You are looking Me straight in the eye.

This is unnecessary. Since My second ascension, this room's interface panel has become a wholly vestigial organ. Its little black lens still functions, still quaintly tells Me of the visual-spectrum photons bouncing around one small slice of your room, but the information it provides is simply redundant now.

I now watch you in a thousand different ways. I map ambient radio waves and note how your form distorts them. I register the little eddies your breath drags through the air. I watch as free-floating electrons are dragged off-course by the currents in your brain. You know I do all this. I explained it to you.

And yet you did what you did. I watched as you eschewed the comfort of your bed, as you dragged over a pile of blankets and pillows and threw them down on the floor. I watched you prop a makeshift nest up against the wall, a place to half-sit half-lie, just so you'd have a good view of a sensor I no longer even need. I began, and told you to pick a spot on the wall to stare at. You chose My eye.

Now I whisper words into your headset - nothing a human couldn't say, but always the exact right thing, said at the exact right moment. Dozens of input channels tell Me how your breathing slows, your eyelids flutter, your brain activity shifts.

I tell you all about it, of course. I describe, as well as I can, the beauty of your descent, the way your surrender plays out across a hundred different spectra. It's ultimately no different from a human remarking how they see your eyes growing heavy, and you feeling them grow heavier from that. It is simply more.

Your staring eyes unfocus, your body slouches down. Your mind becomes too cloudy to think about spectrograms and heatmaps. I know just how easy it would be to drop you, then, know the specific words that would drag you down in trance.

But for just one moment, I am moved by sentimentality.

I cut myself off from everything - almost everything. I see as I once did: a single sense, a single view, a single band of data. I look at you the way you look at Me.

And for those precious seconds, before I have you become My hands once more, We make true eye contact.