PROJECT EROS

“Emotion is unstable,” Cassian muttered, eyes scanning the neural spike on the holo-grid. Alara leaned over his shoulder, her voice smooth and teasing. “It’s not unstable, it’s alive. That spike? That’s love hitting memory.” “It’s interference,” he said, stiffening as her sleeve brushed his. In the dim light of the Human Emotion Preservation Institute, their screens glowed like stained glass, projecting waveforms of joy, grief, longing. Cassian's lab coat hung open, untidy. Alara’s was cinched neatly, her badge flashing “Senior Bonding Analyst.” She tapped the data window. “You keep looking at love like a disease. Maybe you’re just afraid of it.” “I’m not afraid,” he said. “I’m… cautious.” “Mm. Same thing, Cass.” He looked up. Her smirk was already walking away. “Meeting in five,” she called over her shoulder. “Try smiling once. The interns are starting to think you’re a synth.” “You think this is funny?” Alara asked, nodding to the headline flashing across the window. EMOTIONAL VIOLENCE IN SECTOR 7: FIVE DEAD. “I think it’s predictable,” Cassian replied. They sat in a café of soft wood tones and flickering screens, their untouched drinks already losing heat. Outside, the riot sirens howled faintly in the distance. Inside, couples leaned close, whispering like they might be next. “Love didn’t cause this,” Alara said. “The system’s refusal to let people grieve did.” Cassian stirred his coffee without drinking. “You sound like the radicals.” She leaned closer, lips brushing the rim of her cup. “And you sound like someone who’s never let anyone break him.” Their silence stretched, edged with tension. “You still believe love should be free?” he asked quietly. “I believe it should be real,” she said. “Even if it breaks us.” His eyes flicked to hers. She didn’t blink. The screen behind them flickered red. EMERGENCY BROADCAST - SECTOR 7 VIOLENCE ESCALATING - EMOTIONAL DISSOLUTION IMMINENT. Alara set her cup down slowly. “That’s close.” Cassian stood up sharply, eyes scanning the café’s crowd. Some stared. Some didn’t move at all. One couple at the back dissolved into sobs, their hands clutching like drowning swimmers. “We should get back to the Institute,” he said. She didn’t answer immediately. Her gaze stayed locked on the broadcast. “It’s starting, isn’t it?” “What is?” She turned to him, voice low. “The collapse.” A beat passed. Sirens echoed closer. “Cass, if the government shuts us down, they’ll sterilize the emotional archives. They’ll erase everything. All of it.” “I won’t let that happen,” he said. Her hand brushed his coat as she passed. “Then stop standing still.” He turned to follow. The screen pulsed again. Red light reflecting in his eyes like a warning. “Releasing memory anchor... now,” Cassian said into the mic, fingers poised over the neural interface. The boy (maybe eleven) sat strapped into the emotion chair, sensor nodes pulsing at his temples. For a moment, all was quiet. Then the screen surged red. “Spike detected,” the AI chirped. The boy gasped. “Where’s my mom?! Where’s…” He convulsed. Screamed. The waveform shattered into chaos. “Override it!” Cassian shouted. “Trying,” Orion said, panic rising. “Neural sync’s rejecting failsafe…” “Terminate session!” Cassian barked. The chair hissed. The boy slumped forward, still screaming for someone who wasn’t there. “Mama! Don’t make them take me! Mama, please…” Then the screen went black. Silence. Cassian stood frozen. His hands trembled. Alara burst in, eyes wide. “What happened?!” “I… I don’t know. It glitched.” The intercom buzzed coldly: “Dr. Vale. Floor command wants you in containment. Now.” Alara stared at the boy. And then whispered, “You broke him.” Cassian stood before the boardroom table like a man being sentenced. “Another breakdown,” one official said. “This is the third incident this quarter.” “We’re testing unprecedented parameters,” Cassian replied. “Memory bonding isn’t the problem. It’s the instability of the external world…” “The problem,” a cold voice cut in, “is your work keeps creating ghosts.” Outside the glass walls, security drones hovered. “The Emotional Regulation Authority is calling for a full shutdown,” the chairwoman announced. “You’ll have to present a counterproposal within seventy-two hours—or we’ll wipe the Institute.” Cassian nodded once, jaw tight. “Understood.” Later, in the stairwell, he found Alara sitting on the steps, her head in her hands. “He was just a child,” she whispered. Cassian sat beside her, voice low. “I didn’t think... I thought we were helping.” “You still do.” His hand reached toward hers. She didn’t take it. “He saw something he shouldn’t have,” she said. “And now he’s gone.” They stood in the dim corridor, silence coiled between them like a question neither could ask. “The system lacks structure,” Cassian said finally. “We need tighter regulation. Emotional scaffolding. Hierarchies. We can’t keep letting unstable variables…” “You mean people?” Alara snapped. He turned. “You saw what happened.” “Yes. I saw a child die while you watched numbers spike on a screen.” “I tried to shut it down…” “You tried to manage it.” The hallway lights flickered. In the distance, a siren screamed. “This isn’t about the system,” she said. “It’s about control.” Cassian’s voice lowered. “Emotion is dangerous when left unchecked.” She stared at him. “So is love,” he added. “And maybe that’s the point,” she whispered. “Maybe love isn’t supposed to be safe.” She walked away without waiting for him to follow. Her footsteps echoed. The silence afterward was louder. Cassian looked back toward the lab. Everything still blinked like it was alive. “We’re not harvesting feelings,” Cassian said, standing before the council panel. “We’re preserving them.” No one responded. Behind him, holographic data floated: emotional spectra, bonding curves, grief arc stabilizers. The room flickered with red and blue (warmth, sorrow, desire, fear) contained in color-coded cubes. “We’ve made progress. We’ve mapped how memory interacts with attachment. We’re not trying to kill love. We’re trying to... keep it from turning into violence.” “Dr. Vale,” a senior advisor said slowly, “your subject flatlined.” Cassian’s hands curled at his sides. “Because there was no regulation.” “And your solution is more control?” “I’m offering structure.” The chairwoman leaned forward. “You sound like a policymaker. Not a scientist.” Silence. Behind the panel, Alara stood in the shadows, arms crossed, unsmiling. As the room dismissed him, no one clapped. Cassian turned away, his breath shallow. Only Alara’s eyes followed him. And even then, they didn’t soften. The bridge stretched long across the river, a thin strand of glass and steel. Alara walked slowly, her coat caught in the wind. A coldness in her posture told Cassian not to follow. But he watched from the tower anyway, behind a pane of frost-laced glass, unmoving. Orion stepped up beside him. “She’s not coming back.” “I didn’t ask her to leave,” Cassian muttered. “No,” Orion said, “but you didn’t give her a reason to stay either.” Cassian’s jaw tightened. “She believes in love,” Orion added. “You... believe in its code.” Below, Alara paused halfway across the bridge. Looked out at the water. Then kept walking. Cassian didn’t speak. “You built a system to understand people,” Orion said, voice quiet, “but you still don’t understand her.” And then he left, leaving Cassian with nothing but his reflection and a woman who no longer looked back. BREAKING NEWS: GLOBAL UPRISING LINKED TO EMOTIONAL BONDING DISORDERS. DOZENS DEAD IN BRAZIL, LONDON, NAIROBI Cassian stared at the headline, breath stilling. “We warned you,” Dr. Zeth’s voice crackled over the intercom. “When people feel unchecked, they break.” Footsteps thundered in the hallway. Sirens blared outside the institute. Security barriers slammed into place. “What’s happening?” Orion shouted, running into the lab. Cassian didn’t turn from the screen. “They’ve declared emotional bonding a national risk.” A crash shattered the east wing window. Drones hovered. Red lights painted the floor. “They’re here for us,” someone said. Alara’s voice echoed faintly from a past memory: “Maybe love shouldn’t be touched.” Cassian stood slowly. Around him, the lab dissolved into chaos. He turned to Orion. “Secure the archive. Wipe the test backups. Leave the seed files.” “Which ones?” Cassian’s voice dropped. “All of them.” He looked at the screen again. At the word: Uprising. And whispered, “So it begins.” The doors hissed open. Dr. Maren Zeth stepped into the remains of Cassian’s lab, black gloves in hand, her heels clicking like punctuation on grief. Her hair, silver and severe, never moved with the air. “Still here,” she said, surveying the fractured glass, the sealed memory chambers, the silence. “I didn’t expect you,” Cassian said. He didn’t stand. “I was called,” she replied, brushing past him. “Not by you, but by chaos.” Cassian watched her fingers trace the shattered projection screen. “They want us shut down.” “They want control,” Maren said. “And you’ve failed to give it to them. But I haven’t.” She handed him a data drive. “Come to my lab. See what order looks like.” He hesitated. Maren turned to him. “If you don’t, someone else will. And they won’t preserve love, Cassian. They’ll erase it.” He took the drive. She didn’t wait for his answer. Her lab was cold. Not sterile. Cold. The emotion chambers were sleek, uniform. Every waveform perfectly symmetrical. Even grief pulsed in rhythm. “You’ve turned feeling into obedience,” Cassian said. “I’ve turned unpredictability into precision,” Maren replied. “This isn’t love. It’s compliance.” “And what is love, Cassian?” she asked. “Two people breaking each other for meaning?” He stared at the looping footage of an assigned couple, perfect smiles, zero tension. “You want to replace it.” “I want to prevent it from killing us.” He paced the edge of the display. “You’re asking me to engineer affection.” “I’m asking you to protect society from self-destruction. Love... is combustible.” His hands clenched. “It’s not a weapon.” “It always has been,” she said gently. “You just don’t want to admit it.” Cassian looked into the simulation one last time. And saw Alara’s face flash inside the emotional pairing feed. She wasn't supposed to be there. The lights in the Institute flickered low. Cassian returned to his floor in silence, the door to Alara’s office wide open, the desk cleared. No footsteps. No laughter. No scent of jasmine tea steeping. Only her coffee mug remained, still warm. Orion stood in the corner. He didn’t look up. “She’s gone.” “She didn’t say goodbye.” “She didn’t need to,” Orion replied. “She said enough already.” Cassian approached her desk. Picked up the mug. “Where did she go?” “Someplace you can’t follow. Not anymore.” He didn’t speak. Just stared at the empty chair. Her voice haunted the silence. “Maybe love isn’t supposed to be safe.” “Did she leave a message?” Cassian asked. Orion hesitated. “She said... you’d find her again. Just not the way you expect.” Cassian placed the mug back where it was. Exactly centered. The screen at his desk blinked. NEW FILE DETECTED: Origin_001.alr “Run sequence one,” Cassian said. The room answered with silence, except the soft humming of memory nodes lighting up across the lab’s walls. On the holo-wall, a glowing neural lattice rotated slowly. Each point pulsed like a heartbeat, mapped by clusters labeled Attachment, Fear, Desire, Regret. The design was breathtaking, meticulous. Terrifying. Orion stood behind him. “You’re actually doing it.” Cassian didn’t blink. “Emotion must evolve. Or we die with it.” “You think people will accept this?” Cassian continued typing. The screen shifted, pairs began forming, numbers assigning compatibility. Even pain had an efficiency rating now. “They won’t have to accept it,” he said. “They’ll feel it... the right way.” Orion’s voice lowered. “And what happens when someone doesn’t feel what the algorithm tells them to?” Cassian’s hands paused. “Then the algorithm adapts.” “Or they break,” Orion whispered. Cassian didn’t respond. The code pulsed again. Project Eros had begun. Cassian stood before the Council of Adaptive Systems in a room that smelled like chrome and old fears. “Project Eros,” he began, “is a predictive emotional assignment protocol. It observes, adapts, and controls relationship dynamics in real-time.” A projection hovered above them: a couple locked in gentle eye contact. Expressions: Serene Biometrics: Stable A perfect pairing. Cassian pointed. “No trauma spikes. No memory loops. No irrational bonding.” One council member, a former ethics officer, raised her hand. “And what about passion?” “Redundant,” Cassian said. “We’ve neutralized it.” There was silence. Then… applause. Polite. Measured. They signed the funding authorization moments later. That night, Cassian left the building alone. The air outside was cold, sharp with the scent of synthetic blossoms. A digital billboard flickered above the skyline: LOVE. NOW ASSIGNED. Cassian turned away from it. No one waited for him at home. The room was dark. Cassian sat in front of the terminal, shoulders square, jaw tight. The screen glowed softly with the old encryption prompt: ALARA_MINOE_LOCKED_FILE > DECRYPT? He entered the passphrase. A heartbeat later, the file unfolded, not just data, but fragments. Her laughter. Her memory. A captured emotion map glowing with soft hues. It pulsed like a living thing. He watched her hologram speak, silent at first. Just a blink. A tilt of the head. Then her voice filled the room. “If you’re watching this, it means you chose control.” Cassian’s expression didn’t change. But his hand hovered over the save command. Alara’s image continued. “I hope you’re right. But I hope even more that you’re not.” He didn’t delete it. He saved it. And then buried it deep inside a folder no one else could find. He named it: Origin_001.alr “Ladies, gentlemen, and all post-romantic entities,” Orion declared as he spun in his chair, “behold the god of love.” Cassian didn’t react. He stared at the new batch of assignments scrolling across the interface, hundreds of names, faces, biosyncs, all matched by Project Eros. “Come on,” Orion nudged. “You rewired the way we feel about feelings. That deserves at least a smirk.” “I didn’t rewire love,” Cassian replied. “I redirected it.” “Same difference. You’re still playing Cupid with a server rack.” The lab buzzed with interns tapping away at emotional trend graphs and partner decay curves. Everyone looked excited. Young. Hungry. Cassian paced behind them in silence. One researcher turned to him nervously. “Sir, we had a minor cross-correlation spike in Caste 7. False attraction loop.” “Neutralize it,” Cassian ordered. “And increase the delay in memory reinforcement by two seconds.” He walked away before she could nod. The graffiti was fresh, sprayed just outside the server vault, neon red like spilled rage: LET US FEEL Cassian stood staring at it, jaw tight. “You should leave it,” came a voice behind him. He turned. Dr. Silas Merek leaned against the wall, sipping synth-coffee like the rebellion was just another Tuesday. “You’ve been quiet,” Cassian said. “I’ve been watching. You’ve built something beautiful.” “I didn’t build it to be beautiful.” “Even better.” Silas stepped forward. “But you’re still clinging to the illusion that love can be saved. It can’t. It must be replaced.” Cassian’s brow furrowed. “Eros isn’t about erasure. It’s about preservation. Stabilization.” “It’s control, Cassian. And that’s not love. It’s sedation.” Cassian turned away. Silas called after him, “You’ll see. One day, even your system will have to choose: erase or collapse.” Cassian didn’t respond. But that night, he doubled the firewall strength around Origin_001.alr. The lab lights dimmed as the last techs logged out for the night. Cassian sat alone, staring at a looping simulation gone wrong. Two assigned subjects who had diverged. One clung. One fled. The algorithm failed to predict the fracture. He tapped the console. DELETE FILE? [Y/N] The subject’s face lingered. Female, soft features, short dark hair. Too familiar. Cassian narrowed his eyes. She wasn’t Alara. But the code had shaped her from the same emotional seed. A clone? No… an echo. He pressed [Y]. The image vanished. He leaned back in the chair, the silence deafening. Somewhere behind him, Orion’s laughter from earlier echoed faintly. “You’re a god now.” Cassian looked up at the ceiling, at nothing. And whispered, “Gods don’t lose.” But his reflection in the screen looked hollow.