I'd like to say that it all started with a big bang but it didn't. It started with a little ding-dong.
Usually when someone rings, Will Lee opens the lab door because his desk is the closest. You'd figure that it'd drive him crazy, having to stop work a couple of times an hour all day long because another grad student forgot his badge or a visitor was looking for Professor Gomplik or some undergraduate student was desperate to find his TA out of office hours. But it didn't seem to bug Will. He was a tolerant guy.
Most likely he welcomed the opportunity to get away from his keyboard for a minute. He was supposed to be working on a network management project that Gomplik had assigned to him but nothing much was happening. It was the most tedious research project ever conceived in the mind of man.
Will should have been more on the ball last fall and proposed a decent research project of his own.
That fateful day, though, Will was away from his desk -- probably giving Gomplik one of his biweekly updates: "So far, no progress." -- so it was left to me to open the door.
A woman was standing in the corridor. Not just any woman, but a red hot piece. She was somewhere between twenty-five and thirty by my uneducated estimate -- older than most of us graduate students by a couple of years but not nearly old enough to blunt our interest. Not when she looked as good as she did. All we saw was long waves of red hair, big green eyes, and curves to die for.
She ensured that men appreciated her assets by wearing a purple miniskirt that rode high on her thigh and a pink blouse that was unbuttoned half-way to her navel.
And she wore makeup. Eye shadow and lipstick and the like. You never saw female computer science students wearing makeup around here.
She wouldn't have been more alien to us if she had green skin, a chrome dome, and had beamed down from a flying saucer.
I took one look at her and was tempted to fall to my knees and offer a prayer of thanks to God. Never mind that I've been an atheist since ninth grade.
Instead of doing anything, I just stood there with my mouth hanging open, drooling testosterone. I was too surprised to say a word.
"Can I come in?" she said.
Her voice was as sweet as an angel's.
Too bad I didn't believe in angels, either. I believe in reality, and, realistically, I figured that she was lost. She was probably looking for the French Department and had stumbled into the wrong building. Some graduate students in French Lit are nice to look at.
"Who are you looking for?" I asked. My voice croaked like a frog's but I was happy to be able to say anything.
"This is the Network Architecture Laboratory, isn't it? That's what it says on the door."
"Professor Gomplik isn't here. He's probably in his office." My voice was practically breaking under the strain of talking to this celestial being.
"Who's that?" she asked.
"He's the supervisor of this lab. This is his lab. His and Professor Ramaveda's. But Ramaveda's on sabbatical until August."
"That's all right," she said. "I don't need to talk to him especially. I just want to talk to some computer scientists. There are computer scientists in here, aren't there?"
"Sure. Well, graduate students, anyway. A half dozen of us." If this gorgeous creature wanted a computer scientist, then I wanted to be one in the worst way. I was a doctoral candidate. I had my master's already so I figured that made me a computer scientist.
"That's good enough," she said. "You're all men, right?"
"Right." A lot of the labs had female grad students, but not the Network Architecture Lab. Our work was too boring to interest women. Women preferred the more interesting subjects like human interface design.
"And you know all about how email works, right?"
"Sure," I said. "But you're probably looking for the IT help desk. That's in the IT Services Building on the other side of campus. They can get your email working for you. That's their job."
"That's not quite what I need. You're the people that I want to talk to. I'm sure about that. Can I come in?"
I couldn't see why not. If she was certain that this was the lab that she was looking for, then I more than ready to make her welcome.
I stepped aside and said, "Come on in."
Her pink heels were high, making her hips sway in the most entrancing way as she walked into the lab.
Every head in the place turned to watch her, eyes following every movement the way cobras follow the sway of a snake charmer. An apt analogy, it would turn out.
When she reached the center of the room, she said, "Let me explain why I'm here. Come close so I don't have to shout."
That made me think that she was probably a saleswoman who had made the mistake of thinking that graduate students had some say in the way our professors' grant money was spent. I thought that she couldn't be more wrong.
In fact, it was me who couldn't have been more wrong.
"You're a fine-looking group of men," she said when we were all standing in front of her. "I've come here to offer you a proposition."
The room was so quiet that you could hear the whine of motors from the robotics lab across the hall.
"Do you know anything about motorcycle gangs?" she asked.
We looked at each other with arched eyebrows and shook our heads.
"Motorcycle gangs, the outlaw ones, have
mamas
. A mama is a woman who hangs around the clubhouse and has sex with any member of the club any time they want it. What do you think about that?"
We looked at each other again but had nothing to say. We presumed that this was a rhetorical question.
"Well, I think that's not fair. Outlaw motorcycle gangs don't contribute anything to society. They sell drugs, abuse women, and fight with each other. I think a laboratory like this one does more good for society in a year than all the outlaw motorcycle gangs in the world have done since creation. That's what I think. So, you know what I think?"
We shook our heads mutely, not daring to believe where this woman was going.
"I think that every productive scientific laboratory deserves a mama. I'm going to put my ass where my mouth is. I've come here to volunteer for service in this lab. I'm going to give you boys a lot of sex. What do you think about that?"
The whine of the robots across the hall grew louder. Someone's computer received an email and pinged softly. We all jumped in surprise.
Finally Ernesto said, "Are you crazy?"
The woman smiled. "Maybe. But not as crazy as a woman who walks into a Hell's Angels' clubhouse."
"You aren't serious," Yit'gien said.
"Yes," she said. "I mean what I say."
"Why are you doing this?" Ahmed asked.
"For fun," she said. "Really, it's more than fun. I'm not smart enough to invent the Internet or whatever it is that you guys are doing this year. But I'm sure that you're doing something important and I can help by giving you all the encouragement that I can. In my own way, I'm going to contribute by helping reward you guys for making the world a better place." She looked around at us. "You are doing important things that will make the world a better place, aren't you?"
"Oh, yes; sure; of course," we all said together.
She smiled. "I'm sure that you are. Now, there's going to be a few rules. This isn't going to be a free-for-all, okay?"
"Okay," we said, each phrasing that sentiment in our own way.
"First, I'm only doing one of you at a time. I'm not into orgies, okay?"
"Okay."
"Second, everything has to be consensual. I'm not going to get raped. If I say
