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 in on the first day of O-week, in Canberra, at the National University of Australia, when they had moved into ressies, Julie 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, but instead they poured out all of their thoughts to each other in Julie's room, and then each had taken their turn baring 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 made it quite clear that it was a one-off experiment. Julie hadn't liked the soft, squishy sensation of Cassie's mouth against hers, and Cassie soon learned 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 a little weed.

For that first degree, most of that time was actually study. 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 although Cassie was doing an arts degree, she really did love science, and coveted Julie's mind.

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 let herself feel like a little bit of a radical.

Cassie was also 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 wasn't interested in Cassie that way, and Cassie had given up on all of her other relationships to be with Julie. They moved into a house together, and Cassie stopped hanging out with most of her Lesbian friends. Many of them just assumed Cassie and Julie were a couple, but the few that stayed close to Cassie knew the 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: 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, 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, who she abhorred.

She spent more time over the other side of campus with Julie in the School of Biological Sciences Research. Julie's Ph.D. was in biology, but she was that rare thing, a biologist with computer science skills. She 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 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's 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.

She was hoping she could use the Taubett machine to analyse the tiny trails left by worms in a patient's flesh.

Julie actually didn't much care for the worms herself, but she liked talking about them with Cassie.

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 guessed at Cassie's interest, and fed her with many titbits of information.

One of Julie's most cherished memories was describing to Cassie 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.

Cassie found the whole idea of parasitic infection strangely appealing, especially coming from Julie's delicious, educated lips.

The idea of having one's body co-opted by a creature which would feed from you, and and multiply within oneself, held a strange fascination for Cassie, and she loved to have discussions with Julie about the many and varied mechanisms parasitic worms used to infect their victims.

Truth to tell, she could never entirely tell whether her interest was due to the worms, or if it was as a result of listening to such a beautiful woman.

Julie wasn't conventionally beautiful, but she was beautiful to Cassie, nonetheless.

She actually looked rather like a photo of Nana Mouskouri that Cassie had seen in her own Nana's LP collection.

She had very fine skin; elegant, if sharp, 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, and Cassie thought Julie very elegant.

As with Cassie, Julie also had a sharp tongue, and they both liked to compete in a kind of bitchy one-upmanship, especially when they were talking about boys.

Julie knew what she was to Cassie, and didn't mind it.

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.

Cassie's obvious regard made Julie feel appreciated.

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 when Cassie held her as they watched Doctor Who on their sofa, sometimes drunk, sometimes stoned, 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 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 graphic detail. She found them on a science-fiction story site, and, although she enjoyed reading the stories very much, she didn't realise for quite some time how accurately they had portrayed events.

Some of the details of the epidemic had emerged in the main-stream media, and the initial stories had been extremely concerning, as thousands of people 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.