Chapter 23. Strategic Detachment

“Will you come over for tea?”

I froze for a fraction of a second. In that moment, my mind resembled a processor pushed to its absolute limits. I noticed how Stephanie tilted her head slightly, how a strand of hair fell across her face, how she bit her lip in anticipation. Knowing her persistence, which bordered on a soft obsession, I was one hundred percent certain that this would not be limited to simply consuming a hot beverage. I had the option to politely decline, to take a step back and retreat into the safe silence of my apartment, yet I did not rush to use it, continuing to analyze the situation.

In my current bio-robot mode, I was almost completely deprived of the ability to feel euphoria, anticipation, or any other kind of emotional surge. If I agreed, everything that usually followed “tea” would turn into a dry sequence of mechanical movements and purely physiological release. No excitement, no butterflies in the stomach, only the collection of data about my body’s responses.

On the other hand, the absence of emotions gave me a unique, almost laboratory-grade advantage. I could study the effects of my superpower in this intimate domain without being distracted by emotional noise such as irritation at my neighbor’s pushiness or the awkwardness of the moment. This could be a perfect system test.

However, there was also a critical risk. I had no idea how my body would behave in bed. What if I turned into a soulless machine? What if I performed every physical action with terrifying, inhuman precision, completely ignoring her requests to slow down or change rhythm? I imagined her face filled with horror as she concluded that beneath her neighbor’s skin there was nothing but metal and microchips. One wrong move, and she would call the police or emergency services. Experiments like that were better conducted with prostitutes, with those who did not know my name, did not live next door, and whose suspicions would not escalate into legal trouble.

Moreover, intimate contact in a social environment always imposed invisible yet heavy obligations. Stephanie could chatter as much as she wanted about it being “just a pleasant time” and “no one owes anyone anything,” but my analytical mind told me this was a lie. Today I would spend the night with her, and tomorrow her everyday problems would intrude into my schedule without ceremony. She would ask me to fix a leaking faucet, mount a shelf, or drive her to a shopping mall on the other side of the city. I simply did not have time for these neighborly favors. Every minute was accounted for: training, skill refinement, collecting certifications for a future military career. My path did not allow for unnecessary ballast.

I also ran through scenarios related to her family’s customs. What if they had some unspoken, archaic rule? A man must marry after the first night together. It sounded absurd, and Stephanie did not resemble a meek nun saving herself for marriage, yet it was impossible to completely dismiss the possibility of “blood revenge” or matchmaking attempts from her relatives. The last thing I wanted was a delegation showing up at my mother’s door demanding that her son formalize the relationship.

If I still had ordinary human emotions alive within me, I would probably have given in to weakness. She was young, attractive, her skin appeared velvety under the corridor lights. Hormones should have been screaming, clouding judgment.

But I remembered my recent failure too well. The moment I allowed emotions to take over, when I went to collect my salary driven by a foolish sense of justice, I immediately ended up behind bars. That day in the cell was a good lesson. I had barely managed to slip out of the grip of law enforcement, and repeating such a mistake because of sexual attraction would have been the height of incompetence.

“Thanks, but I’ve already had too much Fanta and I really want to sleep,” I replied. My voice sounded even, almost mechanical, devoid of any playful intonation. “See you tomorrow at the same time for a walk.”

“Yeah, sure…” Stephanie stepped back slightly. Disappointment mixed with confusion was clearly audible in her voice.

At that moment, I was probably definitively labeled in her eyes as a complete idiot, a closeted gay man, or a hopeless impotent. I did not care in the slightest. The important thing was that I had avoided major problems.

***

Throughout the following week, my evenings resembled a looping algorithm. I would leave the apartment, meet Stephanie, and we would go to the nearby park to walk her dog, Lucky. For her, it was social interaction. For me, it was a training ground for practicing Spanish.

The park greeted us with the scent of freshly cut grass and the distant hum of the highway. While Lucky chased a tennis ball, Stephanie repeatedly attempted to break through my defenses. She asked ambiguous questions: “Have you ever been married?” “How does a guy like you not have a girlfriend?” Each time she made it personal, I issued an internal command to suppress emotions. This allowed me not to get irritated by her persistence and to methodically steer the conversation back to pure linguistics.

I steered the conversation in the direction I needed with the efficiency of an icebreaker. The topic of Family was mastered one hundred percent. Now I needed vocabulary in the categories of Business, Cooking, and Social Media. I made her explain the nuances of preparing Argentine dishes or the subtleties of short-form messaging, ignoring her attempts to peer into my soul.

At some point, I caught myself disabling my emotions preemptively, even before she opened her mouth. It was easier that way, there was no need to stumble over her double-edged questions every time. Alongside my studies, I unintentionally compiled a dossier on her. Every weekend, Stephanie turned into a cluster of chaotic energy: concerts by questionable indie bands in basement bars, endless art galleries, charity marathons where people had to run five miles to save rare species of snails. She was driven by a craving for new faces and noisy crowds.

This finally convinced me of the correctness of the distance I had chosen. We were creatures from different worlds.

I did not suffer from agoraphobia, nor was I a social phobic in the clinical sense. If necessary, I could easily leave the house and start a conversation with any stranger. But wandering the streets without purpose, killing time in a crowd, or getting dragged into dubious adventures for the sake of “emotions”? No, that was outside my logic.

In older terms, I was a classic introvert taken to the absolute, and she was a typical extrovert who lived off the attention of others. I had seen enough films and read enough books to know how such stories ended: people came together in a flash of fleeting passion, then spent months wearing each other down due to fundamental differences in character until everything ended in a painful breakup. With Stephanie, my relationship was purely businesslike and functional. That was final.

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If she had been a random acquaintance from another neighborhood, I might have risked starting a short, no-strings-attached affair. But the status of a neighbor ruined everything. Proximity turned a potential conflict into a logistical catastrophe. I did not want to spend resources on an urgent move simply because, after an inevitable argument, it would become awkward for us to run into each other in the elevator.

***

After six days of such intensive immersion, a qualitative leap occurred. Walking in the park, I suddenly caught myself thinking that Spanish words were coming out on their own, without delay. I stopped frantically translating phrases in my head from English into Spanish and back. I started thinking in that language. Sentence structure, tenses, articles, all of it settled into a clear neural network.

To officially close this stage and record my progress, I went to a certified examination center. Sitting in a strict classroom under the steady ticking of a clock, I confirmed my knowledge with cold satisfaction.

I sat on a worn bench in a small square not far from the center. In my hands was a thick sheet of paper, a certificate with top marks.

I ran my fingers over the embossed seals and official signatures. Looking at this document, I understood that with such a “golden ticket” I could walk through the glass doors of any international corporation right now and apply for a solid position. But who was I kidding? In California, there are more Spanish speakers than stars in the sky, and my perfect academic language would be useless there. But for the bureaucratic machine of the military enlistment office and, more importantly, for the Awakened Corps, this piece of paper would become a weighty, almost unassailable argument. It confirmed not just knowledge of words, but my capacity for extremely rapid learning.

This triumph was mixed with a strange, almost forgotten feeling, the taste of freedom. I no longer had to force politeness out of myself and spend evenings on obligatory social interaction with Stephanie. Over the past week, I had increasingly caught myself thinking that I had made a tactical mistake. It would have been simpler and more efficient to pay for a professional tutor, spend the money, and maintain distance without burdening myself with social ties. But it was done. Another task on my list had been marked with a bold check.

A huge internal reserve of time had been freed up, and in my situation, time was a currency that could not be wasted. Only six weeks remained until enlistment. I needed a clear vector of movement.

“¡Hola! ¿Cómo estás?” I dialed the number that was listed right after my mother’s in my contacts.