Field note. The colony has installed vertical transport chambers inside their dwelling-stacks, and their behavior within these chambers is the most anomalous data I have collected this cycle.
The chamber is a sealed metal box that ascends and descends a shaft. The human enters. It presses one of several illuminated buttons, each marked with a numeral, and the box carries it toward the corresponding stratum of the stack. Mechanically, the device is trivial. The behavior it induces is not.
Upon entry with a second human, the specimen undergoes an immediate change. It ceases all vocalization. It orients its optical sensors upward, toward the numerals that count the passing strata, and holds this posture with rigid discipline for the entire ascent. It does not look at the other organism. It does not look at itself. It appears to be reading a sequence it already knows, over and over, as though the numbers might escape.
Two humans, sealed together in a box the size of a burial chamber, moving through space at identical velocity toward largely identical destinations, and they will construct an elaborate pretense that the other is not present. They study the ceiling. They study the reflective wall-panel, which duplicates them exactly, and they pretend that duplicate is also not present. When the doors part, both exhale in the manner I have logged elsewhere as pain relief.
Correction to earlier hypothesis. I had recorded the chamber as a labor-saving device. This is incomplete. The stairs adjacent to it accomplish the same vertical transfer, cost nothing, and are near-empty at all hours.
The chamber is not for saving effort. The humans queue, willingly, for the one method of ascent that guarantees they will be trapped in silence with a member of their own species. I suspect this is a punishment.
They administer it to themselves several times a day.