Sometimes a controlled experiment can produce uncontrollable results....
My name is Jack. I am going to withhold my last name. You will soon understand why.
Our neighbors Sherry and Bob were also our best friends. We moved next door to each other about five years ago, but we were friends for 15 years before that. Sherry has been my wife Carroll's best friend since they were freshman roommates in college.
We had remarkably similar stories. Both couples got married early, during our first year of college. We had kids right away, which is why we got married so young, and lived in married student housing beginning in our sophomore years. We swapped babysitting and occasional cheap date nights out and helped each other through all the trials and tribulations of trying to finish college and get a degree with young kids, no time, and no money.
Both Sherry and my wife Carroll graduated on time and got jobs as public school teachers, which was always their plan. That allowed both couples to move out of student housing and into cheap duplexes. Bob and I got a little behind schedule. I finally finished my Mechanical Engineering degree, but Bob dropped out. They say life is what happens to you when your original plan does not happen.
I got what I thought was an interim job with the University physics department where I went to school. I am still there. I'm one of the guys that builds and maintains all the experimental apparatus the eggheads use. They never want anything simple, and at least 50% of what they need must be custom fabricated. I've always been the tinkerer and electronics nerd keeping up with all the latest stuff, and I'm good with machine tools and welding, but this job sometimes forces me to get out ahead of the latest thing and work on stuff nobody else had seen yet. All my "customers" were good at handwaving and vague descriptions, and not so good at settling on hard specs I could work to. But my job kept me interested and brought in enough dough to make Carrol and me feel comfortable for the first time. In high school, athletics was never my forte. I was never on any teams, as I had an after-school job with an electronics company. I had to work hard just to stay in decent shape. When I got to college, most of the girls never noticed me, and I felt very blessed to have met and married a stunner like Carroll.
Carroll was the classic beautiful rich kid white girl. Blonde, tall, shapely, and mannerly. Before I met her, I resented her type. Butter wouldn't melt in her mouth, and she was so hot all the guys chased her. I never thought I had a chance with her. We got assigned to a study group together in history class, probably the only way I could have ever met her. I was surprised to find she was smart, and nice. She smiled at me and even laughed when I tried to amuse her. Which turned out to be my advantage. Most of the guys that chased her thought being a macho asshole was the way to impress her, and she figured they just wanted to pump her and dump her, which most of them probably did.
Maybe she saw me as a safe option while she looked for somebody better, but she went out with me. I treated her like a lady, the only way I knew, and she liked it. My life changed one day when she told me she had always liked that I acted like such a gentleman, but now that we knew each other better, when I was alone with her maybe we should relax the rules a bit. I kissed her, and she kissed me back. It was wonderful. I didn't have a car, but she did, and it wasn't long before we began to use the backseat every weekend. Soon we were expecting.
Her folks were not happy that I was marrying their little princess, but the alternative was much worse. The reception was the first time I had ever been to a country club. Her parents were embarrassed, but I loved the move to married student housing, as I could go wild with Carroll in a real bed without worrying about car door handles, arm rests, or cops with flashlights. Having her in my bed every night made even our harried married student life seem like a dream come true.
I always liked Carroll's friend and roommate Sherry, and Sherry approved of me. She kidded me about it. "I can tell you're not a self-absorbed asshole like those rich guys her parents try to fix her up with. I am very intuitive, you know." Sherry's parents were also very well off, but they only had two homes. Sherry would always tell you what she was thinking, she had almost no filter. She was always honest, but she was never subtle. Sherry was almost a complete physical opposite of my Carroll. She was a short, dark brunette hardbody and great looking, but not nearly as reserved and mannerly as Carroll. She had met Bob in high school, but never dated him back then, as they ran in completely different cliques. But somehow at the University, they hit it off, and soon they were moving to married student housing along with us.
Sherry's husband Bob was that hunky athlete all the high school girls wanted to date. The fastest white guy on the football team, all district first baseman on the baseball team, and all around good looking bad boy. A knee injury senior year had dashed his athletic scholarship hopes. He was okay, but never going to be as fast or make the kind of instant cuts he could manage before the injury. He ended up plugging along at the state U like the rest of us, but academics was never his forte, either; he finally quit. He ended up becoming a firefighter, and it was his natural calling. He got certified as an EMT, and for water rescues, and high-rise rescues and firefighting. He was now that hunky firefighter all the nurses wanted to date, but he was already married to Sherry, and he was devoted to her. He was the kind of naturally athletic, good looking guy that you were sure would be a real dick, but he was instead a nice guy. He was often inspired to sing. Mostly classic rock or country, but always off key and he usually got the lyrics wrong, too, sometimes hilariously.
When all four of us were getting paychecks, we began to look for houses. Carroll and Sherry hatched a plan to buy two houses next to each other, but in the highly sought-after school district they both taught in. Given our relatively low incomes, that would mean fixer upper houses that would require a lot of work. Bob was good with plumbing, carpentry, masonry, and dirt work, and I could do HVAC, electrical, electronics and wireless. Sherry used to tease us that Bob and I together made almost one real contractor. But we had trouble finding even one such house, much less two. We did however draw up extensive plans and spent years discussing what we wanted to do if we ever found such a deal.
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Both couples had two kids. Life's genetic lottery is always interesting. Carroll and I had two girls, both pretty, tall, strong and very athletic. Bob and Sherry had two boys, both brainy, clumsy and shy. You just never know. But all four of us loved all four of them and we were so close they were practically raised as one big family. Bob taught our girls baseball, volleyball, and rock climbing, and I taught his boys physics, electronics, and a one of my lifelong interests, astronomy. All four of us traveled together to our girls' softball and volleyball tournaments, and to spelling bees, Math Olympiads, and robotics competitions for the boys. From time to time, Bob would appear on the local TV news as he pulled someone from a low water crossing or repelled down a cliff to rescue a fallen hiker. There was usually a breathless nurse or candy striper looking at Bob with big eyes in addition to the reporter singing his praises.
The kids grew up fast and they began looking at colleges before we knew it. It was more correct to say colleges looked at them. Both our girls got athletic scholarships, and both their boys academic ones. All the grandparents were well off and had set up educational trust funds that easily covered the expenses the scholarships did not. We had been getting nice raises all along, and now in our early 40's we finally had disposable income and some time on our hands. We were old enough to be financially secure, but young enough to still feel our oats, and perhaps get in a little trouble.
It took years for us to find two houses close together, and we only did because Bob was buddies with some guys that moonlighted doing private home inspections. They told him about two houses that had failed their inspections and as a result planned short sales fell through. Sherry talked to her dad, the financial whiz, and he negotiated a foreclosure sale with both banks. With our years of steady paychecks, raises and good credit, plus some down payment help from our parents, we soon owned two adjacent houses on a cul-de-sac in the right part of town.
Our initial walk-throughs were very much like that Zombie House show on TV. Problems on top of disasters. We could not possibly move into these houses right away, and there would be plenty of projects to work on for years after we moved in. But between Bob and I we could do almost all of it ourselves.
We had the roofs redone by a real contractor and did the bathroom remodels first before we moved out of our duplexes. The kids pitched in and helped us before they left for school. We then decided to concentrate on the yards to get them established and growing and change the looks of the places immediately. The greatly improved front yards made the HOA happy immediately, and we enjoyed great relations with all the neighbors from the start. Our plans for the backyards, however, were outdated. We no longer needed swing sets or playhouses, and these houses had several nice big trees back there. It was Bob who came up with the new plan.
A big treehouse in the largest backyard tree, a giant hot tub, a full outdoor kitchen with BBQ pit, a fire pit with seating around it, and some nice landscaping, all surrounded by a 12-foot-high masonry privacy wall. We all blessed off on it and began to pitch in to accomplish it. Home Depot loved us and our credit cards. We had it finished before summer began.
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My comfortable job was shaken up by a major reorganization at the university. I no longer worked for the Physics Department, but for the new Science Department. So now, in addition to physicists, I had to work with chemists, biologists, geologists, and other assorted academics, including psychologists, but I didn't figure they would need to construct very much in the way of experimental equipment. That was one of the many things I was wrong about. They did need stuff, and they were even more inclined than physicists to be vague about what they really wanted.
The most challenging was Dr. X, whose name I have redacted because it would be immediately recognizable. He was a brilliant but highly eccentric guy who called himself a psycho-biologist. That meant he dabbled in everything from social psychology to sexual behavior, and from neuropharmacology to biofeedback to electronic muscle stimulators. His original grad school buddy was Timothy Leary, and he was rumored to have experimented with magic mushrooms, LSD, ecstasy, and several yet undisclosed psychoactive chemicals. He had published hundreds of papers and pulled in many millions in grant money every year, so he was solid gold with the university administration. My boss just said listen patiently and try to do whatever Dr. X wants.
Every time he talked to me, I had to go scurrying to the library to read his papers and their references and figure out what he meant, but I began to follow his ideas. He took a shine to me and began to take me into his confidence. He believed he was on the verge of discovering a way to replace most psychoactive drugs with electronic and magnetic stimulation devices. Not only could he replace them, he believed he could counteract them, too.
After swearing me to secrecy, he waxed enthusiastic about the possibilities. He envisioned a device like a breathalyzer, installed in a car, that could not just stop the intoxicated driver from starting the car but could erase the intoxicating effects of the alcohol so they could drive home safely. He wanted to replace drugs with dangerous side effects used in conditions like schizophrenia with virtually harmless stimulators. He thought he might be able to cure debilitating syndromes like PTSD by just using a headband monitor/stimulator. He was convinced that his greatest discovery was just on the horizon.
But he was unsure about how the build the first apparatus to test his ideas. His solution was to have me build four different alterative prototype devices over the summer, so they would be ready for him to test when the fall semester began. He always spent the summer at his wife's ancestral home in Vermont. After much discussion, he finally agreed to outline the basic electromagnetic signals he wanted to use, and protocol for the testing he would conduct, so I could do some preliminary work. He also gave me a reading list and some of his notes that I should review over the summer to better understand the technology.
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The more I studied his plans, the more I thought building four separate prototypes was a waste of time and effort. I enlisted the help of one my physicist friends, and he gave me an idea of how to generate all four signals that Dr. X wanted in any combination by using one more powerful and programmable device. I was able to cobble together a breadboarded version by early June, and two full days of lab testing seemed to confirm that I could meet all the tests that Dr. X wanted right now.
Summer is not a busy time on our campus. There are only a few sections of summer classes, most full research professors are gone, and the people that are here are running existing equipment rather than developing new stuff. I literally had nothing else to do. So, I started working on a more advanced prototype that would be more suitable for experimentation. It looked like an over the ear headset, with some extra little antennas and arrays that interacted with the brain. It was ready about the time we had finished the backyard project.
We had a 'spa night' to christen the new hot tub. Bob smoked a brisket in the new BBQ pit, Sherry and Carroll made side dishes, and I set up some good wine. We all had a good time and pronounced the project a great success. Sherry drank the most wine, and she was already the loosest and least inhibited of the four of us even when stone cold sober. As I mentioned. she had no filter and she usually just said whatever popped into her head.
Despite that, she was charming and fun to be around. She was short and fit and cute and had dark blue eyes and black hair. She was one of those people who would lean into you when she talked, touch your shoulder or your elbow, and smile back immediately when you smiled at her. I had often thought if I hadn't found my Carroll, I would want to be with somebody like Sherry. Bob was also voluble and never afraid to give his opinion on anything, and Carroll and I both thought the world of him.
