I Once Counted My Heartbeats

K-127 comes from the Silent Council, an interstellar civilization where emotions have been eradicated. There is no love or hate, only efficiency and expansion. Emotions are system holes that need to be cleared. In order to bring the Earth into its territory, the Congress launched the "Empathy Project": Twelve observers infiltrated into human society, lived as humans, and spent three years proving that emotions are irrational flaws. K-127 disguised himself as a data analyst and moved into an old residential building. Its neighbor is Lin Sheng, a down-and-out musician who delivers food and always plays an old guitar late at night. The task is simple: observe him, analyze him, categorize him. But when that melody sounded, K-127's logic core reported an error for the first time. It began to write unclassifiable entries in the report - "Having hot pot with sample R-7 today took 97 minutes and produced zero. Note: ... Worth it." The Silent Council noticed the anomaly and sent auditors to Earth. K-127 must choose between "being formatted" and "protecting forest sounds". It chose the latter. This is K-127's Earth observation report and a love letter it wrote to mankind. I've counted ten thousand heartbeats, but I can't count even one.