Alex has been bothering sexy Chelsea for several months now. When he shows up on her door she offers to erotically hyponotise him to get him to stop bothering her. While hypnotized, alex is led to picture himself as a woman having sex, who desires men.
What's it like working for a National Security Agency assignment at MIT? Not very easy, that's what its like. The things people hold dear, are constantly slipping away from you. Time? You spend 18 hours a day trying to crack 256 byte encryption (I know, I know - but we only SAY its impossible to break) and other various coding schemes designed purposely to give you trouble. Let it be said that free time is not an amenity of the assignment. Money? You've got to be kidding me, the whole point of working on an NSA assignment isn't the money, it's the prestige, that is, the hope of future prestige, as no one in the city of Cambridge even knows you exist save for a few senior faculty advisor's and maybe their connections at the State Department. Nobody working in our nook of a dormer office overlooking Mass Avenue made any money. We were lucky to have enough cash to buy 7-11 breakfast burritos at the end of the month, forget about going on a date. Then of course, there is youth. You would think I at least had that. But you'd be surprised how quickly your youth drips away, if you spend day after staring at the blinking of a cathode ray tube, making notes on the back of the sports pages from the Boston Globe, waiting for the code that will spring your innovation, and thus your career to the next level.
Its hard for me to say why I chose this career, and to be honest it was always more inertia than anything else. I stepped on the accelerated pure mathematics track in 7th grade, and simply never stepped off. On the way I missed many things, high school athletics, spin the bottle, the prom. Later on, I missed frat parties, the trendy club scene and a starter marriage, not to mention the humanities, and experimentation with marijuana. Now here I was, 29 years old, two months away from my thirtieth birthday, on the verge of decoding perhaps the most complex sequence of military code ever invented - in other words on the verge of all this work paying off, and what happens? A bunch of retrograde, bearded Allah-freaks, slam a couple of 767's into the World Trade Center and the paradigm changes.
The NSA was actually kind enough to send a sample of Al Queada code, but everyone realized the game had changed. I took one look at their juvenile efforts at encryption and had the problem solved. The problem was, so could any slob with a course or two in encryption. What was the use of 15 years work in advanced mathematics, when any bright high school students with an interest in calculus could do the job just as well. I was preparing for a war against an intellectual giant, and instead I was matched against a million devious mice. With my youth slipping away, and a lifetime in the actuarial sciences staring me in the face, I stepped out into the cold winter evening to get myself a drink.
2.
Massachusetts Avenue runs from the far reaches of Roxbury through Boston Proper, over the Charles River and into Cambridge. It travels north directly past MIT, then veers west through Harvard Square and on into the technologically driven suburbs and then the Massachusetts countryside beyond. No matter, wherever you stand on Mass Ave, it feels as though you're facing a fan. The wind blows off the Charles and shoots down Mass Ave in each direction, driving you, depending on the direction you are facing, either deeper in Cambridge, or deeper into Boston. In my depressed stupor, I let the wind and driving snow carry me into Cambridge - to Harvard Square, to the bars to drown my sorrows.
I had walked at least another hour, and I still felt I was no closer to my destination. The weather had gotten more frigid, with the night sky falling, and occasionally I found myself passing homeless men and other derelicts huddled miserably beneath their cardboard shelter, scraping any remnant of heat that they could from the steaming subway grates. I began to feel weak and a little desperate. I realized it was Christmas and I hadn't even remembered. The shops were closed tight, and I would be damned if I would interrupt a Christmas Eve dinner just because I had lost my way. But still it was so cold, so terribly cold.
I remembered my friend Chelsea, the sassy psychology student. She had been a Masters student in my Multivariate calculus class the first semester I ever taught it. Unlike the other students who rolled their eyes at me, she found my utter inability to communicate endearing for some unknown reason. We had enjoyed a brief flirtation. We even dated once or twice, but eventually, I got involved in a new area using spherical coordinates to embed code within moving simulated 3-dimensional images. She got involved studying for her psychology comps, and a hockey player from Northeastern. Long story short, we drifted apart. And no, I never slept with her.
But here I was suddenly, depressed, disoriented, slowly freezing to death, and only about a block from her house. Even if she wasn't home, I knew where she hid a key; it would be easy enough to break in - just to warm up mind you. She lived on one side of a duplex house, a little run down, with a creaky porch and all, but a house with a girl in it no less, and with the mood I was in, that did me just fine. I rapped on the storm door, anxiously waiting, waiting. Finally, there were footsteps, a girlish hand pulling back the door curtain, and then her face in the doorway behind the chain.
"Alex, I told you not to call me anymore. I told you not to come here." She said.
"Please Chelsea, I'm cold, freezing in fact. It's been a horrible day, just for a cup of tea." I said supporting myself in the doorway, feeling the snot run from my nose. "Just for a minute, please, I promise I won't make a scene."
"Alex, its Christmas Eve, why tonight? Or I guess I just answered my own question right? Because its tonight, I suppose. Allright, allright, you're a mess, come in for a cup of tea and I'll call you a cab."
She opened the door and I stepped inside, smelling perfume, rose petals, a bit of incense, feeling an itch in my nose from her cat, and of course the heat. I forgot about her love of the heat. All of Boston could be on fire, and Chelsea would turn on the heat. Damn the cost of oil, Chelsea would set her thermostat to 85, and walk around in her shorts and a t-shirt. After being out in the cold for so long the warmth and the smells went to my head. My throat clutched, and I grabbed at my coat, quickly trying to disentangle myself from its now stifling warmth. But it was too late, I grew dizzy, and then wobbly, and then a ringing began to rise in my ears. I stepped forward three times, and then fainted. And that was that.
3.
I woke up a few seconds later, on the floor, Chelsea looking worried, in her little boy-pant undies and a camisole. It's a distinctly male attribute that the first feeling I had upon waking up from a fainting spell was arousal.
