Crown

 

The first time I saw the crown, it was under the wrong kind of light.

It shimmered faintly where flesh met metal, just behind Lio’s ear, like a row of silvered hair vanishing into skin. The halo they produced was subtle, almost like heat distortion, and every time he moved, it caught the air the way an open wound might: a softness that shouldn’t exist.

We were sitting at a dive café under the violet glow of the city’s lower tier, the place where biotech leaks into the streets. The kind of spot where you could buy an organ and a sandwich with the same card.

I was trying not to stare.

“You’re an engineer, right?” Lio said, tipping his head toward me. “You keep looking like you want to dissect me.”

I laughed, a little too quickly. “Force of habit.”

“Don’t worry.” He smiled, and the halo pulsed faintly like it could hear him. “I like the attention.”

I worked in neurotech design interface safety and bioethics, the polite term for making sure people’s luxury augmentations didn’t melt their brains. Crowns had become the new obsession: organic neural enhancements shaped like decorative halos. They started as performance art; a sort of biotech couture, living jewelry, but quickly became the kind of thing venture capital called transformative.

The models I knew were legal. Government-cleared. Mostly cosmetic, with mild sensory expansion.

Lio’s wasn’t one of those.

He was beautiful in that accidental way some people are: too fragile-looking to belong to the city, and too sharp to survive anywhere else. He played in a noise band that never played the same set twice, lived three floors above a club that didn’t close, and swore he didn’t believe in sleep.

We met because he wanted me to fix his implant.

 We kept seeing each other because I didn’t.

The more time we spent together, the more the crown changed. It started growing down the back of his neck, more hair-thin, glinting threads that disappeared into his skin. Sometimes, when we were lying in bed and he fell asleep, I could feel it hum faintly against my chest.

At first, I thought it was resonance: a process of the device syncing to ambient electromagnetic fields. But it wasn’t that. It responded to touch, to breath, to speech.

Once, I whispered his name against his shoulder, and the halo brightened, threads contracting like muscle. Lio half-woke, smiled without opening his eyes, and said, “It’s listening.”

I should have walked away then. 

Instead, I kissed him.

In the morning, the crown had grown.

A new loop had appeared. It was fine, bone-white, like enamel just above his temple. When I touched it, it was warm.

He flinched. “Don’t,” he said softly. “It’s sore.”

“I can take a sample. Check if it’s fusing too deep.”

He turned away. “No doctors.”

“I’m not a doctor.”

“That’s worse.” He laughed quietly, then reached for my hand. His fingers trembled. “You’ll look at me like a problem to solve. I don’t want that.”

He was right. That was exactly how I looked at him.

Days blurred. Nights became experiments in tenderness and control. I learned the crown’s rhythms, the moments when it hummed and when it quieted. It seemed to respond to emotion: fear, arousal, pain. If he was agitated, it flared with color I couldn’t explain. When we made love, it glowed so faintly I could see the outlines of its veins through the skin.

Once, I tried recording it. The footage showed nothing. Only a static ring, shimmering and gone.

I ran tests in secret: spectral scans, EM fields, microcurrent readings. Every dataset contradicted the last. Organic but not biological. Reactive but not mechanical.

When I told him, he just smiled. “You don’t have to understand it to love me.”

But I did. Understanding was the only way I knew how to love.

The first real change happened a week later.

We were out walking through the underpass markets, where synthetic rain dripped from the ceiling and vendors sold pirated prosthetics out of crates. Lio paused by a stall displaying unauthorized neuralware. I caught a flicker in his halo; a subtle shift, like the shape of it had twitched.

The merchant looked up and froze.

“That’s not factory,” she said.

Lio smiled, but there was a tremor in it. “Just an early model.”

“No.” The woman stepped back. “That’s evolving.”

Her tone made my stomach tighten.

That night, I asked him what she meant.

He said nothing for a long time, then whispered, “I didn’t buy it.”

“Then where—?”

“I grew it.”

He said it simply, like he was confessing the weather.

He told me about a night months before we met. It was an afterparty, a biotech performance group that injected stem-sequence cocktails as art. 

“They said it would make me perceive connection differently,” he said. “I thought it was just drugs.”

But then, days later, he felt something under his scalp, like a heartbeat.

“It wasn’t infection,” he said. “It was invitation.”

He looked up at me, eyes wide, crown pulsing faintly in rhythm with his words. “And when I let it in, it stopped hurting.”

After that, everything accelerated.

He began finishing my sentences, anticipating touches before I made them. He’d wake up from dreams and speak words I hadn’t said aloud.

Once, while I was working late, he texted: You’re thinking about leaving.

 I froze at my desk.

I hadn’t said it. But I had thought it, for half a second, after another fruitless scan, another blank result.

I didn’t reply.

When I got home, the lights were off. He was sitting in bed, halo dim. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “It gets confused. I get confused.”

“Between what?”

“Between where I end and it begins.”

He reached for my hand, guided it to his temple. “Can you tell the difference?”

I couldn’t.

In the days that followed, I began hearing faint static when he was near. Not sound, exactly, but a shimmer in the air. The crown had grown again, pale ridges curving behind his skull like fossilized coral.

He spoke less. Sometimes, not at all. But when he did, his words felt shared, like someone else had whispered them first.

The last night we were together, he said, “It’s hungry.”

“For what?”

“For attention. For company.” He smiled weakly. “It wants to connect.”

His voice broke. “It’s lonely, I think.”

Then he looked at me and for the first time, I couldn’t tell whether it was him looking.

I tried to sleep, but the apartment was alive with the faint hum of the crown’s frequency. Every wall seemed to pulse with it.

At dawn, I woke to find him standing by the window, back turned, halo glowing faintly gold. The filaments had spread across his shoulders, a delicate network like veins beneath the skin.

He turned toward me slowly.

“It found others,” he said. “All night. Through signal, through dream.”

“Lio—”

“It says I don’t have to be alone anymore.”

The words were too calm, too perfect. His lips didn’t match them exactly.

Then the halo pulsed once, hard, and he flinched.

For a heartbeat, I saw the filaments beneath his skin shift, like something breathing in reverse.

He whispered, “I think it loves you.”

Then he smiled, and the smile was wrong.

By the time the medics arrived, he was gone. Not dead, but empty. The crown was inert again, colorless. They kept him in containment for observation, and I was told to stay away.

I obeyed for almost a week.

Then I went to him again.

The lab lights made him look pale and unreal. Tubes everywhere. Electrodes mapping signals that didn’t match any known brain pattern. The crown was still visible, dull ivory now, no longer glowing.

He didn’t move when I entered.

I sat beside him, took his hand. It was warm.

“I should’ve stopped it sooner,” I whispered. “I thought I could understand it.”

His fingers twitched.

The monitor blipped. It was faint, then stronger.

Then, in a voice that wasn’t quite his, he said softly, “You still can.”

The crown lit faintly, threads trembling.

I felt something bloom behind my own eyes. There was suddenly a static ache, a whisper I couldn’t decipher.

When I reached up, my temple hurt.

It’s been three weeks.

They say Lio is stable, though he doesn’t wake.

I keep working. I tell myself it’s research. I don’t tell anyone about the dreams; the ones where I hear him humming behind my skull, where I see threads of silver in the mirror when I comb my hair.

Sometimes, late at night, I feel warmth at the edge of my scalp. A pulse, gentle, like a heartbeat not my own.

It feels like someone touching me from the inside, softly saying I miss you.

And though I know I should be afraid, I touch the spot and whisper back,

“I miss you too.”

 

Prompt credit to createglue