“

Look at me!

It had been a long time since he had looked at anyone.

They had all been patterned from the same templates after a while - fear, hatred, desperation, shock; carefully schooled neutrality, the occasional morbid curiosity. All else had been permutations or combinations thereof, varying only in intensity, and so he had stopped looking; stopped meeting the staring eyes, stopped picking out the harsh, tense lines of mouths and jaws. Beneath the mask and armor of the helmet, the tilt of his head had become a reasonable compromise between a show of attention and the itching discomfort of viewing those same expressions over and over again. It had sufficed for over a thousand cycles, for thousands of faces, and become a habit so deeply ingrained that the decision tree never factored into surface processing anymore.

Except for three. Three faces still made him avert his eyes in a carefully planned and executed routine.

”