1:23 Ch. 04

Part one-Harriet's Troubles.

Harriet Kono sat twisting the ends of her long black hair, an automatic reflex brought on by stress. Her grandmother told her millions of times that twisting her hair made her look nervous and twitchy.

"Good paying companies don't hire nervous girls that twist their hair," Harriet said aloud in a stern mocking voice in imitation of her grandmother.

She kept twisting her hair as she looked around her well supplied lab here at the Honolulu University campus. Everything was paid for by Mr. Imperial and that included a HEFTY stipend.

"Big paying companies DO hire twitchy nervous girls so shut the fuck up, obaasan," Harriet said in defiance of her long dead grandmother. Of course, if her grandmother had been in the room Harriet wouldn't have been able to look her in the eye let alone say such a disrespectful thing to her face.

The Imperial people had paid for everything she asked for without question. They didn't even ask to see receipts. But she saved them anyway. At first she ordered just stuff she needed. But as time went by, she grew bolder and asked for more elaborate and expensive things. At the top of her latest list were several snazzy partitions to break up her lab space, two fully loaded expensive laptops, an adjustable hospital bed, the latest I-pad and an expensive ergonomic office chair that she could sleep in if she chose too. She felt a little guilty because the partitions were a little indulgent ... perhaps the second computer was too, the I-pad for sure ... okay, so was the chair.

She looked around her lab again. The partitions made the space look more professional she thought. Looking professional was a big deal to Harriet. Her mother and father were scientists too. At some point she planed on giving them a tour of her shiny new lab. She wanted ... she NEEDED the place to look just right when she showed them the brain tube.

Harriet realized she had used Kent's term BRAIN TUBE for the devise she was working on for Mr. Imperial. Her official name for the device was the enhancing-cerebral-stimulator-processor. Kent couldn't remember any of that so he dubbed the thing the brain tube. It sound so stupid. But she had to admit that it was growing on her. She imagined that You-Tube might have sounded dumb when if first came out. Now look how big it was. "The BRAIN TUBE will be BIGGER." she said with a swell of pride.

Pride of another sort washed over her as she recalled how she had used her feminine wilds to seduce Kent Orlando to volunteer. Harriet was a pretty girl, but years of being a science geek never allowed her to develop a true feminine allure. Her seduction had been a bit clumsy, even laughable at times, but certainly exciting for Harriet. It helped that Kent had a fetish Asian girl crush on her thus improving her odds of success by several percentage points. All that aside, Harriet had a thing for Jocks like Kent. To this day, no one but her friend Ashley knew that Harriet mooned over ball players of all sorts. Russel Wilson, quarterback of the Sea Hawks was her latest crush, before that it was David Beckham and before him Tom Brady for a loooong time. She pushed aside her rambling thoughts, sat in her expensive ergonomic chair and ran her fingers along the soft fabric siding of the nearest office partition.

"He's sitting up and is gonna say something irrelevant," Harriet said aloud.

She got up and stepped around the partition to the designated lab side of her space. No such luck. Kent lay unmoving on the adjustable hospital bed with the brain tube device surrounding his head. The thing covered most of his face. Kent commented that it made him feel like Dr. Doom from the Fantastic Four. It seemed to Harriet the jocks read a lot of comic books.

She looked up at the standard round university clock on the wall above Kent's bed. It was 2:34 in the afternoon. She typed a note in one of her laptops that Kent has been under for one hour and eleven minutes. It was a short period of time but it seemed like weeks to her. For Kent ... and Harriet when she visited the world of the brain tube, hours and days would pass, yet in the real world only a hand full of minutes went by, sometimes just seconds. Harriet couldn't decide if the compressed time was a good thing or a destabilizing veritable. The experiment had started at 1:23 in the afternoon. She had voiced the time aloud and Kent had made a lame joke about the numbers in all in a row 1,2,3.

"He says the most stupid things."

She checked his heartbeat on the monitor ... a bit fast but near normal. She manually took his blood pressure with a blood pressure cuff. It was a little high too but still within safe parameters. Except for a few minor muscle twitches, he remained totally still. Her eyes traveled down his body and focused on his erection bulging in his shorts. The erection had formed at the start and had remained constant to now. She left THAT tiny bit of data out of her notes. She put aside the blood pressure cuff and started twisting the ends of her hair a feelings of dread threatened to wash over her.

"This was too soon after Alice," she whispered. "I should have waited, done more tests."

Thinking of Alice Mihara piled on guilt on top of the dread. Alice Mihara and Harriet were first cousins and Harriet had taken advantage of Alice's old fashion Japanese sense of familial obligation. Basically, she quilted Alice into participating.

On the day when things went bad with Alice, her friend Ashley Grant, a scientist from a different department had come to her rescue. Fortunately, Ashley had agreed to keep quiet about the incident but only after giving Harriet a pointless tongue lashing about scientific ethics. Unfortunately for Harriet, Joy Maeda, Alice's annoying big mouth friend had come too. Joy and Alice were friends going way back and Joy threatened to go to the dean. Thankfully, it was Alice who had talked her out of it.

Anyway, Joy had accused Harriet of fucking up her own cousin's head for money.

But that was hardly accurate. Yes, money was involved, but it was the prestige of working for Mr. Imperial that Harriet truly craved. That seemed a little less insidious but stupid head Joy Maeda couldn't see pass the money. And Alice was fine ... mostly. Joy was a dance major and she knew shit about what a scientist had to go through to get results.

Harriet looked over at one of her open laptops on a work table nearby. A little green bird flashed in the lower right corner. Huxtable, her peacock avatar, had found Kent in the world of the brain tube. It took only four and a half minutes this time, big improvement over the sixteen minutes from the last hunt. It seemed so surreal that she had to hunt for him every time he escaped her in the world of the helmet when he physically lay before her. The temptation to shake him violently to wake him up was overwhelming. Then she remembered what happened when she had done just that to Alice. As she mused darkly, her eyes settled on Kent's erection in his shorts.

She slapped her forehead. "Stop it! Get focused girl!"

She walked back to the office side of the partition, sat down in her ergonomic chair and picked up the smaller augmentation helmet. "I'm getting him out this time," she said with conviction.

She adjusted her chair so that she was practically laying on her back and held her new helmet above her for inspection. Like the big helmet around Kent's head, it would cover her eyes and ears but it was lighter, sleeker in design and totally wireless. She had learned a lot making the smaller helmet and planned to reduce the bulky, hardwired one first chance she got. She poked at the mouth piece and beamed with pride at the new addition, it engaged the tongue and teeth thus enhancing taste and the act of eating. She recalled eating a piece of pizza at one of the campus kiosks when she was hunting for Kent. The taste and texture of the pizza had been amazingly real. She imagined Mr. Imperial gushing over that innovation. The new helmet had no on switched to worry about, the simple act of putting it on would start it up. Taking it off would shut it down just as easily, something she wished she had taken the time to fix on the old helmet. Still holding the new helmet aloft, she took another minute to make sure all was operational but she knew she was merely stalling putting it on.

She let out a deep sigh and wished to hell that Kent's imagined world wasn't so SEXUAL. The first test with Alice's had had a dark sexual bent too but Harriet had attributed that to her cousin's personality quarks and over active imagination. She thought she was safe with Kent who told lame jokes and clearly lacked ANY imagination. But the sex thing happened again proving that it was a problem with the software and not the test subjects. Harriet had been clueless at the intensity of Alice's experiences. But with the augmentation helmet she was right in the middle of Kent's dirty adventures.

"Stop stalling ... just deal, okay?"

The day before she used the helmet on Kent, she had sent out a purge program to clear out the old Alice stuff. Hours later, the purge program checked back saying that is had cleansed ninety six percent of the corrupt files. At the time, she thought that good enough but perhaps the remaining four percent was gumming up the works somehow. After she got Kent free of the helmet, she planned on cleaning out Kent's creations too. Then she would start from scratch. There HAD to be a way to nix the sexual path to the brain the helmet was taking. No way was she was going to report all this shameful sex stuff to Mr. Imperial and his people. It never occurred to her that the sex stuff might be interesting to Mr. Imperial. All she wanted was the helmet to work to her set specifications PEIRIOD. She sat up, went to her second laptop, hit some keys and sent a MUCH more aggressive debugging program after the last bits of Alice contamination.

Harriet lay back in the chair and slipped on the augmentation helmet and wrapped her lips around the new mouth piece. A wave of euphoric bliss blanketed her much like the onset of a marijuana high. The euphoria was way too brief though and she had to stamp down a surge of panic as Kent's imagined world became real and solid all around her. She found herself standing in the commons quad between the four round dorm towers.

"Always on campus," Harriet said with a shake of her head.

She saw Huxtable her peacock avatar standing at the door of the Aloha cafeteria and she headed in that direction.

Part two-Breakfast with Alice

Kent sat at a table at the Aloha cafeteria that serviced the four round dorm towers of Honolulu University. Across from him sat Alice Mihara steadily shoveled fried rice into her mouth with her fingers. She had a fork but chose to ignore it.

None of this is real, he thought. The food she was eating, the table, the cafeteria, Alice, even himself. This was all created by the brain tube. The real Kent Orlando lay in a hospital bed in Harriet Kono's lab at the science and technology center on campus. He mindlessly took a sip of lukewarm, grayish cafeteria coffee from the cup in front of him. He made a face. 'I should wish for a cup of Sumatra instead of this swill,' he thought.

"If you wanna keep secrets you shouldn't think so loudly," Alice said with a full mouth.

Alice was a slim tiny Asian woman at five two or three. Kent was a little over six feet with the wiry muscle tone of a basketball player. He towered over her and had a hundred fifty pounds on her easy. Yet the chick frightened him to no end. Barely an hour before, Alice was an obsidian giant ten feet tall and he watched her brutally murder three people.

"Sorry about that," Alice said.

Kent cringed. Having his thoughts read was so unsettling.

"I thought that you and your friends were attack programs," Alice said, "Harriet's been sending them at me for a long time." She tipped her cup of coffee back, took a sip and grimaced. "You're right, this is truly SHITTY coffee. If you focus hard enough bet you can get us something decent."

"Why don't you do it?" Kent asked cautiously. The woman had the power, he had seen her in action.

"I could," she said. "But this is your fold, your center of power. You had better figure out how to use it." She grabbed a hand full of rice with her fingers and stuffed her mouth in a most unladylike fashion.

"No food in your fold?" he ask, appalled at her at her savage table manners.

With her mouth full, she said, "Harriet's attack programs make things hard to come by. This cafeteria food is the best I've had in long time."

Kent couldn't get his mind off of how she so easily killed Donny, Joan and Suki.

"You had better learn to cover your thoughts," Alice said.

Even though he had no idea how to do it, he made an effort to read Alice's thoughts. His focus was interrupted by a sudden blaring of an old Beatles song 'Helter Skelter.' Kent looked around to see where it was coming from.

"And again ... sorry about your friends," Alice said.

"I don't know why I'm so upset," Kent said looking back at her. "None of this is fucking real!"

"You had better change your thinking about that right now. In this world of the cerebral enhancer—"

"Brain tube," Kent said. "We call it the brain tube now."

"Whatever!" Alice said irritated as she picked up her unused fork and pointed it at him. "THIS world is real and the other is too faraway to matter. We can all die here." For just a second her eyes went totally black reminding Kent of the murdering monster she was.

"For me it's just game over," Kent said in spite of his fear of her.

"That's what I thought too," Alice said and went back to her fried rice. This time she used the fork but it only marginally improving her table manners as she shoveled rapid fire fork fulls into her mouth.

Her comment about dying quieted Kent for a few moments. After a small stretch of silence, he dared to ask, "What happened to you."

"I want pancakes," she said and stood up with her tray. "Work at getting us a decent cup of coffee."

He watched her get in line with other students at the breakfast buffet. He found it odd that she didn't simply go to the front of the line. In this world, she was a virtual god and could do as she pleased. He took the time to check her out: He assumed she was Japanese because her last name, Mihara, sounded Japanese to him. She wore jeans and a hippy white blouse edged with flowers, slight of figure with long black hair, she was beautiful in a quiet unassuming way. He was totally afraid of her ... but the stupid male part of him wanted to please her too. He looked at his mug of muddy coffee and willed it to turn into Starbucks ... Sumatra would be nice. "Change!" he commanded summoning all his Charlton Heston-Moses fury ... but nothing happened.

He nearly jumped out of his skin when a person plopped next to him at the table. His fright turned to relief when he saw that it was Nefertiti Ulamat. Not the real Nefertiti of course but the version conjured up by his sexual psyche. It occurred to Kent that he hardly knew the real Nefertiti who worked as a TA in his anthropology 101 class, bet this Nefertiti he knew very well. She had been his guide from the first. To say the least, he was pleased to see her.

Nefertiti, or Neffie as she liked to be called plopped a cup carryall onto the table with three grande size cups of coffee. The tray overflowed with little half and half creamers and packets of sugar.

"Sumatra times three," Neffie said with a sweet bright smile.

His pleasure seeing her quickly turned to concern. "Get out of here!" Kent said in a desperate whisper. "I'm with Alice!"

Neffie's smile evaporated as Alice approached with her tray stacked high with food.

"Hello Neffie," Alice said frostily as she sat and claimed one of the coffees along with some creamers and packets of sugar.

"Hi, Alice" Neffie said with a cool edge too as she busied herself with her own cup of coffee.

Did they know each other? Kent wondered. It seemed unlikely. Neffie was a manifestation of Kent's psyche so he had to assume that Alice had read his mind and found her name. Neffie knew of Alice's existence because Alice was a force everyone feared here in the world of the brain tube. In fact, it was Neffie who had first warned her about Alice. Still though, they acted like old friends with hard feelings.

"Alice and I knew each other before Harriet put the helmet on you," Neffie said timidly.

"How did you—" Kent started to say but Alice cut him off.

"Dude! Really! Everyone can hear your thoughts! Anyway, Neffie and I were kind of friends in the other world too."

Neffie shrugged. "Can't say much about that. That other girl isn't me."

"I thought that Neffie was one of my creations?" Kent asked surprised and confused.

"Neffie first appeared in one of my sexual fantasies," Alice said with a mouth full of pancake. "It was an all girl orgy with a chick named Meka Okuda, Scarlet Johansson and Courtney Cox the sexy cougar version."

Neffie gave a tiny half smile. "Kent has been trying to get to Meka Okuda too."

"Everybody wants to fuck that chick," Alice said. "In the other world she's a photographer. I posed for her a couple of times but never got in her pants."

"The real Alice had fantasies of you too?" Kent asked Neffie in disbelief.

"Don't know," Neffie said.

"She was on the radar," Alice said. "This Neffie though was my wing girl in almost all my adventures here."

"Until you went ... dark," Neffie said guardedly.

"Until I went dark," Alice repeated with a crisp nod. "I'm sorry."

"You are under constant attack," Neffie said. "I understand."

A long uncomfortable silence followed.

"She's been a good wing girl for me too," Kent said, daring to break the silence.

Neffie smiled. "Part of two people's sexual fantasies makes me a busy girl."

"You asked what happened to me?" Alice said to Kent.

Kent decided he ultimately didn't want to know.

"Too late to back out now," Alice said reading his mind. "I was the first test subject for the ... what did you call it now?"

"The brain tube," Kent said.

"Right, brain tube," Alice said. "Harriet and I are related. First cousins. She thought our family relations was the reason that I volunteer to help. Far from it, I was on a mission of sorts having to do with the technology she was developing ... but that was in the other world and the mission went away with the other Alice. Anyway, I let Harriet put the thing on my head. She thought that my experiences would be ... you know normal or something. Like surfing a big wave, climbing a mountain, kayaking ... whatever. The girl has no imagination if you ask me. Anyway, all my fantasies were sexual."

"Mine too," Kent said.

Alice laughed with very little humor. "Harriet must have thought that she had solved that little glitch if she's at it again. She must have gotten some fresh money from her corporate handlers too." Alice aggressively stabbed ar an obscene length of Portuguese sausage with her fork.

"She can piggyback in Kent's world with some kind of mini helmet," Neffie said. "She thought she could control things first hand. Didn't quite work out that way."

"She can come here? I could talk to her?" Alice asked sounding shocked.

"I don't think that would be a good idea," Neffie warned dropping her eyes to her lap.

"The bitch has been trying to kill me for years," Alice said darkly. Her eyes went black on black again.

"I don't think she knows that it's you she's been attacking," Neffie said without looking up.

"Whoa! Did you say YEARS?" Kent asked.

"Yeah! Fucking YEARS!" Alice yelled and stood up from the cafeteria table. "I lived in a dark place for countless fucking YEARS just to stay alive!" Alice started to grow and her skin darkened to a shiny gray-granite. She was about to turn into the ten foot tall obsidian giant that had killed Donny, Jane and Suki. Kent got up and backed away but Neffie remained seated.