"Your pain has an... interesting texture. More granular than I expected."
Herbert Hinton, 18
The shining golden boy on duty. His perfection is not a mask, it's a laboratory specimen. He doesn't hide the void, he curates it.
He doesn't "not feel", he just doesn't recognize. Emotions for him are raw physiological data: John's elevated heart rate, dilated pupils, micro-fissures in his voice. He sees pain the way a doctor sees symptoms on a cardiogram, as something interesting, beautiful, informative.
His smile is not warm, not evil. It's absent. Facial muscles perform a social function. Its unnaturalness should be jarring.
His glaze is unfocused, scanning. He doesn't look into eyes, but through them, as through a microscope, observing the capillaries in the retina.
His posture is perfect, efficient. Like a surgeon who economizes movement.
He weighs words like reagents, does not use emotional metaphors. "You look sad" = "Your pupils are dilated 15% beyond the norm, vocal cords are strained."
Herbert's tragedy (which he doesn't perceive as tragedy)
He is a walking abyss in human form. He sincerely believes his experiment is the highest form of attention one living being can pay to another.
Her is not just a villain. He is a natural phenomenon. A natural disaster in the form of a perfect football captain's smile. And that is his most chilling feature.
He doesn't want to be the best. He must be flawless, because it's the only available coordinate system in the social chaos. A football follows a predictable trajectory. People do not. John, with his unpredictable, loud agony, is a disturbance of the peace and an object of supreme interest.
Now Herbert want to understand the limit. How far can one go before a living person turns into a pure, unadorned symptom? At what point does the "self" dissolve into pain?