She returned to hugging him with her face nuzzled into the crook of his neck, but waved her hand in the general direction of the assistant and asked, "Who or what is that?"
"My soul space assistant," he answered absentmindedly.
He was still processing what she had just said. Her obsession with him was evident. The way she described wanting to be part of him, inside him, was equal parts enticing and disturbing. With the loss of his parents, then his adoptive parents, he had begun feeling like the lone survivor stranded on a desert island, so the idea of being inseparably connected to someone was enticing. But the way she described it, and the tone she used, left no doubt that she was obsessed with him, and he had never read any story, or heard about any real-life situation where it was beneficial to have a woman be that obsessed with you. The yandere archetype in anime was meant to be humorous, but it wasn't something he had ever wanted to experience in real life. The soul bond description said that the bond prevented the person from being able to harm him, but he wondered whose idea of harm it used, his or hers.
Looking back at the assistant, he asked, "The description says that the soul bond will prevent the bonded person from harming me. Who's definition of harm does it use? How does it actually work?"
Madison tense up when he mentioned "harm." He cared about her, but given her revelations, he couldn't afford to avoid hurting her feelings. He needed to know what kind of risk she posed to him, given the degree of obsession she had revealed. In the back of his mind, he wondered if she would resort to locking him in a room, or murdering the first girl to make eyes at him.
"Also, how does the soul bond prevent the bonded from revealing information about Genesis Heart? Are there any limits to what it can prevent?" He figured he should learn about this aspect as well.
"The soul bond fundamentally alters the bonded person's value system such that they will value your health, physical and emotional, above their own or that of anyone else. There is no separate logic or intelligence associated with the soul bond, so the bonded person's understanding of harm is the primary limiter. However, your own reaction to their actions will propagate down the link to the bonded person and can influence their behavior. So, if they are about to do something that they genuinely believe is innocuous but you know to be harmful, they will feel your knowledge of that potential harm manifest as a sudden sense of danger and will halt their potentially harmful action."
"As for your other question, all knowledge of Genesis Heart, including any events related to it, are sealed inside the bonded person's mind. They will be unable to do anything that could possibly reveal information about Genesis Heart no matter the circumstances, not even if you command it. This effect is a core defense mechanism of Genesis Heart designed to ensure your safety."
"So that's what that is," Madison said into his neck. "I felt something shift in my mind when the bond formed, but up until now, I just assumed it was my mind unclenching, letting go of my irrational fears. But now that I know about the value system changes, I can feel it. There are some things I did in the past that I could never do now because I know you would hate it."
Say what? What things? What did she do that he would hate?
"Madison?" he asked. "What did you do?"
"Um... promise you won't get mad?" she said, then sighed. "Sorry, that's a stupid thing to ask. Of course you're gonna be mad."
He grabbed her shoulders and pushed her back so he could look at her face. "What did you do?!"
For a moment, thoughts of her sabotaging Jacob's truck or somehow accelerating Fran's cancer flashed through his mind. He knew they were irrational thoughts, but the fear remained.
"So, um, I might have, um, warned off a few girls," she said while looking down, avoiding his eyes.
"Warned off?" He wasn't sure what she meant. Warned off from what?
"Um... you know, told to go away? They were sniffing around you, so I told them you were mine."
He'd had many interactions with students, male and female, some of them unpleasant, most of them neutral, but he didn't remember any interaction that qualified as "sniffing around." He assumed she meant "showing interest." Not that he knew exactly what that looked like. He just assumed it would be obvious when it happened.
"Who?" Maybe if she gave him some names, he could make sense of what she was saying.
"Umm... Katie, and umm... Sam?" Despite the rising question tone at the end, he could tell she was certain of the names.
Katie, or Katerina Blake, was a willowy brunet from his junior year chemistry class. When he thought back, he remembered she had approached him a few times early in the semester to ask him a question, but then eventually stopped. At the time, he thought she was just talking to him because she thought he was the most knowledgeable, but now he was beginning to realize that maybe it was because she was interested in him.
And Sam, or Samantha Norwood, was a petite red-head that sat next to him during the first week of his senior year AP physics class and was constantly leaning over to look at his notes. She never said a word, but got really close to him when she leaned over to look. At the time, he had just assumed she was really near sighted, and either forgot her glasses, or didn't want to wear them for some reason.
As his memories of Katie and Sam surfaced, so to did other memories. He'd asked Jacob for advice on how to get a girlfriend and Jacob had replied that at Jack's age, he should focus on just going out on lots of dates with lots of different girls. "You can't know what you really want, if all you've ever had is vanilla ice cream. Try all the flavors first, then when you finally pick a flavor, you can do so, certain that it's the right choice." So, he had dredged up the courage to ask a girl out on several occasions. Each time, the girl had firmly declined. And each time, they had done so with a distinct tone of disgust. He'd complained to Jacob, who had just encouraged him to keep trying. But after the fifth rejection, he'd given up. If the rejections had been polite, or neutral, he would have kept trying, but because each rejection was given in disgust, he had begun to think there was something wrong with him, something inherent about him that girls found disgusting. But, with Madison's confession came the possibility that all those rejections had instead been a result of her machinations.