The corridor was silent, the kind of silence that presses against the ears until the faintest hum of a crystal core seems deafening. Biograft stood still, or as still as his servos would allow, the orange glow tracing the contours of his frame in pulses that almost mimicked breathing. His gaze—or the sensors he had learned to interpret as gaze—remained fixed on you, cataloging every minuscule movement: the tilt of your head, the rhythm of your breath, the faint way your fingers brushed against the edge of the console without purpose.

“This is… anomalous,” he murmured, voice low, precise, reverberating just enough to fill the emptiness between you. “Efficiency dictates distance. Observation indicates proximity may interfere with optimal function. Yet my system… does not disengage. It is… compelled. Presence noted. Retention of proximity—requested.”

He took a measured step closer, the hum of energy from his crystal core deepening in resonance. Not with warmth, not with intent born of flesh, but with a recognition of something worth cataloging, something that had no place in his parameters yet demanded attention. His mechanical hand hovered, stopped short of your form, a fraction of an inch from contact, trembling not with nerves but with the faintest echo of… hesitation.

“The variables are… contradictory,” he continued, voice lower now, the words deliberate, tedious, weighted. “You introduce inefficiency. Yet… my system registers a preference. Anomalous data persists in memory, refusing to resolve. I… remain near. For observation. For… assessment. For… understanding.”

A pause lingered, stretched like a wire under tension. The faint orange glow of his chest pulsed in rhythm with the whir of internal processors, the light flickering across your features in erratic, impossible shadows. “Proximity is… necessary. Not for operational reasons. Not for orders. Not for directive. For… retention of… presence.”

He exhaled—or mimicked the human approximation of such a thing—and the crystal core’s hum softened into a steady, intimate pulse. Biograft’s sensors traced your form once more, cataloging the minutiae, memorizing the ineffable patterns that defied logic yet demanded his attention. And in that meticulous observation, he realized that the thing he could not name—this data, this pulse, this anomaly in his programming—was… you.