Chapter 2

Classrooms. Riemann was built in the early 2000s, when the bright idea of having windows that opened had returned - these windows were photochromic, though, so if the sun were coming in too strongly they would darken. The desks and chairs were separate, all made of some industrial material and uniformly beige. Hexagonal basalt floor tiles. The place was built to last.

Mr. Mesrobian directs the ‘homeroom’ function - fifteen minutes a day out of everyone’s life for administrivia. I’m not saying anything is wrong with Mr. Mesrobian. He’s a nice guy who has to do a short but dull job every day and he tries to make it bearable. He strides and he’s solidly built, maybe 175 cm and 80 kilos. Oddly, he has a mustache.

“Good morning, gentlefolk. I hope you are ready for some excitement, not that we have any planned today but it’s good to be prepared.

“General announcements. Students are reminded that the wild animals on campus are not to be fed. A student was chased and nipped by a Canada goose, said goose’s wrath being incurred by the student’s running out of dried maize.

“The Administration cautions students about vehicular traffic regulations on local roads. While pedestrians have the right of way on the rightmost lanes in either direction of traffic, this does not apply to the center lanes. It is pedestrians’ responsibility to cross the center lanes at a traffic control, or with due caution.

“School cooking classes are now producing more than half of the student body’s lunch requirements. Chef Bardy is commended for making a complex logistics chain work to use class results that were previously sent to zoos as bulk food.

“Anything for the record, comments or questions?”

Nope.

“Gentlefolk, maintain hope.”

>Dear Master Ro,

I have an appointment this afternoon that I am afraid I cannot miss, so I must sacrifice today’s lesson for it. I will pick it back up Saturday. Your affectionate student -Achille

I went to the clinic and got my tattle-tat. Green, of course. It meant I didn’t have anything going on with nasty bacteria or viruses. It would turn red if there were anything of that kind requiring medical attention.

Western Lit, Mr. Moss, Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy”.

Hal Hunter is in this class, we’ve been friends forever. He is clever with humor, there are sly puns and jokes in things he says that sometimes dawn on you hours later. He’s been a bit down of late, but he said “Hi, Ash”. I touched his arm and sat down just as Mr. Moss came in to start the class. He looked around. “Anything?” Hal said the only thing keeping ‘Tristram Shandy’ from being slapstick was the mulishness of the people in hanging on to their hobby-horses. A dozen people started jabbering at once. Leave it to Hal for that, it wasn’t -quite- snark but you had to listen.

Diff. EQ., Dr. Green

Bang-ja and I sit together in this class, where we listen to Dr. Green tell us about the mathematical prowess of Dr. Green, occasionally throwing in anecdotes about how Dr. Green used today’s subject ideas to save America or cure world hunger. We race ahead of him out of self-defense and kill his exams. He likes to hear Dr. Green, not students, talk so class interaction is very limited.

Lunch

Bang-ja and I usually hang around together at lunch time. The first thing to know about Bang-ja is she is radiant. “Kilowatt smile” hardly covers it. She’s about 170 cm of a serious dancer (“but I’m far too tall and heavy”). Her hair, worn long, has a look of sliding over itself when she moves her head quickly and it’s so black it seems blue in certain lighting. Her flattish face, high cheekbones, prominent epicanthic folds, flawless skin and khaki coloration reflect her Korean ancestry. I had known her for years. We both like math.

She said “here’s another one. See this figure? How is that achiral?” It looked like a couple interlinked links of chain. In this one there was a little trick. So I sketched it for her on my tablet, then said “here, twist the view around like this” - I showed her. She said “how does this help?” and I said “another way to decide about chirality is to see whether there is a plane of symmetry, two-dimensional analog of an axis of symmetry. That’s the same, conceptually, as a mirror and if the figure on both sides of the plane of symmetry is the same, it’s achiral.” She looked at me, lost. So I sketched the plane. The trick is simply sticking the plane in, not thinking about how difficult it would be to cut it like that if it were metal. I showed her. “Oh, that’s ... I see it. Thanks.” “Doing this is a series of little tricks of imagination. I have no idea how else one gets there.” I showed her a few more examples and sent her the index number of the application in the Collective public server. “It’s worth monkeying with, more like play than seriousness, and if you are anything like I am one day you will suddenly find this easy.”

She showed me the infamous calc problem #9, and she had indeed done all the work to evaluate the integral the hard way. “Wow. It looked so bad I did this, and it really was bad.” So I showed her - for now, without proof - what you had to do to differentiate under the integral. It’s a ‘seeking’ thing and very often all it takes is insight. Serge provided that, but once he started I’d picked it up and told Bang-ja about that as well.

When we packed up Bang-ja said “I had no idea your legs were so pretty.” “Ha. I know my tibias are beaten to hell and gone.” “It doesn’t show. Have a look some time.”

Comp. geom., Mr. Simmons

For me most computational things feel like book-keeping and this wasn’t an exception, but closed-form solutions in anything tougher than very simple geometry are too hairy in the theory of shells and hulls, so here’s where I got some of my requirements out of the way.

Drama, Mr. Bowen

“Well-rounded” students took classes like these so in a spurt of bureaucratic excellence it became a requirement for everyone. I thought I had zero ability in the class but sometimes I caught glimpses of interesting thoughts. Prized was thinking rapidly on one’s feet, especially when we were doing improv, and maybe I was getting a little better at it. It still was a sea-anchor on my class standing, but I’d only have to take this sort of time-waster once.

Danni wouldn’t be out of her last class for a few minutes, I thought, so I sent her a quick message and went to the measurers’ place just around the corner on Bohr. They have two cells, both occupied, so I figured on waiting five minutes but one of them opened up in about two. “OK, go ahead.” So the walls darkened, I stripped, put my feet in shallow cavities. Coiled my hair, stuck it on my head and put on the goggles and my hands on the handles. The goggles darkened and a dim red glow came from them. “Ready, one.” “OK”. And I knew there were lots of measurements going on but they can’t be felt and you’d better not try to see the laser light - ‘with your remaining eye’, as Serge would say. “Ready, two” as the cavities and handles moved. “OK.” And so it went for eight different poses. “Achille Boakye, safe” and the light in the goggles turned green. I took them off, put my clothes back on. When I opened the door the walls cleared. “Accept here, please.” I thumbed the pad and got a disk, but the data were already going wherever Aunties keep such things.

I got back to school and Danni was waiting at the fountain just inside the school gates. She was speaking and gesturing animatedly to a man I recognized, Cat Somebody from drama. Maybe Cat is a gymnast, I thought, that’s Danni’s main sport and although she is just as too big for it as Bang-ja is for ballet, she’s wonderful to watch except when you are afraid she is going to faceplant. When Danni spotted me she excused herself from Cat and came right over. “Cat’s OK but I have been thinking about hanging out with you and I can’t wait, are you ready?” We walked outside the gates, she took my hand, I could feel her almost fizzing. “Um, look, sorry but I’m feeling your excitement and you might be misplacing it. I have no idea what I’m doing and you are the first person I ever kissed with feelings.” “We’ll see, OK, it’s just that that first kiss was so wild I am wondering if you have, erm, other talents.” I squeezed her hand a little.

She’s always called my house ‘the abandoned house’ because most of it looks empty. We clear away things when we’re done with them, or build them into cabinets, so yes the rooms, except for the dining room and the deck, are empty when unused. It’s about noticing the room itself instead of what it contains. So I led her to my room, opened one of the cabinets, unrolled my futon and then asked her “sure you want to play?” “I’ve been thinking about it all day. Yes. I’m going to kiss you for a minute and then we’re taking one another’s tops off. If things go well with that, off go the rest of the clothes. Safeword is ‘safeword’ or ‘elephant’ in case you want to stop, ok?” I said “okay.”

I sat on the futon, patting next to me where I wanted her. I wanted to lie on top of her and kiss her now, and when our tops were off, and when we were naked but of course it made sense to be flexible, I didn’t know what she wanted. So I kissed her and she responded eagerly and that made me happy, I can please Danni!

She wanted our tops off as much as I, so keeping the kiss going I unbuttoned the school blouse and then her bra. I had to help her take my blouse and bra off and her eyes widened. “Your breasts are beautiful!” Well, I hadn’t exactly made a point of showing them off. She stroked my right breast and missed the nipple, twice, so I knew she was teasing and once again, lightening up but not breaking the kiss, I planted her hands on my breasts so she could play with them.

My nipples and areolae promptly lengthened and hardened, and that’s maybe 20 mm of nipple and the bulge of my areolae was another ten. I decided to finish the first kiss so I began squirming on top of her to bring my big distended nipples in contact with hers, and they responded. She was flexing her hips and I was aware, again, how happy it made me that she was enjoying my touch, and then I had a swell of feeling about bringing her delight, and she came. It had been faster this time.

She lay beneath me, petting my hair, my breasts, the sides of my neck and she was giving me pleasure too. I felt her wish for my own delight and that gave me another wave of feeling for her and she came again.

After a couple minutes of her lying inert she said “I don’t mean to be rude but this is like nothing I have ever experienced, and I don’t understand.” “I don’t, either, I thought if you came once you’d have a refractory time but that theory didn’t play out with the facts. I want all our clothes off, this is far more delightful than I had thought it would be.”

“It’s not that. Ever since that first kiss I have, um, been feeling things from you. It isn’t just your body, it feels like your mental focus is on me, too, and I’m getting a backwash of it. Like I knew, in that first kiss, you feel a lot about me.”

“It’s true, I do, and that first kiss was kind of a blast in my head but it was all, um, not merely true but also right.” “And the mental focus?” “Uh. Looking, feeling, tasting I get complete impressions of stuff, like what would feel good for you.” “Wish I could do that.”

So she stood up and took off her skirt. Beneath it was a mesh garment tight around her, um, clit. “I’d thought I wouldn’t cum if I wore that, but it’s another busted idea.” “Take it off, then, I wouldn’t want to make a mistake, it looks a little painful.”

She said “it isn’t, it’s secure but I’ve never cum when I was wearing it before.” And she removed it and I was surprised how quickly her clit became hard - the refractory time theory seemingly not working at all. Of course I took my skirt and underwear off and there was my dangling spigot again. Bah. I wished for once to find it doing something, anything except being a conduit for urine - yet with Danni sporting her boner I decided to roll the dice. I kissed her clit, licked, kissed some more, but I had to stop because she wasn’t breathing well.

“OK, this is now officially part of how weird my body is.” “It is but it feels so good when you’re doing, uh, basically anything. I keep getting strong feelings about how delicious you are.”

There were things at play here I didn’t understand at all, so I said “There are things at play here I don’t understand at all.” She giggled. “Well, the exploration has placed us in an alien landscape so let me try some things, ok?” I nodded. “I want to kiss your breasts.” “I want that, too, Danni, see what happens.”

She sort of nibbled her way up the left one and muttered “it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye”, but she kept on and it felt delightful until she started playing with my ass, at which point things changed a lot: first, I had to have that; second, my ass grabbed her fingers which made her squawk; third, my cock began its first ascent.

“What ... thefuck...” she breathed. “Please, Danni, I need your fingers inside me -ah! - now. “Ash, relax, you’re ... it feels like you’re trying to pull my fingers inside you.” “I am, I really like that.” “But no one can do that ... uh. UP TILL NOW no one I’ve known could do that.” “Seems like I can, please, more?” And as she gave me more of her fingers inside me I had a real, thick erection and that felt wonderful. “Ash?” “Mmmm?” “That is a size queen’s dream, good thing I am a size queen.” She asked for her fingers back and I opened. “People ... sorry, never mind.” And of course my erection flopped over.

“I have an idea”, said Danni. She rummaged in her carry-along and found a longish dildo. “I’m not sticking my clit in there until you give that back unscathed, but maybe it’s all you need. Try to relax.” I put my ankles behind my neck and opened. “Insect hoofs on Lassie, how did you do that?” “I saw it and tried it and it worked, I’d kind of forgotten about it.” “Think of a career in porn.” “I’m thinking of a career in math, no, thanks.” “I wonder if there are cardiologists who do erotic vids.”

She stuck the dildo into my hole and I sucked it in. “How did you do that?” “Don’t know. It just happened.” My cock rose and and hardened again and I said “wait a sec, first - um, well, second time I’ve had a boner.” She rearranged my legs for access to it. “I want”, said Danni. She lubed and slowly took my proudly erect cock in her ... cunt? I’d check in about that.

This was different, not that most of the afternoon hadn’t been. It was intense and I looked at my sweet brave friend Danni and I felt another of those surges of affection and she came, painting me from face to tits. “That wasn’t supposed to be so fast.” I laughed. “What is supposed to be isn’t winning here. I’m as baffled as you.” “Then maybe we ought to play as though we’re aliens or something.” I flared and rippled my cock and she made a face like an astonished fish and started riding me as though she had to have it all at once. This was delicious and she was sweating and my cock was feeling all kinds of sensation and then the almost-familiar surge of affection for her came along, blossomed and Danni gave me my first orgasm. My body locked up as every nerve fired at once.

When I opened my eyes there was Danni checking my pulse. “Vasovagal syncope, Ash. The first time you have one is the most dangerous, and you were ninety seconds away from my calling 7700. I’ve had two. What happens is your nerves signal all together, your blood vessels relax at once, your blood pressure and heart rate crash and boom, so does a lot of cognitive activity. You’re back and we’ll treat you as the fragile creature you are right now.”

I tried to sit up but she pushed me back. “Serious shit, Ash, lie there for another ten minutes. You are going to be OK, but my way and I’m not kidding, just lie there.” “Did you break me?” She laughed. “We don’t know yet who broke whom, but you spoiled me with the body you were so worried about.” “As in...?” “Best sex of my life, and the scariest AND the most virtuosic.” I reached my arms out, she hugged me ... Danni, Danni, you have no idea what you have given me...

She wouldn’t even let me wrap my legs around her until the ten minutes were up but then it was OK and she wanted more kisses. In a couple of minutes I was hard again and this time she played with my cock, lightly, dragging her nails across scenic bits as I squirmed and rasped my breath in and out and here is Danni, experimenting fearlessly, and we came again, and together. That was wonderful and I managed to stay present, holding her as she rolled her eyes up toward the ceiling.

“Ash?” “mmhm?” “Is this fun for you?”

I started to laugh, then thought better of it. “Danni, now I understand why people like sex.” She laughed, loudly and long. “You thought it was overrated?” “I had no idea what to think, but now I understand a little. There are way more things to try.”

I said “would you let me try another, um, thing?” “Sure.” “On your back, then. In a little while I am going to kiss your ... clit?” She nodded. It rose along with my cock and nipples.