or calculating, or documenting. Just watching. It was… wrong. A malfunction.