I should have filed the Mercer report at noon like a reasonable person. Instead it was 11 PM and I was still in the holo, surrounded by floating spreadsheets, and Dani was still there too — her workspace bleeding into mine the way it always does when we're both pulling late shifts, our projected desks pushed together in the shared layer like we're actually sitting side-by-side instead of me in Portland and her in Chicago.
*I had noticed her, obviously. You'd have to be dead not to.*
She has this habit of pushing her hair back with both hands when she's frustrated, and I'd watched her do it maybe forty times that night. The holo renders the gesture perfectly. That's the thing nobody tells you — the haptic fidelity is good enough that you stop thinking of the avatars as avatars. You just think of it as *her*.
---
The glitch happened around 11:30.
The server load spikes sometimes on deadline nights, and when it does the boundary calibration goes soft. Our avatar spaces started overlapping — not dramatically, just a few centimeters at first, our forearms occupying the same projected volume. And I felt it. That's what I wasn't prepared for. The overlap registers as warmth and a low, diffuse pressure, like sitting too close to someone on a train.
"Your elbow is in my elbow," Dani said.
"I know."
Neither of us moved.
She looked at me — *really* looked, the way you do when something is shifting and you want to confirm the other person feels it shifting too. "This is probably going to get worse before IT notices," she said.
"Probably."
*Say something. Say something real.*
"I don't hate it," I said.
She laughed, quiet and a little unsteady. "Yeah. Me neither."
---
The overlap spread. Our shoulders merged, then our sides. The warmth became something more insistent — pressure against my ribs, my hip, the outside of my thigh. She turned toward me and the sensation bloomed across my chest, a full-body contact that the haptic layer approximated as heat and weight without quite being either.
"Can I—" she started.
"Yes," I said, before she finished, and she laughed again but didn't stop.
She moved closer and the overlap deepened and *god*, it doesn't map exactly onto touch but it maps onto *want* — the system reads proximity and translates it into something your body interprets as pressure, warmth, the specific gravity of another person choosing to be near you. When she put her projected hand against my face I made a sound I wasn't expecting.
"Still good?" she asked.
"*Extremely* good."
What followed was clumsy and a little technical and absolutely nothing like what I'd imagined on the nights I'd imagined it — which I had, fine, yes. The haptic layer has limits. You work around them. You figure out what the system can carry and you lean into it, and at some point the gap between simulation and reality stops mattering because *she* is real, her voice is real, the way she said my name was real, and when she came she said *there, right there, don't stop* and I didn't.
---
We filed the Mercer report at 1 AM. I don't remember if the numbers were right.
IT patched the boundary calibration the next morning, and our desks snapped back to their proper distance, and I sat there in the clean empty holo thinking about how I'd been working six feet from her for two years and it took a server glitch to close the gap.
