the social experiment // haylor au

one // the hypothesis

There were twenty eight right angles in the door.

It was made of a dark wood, mahogany, perhaps. Harry could see the grain of the wood – lines running almost parallel to one another, from one end of the door to the other.

It was chilly outside – around 11°C.

Harry stood there, trying to find something else observable, another fact he could recite and hold onto amidst all of the uncertainties swirling in his mind. He hated being confused and anxious – and he wasn't used to it. If it wasn't for Gemma, he wouldn't be in front of that door – he'd probably be back at work, modifying the blueprints for the bridge he was overseeing the engineering of. He was sure Malika had figured out a way to run the gas and water pipes parallel to one another without interrupting the flow of one or the other – he could be working on so many things – finalising the deal that would mean he could be designing the schematics for a minor NASA spacecraft – but he was there, at the door of a psychologist he was sure he had no use for.

But his older sister, after having married her husband, had become increasingly worried about the fact that Harry hadn't been in a long-term relationship in almost four years. Or any kind of relationship for that matter. In fact, as she had put it, he was "emotionally detached" and "not making emotional connections with anyone".

He rolled his eyes at the mere thought.

Harry didn't need lasting emotional connections. Not anymore. He needed to focus on his work. With his genius IQ, his contributions to society had to take first priority. That was his purpose – to make the world a better place with his big brain. Emotions were incredibly overrated, and their consequences lived on and caused all sorts of problems.

Still, Gemma maintained that Harry had some deep psychological scarring that was hindering his willingness to find love. But it was simpler than Gemma thought.

Harry didn't believe in love. Not in the way that most people did, anyway. What people called love was merely a series of chemical reactions in the brain that increased the endorphins in the body and instigated lust, attraction and attachment. It was a temporary chemical reaction that wore off with time. People who had been in "love", were the same people filing for divorce two years later. The reagents had been used up in the brain and the chemical reaction had stopped. It could all be explained by science.

That was all it was. Love didn't really exist, and that was a scientific fact. He found comfort in facts and statistics – things that had been proved to be correct, things that made sense and rarely changed. Human emotion was fickle and throughout his years in contact with people, he'd found them to be capricious and irrational in their decision making.

"It will be fine," he said out loud to himself – he knew that if he repeated the words out loud, he was more likely to internalise them. Harry brought his fist up to the door to knock. Realistically, nothing of note should happen during his time with this shrink, except the fact that he was going to be losing half an hour he could be using to get work done. But that could hardly be helped. He wanted to keep his sister happy.

He hadn't taken the time realise the peculiarity of the place he was entering – there was a path leading from the pavement to some dark stone steps and the mahogany door. The house was like any other on the street – two storeys high and made of dark brick. The houses were right next to each other with no space between them and had small front gardens  – and the more he looked around, it seemed he was in an upmarket residential area, rather than somewhere a psychologist would operate. The front garden was well-kept, and neat – a series of rose bushes lining the path.

He allowed the comfort that came with fact that this place vaguely reminded him of the small town in England where he'd grown up – not that there was anything all that comforting about his hometown these days.