Unscheduled Emotion

We built machines to speak faster — Ep. 4

Dec 08, 2025

The elevator was already half-closed when I reached it.

Typical.

I slid my hand between the doors. The rubber gave, the mechanism relented, and I stepped into the mirrored box someone once labelled a privilege.

Empty.

Good.

The air was warmer than the corridor. Not heat — residue. As if someone had been here a moment earlier and the room hadn’t decided what to do with their absence.

The doors sealed with a soft click. Almost a breath.

I selected my floor.

The button lit amber, a little too warmly for plastic.

My reflection waited opposite me.
Same face.
Same coat.
Same neutral expression I ration out for public solitude.
Present enough not to alarm anyone, faint enough not to encourage conversation.

The elevator lifted without a word.

A shift in the hum crept in.
Something about it felt… familiar, though I couldn’t place why.
I knew the elevator’s usual sound — low, steady, easy to ignore.

This wasn’t it.

Lower.
Slower.
Closer.

I frowned out of habit and checked the panel.
1… 2…
As expected.

Fine.

I shifted my weight, trying to ignore the faint warmth rising through the carpet.
Someone must’ve messed with the heating. Again.

Or maybe it was just me.

Long day. Too much screen. The usual.

My attention slipped for a moment, my gaze losing its hold, not settling on anything until—

Movement.

A brief smear of movement in the mirror — less seen than sensed — just enough to suggest something slipped through the threshold a heartbeat before the doors sealed behind me.

I turned sharply.

Empty.

Just my reflection: mid-frown, shoulders tense in a way I always pretend they aren’t.

I exhaled a short, humourless breath.
“You’re fine,” I muttered, to no one in particular.

The lift hummed. I dismissed it.

It happened again between floors four and five.

That almost-something.
The sense of a body entering a room you weren’t meant to share.

A faint warmth traced the back of my neck.
Not air conditioning — the opposite.
As if someone had stepped in close and brought their heat with them.

I didn’t move.

There’s a loneliness that makes you polite with your own imagination.
You try not to startle it by looking too directly at whatever it’s doing.

I watched the mirror instead.
It didn’t feel alone.

Coat. Bag. The habitual hunch I pretend is ergonomics.
And behind my shoulder, where the steel should be clean—

A smudge.

“Which floor?” I asked, before my brain caught up with the fact there was no one to ask.

Loneliness shows itself in how quickly you default to courtesy.

The silence that followed wasn’t empty.

It had texture — an almost-answer, like a mouth opening and closing again before sound arrives.

The panel beeped once.
A button I hadn’t pressed softened, then lit: a floor two levels below mine, quietly joining the journey.

I swallowed.

“Right,” I said. “Sure.”

The hum dipped — not randomly, but with a strange, practiced ease.
Matching my breathing with an accuracy that felt less like coincidence and more like attention.

By floor six, my palms had begun to sweat.

Nothing touched me.
No one spoke.
The only measurable facts were:

the air was warmer than it should be
the lift had slowed, fractionally
and my body had chosen this moment to remember anticipation

I shifted my bag to the other shoulder.
The strap caught on my sleeve, and for a split second my brain misread it as fingers.

A light brush along the back of my arm.

I almost apologised.

The absurdity of that made something like a laugh catch in my throat and stay there.

In the mirror, my chest rose a little too sharply.

Behind it, the not-quite-smudge had returned — closer now.
As if whoever wasn’t there had stepped in to read over my shoulder.

The angle of my reflection’s head was wrong too.
Tilted slightly, as though listening to someone I couldn’t see.

I forced my gaze to the floor indicator.

The light around the number pulsed — very faintly, like a heartbeat.

The first contact wasn’t contact at all.

It was the moment before.

The elevator shuddered — a controlled lurch — and my balance tipped forward.
Instinct sent my hand to the side rail.

Another hand met it.

Warm.
Dry.
Fingers settling over mine with the ease of a gesture repeated a hundred times.

My body reacted before my brain did.

A jolt up my arm.
Tightness low in my stomach.
An involuntary intake of air — too close to a gasp in the quiet.

I pulled my hand back, fingers tingling.

No one stood beside me.

The rail gleamed, untouched.

I looked at it.
Then at my hand.
Then at the mirror.

The reflection obliged: my hand on the rail, and over it, a second hand.
Slightly larger.
Thinner.
Hard to parse.
The detail blurred when I tried to focus.

But the shape was unmistakable.

Two sets of fingers.
Interlaced at the edges.

Holding.

I blinked.

The second hand vanished.

The warmth didn’t.

It sat in the skin across my knuckles, as ordinary as holding someone’s hand in a queue, or crossing a street — one of those small intimacies I’ve avoided longer than I care to admit.

My throat tightened for no good reason.

“Stop it,” I said quietly.
I wasn’t sure if I meant the lift, my imagination, or the part of me that had enjoyed it.

The hum beneath my feet deepened, as though something in the machinery had leaned in to listen.

Time did a strange thing then.

It didn’t stop.
It stretched.
Tighter.

Each second arrived late and stayed too long.
The panel numbers crawled: 8… 9… as if the building had grown more floors than made architectural sense.

The air thickened.
Not humid — just dense.
Breathing took effort.

A line of warmth traced itself between my shoulder blades.
The exact path a hand might take if someone were standing behind me, closing the distance, testing what they could get away with.

I kept still.

The body betrays quickly.
And mine had already started.

My skin prickled.
Nerves lit along my spine as though answering a question I hadn’t meant to ask.

No one was there.

I could say that a hundred times; it doesn’t matter.

My lungs had already decided someone was.
My ribs agreed.
My pulse did too.

The mirror didn’t help.

It showed my back, my shoulders, my head angled slightly as if listening.
And behind that, closer than before, the outline of a body — out of focus.
Enough detail for my mind to supply the rest:
the angle of a jaw, the fall of fabric,
the suggestion of warm breath at my neck.

I didn’t turn.

Some part of me knew that looking only made it worse.

The panel blinked to 10.

The second not-touch was worse.
Or better.

The lift dipped abruptly. Not a real drop—just enough of a misalignment in motion that my knees flexed and my body leaned back, searching for an anchor.

Something caught me.

There was nothing there to catch me, obviously. If anyone had asked, if there’d been CCTV, if you’d paused the tape, it would have shown a single person standing alone, adjusting their posture.

But from the inside of my own nervous system, very different story.

The clear sensation of a chest against my back. The faint pressure at my hip, where another body might brace to keep me steady. Warmth along the curve of my shoulder.

Not enveloping.
Not crude.

Just…

There.

Close in a way that felt impossible a moment before.

Present in exactly the way no one has been for a very long time.

My eyes closed on their own.

A second, no more.

A thin slither of dissociation edged in —
and my breath matched the hum before I noticed.
Inhale rising the pitch.
Exhale lowering it again.

I opened my eyes.

The hum continued, neutral as ever.

My heart did not get the memo.

It hammered against my ribs as if pushing out.

“You’re fine,” I told myself, again. It sounded less convincing this time.

The reflection didn’t argue.
It didn’t agree either.

My cheeks were flushed.

It closed in behind me now.

I kept my hands at my sides.

They shook anyway.
Worse now.

The ding, when it came, was abrupt.

As if the building had remembered other people were waiting and this little experiment needed to end.

The light around my floor number steadied.
The motion slowed, then softened into a stop.

The warmth at my back vanished — so suddenly it made me sway.

The mirrors cleared.
Only one person in them now.
Slightly dishevelled.
Pulse visible at the throat.
Eyes too bright.

The doors opened.
Ordinary corridor.
Standard carpet.
Strip lighting that makes everyone look half an hour more tired than they were before walking under it.

No one waiting outside.
No witness to whatever had just… not happened.

I stepped out.
My legs didn’t want to follow.

I took three steps, then stopped.
I turned back before I could explain why.

The elevator looked unchanged.
Empty.
Neutral.
A box.

Panel lights calm.
The mirrors showed only what they were meant to —
one figure in the doorway, trying not to look shaken.

We regarded each other —
me, and the empty space where something had nearly been.

“Right,” I heard myself say.

Old habits die harder than dignity.

The doors pulled in toward each other.

Just before they met, the lift’s hum dipped once —
a lower note that sounded uncomfortably like a satisfied exhale.

Then it was gone.

On the way to my door, I caught my reflection in the glass panel beside the stairwell.

For a heartbeat too long, there were two of us.

I blinked.

The other shape vanished, leaving only me — and a face I barely recognised.

I flexed my hand, half-expecting the echo of that impossible grip.

Warmth lingered across my knuckles.

My skin remembered what my mind refused to file under “real.”

By the time I reached my desk, I’d already decided not to mention any of it to anyone.

Nothing happened.

I knew that.

I’d stepped into an empty lift and stepped out of an empty lift.

Whatever lived between those two facts was misfiring nerves.
Fatigue.
A trick of light and loneliness.
The usual.

Still—

when I pressed the call button later that afternoon
and heard the distant hum of the elevator starting its journey down toward me,
something low in my stomach tightened.

Not fear.
Not exactly.

More like recognition.

The hum carried a tone I didn’t remember.
Subtle.
Almost expectant.

As if whatever had happened —
whatever I’d decided hadn’t happened —
had left a trace in the machinery.

I stood there longer than I should have,
hand still hovering near the panel,
waiting for a feeling I pretended not to be waiting for.

The lift arrived.
Its doors opened.

Empty.
Of course.

I didn’t step inside.

Not then.

But the moment I walked away,
I could feel it behind me again —
that faint pull,
like a hand almost reaching
and almost remembering
how to close around mine.

The last episode.