They had given her a work schedule. She had agreed to it without reading it carefully.
The schedule said: mornings in the studio, observed but not assisted; afternoons optional debrief; Tuesdays the clinicians would run passive scans during a work session; Fridays she would review the data with them. She had agreed because the residency required cooperation and because she had understood observed but not assisted to mean they would watch through a window or a camera. She had not understood that Dr. Vasquez-Kim would sit in the room.
He had a chair in the corner. He held a tablet. He did not speak.
She worked anyway. There was no other option. She had come here to make things, and the clay did not know Dr. Vasquez-Kim was watching. The Felt platform registered her biometrics: heartrate elevated (84, first hour), then declining (71, second hour), then stable (68, third hour). Her heartrate always dropped when she found the work. She had not needed a chart to know this.
She was making a new piece. Not from the residue clay — she had brought that with her, but she was leaving it alone for now. Plain clay. Thrown on a wheel she had not used before. The wheel ran slightly fast; she adjusted her pressure. The clay did not care that she had adjusted. It responded.
Dr. Vasquez-Kim did not take notes visibly. She assumed the tablet was recording.
By the third hour she had stopped thinking about him.
This was the data she had not expected to provide: that it took three hours to stop performing for the observer. She was aware, in the second hour, that her actions were slightly too deliberate — she was demonstrating rather than working. The felt-capture device knew. HR 71 is not quite work; it is the body in the presence of documentation.
In the third hour, HR 68, she stopped demonstrating and started making.
The piece she made was a small bowl. Narrow at the base, wider at the rim. Nothing she had intended. Her hands had found it. She set it on the drying rack without examining it.
Dr. Vasquez-Kim wrote something on the tablet.
She wanted to ask what he had written. She did not ask. She was not sure she wanted to know what the transition between 71 and 68 looked like from outside.
After he left she stood alone in the studio for eleven minutes.
The south light had shifted. The three-piece set was on the shelf where she had placed it two days ago. The new bowl was on the drying rack. The unnamed cup was at home on her shelf in her own studio.
She turned on the felt-capture device. HR 62. Below resting. The room, without the observer, produced something the chart would classify as rest.
She stood in the room. That was the data. She did not know yet what the clinicians would make of it.