Chapter 10: A Slight Change of Plans
It was our last day in Austin, and Julie and I were plotting a course through uncharted territory. I had come to Austin to attend a conference and have a rendezvous with Julie, since it wasn't far from her hometown of Oklahoma City—but there had been a slight change of plans. Our relationship had once been purely sexual, but somehow along the way we had fallen in love. Now, rather than each of us going back to our respective homes tomorrow, we were both headed for New York to start building a new life—together.
But before we could really get started on our new lives, we had a lot of old business to attend to: she had a condo to sell and an ex-boyfriend (although he didn't know it yet) to evict; we both had personal belongings to retrieve and get to New York; and we had to come up with at least another 30 grand in seed money for our day trading scheme. But the first order of business was to build Julie her own mindreading machine. So right after lunch I started putting together mindreading machine number four.
The mindreaders I had built into eyeglass frames proved to be the most versatile, so I had asked Julie to pick up a pair of plastic-framed sunglasses for herself. But as I started working with the electronics, it soon became apparent that any frames that were feminine enough for her to believably be wearing didn't leave enough space for all the electronics that needed to go inside them, even if I had been able to hollow them out without the kinds of tools I had access to when I worked for the Defense Department.
"Dammit," I said, "these women's frame styles are too small. I can't build a mindreader in this small amount of space."
"Does it have to be a pair of sunglasses? Can you build the mindreader into something else?" she asked.
"I can built it into a lot of things, but it has to be worn somewhere on your head, and it has to be something that won't seem odd when you're wearing it," I said. Looking up at her, I joked, "I would gladly build one into a tiara for you, by queen, but I think it would attract attention."
"Could you build a receiver in a Bluetooth headset?" she asked.
Fucking brilliant, and I told her so. Once again, the solution was a stroke of sheer genius—and once again it was hers, not mine.
She got a little pleased look on her face, like someone was finally recognizing something she knew she had but that no one else seemed to have noticed before. "Why are you the only person who appreciates my ideas?" she asked wistfully.
"Because everyone else is a fucking idiot! I want to hear every single idea you ever have. Ever." I told her.
She put both of her arms on my shoulders and kissed me lovingly. "There really is no one else like you in the whole world," she said.
I held her and said, "I can only hope you remain deluded like this forever, and thus never notice that you can do much better than a boring old man like me."
"You stop that," she said in mock anger, "no one puts down my knight in shining armor like that" and kissed me again.
This road was going to end up with us both in bed in about two minutes. Julie was wearing a bluish-teal halter top that ended a good six inches above the top of her low-cut, ultra-straight leg jeans, but had blue lacey material in the front that teasingly revealed only some of the smooth skin in-between. In other words, she was hot and gorgeous like usual—but we really needed to get some work done, so not without regret I changed the topic.
"The only problem with this Bluetooth idea," I said, "is that we don't have a Bluetooth headset to use. Would you want to go get one while I work on these electronics some more?"
She was disappointed that we weren't headed back to bed, but she knew that we had to get this done. "Okay, throw me out why don't you."
I grabbed her waist from behind as she was walking away in mock petulance, slipping my fingers under the lacy covering so that I touched only smooth, bare skin. "I will never, ever throw you out," I whispered in her ear, then nibbled on it gently. "I promise I'll make up to you later what we don't have time to do now."
She reached behind her with one hand to hold my head, turned over her shoulder for one more kiss, then pointed her high heels out the door and went in search of a device.
The Bluetooth mindreader turned out better than I could have hoped. There was plenty of spare room inside once I took out the unnecessary blue light circuitry—which also allowed her to be using it without the world knowing about it. It came pre-equipped with its own rechargeable battery, so unlike me she wouldn't have to be replacing watch batteries all the time. With battery life not a problem, it wouldn't have needed an on/off switch like my eyeglasses did, but since there already was one I left it there. I added two tiny additional buttons; one which allowed her to switch to phone function so that she could actually still use it as a Bluetooth headset—and one that would send an emergency distress signal to my Blackberry. Julie could bench-press almost as much as I and had a black belt, so she was probably better off defending herself if needed than relying on me to come to her aid, but it made me feel better that it was there.
I loaded up the software and we got ready to try it out. Julie clipped the headset to her ear and turned it on.
Is it working? Is it working? I was thinking.
"Yes, its working, its working," she laughed.
I love her laugh—its so delicate. Her laugh got me started thinking about how beautiful she was and how my love for her kept growing. Of course, she was reading these thoughts even as I had them. She smiled but looked away, saying "I feel funny eavesdropping on your thoughts. I mean, I like the thoughts I'm receiving, but it doesn't seem right to be stealing them like that. If we use these on each other, to be fair we should at least both have them on at the same time."
"See what I mean...now that's another great idea by you!" I said, pulling my glasses out of my pocket and turning them on.
She smiled even broader and turned to look at me.
Everything turned gray. It felt like there were pulses or something running through my head, like it was subject to a deluge of pressure waves. My temples instantly started to ache. If I could have concentrated on what my eyes were seeing, I would have seen Julie grab for her temples as well—but I couldn't concentrate on anything. Probably from the pain, Julie doubled over—and as soon as she did the feeling stopped. It took me a second to figure out what had just happened, but I quickly whipped off my glasses when I did.
Julie was slowly sitting up again; she probably had the same dull headache I now had. "What happened? Did I speak too soon?" She had taken off her headset.
"Feedback," I said. "Just like if you put a microphone in front of a loudspeaker. When the mindreaders were fixed on each other, it must have shuffled the same thought back and forth, with increasing intensity, blocking our ability to think anything else."
"We have to be careful never to do that again," she said.
"I'll say—if you hadn't instinctively bent over and broken the loop, we might have been frozen like that until...well, I don't want to find out," I said.
"I'm afraid to try it again," she said.
"I don't blame you, but unless the feedback blew a circuit—entirely possible I suppose—it should still work fine." I said. "Here, I'll be the guinea pig." She handed me the headset and I put it on, then looked at Julie.
Her thoughts were full of wonder at what this contraption was, and admiration of me for being able to create it. She was also almost embarrassingly grateful to me for loving and accepting her as a person, not just a bombshell, and loved me for it. But she was also now petrified of her mindreader.
I looked away. "Yes, I agree: we should not use these on each other unless we both agree to use them. And, obviously, we'll have to be sure not to have them turned on at the same time. Yours works," I said, pulling off the headpiece and putting on my glasses. I could immediately see she was still afraid of it "and so does mine which is how I know that you're still afraid of the thing."
She took the headset back but was holding it the way one might hold a dead mouse.
"Please, darling, you know I would never hurt you, right?" I said. "I just put it on, it's perfectly safe." She looked at me, torn—afraid of the device, but trusting of me, and further not wanting to have her fear of the device turn into an issue of mistrust between us. I hadn't meant it that way, but suddenly the device had become an ultimatum on a trust that was still taking root between us, so I quickly reversed field. "Tell you what; it's new, I guess I can't be certain something weird with the Bluetooth doesn't interfere with it. I'll wear it, and we'll go for a walk. If all goes well, I'll test the panic button, which uses the Bluetooth function itself. If it passes all those tests, will you try it again?"
She nodded in relief; she was afraid, but she was also quite reasonable, and recognized my suggestion as such. "Thank you," she said quietly, referring to my not making her choose between trusting me and fearing the device.
"Anything for you, my sweet," I replied and kissed her.
I put on the headset and we started walking up Congress, across the "bat bridge" and into downtown Austin. Julie's ass swayed naturally in her tight, straight-leg jeans as we walked the city; I couldn't see that of course since I was walking with her, but after my mindreader picked up the thought "check the ass on that chick" five or six times I got the message. In fact the thoughts of EVERY man—and a couple of the ladies too—turned sexual when they caught a glimpse of my dear Julie. She knew at some level that she looked good and that men in general liked the way she looked; after all, she'd relied on that to make a living for many years. Still, I'm sure she had no idea just how powerful an effect she had.
We found a nice restaurant in the warehouse district; I turned off the headset so I wasn't reading Julie's mind all through dinner. After a leisurely meal and a couple of drinks, we went back to the hotel. Once upstairs, I pushed the panic button. My Blackberry began to play "Need You Tonight," the ringtone I had specifically assigned to her panic button. Nothing had gone awry.
