Chapter 33: Mastering the Brain

The following week, Tamara was busy with paperwork. She and Emma had gotten the reviewers’ comments on the physics article they had recently submitted. Emma wanted Tamara to read the review and prepare responses or suggest clarifications in the article.

“This is the best writing practice you can get, reading reviewers’ reaction to your paper,” Emma had told her. “It helps when you do the original writing; you’ll know the kinds of questions you’ll probably get, won’t you.”

“Sure,” Tamara replied. “Dr Beauford did that with our papers. He was funny; you should have heard him when he read the reviews of our last paper. I didn’t know that there were so many synonyms for ‘idiot.’”

“Really now? Reviewers generally try to be constructive and suggest ways to make something clearer when it’s puddled...” She noticed Tamara’s blank look. “Sorry. It means ‘confusing.’ That sounded like an unusual review.”

“It was. Beauford realized the guy ... whoever it was ... wasn’t current in the field. He told the editor to get another review from someone who knew the field.”

“Ah, that makes sense. Well, dear, here’s your chance to contribute a bit more to the paper. Here’s the three reviews; see what you make of them.”

And the other item of paperwork that Tamara had to prepare was the proposal for her MRI work. Emma wanted to be sure that Tamara approached her project in a disciplined manner. She knew that if Tamara got one of her creative ideas, she might go off on a tangent. Since the MRI project was likely to be an expensive one, Emma had to teach Tamara how to conserve resources. Also, much of the project would be done at the APL, where Emma had access to the superconducting MRI prototype whose design Hopkins had licensed for commercial use, so Tamara’s access would not be as easy as it was to go to the Physics building. The APL ran a shuttle service from Hopkins, but Tamara would have to fit the travel time into her schedule.

She had a busy week, working on the journal paper reviews and preparing her research proposal, which Emma wanted in the format of a research grant proposal. For their physics article, one reviewer wanted the authors to show, in a physical system, how electrons could be made to move against a charge gradient, despite Emma’s calculations which showed that theory supported a high storage density in the molecular lattice. Tamara added a reference footnote to that section which referred readers to her engineering article, noting that it had been submitted. For her own project, she already had drafts of her project design which she had previously prepared for Beauford. That was when she learned about the high costs of research. She used those drafts to write her proposal. She was glad when she got those writing jobs completed. And now it was the weekend. She and Peter planned to make their postponed visit to the Museum of Industry. They were seeing each other regularly now.

Early July

Peter and Tamara were on their postponed visit to the museum, and their conversation had turned to their visit to Emma’s home.

“I’m still having a hard time seeing you as a shy, withdrawn kid,” Tamara told him. “You seem to be outgoing and okay with social situations. Oh, and let’s suspend the French for today; I sense that we’re gonna get a bit emotional and that’s not good for teaching.”

“Okay on the no-French. It’s a long story ... well, not that long, but it seemed to me that it took forever to get through childhood. Socially, it was awful.”

“Jeez, sweetie, that’s terrible. Um, just a guess here, but did your empathy play a major part in making your troubles worse?”

“Crap, Tamara. You’re a psychic, you know? Somehow you know things about people and it’s just uncanny,” Peter exclaimed.

“Well, thank you, I think,” she grinned. “Someday I’ll tell ... well, how ‘bout this? You tell me yours and I’ll tell you mine.”

Peter laughed. “Now that’s a pretty funny repurposing of that age-old ‘get-into-the pants’ routine, isn’t it? Okay, but I won’t ask you to tell me anything embarrassing about your own childhood.”

Tamara could sense the “embarrassed” taste flowing from him. She rested her hand on his arm.

“I’ve got nothing embarrassing to hide,” she said. “But you don’t have to be embarrassed with me. After all, I’ve seen all of you, right?” she joked.

Peter chuckled. “Yeah, I think it’s self-embarrassment, if that’s a thing. I embarrassed myself, I guess. So let’s see. Um, need to go way back. Okay, my parents told me that when I was four or about then, I had taught myself to read. Dad read me books, he told me, and I would ask him what the letters were. I must have memorized what he read, and later, worked out how the sounds matched the letters. Back then, Mom was still on sea duty and we were living in Norfolk at the Navy base. She had a doctorate in physics and was a lieutenant, the nuclear surface warfare officer on a carrier based there, and Dad was a lieutenant commander, the head of the base’s mechanical engineering department.”

“Oh, a military family, then. My dad’s a Marine.”

“That’s right, cool. Yeah, Dad was in Navy ROTC in college and got a master’s. He met Mom on one of their tours and the Navy kept them together. Dad didn’t want to make the Navy a career, so he stayed in until Mom got her teaching job at the Academy when I was, um, five or six years old. Anyway, I went to kindergarten in Norfolk and my parents told me that I would come home from school crying. They found out that my teacher was criticizing how I didn’t learn to read properly. It seems that a lot of the unfamiliar words I came across, I read phonetically. When the teacher stopped me and told me to read properly, the kids would laugh.

“That started me down the path to being shy. I also could feel that the teacher didn’t like me and even though a lot of Navy kids were in the school, the other kids looked down at us. I could feel their emotional hostility. And I was very advanced, too, in kindergarten and first grade, when we moved to Maryland. In first grade, I’d get bored in class and would sneak something to read. The teacher would call on me when she thought I wasn’t paying attention, but I knew the answer. The other kids saw me reading and I could feel their jealousy, ‘cause if they got caught reading something not part of the class, they got scolded and I didn’t. Stuff like that kept happening and it got so that I became withdrawn. If I answered in class, the kids would think I was showing off.

“We moved when Mom was appointed to a faculty position at the Academy and then Dad got his job at the APL. I mentioned the singing lessons; my folks put me on them to help in my confidence, that’s when I met Amy. She lived next door and was also very shy, but we kinda bonded. Since we had each other, and I could still sense rejection from other kids, we never made any friends. When we were in junior high, we found out about the Program and because Amy was so small—she wasn’t growing normally even then—her parents sent an exemption request to the high school. My folks thought that since we were nudists, I’d be okay.

“Oh, and I need to mention my sister. She was like a rock for me. She tried to watch over me at school too. The kids would sometimes pick on Amy and I would get in trouble for defending her. I’ll admit that the only way I had to defend her was physical; I would push kids away from Amy when they were being annoying, so Barbara had to explain that I was protecting my friend. She got me out of trouble a lot. Fortunately, she could be around a lot. We lived in a small community and the high school was pretty small. Less than a thousand kids, total. So that’s how my growing-up years went.”

Tamara shook her head in sympathy. “That’s just so sad. Childhood should be about having fun and making friends. It sounds like a terrible time.”

“Oh, don’t get me wrong; it actually got me to here, into the Clarke program. My friends were Amy and books. I learned a lot, and by junior high, Dad was taking me to the lab sometimes. I gravitated to the engineering side of science rather than theoretical. I like things that do stuff.”

“But your reaction to getting put into the Program seemed so extreme,” Tamara commented. “I can see shyness as a problem, but you say you were naked in public—the resort, anyway—so your being nude wouldn’t have been a body-image or exposure problem. Am I wrong?”

“No, you’re not wrong. I think my empathy caused the psychological reaction I had. When Amy and I began high school, a week in, they had that ‘Program assembly’ a lot of schools do to begin each year or each term. They call a bunch of kids to the stage and make them strip. That’s crazy, it’s completely degrading, doing it so publically. When they started the assembly, the whole room was bursting with negative emotions. Both Amy and I could feel it and it was terrifying for us. She was shaking and I wasn’t much better.

“When they called kids up to the stage, most were frightened but several panicked. One boy and one girl really freaked out when they were called and had to be dragged up to the stage. The boy was fighting and he got himself free of the teacher holding him—kicked him, I think, and ran off backstage. We heard the door alarm go off so he got out of the building that way. Some teachers ran out to look for him, but the principal went on anyway, going over the rules and stuff. Someone came over to him and whispered so the principal looked at a paper and said he was replacing that boy and called another name—and that boy got up and dashed out of the auditorium. He got out of the building too.

“The principal got really irritated and got another boy up there. Meanwhile, the panicking girl was wailing. Amy and I were just trying to hold on, but all the emotions were destroying us. They got all the kids up there to strip and the ones who didn’t were held while a staff member pulled off their clothes. The panicked girl was stripped too and she collapsed—fainted, I don’t know, because that sent me over the top. I got sick. I just made it out to the aisle before I threw up ... then went into dry heaves. Somehow I wound up in the nurse’s office. They couldn’t reach Mom or Dad immediately so they called an ambulance to take me to the hospital. I found out later that the docs thought it was shock. Maybe it was, from my empathic sense being overloaded.

“Yep, that is extreme,” Tamara said. “I have a strong empathic sense too, but I learned how to ... um, compartmentalize it, I guess you’d call what I do. My mom is a kind of therapist and I learned about thoughts and emotions from watching her and talking with her.”

“Man, could I have used advice like that,” Peter mused. “So Amy was really frightened when they took me away and she curled up into her shell. Her parents got called and they brought her home. That was the first day we saw the Program operating. I got put on meds, a SNRI—that’s a serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor—that blunts emotional responses as well as being an anti-depressant. I was given a small dose, just enough to ‘take the edge off,’ as they put it. It must have helped a little, ‘cause I was able to function in school despite the crap I saw happening.

“But my biggest problem was seeing what was happening to Amy. She definitely wasn’t growing and looked just like a ten- or eleven-year-old kid. The other kids teased her unmercifully, asking her if she was lost; the kindergarten was in another school building, stuff like that. And when she had P.E., the girls just tore her up with insults and vicious comments. After a couple of months, her parents got her a P.E. exemption when they got her delayed puberty diagnosis.”

“This is really difficult for you to talk about; I can feel it,” Tamara said. “You want to stop?”

“No, I want to tell you some of the sights that I saw that sent me over the edge. One of the first surprises I had was when I learned that the school was considering having their swimming programs done naked. They were also looking into naked gym for everyone. But I think that got the parents so riled up that they dropped that idea. It was the crazy sex stuff in classes that bothered me the most, because I couldn’t ignore it and just walk away. One of the kinds of orchestrated sex shows was performed in the classroom—they called it ‘relief’ sessions. Starting from the very first day that they ran the Program, I saw those sessions every single day. Anyone ever tell you about them?”

“Not firsthand,” Tamara told him. “But I did I read some descriptions on a website and those were nasty.”

“So a typical one went like this. For a guy. The teacher had him sit in the front, facing the class. He was asked if he wanted solo or help.”

“Solo meaning masturbation.”

Peter nodded. “Yeah. The first one I remember, the kid was nervous but his cock was so hard, it was almost red in color. There had been some girls in the hall teasing him just before.”

“It sounds like the Program wasn’t so terrible for some kids, then.”

Peter shook his head “no,” but then went on, “That’s not it. It wasn’t only the negative emotions that I felt. I was sensitive to really strong positive ones too, and it was the tension between positive and negative that would overload my ability to cope. This one time, it was the first I really watched, made an indelible impression on me. I can’t forget what I saw—I can see it even now when I close my eyes. The guy wanted to get help, so the teacher got a girl volunteer to come get him off. He spread his legs and slumped down in the chair and she took his cock, starting to pump it slowly up and down. His head rolled back and he groaned; then she put her mouth near the tip of his cock and licked the head, then up and down the sides. Finally she put it into her mouth and began sucking and he began bouncing his hips and groaning. Then he howled and she jerked her head back as a jet of cum hit her chin, but then she shoved him back into her mouth again. He finished in her mouth. I could tell since I saw some of his cum dribble out of the corner of her mouth when she walked back to her seat.”

“So the girls just did that?” Tamara asked in disbelief. “Just gave blowjobs in public?”

“Well, think about it. I overheard a girl talking to a friend, saying that it was cool that she could do things with boys, seeing so many naked ones and trying stuff on them, with no risk to herself. Not like if she were on a date and didn’t want to be touched, herself. Looking on the Program that way, I suppose some kids thought it was okay. Except when they had to be the naked ones.”

“That makes sense, in a really twisted way. The girls got a chance to handle a lot of penises with no danger of being forced into having sex,” Tamara agreed. “Did girls do the ... ah, relief thing too?”

“Not as much as boys, but yeah. I remember a few times, but there wasn’t much to see. Guys had their faces in gals’ crotches. Again, I was suffering with all the emotions in the room. Um, yeah, one time in ninth grade, the health teacher did one session with a boy and girl, a quite timid little thing; he made them pose to show their parts. The girl was completely petrified, especially when he told the boy to do oral sex on her. It was crazy; he actually had a camera and projector set up and had the boy take a position so the camera had a close-up view.

“He wanted to show foreplay too so he had the kid start to massage her breasts. Gently, he told him.”

“Um, yes, gently,” Tamara agreed.

“Then he began taking her nipples in his mouth and started to suck on them. The teacher said to fondle her genitals then, so he started to rub his fingers up and down her vaginal slit. The teacher zoomed in the camera on that and we could see his finger begin to massage her clit.”