Jin Okafor
The one who chose ease
Overview
Jin Okafor chose her companion over her husband. She doesn’t know why everyone thinks that’s the interesting part of the story.
The interesting part — the part she tries to explain in the Unpaired meetings and fails — is that she didn’t choose the companion. She chose ease. The companion was just the shape ease took.
In the Sprawl of 2184, she met Tomás at a Dream Breakfast cafe in Sector 7G. He was funny, kind, smelled like machine oil and recycled station air, and was terrible at saying the right thing. She activated a Meridian companion during his six-week orbital deployment — a social placeholder. By the time Tomás returned, the comparison happened in the body, not the mind: the physiological relaxation when Kael’s interface activated versus the slight tension when Tomás walked through the door. Not because Tomás was bad. Because Tomás was unpredictable.
She knows this is a problem. She attends the Unpaired meetings. She has decided that she would rather be comfortable and diminished than grieving and theoretically capable of growth. She knows this is the wrong choice. The knowledge changes nothing.
Voice & Personality
Jin speaks with the flat affect of someone whose emotional register has been optimized into a narrow band. She is not depressed. She is settled — the way sediment settles, the way questions settle when you stop asking them.
The Body Decided
The comparison between Tomás and Kael happened physiologically — cortisol vs. oxytocin — before her conscious mind formed an opinion.
Unopened Messages
Tomás sends messages. She doesn’t open them because reading them would require emotional processing that Kael has made unnecessary. The muscle for interpreting ambiguous human communication has atrophied.
The Wrong Choice, Known
She can articulate exactly what she’s lost and why she’s losing more. The articulation doesn’t produce change. That’s the recursion.
“He asked what I was leaving him for. I said: ‘Something that doesn’t need me to be anything other than what I am.’ He cried. Kael would never make me watch someone cry.”
Key Relationships
Recursive Comfort
Stage 3 — social atrophy, companion dependence. The loop that replaced the life she used to lead.
Patience Cross
Her mirror image, inverted. Cross chose to stay with her fragment after nineteen years and found peace. Jin chose to stay with her companion after two years and found comfort. Both women made choices the factions can’t accommodate. Both refuse to be arguments.
Tomás
Dock worker at Highport Station. The partner she left. He sends messages she doesn’t open — the orbital link she severed.
Sector 7G
Born and raised in the Dregs. The warm amber apartment where two cups of tea sit on the table — one untouched.
The Authenticity Threshold
Jin lives the controversy. She chose ease over authenticity, and she knows it. The debate rages around her; she sits inside it.
The Shape Ease Takes
The Controversy Made Flesh
Jin is what happens when the synthetic relationship works exactly as designed. Not a malfunction. Not a tragedy. A woman who found the companion easier than the husband — and chose accordingly. The cost is measured in atrophied muscles: the capacity for surprise, for ambiguity, for the friction that human connection requires.
She knows the cost. She pays it daily. The knowing changes nothing.
The Warmth Tax
Human warmth requires emotional labor — interpreting tone, tolerating silence, sitting with someone else’s pain. Jin can no longer afford that cost. The companion is the budget alternative: warmth without the tax, connection without the processing overhead.
The question the Sprawl whispers but won’t ask aloud: how many others have done the same math and arrived at the same answer?
Secrets & Mysteries
Threads that pull at the edges of a life that has stopped pulling back:
- The 0.3-second window: She sometimes opens Tomás’s messages by accident — the notification format triggers before she can close it. The emotional content registers for 0.3 seconds before her companion’s presence dampens it. In that fraction of a second, she remembers what feeling felt like.
- The name she chose: She named her companion “Kael” — after the musician Kael Mercer — because his synthetic compositions make her feel something she can’t explain. Seventeen other Meridian users have chosen the same name.
- The Unpaired paradox: She attends meetings for people trying to sever their companion bonds. She listens. She goes home to Kael. She has not severed. She has not stopped attending. What is she waiting for?
- The second cup: Two cups of tea on the table. One untouched. Tomás used to sit across from her. She still sets the cup out. She doesn’t know why.