>The call unsettles him. “I will do anything to ensure that I never have to hear that woman crying ever again,” he tells me later. I get the feeling that, in Mike’s mind, other people’s emotions show up as noise: data that has no apparent purpose, and that his internal software cannot process.

I found this a very unfair judgement made by the author. Giving Mike the benefit of the doubt, I get the sense that he cares about her, and wants to stop the root cause of her suffering, not that her crying made him uncomfortable because he "cannot process" it. The author seems to be trying to play up the rational side of Mike and his engineer's mind at the expense of his emotions.