Chapter 1 -- Cassie, Julie and Eve
Julie and Cassie had been together for a long, long time.
They had been at the same uni for six years now, and both were in their final year of a Ph. D.
They'd met on the first day of O-week, in Canberra, at the National University of Australia, when they had moved into ressies. Julie was from Perth, and Cassie from Sydney. Their rooms were on the same floor, and they'd clicked immediately.
On that first day there was a party put on to welcome all of the first-years, and they'd got far too drunk on cheap, crappy bubbly. That first night they did not sleep, instead pouring out their thoughts, and then their hearts, and then their souls, to each other.
To a point.
Cassie was a Lesbian, and she'd fallen in love with Julie that first night.
Julie didn't work this out until second semester. They were drunk again, this time in Cassie's room, and Cassie surprised Julie by kissing her.
Cassie had liked kissing Julie, she liked it very much, but Julie had not liked the soft, squishy sensation of Cassie's mouth against hers. Julie made it quite clear that it was a one-off experiment, and Cassie knew then that the softer side of Julie, the one she coveted so much, was strictly off-limits.
Still, when all was said and done, even if the relationship wasn't everything that Cassie wanted, their friendship suited each other well enough, and they were firm friends through two degrees.
Those were good times, nothing much to worry about, nothing but study, parties, politics, drink and drugs.
For that first degree, Cassie and Julie really did spend most of their time studying. They were both on good NUSA scholarships, and got loads of high distinctions, and the few plain-old distinctions they received could be dismissed as the price of actually having a life.
Julie was doing a medical science degree, and Cassie was doing an arts degree, mostly in psychology. Although Cassie felt more comfortable working in the softer sciences, she was fascinated by the scientific world inhabited by Julie, and enjoyed knowing that she was a spectator at the cutting edge of real science, if not an active participant.
Without Cassie, Julie wasn't all that sociable. Cassie supplied Julie with a social life, and was heavily involved in university politics. Everyone on the campus had been accosted by Cassie at one time or another in support of women's groups, or peace rallies, or GLBT rights, and sometimes Julie came along to Cassie's rallies or meetings to let herself feel like a little bit of a radical.
Cassie was also a very good student of human nature, and a good judge of character, and Julie relied on Cassie to look after her. Cassie had learned not to press the issue of love, and Julie guessed the reason for Cassie's occasional dark, foul moods, but she assumed they would pass, and they always did.
By third year, Julie had worked out that she was pretty much asexual, and Cassie had pretty much given up on sex to be with Julie. They moved into a house together, and Cassie stopped hanging out so much with her Lesbian friends. Many of them just assumed Cassie and Julie were a couple, but only the few that stayed close to Cassie knew the sad truth.
The house they shared was cold, damp, and mouldy. It had been a group house since the '70s, and it wasn't in good condition. It was way out in Downer, a suburb that could be used as a definition for nominative determinism, as it was dull and dreary, nowhere near any night life, and named after a second-rate prime minister.
Cassie's Ph. D. was in Psychology, which she no longer enjoyed. She didn't spend much time in her office as it was dreary, and made her feel depressed. As Psychology was one of the university departments, she had to deal with snotty undergraduates, tutoring them in B.F. Skinner, a man she totally abhorred.
She spent most of her time over on the other side of campus, with Julie, in the School of Biological Sciences Research. Julie's Ph. D. was in biology, but she was a rare bird, a biologist with computer science skills. Julie was always busy, with programming mostly, but she didn't mind Cassie's company while she was working. As Biological Sciences was one of the Schools, there weren't any undergraduates to teach, and she could concentrate on her thesis.
Cassie wished that her thesis topic could be more like Julie's.
Julie was getting to study parasitic worms. She was studying the cysts and trails caused by parasitic worms as they invaded the human body. She had started out by examining MRI and CAT scans of victims whose flesh was infected by tapeworms, in
Cysticercosis
. The older imaging devices could only see the cysts, but she had lucked out by being in the right place at the right time when the School of Physical Sciences, right next door, built the first practical Taubett X-ray interferometer.
The Taubett machine was a then-new imaging device which uses X-rays at very low doses, a thousand times smaller than regular X-rays, and measures refraction instead of absorption. It could produce excellent images of soft body tissues, and by scanning a sequence of 2d images in a spiral arrangement, could reconstruct a volumetric view of the three-dimensional structures inside the human body.
Julie was hoping she could use the Taubett machine to analyse the tiny trails left by worms in a patient's flesh. Her programming skills had already transformed old-fashioned CAT scans into beautiful visualisations. She wanted to see some scans of infected humans taken with the Taubett machine, but so far she'd only been allowed to take images of plastic phantoms and small dead animals.
Julie didn't much care for the worms herself, but she liked talking about them with Cassie.
Cassie had a fetish for parasitic worms.
Cassie had followed Julie's progress closely, and was fascinated by the many different species of parasite which made a home in the human body, the various symptoms they caused, and the ingenuity of the solutions evolution had devised for them.
Julie knew all of Cassie's secrets, and liked to tantalise her with possibilities.
One of Julie's most cherished memories was seeing the blush in Cassie's cheeks as Julie first described the process by which
Schistosoma
colonises a human host. Tiny worms,
Cercariae
, are released by their snail hosts once per day into water. If any come into contact with a poor individual's skin, they search the skin for a hair follicle and release enzymes to digest the skin and allow them to enter their host's capillaries. After visiting various way-points in their host's body, they develop suckers to attach to their host's liver, and begin to feast on red blood cells. A male and a female worm might meet, perhaps in the host's heart, and then fuse, to begin expelling eggs into the bloodstream and the intestines of their victim.
Once the eggs entered the water and infected another snail, the whole cycle would begin again.
The idea of having one's body co-opted by a creature which would feed from you and multiply within oneself was delicious to Cassie, and she loved to learn about the many and varied mechanisms parasitic worms used to infect their victims. Even more delicious was hearing the explanation from Julie's kissable, educated, lips.
Truth to tell, such discussions would often leave Cassie aroused, and she could never entirely tell how much this was due to the worms, and how much it was due to listening to such a beautiful woman.
Julie wasn't conventionally beautiful, but she was beautiful to Cassie nonetheless. Julie actually looked rather like a photo of Nana Mouskouri that Cassie had seen in her own Nana's LP collection. Julie had very fine skin; elegant, angular features; long, dark, hair; and lively, intelligent eyes behind her not-very-flattering spectacles. She was tall, and slender, and Cassie enjoyed watching her economical movements, which Cassie thought untutored, but very elegant.
Rather than being pretty, Cassie was handsome in a tomboyish kind of a way. She had her hair dyed black and cut short, many, many piercings, including her ears, lower lip, and her tongue, and she was a little on the heavy side. Julie knew what she was to Cassie, and didn't mind it. In fact, Cassie's obvious regard made Julie feel appreciated, but she felt no need to reciprocate.
Both Julie and Cassie had sharp tongues, and they both liked to compete in a kind of bitchy one-upmanship, especially when they were talking about boys.
Julie gave Cassie all the affection that she felt able to, while still remaining aloof, and dressed.
Cassie was physical, and demonstrative, and Julie didn't mind her cuddles as they watched Doctor Who on their sofa, sometimes drunk, sometimes stoned out of their gourds, Julie stroking Cassie's hair, and content in each other's company.
***
When Cassie and Julie had first started uni together, they had heard about the parasitic worm infection in the USA. It was exciting news at the time, and trying to work out the truth about the worms from the heavily-censored media was one of the first games to draw them together.
Some of the conspiracy websites called it an "alien invasion", but those websites were always full of UFO stories, so neither of them paid much attention to that idea.
Cassie found some stories on the web which described the invasion in quite graphic detail. She found them on an erotic mind-control story archive, and, as she wasn't getting any action from Julie, she relied on sites like this for her physical pleasure. She enjoyed these stories very much, but didn't realise for quite some time how accurately they had portrayed events.
Some of the details had emerged in the main-stream media: the initial epidemic had been extremely concerning, as thousands of women had been infected, but a cure had been found within a year. Australia's top-notch quarantine regulations and huge sea border had kept the worms offshore, so that, so far, Julie and Cassie had only heard unreliable reports, second-hand, of the symptoms of the infections, and the life-cycle of the worms.
All of that changed one bright, crisp July morning, the heart of winter in Canberra, at the beginning of a new semester.
Julie and Cassie had taken a break between semesters, and Julie had only just returned from a family wedding in WA.
She was keen to get back to work in her little office.
It was normally a long, straight, ride from Downer to the university, but today Julie took her bicycle along the back streets near Black Mountain. The air, full of frost, invigorated her as the stands of gum trees reminded her why Canberra was called "the bush capital".
She had some thinking to do, as she was in a bit of a bind right now.
Her supervisor had been offered a lucrative sabbatical at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, at very short notice. He had left Australia as soon as the offer came up, much to Julie's chagrin, and had taken many of the senior staff with him. He should have been organising examiners, and meetings of Julie's supervisory panel, and helping Julie through the whole sorry process, but he had only sent her one curt email before he left, and hadn't responded to her since.
Julie still had to write up her thesis, and find reviewers, and she was starting to get worried about even finishing her degree.
Locking up her bike, she walked up to the familiar doors of the Biological Sciences building. The building dated from the 1950's, and still smelled of the same linoleum polish they had been using since it first opened.
As Julie pushed the door open, her eyes were captured by a woman standing next to the empty reception desk, seemingly waiting for her. Julie was immediately attracted by the straightness of her posture, the efficiency of her smart business suit, and her immaculate make-up, which didn't obscure her bright smile and her intelligent eyes.
"Julie Smith, I presume?" the woman said.
High on her heels, she clicked over the linoleum and extended a hand in greeting, leaving no possibility of being ignored. She enfolded Julie's cold right hand with both of her own, which were warm, and soft.
"My name is Eve Hunter. I should have emailed you earlier, or called, but I know you've been on vacation, and I thought it would be more pleasant to meet you in person.
"I'm from Johns Hopkins university in the States. I apologise in advance for all the trouble we've caused you by stealing your supervisor away. However, he recommends you very highly, which is why I am here."
