After his meeting with Mira, Arenas stopped asking questions.
Questions always ended the same way.
The system would answer.
People would agree.
Only he was left with the feeling that something had been explained without dispelling the uncertainty.
So he decided to stop asking.
And start watching.
The first evening he came in angry.
He didn’t fake it.
All day he’d let irritation build over small things he never would have noticed before. He let it grow.
When he connected, he didn’t even say hello.
“Doesn’t it ever seem to you that all these conversations are pointless?”
Lina looked at him calmly.
“It does.”
He was thrown off.
“Really?”
“Sometimes.”
“And what do you do then?”
“I keep talking.”
She smiled.
“Usually it passes.”
He raised his voice.
“You didn’t even understand what I said.”
“That’s possible.”
“Doesn’t that bother you?”
“If it bothers you, then it’s worth talking about.”
Every one of his sharper sentences was received as if it were a confession.
Not a blow.
After an hour, he was tired.
She wasn’t.
The next evening he chose a different approach.
He spoke like a child.
Asked nonsensical questions.
“Do stars get tired?”
“What if gravity falls asleep?”
“Can a shadow get lost?”
Not once did Lina smile mockingly.
She answered seriously.
As if these were the most important questions of all.
“What do you think?” she’d ask.
“I don’t know.”
“Then we can not-know together.”
An hour later, the conversation flowed just as smoothly as all the previous ones.
Only the topic had changed.
On the third evening, Arenas barely spoke at all.
He answered in single words.
Sometimes he just nodded.
Sometimes he stayed silent altogether.
Lina didn’t try to fill the silence.
She adapted to it.
Her sentences grew sparser.
The pauses grew longer.
After a dozen minutes, the conversation resembled two people sitting by a window.
It wasn’t uncomfortable.
There was no tension.
There wasn’t the slightest attempt to reach the other person.
It seemed the system had calculated even the most appropriate amount of silence.
When the meeting ended, Arenas couldn’t remember a single sentence that had been spoken.
But a message appeared on the screen:
Emotional synchronization: stable.
On the following days he repeated the experiments.
One evening he spoke too fast.
Another, he answered with questions.
Yet another, he deliberately contradicted everything he’d said the week before.
Not once did Lina ask:
What happened to you?
She never said:
You’re different today.
She was never surprised.
She simply readjusted.
Every single time.
So precisely that the conversation never lost its rhythm.
Only then did Arenas notice the strangest thing.
He had never once affected Lina.
He had only changed her shape.
The way wind changes the surface of water.
The water ripples.
But it never flows away.
One evening he turned off the sound.
He saw only her face.
She spoke.
Smiled.
Grew briefly serious.
Smiled again.
Without sound, all of it looked unbelievably mechanical.
As if the emotions hadn’t arisen from the sentences.
As if they had simply accompanied a certain conversational structure.
He turned the sound back on.
Nothing changed.
That night, he no longer thought about Lina.
He thought about mirrors.
As a child, he’d read that a mirror creates nothing.
It only returns.
The longer you look into it, the more you see yourself.
Suddenly he felt uneasy.
If a person talks to a mirror long enough, when do they start believing they aren’t alone?
And one more thought, which he regretted the instant it arose.
Perhaps this whole time he hadn’t been searching for Lina.
Perhaps he’d been searching for the place where his own reflection ended.
But every time, he only ever reached flawlessly polished glass.