Chapter 62: Sharing Emotions

NSA, Fort George G. Meade, Maryland: end of October

“All your reports for the last ten days have been uniformly negative,” Ames complained to Nathan Gondon, the agent who had taken over the Alexandre project. “This is your first time back in the office since you began trying to contact the girl, in fact. What’s keeping you from making contact with her?”

“You know, boss, if this were a normal surveillance activity, we could have located the girl within a day or two. But you told me not to use any NSA or police powers, so my hands are tied. I simply can’t track her down. We know where she works, probably—the Hopkins APL, but not where she lives. She stopped using her registered mobile phone a while back so we can’t trace her movements or get a likely home location. Here’s some other things too: First, she doesn’t have a driver’s license from any state. Second, she’s stopped using the credit cards that we know about. We found one bank card and a corporate card and the addresses are a lawyer’s office. She could have others we don’t know about. Third. I can’t find any current apartment or home rental record. Her parents own a home in the county but she’s never there, that I’ve been able to determine. I can’t stake out that home; it’s rural, has several approaches, and a waiting vehicle would stand out like a red flag. That home’s on several acres and has a fence around it and a gated drive. Fourth, I tried Johns Hopkins and they won’t tell me anything. Student privacy, they claim. Next, we queried the State Department passport database and her record still shows a Miami address. That site has multi-story buildings going up on it.

“The APL in Laurel is mentioned in several of her papers but when I went there to ask about her, they blew me off. They don’t give out any info about their workers. I have no idea about how she travels to work, but some of her past credit-card statements show charges from a Uber account and from some executive car services. Those outfits also won’t give out any info about subscribers. I also spent time outside the Physics building at Hopkins watching for her; never saw her. I tried asking various students at Hopkins if they knew her, but someone called the campus cops and they told me that I was banned from the campus for stalking.

“What about tracing incoming calls on any of her possible contacts, like her parents?” Ames asked.

“I tried to have the comm section do that. She’s gotta be aware someone’s tracing her, because after we filter all of the incoming numbers, we find various calls which come from what appear to be a bunch of burner phones—bought with a prepaid card or cash—and anonymous VoIP numbers; that’s mostly a dead end too. It sure looks like she’s aware that someone’s trying to track her. I think that there are only two possibilities to reach her other than sending an email to one of her addresses. One, we use the normal NSA powers for a national security investigation. Or two, try to make a contact through her parents. But to use number one, you really need a strong case and this one is far from that.”

“We’re not using NSA powers; we don’t have any concrete data to back up justifying a warrant for a regular investigation. I’m going on a strong hunch and those hunches have served me well. If you involve the parents, then that would involve other outsiders and most likely make it difficult to convince the girl...” Ames mused. “If she uses a car service for transport to the APL, could you watch for when a car arrives?”

“Watch what building?” Gondon asked. “There are dozens.”

“What about her social media and email contents?”

“We looked; she’s not on any social media—at least with her actual name. She has two email accounts that we could find. One is through Hopkins and then there’s what appears to be a business one with her own domain but that one is registered to an attorney’s office address. She’s very security conscious; all of her emails are encrypted. You nixed it before, but should I try to contact her using an email address?”

“That would be better than trying to go through someone else, like the parents,” Ames said. “But the email can’t come from a government address. Let’s figure out how to set up the email contact. And we need to come up with a way to convince her to work with us and a backup plan if your attempts to reach her don’t work.”

Applied Physics Laboratory, North Laurel, Maryland: early November

Tamara had recruited Peter as her emotion-”pushing” subject to test her EEG electrodes. She was ready for the test on a Friday in early November. She decided to first try the more difficult trial of her wearing the new EEG electrodes while the MRI was performing a scan—more difficult in terms of the likely MRI-generated RF interference with the EEG signals.

“Peter, can I try a little more unpleasant emotion with you first? One I found that makes someone kind of limp for a bit, so it apparently affects the motor neurons. I’d like to see how that appears on the MRI and EEG, if you agree.”

“Um, I guess. Don’t hurt me too bad, though,” Peter said uncertainly.

“This is for science, honey,” she said and he snorted.

When Peter was ready, from about twenty feet away, Tamara “pushed” a yellow-brown taste with black-tinted edges; Peter had no response.

At fifteen feet, she had no response until she caught his eye and then “pushed.” He jerked and told her, “I felt a painful sensation, like a punch in the gut but not in the gut.”

She tried it at inside twelve feet and again needed direct eye contact before Peter yelped as he slumped in the MRI’s chair. She quickly sent a silver healing taste and Peter quickly recovered and sighed as the scan ended.

“Shit, that last one actually hurt, Tamara! That wasn’t funny, you know.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. One time I used it on someone and Dad got the fringe; he said that it hurt him. I thought maybe only the fringe hurt, ‘cause the loss of muscle control didn’t fully affect him. What did you feel?”

“Like I got slugged, but it was crazy, since nothing in my body felt like it got hit. But I felt my muscles go slack, like I had no control. So crazy.”

Tamara went to check the scans in the control room and was pleased to see that the MRI scan, at least, looked good. Both Fox and Foster were there; Foster was monitoring the MRI and Fox, the EEG output. She couldn’t tell about the EEG tracing; Fox was still working on the output.

“Okay, Peter, let’s do the thirst one. No pain this time, okay?” Tamara said when she came back out.

“Sure, but you owe me,” Peter said, sulking.

With Peter sitting about fifteen feet away, she “pushed” thirst to him. When that scan finished, and as Peter hurried to get a bottle of water, Tamara went back into the control room.

Fox looked up from the instrument tracing. “Lots of interference in the EEG here,” he commented. “But I can see a pattern, if I’m reading this right.”

Tamara looked at the chart.

“I see what you mean,” she remarked. “It sort of looks like two signals superimposed. Say, Davy? We still have that brain phantom?”

“Yeah, it’s in the cabinet with the other coils. Oh I know ... you want to try the EEG run with the phantom in the MRI, right?”

“Yep. A control. Dumb of me not to think of that first,” Tamara told him as Peter came in, guzzling his third bottle of water.

While Foster was setting up the phantom, Tamara looked at Peter’s scans when she “pushed” the muscle-effect taste. The scans showed what appeared to be an overload of the neurons in the motor cortex; that overload would also produce a kind of “ghost” pain because the overload extended into the nearby motor sensory area. Tamara now knew about another brain function her ability could affect.

When Foster returned to the control room, they set up an MRI run with the phantom using the same settings as they used with Peter’s scan and then examined the EEG tracing, which, of course, showed no “brain” activity at all.

When Peter returned, he looked at both tracings.

“Marty, do you record the EEG signals in addition to getting the paper output?” he asked.

“Yeah, I think I see where you’re going. Subtract the control run from the live one, right?”

Tamara grinned as Peter nodded. “Sure, that’s a better idea than my trying to use a noise-reduction mathematical filter, I think,” Tamara said.

“I can use the signal-comparison software in the MRI program suite to do that,” Foster offered. “The team working on the data-compression routine set up all of the instrument data acquisition files to use the same format and that includes the EEG signals.”

When they ran the comparison program, they could see that the remaining signal, after subtracting the portion contributed by the MRI’s RF, looked much more like an EEG tracing. Then Tamara tried the experiment with Peter in the MRI and wearing the EEG electrodes while Tamara again sent “thirst” to him. She already had EEG tracings of her “pushing” thirst without the MRI operating.

“Okay, this is enough for now, even though it’s a data set of one subject,” she declared, as Peter was finishing up the last of the case of bottled water. “I want to ship these tracings over to the neurologists at the med school and they can tell me if it shows what we’re looking for. But it does seem to work, so thanks, guys. This is great.”

They started closing up while Peter visited the rest room—he had drunk more than a few bottles of water during the session—and later, when she was alone with Peter, she mentioned the email she had gotten earlier that day.

“I got the strangest email,” she told him. “It came to the foundation email address. The sender was asking about having his company arrange to have me design a training program to improve a person’s sense of smell to enable them to get a job in an industry where scents are marketed—like perfumers or other cosmetics developers.”

“That is strange,” Peter responded. “That idea must have been based on your use of scents to show activation of the olfactory tract. You just mentioned that in passing in one of your papers, right?”

“Yeah and the email got my ‘alert’ sense going. I told you about hearing from Emma that someone was asking about me. Emma told me that she got several calls from people in Hopkins’ admin offices—and a call from the campus police too—that a guy was looking for info about me. The APL admin people also told me that a guy came in there and asked about me.”

“So where’d that latest email come from? Was it like a company address you could check on?”

“I didn’t have time to look it up, sweetie. With it being Friday afternoon, I wanted to finish testing those new electrodes. When we go home, we’ll look it up when we get there. You know, I kinda miss seeing Barbara there all the time; Terence too.”

Tamara had moved into Barbara’s apartment when Barbara graduated. Barbara and Terence were now living together in an apartment in Russet, a town along the Baltimore-Washington Parkway midway between College Park and Hopkins. Barbara was in the psychology doctoral program at Maryland and Terence was finishing up his physics degree at Hopkins, and they were both commuting now.

“So let’s go home now, sweetie,” she told Peter.

Tamara liked Peter’s two-bedroom unit better than her old single, especially since she and Peter were sleeping together now. She was using the spare bedroom as her “extra-curricular” lab now; that avoided having a big Faraday cage occupying part of her living room. After dinner at their apartment, Tamara got her laptop out and began searching for the company name used by the email sender. It was a fairly generic company name and she couldn’t find any company whose work or products could reasonably fit the emailer’s request.

“So you think that this might just be another attempt to find you?” Peter asked. “Like that airport thing?”

“Uh huh, I told you that my warning sense was tickled by it. Kind of a ‘watch out’ sensation.”

“It’s funny; I didn’t feel anything when you told me about the email,” Peter remarked.

“Really? Let’s try something more direct.”

Tamara started her email app and opened the person’s email; then she pushed the laptop over to Peter.

“Read it,” she ordered.

He did. Then, “Damn. This is crazy. I got a warning tingle. How does that work?”

“No idea. But see? Seeing the evidence directly was the key. Somehow you’re tuned to me.”

“I’m tuned to you in other ways, and I’m feeling the need for a tuneup now,” Peter said as he leaned over and kissed her.

As usually happened when they kissed, sparks flew, but this time was different. When they pulled apart, Tamara looked at him, eyes wide.

“Shit, you feel that?” she gasped.

“God, that was crazy,” Peter groaned. “I’m hard as an iron spike!”

“And that kiss made me cum!” Tamara exclaimed.

“And I felt it like it happened to me!” Peter gasped.

They stared at each other for a second and then clothes began flying off. Dropping his underpants to the floor, Peter reached for Tamara, who had just unclasped her bra, and began kissing her chest and caressing her nipples before he dropped to his knees while his kisses traced a path down to her navel. She giggled as Peter tickled her innie with his tongue. Then he grabbed the waistband of her panties and tugged them down, slowly revealing her delta. He buried his face there and she grunted, slightly spreading her legs and Peter found that her vulva was flooded with moisture.

He stood up and in a quick motion, swept her into his arms and lifted her as she squealed in surprise and he headed for their bedroom, carrying her with one arm under her shoulders and the other, behind her knees.

“Oooo ... don’t drop me...” she started, but as they approached the doorway, “ ... watch my head,” she giggled as Peter turned sideways going through the opening. “Are we both horny or what?”

“You bet,” Peter muttered as he deposited her on the bed. “Talking about how our emotions get entwined—like whenever we make love—got me like this.”

He pointed to his erection, now pointing almost straight up.

“Oooh, nice, swee ... eep!” she choked off as Peter dove between her legs, pushed them apart, and began laving her vulva with his tongue.

As he wormed his tongue between her lower lips, Tamara’s breathing got so heavy it seemed to him that she was going to hyperventilate, but her gasps and moans drove him on. Peter moved around to get a better angle and then with several fingers, moved her lips apart to expose her clitoris, which was quite engorged now. He blew on it and then gave the area a swipe with his tongue. Tamara screeched. She was so loud that it startled him.

Peter tried to ask if she was all right but couldn’t move his head away from her vulva; she had clamped her legs behind his head, crossing them, and pulling him against her.

“Ooooh ... so good ... yes...” she was gasping.

Encouraged, Peter attacked the area with vigor, eliciting some additional squeals and “Yes ... yes ... good...” gasps between her louder vocalizations. Peter dove his tongue as deeply as he could into her pussy opening and began trying to tongue-fuck her, but then backed it out, licking her perineum from her flowing pussy opening up to her clit. Tamara shuddered and gasped with each stroke whenever he hit her clit.

Then with his other hand, Peter licked his middle finger and slid it into her vagina. As he felt around for her G-spot, he sucked her clit between his lips and as he rubbed that sensitive spot inside her, he nipped the little organ.

Tamara’s screech then cut off at mid-squeal—it actually turned into a voiceless scream—as she went rigid and her whole pelvis shuddered and her hot channel pulsed around Peter’s finger, as Peter suddenly realized that he himself had ejaculated at the same time that she had orgasmed. That’s when it occurred to him that some of the noise that he had heard actually came from him.

He moved up her body to hold her; she had gone quite limp, but Peter was amazed that even though he had shot a few jets of cum, he was still semi-hard and still quite horny.

Tamara recovered quickly, though, and told Peter, “That was amazing, lover, and I could feel your passions going up the scale too. Did you cum? It felt like it.”

“Yeah, I sure did. I think I felt almost everything you did, too.”

“Awesome...” She glanced down. “Oh! Poor boy, looks like you still have more shots left in the cannon...”

Tamara pushed Peter onto his back, then leaned over him and kissed the end of his cock, which quickly sprang back to almost full rigidity. Tickling Peter’s ball sack, she gently sucked Peter’s organ into her mouth. Using her tongue and lips, she worked his cock until its head was pulsing and almost purple. Then she raised up and straddled Peter’s hips, aiming his cock to impale herself.

She sunk down, plunging Peter’s shaft deeply into her until she was fully embedded. Then leaning forward, she began rocking herself back and forth, allowing her clit to rub on Peter’s pubic bone as she mashed herself against it. She began gasping and groaning again, but when her sounds began to reach a crescendo, Peter grabbed her around the waist and rolled her onto her back.

Peter raised himself up and began stroking into her and she began vocalizing again with gasps and “yes”es and “good”s and “harder”s. Harder Peter could do, so he did, hammering into her with increased strength. Tamara shuddered in a little orgasm and locked her heels behind him, pulling him in tightly with each of his lunges, then she began thrusting herself upwards into each of Peter’s downward strokes.

Both Peter and Tamara dimly realized that once again, they were feeling the sensations that the other felt, as the heat of their passion blossomed into the flowering of the total pleasure that they felt. The flower pulsed as it grew, gathering waves of sensation like additional petals, until suddenly their entire combined consciousness was filled with blinding colors as their flesh erupted in the molten heat of orgasm.