The Empathy Rep

I was thirty-two years old, a senior sales representative for Empathy Corp, and I had never actually used the product I sold. That sentence had been sitting in the back of my throat for two years, the way a bone sits sideways in a throat, and every quarter when the numbers came up I swallowed it again and smiled at whatever executive was in the room. The Nexus was my livelihood. I could describe it for forty minutes without notes. I had simply never put one on with another person on the other end of it, not beyond the ten-minute calibration drills they ran us through in onboarding, where the other headset was strapped to a dummy loaded with recorded baseline data. Sharing a room with a mannequin and sharing a nervous system are two different job descriptions, it turns out.

The qualification policy had changed in March. Every rep scheduled for the fall launch had to log one full live session with a coworker, sixty minutes minimum, both headsets active, both parties real and breathing. No dummies. No recordings. The idea was that we should all know exactly what we were selling, from the inside, before we stood up in front of three hundred buyers and promised them the moon. Reasonable. I agreed with it completely, right up until the moment I had to pick a partner and realized there was exactly one person in the building I actually trusted to sit across from me with electrodes on his temple.

Nate Keller. Thirty-five, technical lead, the man who had built half the safety architecture in the Nexus and complained about the other half. We had shared an office floor for two years. He had a way of looking at my sales pitches the way a man reads a restaurant menu written in a language he resented, and I had a way of talking a little faster when he was in the room, which I had never once acknowledged out loud and never planned to. He kept everyone at a distance the way you keep a hand near a hot stove, out of habit rather than fear, and I knew enough about his file to know the habit had roots. Foster homes, a rotation of them, the kind of childhood where you learn early that the people in charge can leave. I knew that much and no more, because Nate did not offer and I did not ask.

I picked him anyway. I told myself it was because he was the most technically competent person available, which was true, and not because when he said my name I sat up straighter, which was also true.

* * *

The demo room sits on the top floor of our tower in Neo-Atlanta, all white surfaces and holoscreens, a room designed to make you feel like an error in an otherwise clean system. I was there at 5:20 on a Tuesday, forty minutes early, adjusting the left temporal pad of my headset for the fourth time, because it was either fidget with the headset or think about what I was about to do. The pads sat against my skull like cool coins. On the wall display my baseline readout scrolled along, heart rate, skin conductance, the little green line that meant the system considered me a functioning human being.

The door opened at six sharp, because of course it did. Nate does not arrive early and does not arrive late, and I have spent two years finding that trait both reassuring and mildly insulting.

"You're pre-adjusting," he said, which was not a greeting. He set his own headset on the table and pulled the second chair around so we faced each other, close enough that our knees would nearly touch. "Don't. The pads calibrate to whatever position you force them into. You'll skew the mapping and we'll spend twenty minutes chasing noise."

"Good evening to you too."

"Patti." He sat down and looked at me the way he looks at a spec sheet with a typo in it. "Before we start. There's something they don't put in the sales materials, because it doesn't sell, so you're going to hear it from me now."

I liked where this was going already.

"The share doesn't work unless both of us relax. Completely. Not calm, not settled, relaxed, the way you are thirty minutes into a bath. The Nexus doesn't just map sensation. It maps emotional state, and it maps it as vividly as anything physical. If either of us is tense, that tension bleeds through as feedback. Noise. Sometimes worse than noise." He tapped his own temple. "You'll feel the other person's nerves like they were yours, and yours are loud enough as it is."

"That's a lovely thing to say to a sales rep an hour before her qualification session."

"I'm serious."

"I've been tested on this, Nate. Onboarding calibration, twice. I know the manual better than you wrote it." I said it fast, which was my first mistake, and my heart rate chose that exact moment to spike on the display behind him, the green line hopping like a startled grasshopper. He turned, read it, and turned back with the single driest look I have ever received from a coworker, and I have received many.

"Uh huh," he said.

Fine. Point conceded. I did the breathing thing the wellness module kept suggesting, four counts in, seven counts out, and watched my own traitor pulse settle by degrees. The truth, which I kept off the display and off my face as best I could, was that I had never once in my adult life been relaxed in front of a man I found interesting, and the Nexus was about to make a public spectacle of that fact.

* * *

We started with calibration, the standard tactile pass, the thing every manual describes in language so bland it could be printed on cereal boxes. One simple shared memory, low intensity, sensory only, to establish the baseline link. Nate chose his. I chose mine. The system chimed, the holoscreens shifted from white to a soft amber, and the room went very quiet in the way a room does when two people have just agreed to do something slightly enormous.

"Rain," he said, eyes closed. "I'm giving you rain. Just the first thirty seconds of it. Tell me when you feel it."

I felt it.

Not the idea of rain. Not a description of rain. Rain, landing on my skin, the cold prickle of the first drops and then the full weight of it, sheeting down over my shoulders and my scalp and the back of my neck, water finding the collar of a jacket I was not wearing, running down my ribs, pooling in the small of my back. My skin broke out in gooseflesh so fast and so hard that I actually gasped, sitting in a seventy-degree room in a climate-controlled tower, soaking wet in a memory that belonged to somebody else. I shivered and could not stop shivering. It was a full-body shudder, the kind that starts at the jaw.

"Okay," I managed. "Okay. Wow. Okay!"

"Break the link if it's too much."

"It's not too much. It's just..." I laughed, which helped, a little. "It's cold, Nate. It's actually cold. Why is it cold?"

"Because it was raining." He said it plainly, and then, quieter, like it cost him something, "I was nineteen. Bus stop outside Chattanooga. It's the cleanest sensory memory I've got."

I sat with that. Nineteen, alone at a bus stop in the rain, and out of all the memories in his head he had handed me that one, and called it clean. I decided not to pick at it, then immediately started picking at it anyway, in the private back room of my own skull where I do my best overthinking.

We ran the full trade after that, because the protocol required it and because my hands had stopped shaking. Heat next. He gave me a kitchen in August, no context, just heat pressing on my face like a hand, and I gave him the inside of my grandmother's car with the seats black as tar in July, and I felt him actually grunt across the link when it hit him. Cold again, deeper this time, his memory of a snowbank in Ohio and my memory of the Atlantic in April, the kind of cold that makes your thoughts go simple. Pressure. Texture. Sandpaper on a rail, his. The nub of a cheap sofa's upholstery under a palm, mine. Each one arriving whole, unedited, wearing his attention like a coat.

And that was when it stopped being a calibration exercise, though neither of us said so. Somewhere around the fourth exchange I began to notice what came attached to the sensations, riding underneath them, faint as a watermark. A wariness in him, tuned and practiced, the emotional equivalent of a man standing with his back to a wall. A flatness where other people keep their warmth. And under that, unmistakable, a loneliness so specific and so familiar that I recognized it on contact, because I keep an identical one folded in the same pocket. Mine had different roots. It rhymed anyway.

The display flickered amber and the system logged the calibration as complete. We were, technically, free to stop.

Neither of us moved.

The next prompt came up on the holoscreen, the standard menu of post-calibration options, and I ignored all of it. I took the headset half off, one ear free, which is against protocol and which Nate watched me do without comment.

"Give me something real," I said. "Not weather. Not texture. Something you actually felt about something."

He opened his eyes. For a man who built half the safety architecture in that room, he looked suddenly like a man standing next to his own exhibit. "That's not the drill."

"I know it's not the drill."

"The drill exists because unstructured shares get messy. Emotion doesn't tag itself. You get bleed-through, you get afterimage, you get a week of feeling somebody else's Monday." He said it the way he said everything technical, flat and complete, and then he didn't say anything else, which for Nate was practically a speech.

I waited. I had learned, over two years of sharing a floor with him, that waiting was the only lever that worked. He would fill silence eventually. He always did, like the quiet embarrassed him personally.

"There's a category in the archive," he said finally. "Wanting something you can't have. It's a common one. People send it on dates, that's the joke. Like telling somebody your zodiac sign."

"Is that what we're doing? A date?"

"No," he said, too fast, and then, with the honesty that kept surprising me, "I don't know. Send me yours first if you want mine."

Fair. I went digging in my own head for something I could hand over without handing over everything, and found the obvious one from three years back, the coworker at the other firm, the one who ended it because I kept backing out of rooms I had already entered. I was twenty-nine. I had wanted the whole thing and kept