Chapter 6

Laura woke up rested and fresh. Her feet were feeling great, unlike that time when Amanda had been too tired to rub them for her. Clearly there were benefits to a foot massage, even if it had made her a bit uncomfortable at times. Amanda seemed so focused on her, Laura couldn't avoid wondering if she had a nefarious purpose. She had had a very strange dream, after falling asleep. In her dream Amanda was kneeling by her bed, kissing her feet. Both her and Amanda were naked, and there weren't any bedclothes. It had made her feel some odd thrill inside her, something she didn't know how to deal with, but which she couldn't completely ignore.

In fact, Amanda's foot massage had made her experience sensations she wasn't at all used to. She had never been physically intimate with anyone, after her incident with her cousins, and it was the first time in her life she had felt taken care of and pampered quite in that way. Her parents weren't very tactile people, but even when her mother had held her or comforted her it had always felt different. It was the difference between being helpless, and being in control. She was the one being served by Amanda, the one who had to be pleased. It was exhilarating, and somehow it made her warm inside, in ways she wasn't equipped to describe.

Those were her thoughts as she got out of bed, unusually alert. She felt her pubic area was a bit damp, which seemed to happen to her from time to time. Then she realised her clothes weren't lying on the floor like she had left them. Someone, it had to have been Amanda, must have picked upafter her. She blushed, wondering if Amanda thought she was a lazy slob, or unable to do it herself, but though she felt uneasy about it, something felt good about having her roommate sort out her mess like that. She felt the confusion of two contrary impulses clashing inside her, but it wasn't anything of importance, so she didn't think more of it, and got ready for a new day.

She had a booking for the lab again, though after her negative results she wasn't very sure of how to proceed. She needed some time to analyse the data and come up with ways to test different hypotheses. Still, she had limited time with the devolver, so she should try some things out in the hope that they would be useful later. She left her room with those thoughts, while Amanda slept, looking peaceful.

It was still early, and the streets were damp. Autumn was a wet and windy season, and the coming winter would bring cold and slush. Still early and dark, there weren't many people walking yet, though Laura met the occasional morning jogger. Herself, she had never found exercise pleasant, and would rather avoid it, but she didn't mind walking.

As usual, she was lost in her own thoughts. She decided she would collect some data on reactions to faces. Perhaps the problem was that her Subject 8 just lacked interest in music and she was mostly reading boredom. At least that was a possibility. Given how much wetware there was in most people to deal specifically with face recognition, Laura thought it might be a way to get easier readings, which could be used to try to work out a more universal technique than she was using so far. Following this train of thought, Laura came up with some possible reasons for the discrepancies she had been finding, so that she could discard them once she had the data: they came down to the idea her professor had suggested, the possibility that boredom was having an impact on results, different mechanisms for emotion arising from different sense perceptions, and differences related to intellectual engagement with the experience.

It came to Laura that Adrian's specialism may have been on some branch of literary theory. Could it be that his expertise was somehow onlining functional units when he rated poems which weren't being used when he was asked to rate songs, and, if so, would it be possible to measure his ratings when they were unrelated to it? A lie detector that would only work for expert witnesses wasn't what she was looking for, but it would still be a big advance over the state of the art, and well worth her time pursuing.

Walking towards the lab, she took some notes of these ideas in a very schematic way, and sent them off to her supervisor. Maybe Professor Hyde would have some good points on how to proceed. She had a bit less luck looking for alternative inputs to the devolver. As she didn't know much about what would work, she simply thought of possibilities, and left their exploration for another time: gene sequence, blood analysis, traditional polygraphic methods (sweat, heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature), psychometric testing ... She would investigate the potential of each later. There had to be a way to generalise what she had.

Her concentration suddenly broke as she stepped in a puddle. Fortunately she wasn't the kind of person to wear anything but appropriate footwear, so her foot didn't get wet, though she felt the cold of the water through the fabric, and she managed to splash her own trousers. The streets were so old. Built long ago to support cars, back when polluting was free, they were supposed to be maintained, instead of being designed to last, and the materials were often barely in spec. Laura hadn't realised when she first moved, but the deterioration of that basic infrastructure had become obvious even to her. Perhaps one day something would be done. In the meantime she'd better keep an eye on the ground.

At the lab, Laura checked the equipment out, and got things ready for the experiments. She had access to countless databases of audio, video, texts, and even some odour and haptic models, though those required special preparations. Looking at the photo sets she could use in order to set up her protocol with human faces, she found a database with body parts. Curious, she took a cursory look at them: there were countless photos of different parts of human bodies, entirely separated from their context. There were hands, ears, eyes, noses, feet, arms, bellies, breasts, vulvas...

She had never looked at body parts like that, floating about without a body. They looked strangely meaningless, like random objects. There were also stranger photos, which had been cut on less conventional lines, showing, for instance, half a hand, an oval section of a head, and so on. She suspected they had been used for experiments on semantic influence on object recognition, but they were now available for any researcher to use. Although she thought faces were likely to yield better results given the overspecialisation of the visual system to recognising and interpreting them, she wasn't going to let her intuition limit the search space prematurely, so she added body parts to the set of photos her subjects would be shown.

She didn't think a rating task would have much applicability for such photos, though. Rating noses, ears or feet aesthetically didn't sound that plausible to her, so she set up a recognition task instead, where the subject would have to indicate what body part was being shown. The task wasn't the relevant thing: so long as there was some kind of emotional reaction to the photos, she should be able to measure it. That was asuming people would respond at all to segregated bits of human bodies, which she wasn't very convinced of at all; but that was the point: to find out.

Amanda couldn't believe what was happening to her. She ate her breakfast, spoon by spoon of cereal, thinking back over and over again to what had happened the previous night. Rubbing Laura's feet was one thing, and something she obviously didn't mind, but kissing them had been a stupid thing to do. What if she had woken up? What possible explanation could she ever come up with? Although sorting out Laura's clothes had not been quite as bad, and could be excused by friendly altruism, it seemed to Amanda she was betraying her attraction with such gestures. After what Laura had told her of her childhood, she could understand why her roommate was so put off by sex and relationships, and if there was a way through that minefield, being pushy couldn't be it. And yet ... And yet Laura might have been a bit more interested herself than she had admited. The way she caressed Amanda's hand with her foot as she spoke of never having a girlfriend...

"Oh, what nonsense", she muttered. She just had to stop daydreaming about it. She had to be desperate if she was looking for signals in as small a thing as that. That was it, she was getting desperate. Back to work.

Once she finished breakfast, she felt tempted to use her vibrator, remembering how it felt to kneel at Laura's feet and serve her with her body; massaging her was somehow such an intimate experience. Part of what stopped her was having to notify Laura about it. She wondered if Laura would think she was a sex maniac, out of control. Her standards were too different from those of most people in that regard, so maybe twice in a week would seem like wild excess to her. Mostly, she didn't think she should continue reliving her previous night, though, and she did want to finish her application. She wanted to touch the results of her work with her own hands, feel their weight and know she was getting somewhere.

A couple of hours later, when she could no longer come up with more words to describe and justify her work, she decided it was done. She filled in the legal forms, signed with her uni card, and sent it over to her supervisor. Hopefully he could co-sign it quickly and get it queued on the fabber. She might have it in a matter of a week or two, if everything went well.

She remembered she had an invitation to lunch with Lenka and Astrid, and check her comms. They had written back, just to confirm the time. She had another three hours, and she didn't feel like working further. There wasn't much she could do, anyway, until her request went through. She played some upbeat music, and did some exercise. Amanda like dancing and martial arts, and she had learned a bit of both, more of the former than the latter, so she found it easy to come up with her own exercise routines. She hadn't had time to do much with her body of late, and she felt a little stiff and uncoordinated, which was yet another reason to try to keep in shape.

She had been exercising for an hour or so when she heard the soft ping of a comm note. Curious, she turned down the music, which was more appropriate to focus on her body than on her mind, sat down, and read the note, which was from her professor. She felt nervous and joyful; her heart was beating fast with hope. Then came confusion, and annoyance.

Dear student,

I'm pleased to have received your completed application, including the fab geometry files, with full design intent data, which isn't always provided. I gave it a quick check, and it all seems fine.

I'm afraid you must have made a mistake when filling in the legal forms, however. You didn't give your agreement to let other researchers use your work product. Please, resubmit form correctly filled so I can co-sign and queue this ASAP.

When she was filling the forms, she had given some thought to that. Should she give other researchers secondary rights to use her rings? Priority was, of course, assured for her own use, but she still wasn't very sure she should allow it. After all, a big market for her product would be the university itself, and she was not convinced she would be able to sell improved versions that easily, once the basic product was available. There was an argument that letting other researchers use her tool would familiarise them with it and encourage them to buy more, but it could go both ways: this was a prototype after all. What if it had bugs? That, and venture capitalists were always wary of academic licences. It may not have been a rational bias, but protesting irrationality wouldn't get her funding.

What really annoyed her, though, wasn't that Professor Robertson was asking her to change her mind on it. She respected him, and she understood he had an obligation to get the best deal for the university, and for the academy in general, and the more open the licence the better. Pretending her thought out decision was an error, however, was dishonest, and she didn't want to be pressed on it by threats.

She was getting worked up about it. She made a tea for herself, drunk it slowly, and calmed down a little. She still had plenty of time before meeting her friends, so she decided to visit the professor in person. After all, it was common knowledge that written comms could be all too easily misinterpreted. Her decision made, she showered and changed, and walked to her supervisor's office.

It didn't take her long to get there, and she knocked, hoping Professor Robertson would have some time. She should have checked with him, but she just wanted to get it over with. His response to her submission had been so quick she thought he might not have too much on his tray.

"Come in", he said.

She went in and took her usual seat. The professor was a bit surprised to see her, but he smiled at her and she thought everything would turn out well after all.

"So, you're here. Did you bring the corrected form?"

"About that, professor ... I'm not quite sure about granting that licence. I'm afraid that it will prejudice my position when I seek funding. That's why I'm here. I was hoping we could discuss it, if that is ok."

Looking at his face, Amanda thought it perhaps would not turn out well after all.

"If you want legal advice, consult a jurist, child. Why do you bring this to me? I told you what was necessary to go ahead." He sounded irritated.

"You said it was an error", Amanda said. She was getting annoyed again, but her respect for her professor made her anger feel more like helplessness. "I thought about it, and I decided I perhaps wasn't ready to offer that licence now. I have good reasons for it, I didn't just make a mistake."

"In that case," he said, raising his voice, "you should perhaps become ready to offer that licence now. I can assure you that you're indeed making a mistake, child, if not through lack of thought, simply through lack of experience." He managed to soften his final words.

"I'm not a ... bloody child", she said. She could have never imagined Professor Robertson behaving like this. She knew, abstractly, he had to be a tough negotiator, from his time in the private sector if nothing else, but an ally wouldn't behave like that.

"Then stop acting like one. Bring me that form, and let's get some work done. You're wasting my time with this tantrum of yours." His face, normally calm and serene, showed anger and disappointment. "Better: come here, and sign it on my console. Afterwards we can both get back to productive endeavours and forget this unpleasantness."

"What if the hardware has bugs? What if the funders don't like not having first rights? What then, professor?" She was holding back tears and her voice sounded choked. She felt a lump on her throat and told herself she wasn't going to cry.

"You're using university resources to design and build these prototypes. Have you any idea how much it would cost you to commercially fab them? Any idea whatsoever?" His words were clipped, precise. "The form has such an option for cases which do not require expenses of the magnitude we're investing in your work." He paused, took a breath, and looked at Amanda's eyes. "You're using us, and then you'll go away, and sell us your devices, made with knowledge we have imparted to you, tested in our labs. You're acting precisely like a spoiled, selfish child refusing to share her toys, and I simply will not have it. You will produce the form, correctly filled in."

"I ... will ... not." The last word was barely a whisper.

"Then that's that", he said. He shrugged his shoulders, sighed, and nodded. "My offer to co-sign your work is hereby revoked. You can", he added, now perfectly calm, "try to find another chair to sponsor this application. It is, however, most unlikely you will, as I will make sure the reasons of my refusal are common knowledge. Come back in a few days, after you have either verified this state of affairs or grown up, whichever comes sooner. Now I have adult tasks to deal with, so you will kindly run along and play, or whatever it is that children your age do when they're not needlessly bothering their professors with their prattling nonsense."

Amanda felt like she had been slapped. She couldn't control herself, and tears ran down her face. She was so shocked she hardly realised she had been dismissed. Someone she profoundly respected had insulted her beyond measure. Was it her fault?