Field note. The specimen has groomed itself into a false ancestor of itself.
It arrives at the glass structure fourteen minutes early, then waits outside, motionless, in a small heated vehicle, so as not to appear early. This is the first deception. There are many.
Two humans sit across a smooth surface. Neither will eat. Both perform an elaborate ritual of teeth-display that mimics the aggression signal of lesser predators but is here inverted to mean the opposite: harmlessness, availability, hunger to be chosen. The larger human asks the smaller human to describe its own defects. The smaller human names a defect that is secretly an advantage. Both pretend not to know this. This mutual pretense is called professionalism and appears to be the entire content of the exchange.
I catalogued the smaller specimen's tells: a droplet forming at the temple, a hand smoothing a document that requires no smoothing, a laugh emitted 0.4 seconds before anything humorous occurred. The document itself lists the specimen's past exertions in a font selected to suggest competence. It is untrue by omission, and both parties treat this as courtesy.
At the ritual's close they clasp hands, a gesture I first misread as reconciliation after combat. The smaller human says it will "hear back." It will not, in most cases, hear back. This too is known and unspoken.
The specimen returns to its heated vehicle. There, alone, it releases its groomed posture all at once, exhales, and speaks to no one: "That went okay." I have logged this as a malfunction. It has just spent one hour proving it is a creature it is not, to be permitted to spend forty years becoming that creature, and the small collapse in the vehicle is the only moment it was actually present.