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Chapter 73 - Program Redux

“Right. Happens in England too,” Jeremy agreed. “So London—actually many cities of the U.K., especially the larger cities like Leeds, Manchester, and Liverpool and going south, Birmingham—have a large Muslim population. Almost 7 percent of the country’s population now, I think, are Muslim. And most are very conservative, which means that the gals mostly wear the hijab, but a lot even wear the burqa. Anyway, under Islamic law, a girl who exposes her hair, and especially one who wears tight clothing, anything which reveals the body shape, is committing a major infraction against her modesty and against her family’s honor, isn’t she. So imagine if a Muslim girl is stripped starkers in school and made to go to classes that way.

“During the time that I was living there, I saw some news reports of Muslim girls who got put in the Program, got stripped by school teachers and when their family members found out, those girls got murdered. It’s called an ‘honor killing’ but it does nothing for anyone’s honor. Four cases in two years, actually.”

“Damn, that’s terrible” ... “Barbaric” ... “Totally evil” ... “How could they?” ... Their own family?”

“It’s true though. That honor stuff isn’t anything to ignore, either. It affects others, not only family members. I don’t know if you guys know anything about the shootings in the Charlie Hebdo magazine office in Paris, maybe a dozen years ago. That was because the terrorists thought that the magazine had slighted Prophet Muhammad. And the fatwa against Salmon Rushdie is another similar example. Well, honor killings and revenge attacks still happen and they happen in London too, a few over the past ten years that I heard about. One of them was against my school’s head teacher. His auto was destroyed with a petrol bomb and fortunately, he wasn’t in it. It happened because a Muslim girl in my school got put in the Program and got forcibly stripped. I happened to be in the school office when the teachers pushed her, starkers, out of the head’s office and into the outer office, and I was able to protect her modesty by covering her with a window curtain I pulled off its rod and getting her out of the school before any of the kids saw her. Got into huge bovver over that...”

“Huh?” Frank asked and others looked puzzled.

“Jeremy really talks like a Brit,” Tamara giggled. “I love it. Emma does too, so I’ve picked up some of the lingo. ‘Bovver’ means trouble. Like how Cockney speakers say ‘bother.’ Go on, Jeremy.”

“Right then. Got in trouble. Dad got the PM—prime minister—actually the ambassador did—to tell the head teacher to back off—that I had acted properly. That was the week I got put in the Program myself; that’s why I happened to be in the office when they stripped off that girl. I had been arguing with the head about being selected; I knew it wasn’t random as they claimed it to be. I know that I got put in the Program because I was so bloomin’ outspoken against it. So I was the only kid left in the office when two teachers dragged that poor, terrified girl into the head’s office, stripped her there, and then shoved her out. But I learned something important about my temper the first day I was in it. I lost the plot a few times...”

At the blank looks, Jeremy stopped. “Ah, right... I ... erm, lost my temper. Happened a few times that day and next and I actually hurt some blokes when they attacked me, and then I nearly twisted a girl’s arm off after she grabbed my cock from behind me and yanked it. That was so unexpected and hurt me; so I reacted instinctively, but it scared me—how I could act that way with a girl.

“But the corker came the second day in a bio class. We were on an ecology unit and the bloomin’ arse of a teacher asked me to demonstrate how to wank.”

Amelia, Denise, and Kevin shouted, “Jack off!”

“Sure. So I went all snarkey on him, told him I didn’t know exactly what he wanted me to show and that he should demonstrate what he meant, like a good teacher would do. The whole class realized that I was taking the piss with him but he went ballistic and tried to send me to the head teacher... okay, those blank looks mean I need to translate again. ‘Take the piss’ is a totally common saying in the U.K. Means to mock or to be sarcastic about something. Well, I refused to go by myself; I told him that he’d need to come too and lay his complaint there. That did it for me in the Program; I was shot of it after all that rot. I had kept my togs in my rucksack, so I got dressed right then and there.

“That led to another verbal tussle with the head teacher when he found out that I had taken myself out of participating, but I showed him where lots of parts of the Program were in direct opposition to the school’s pupil handbook, and by following the Program rules, pupils were violating the school’s own rules. I asked him how he could possibly justify and support such a conflict and told him that the Program made a mockery of most of the school’s behavior rules. So we agreed to an armistice. He wouldn’t force me into doing the Program and I wouldn’t interfere with the Program in the school.”

“Damn, Jeremy,” Tom said. “That’s an amazing story. Yeah, I can see you going into law.”

“Oh, Jeremy did way, way more than that,” Denise said. “He basically schooled the entire British government on how the Program violated not only many British laws, but also their education department regulations and international law too. The MPs—that’s the members of Parliament—who attended one meeting with us, criticized the reps from the U.K. Program office, telling them essentially that they needed to put some lawyers on their staff who actually knew the law; it appeared to them that a year-eleven pupil with no legal education knew the law better than the government’s own lawyers.”

“So you all got knighted ‘cause you stopped the Program there?” Frank asked.

“It was for a bunch of related things and mostly Denise and Kevin organized it all,” Amelia answered. “They did two major things. One, Denise and Kevin stopped the Program from happening in my school and gave the board of governors an alternative program to do instead, that was the Avery Program, and then they got that new Avery Program all set up, trained the teachers, and got the government’s backing for it. And got government money for it too, can you believe it? And two, Denise showed the government officials the horrid costs to the country if they continued to run the Program; the costs she showed them were based on the studies that Cindy’s group had done. When the officials actually ran their own numbers, they saw that Denise was exactly right. Seeing those costs actually scared them more than having a few kids assaulted, raped, or driven to suicide each year.” With an angry shake of her head and a raising voice, Amelia stood up and continued, “Absolutely, that’s how those berks at our first meeting acted; they didn’t care about what happened to those kids. Those rape and suicide cases were covered in the tabloids, and I scolded those berks that those children’s blood was on their hands.”

Everyone stared at her. Amelia was electrifying them all with the sheer intensity of her words. Sweet little Amelia had somehow turned into a forceful, angry presence; she even seemed to grow taller as she spoke.

“You heard Amelia,” Kevin told the group. “Well, she did just the exact same thing with the Brit department ministers too. They’re like the U.S. Cabinet officials. She really ripped those people a new orifice; they had no response to her accusations. She told the ministers about all the major social problems that were being caused by the Program and by running it, the government was actually torturing and killing its youth. Amelia’s other contributions were just as important; she helped redesign the Avery Program to work better with England’s very diverse pupil-body demographic. Those are some of the reasons why the queen knighted both Amelia, and Jeremy too.”

“So Jeremy helped in keeping your own school from starting the Program before the Avery Program was set up there, Amelia?” JoAnne asked.

“Er, not exactly that way,” Amelia responded. “My school wasn’t state-supported; it was independent, so it should have been exempt from having the Program. Parliament’s law only applied to state-funded schools; mine was tuition-based. But the Program people found a loophole and forced the school into having it, actually extorted them, truthfully, by threatening to withhold education scholarships from the needy families who were sending pupils there. Kevin and Denise went to a meeting where the school’s governors explained that the school was boxed in and would lose maybe 40 percent of its pupils if the government withdrew those scholarships, but even after all the parents there still objected, the governors wouldn’t budge. So Denise and Kevin helped me to prepare a flyer that urged all the pupils to resist and not participate, and I snuck the flyers into school and left them so kids could find them.

“When the day came to start the Program, there was an assembly and pupils’ names got called and most of those kids refused to go to up to the stage; some of them even ran out of the assembly. The Program people had sent a bunch of thugs to be there and when the kids started running away, they began grabbing some kids at random and I got grabbed too. The thugs took this one Muslim girl, tore off her hijab, and ripped her clothes off, her panties too, and after she refused one thug’s demands to touch herself, one of them jammed his fingers into her privates. She had the FGM—you know, the genital mutilation that’s practiced in some Islamic areas? Good, you know about that. So that berk, in jamming her down there, hurt her badly.

“Two of them began stripping me too, but before they got my panties off, Jeremy got to the stage and stopped them. He had been trying to push his way through the commotion in the audience rows and aisles and was finally able to get to the stage. He pulled the one berk off me, the one who was holding my arms so I couldn’t get free, and threw him so hard he slid all the way across the stage. Then he was like a maniac, a ninja, and took down the other two big berks. He threw both of them into some chairs on the stage.

“My arms got free when Jeremy pulled the first one off me and the one berk, the one who was trying to pull my panties off, tried to grab me, so I kneed him in the bollocks so hard that he collapsed, and that’s about when the bobbies arrived. I didn’t know Jeremy at all before then, but he had saved me from having a serious injury, ‘cause the previous week I had surgery to heal a botched FGM that was done to me a few years earlier.”

There were gasps from the others at hearing that she had also experienced a FGM.

“Yeah, I was 12 then and an aunt had signed me out of school against Papa’s orders and she took me to a cutting ceremony; I didn’t know what she had planned. The school called Papa when they realized that the aunt didn’t have permission to sign me out and he realized what had happened and where she was taking me. He got there in time to keep the woman from finishing cutting me, but the wound I had there never healed properly. So that’s why I was in London with Denise and Kevin; it was to get the special surgery to repair the damaged nerves. So that’s my own Program horror story. And I told the government people how the Program tortured kids exactly the same way as the genital mutilation did—they were both a horrid, forced, involuntary, immoral way of trying to modify a girl’s sexuality.”

Cindy went to her and hugged her.

“My god, Amelia, that’s simply terrible, what you went through. Are you alright now? Was the nerve damage repaired?”

“Oh yes, the doctor was amazing and found two kinds of damage in there. A grainy lump thing and a neura thing.”

Cindy nodded, smiling. “I like those terms better than the medical ones. He found you had both a granuloma and neuroma, I take it.”

“That’s right. Those are the words. Adhesive things too.”

“Sure. Definitely adhesions, caused by incomplete and improper healing. You must have been in considerable pain, then,” Cindy observed, sympathetically and Amelia nodded, blushing. “Two years like that?”

“Err, it was closer to three years, and yes, the pain never went away. But some of my friends at school were cut too and as well, their pain was always with them.”

Cindy shuddered. “What a horrible, inhuman, and barbaric practice.”

“It sure is,” Barbara agreed. “That’s a chilling way to finish our tales of Program experiences. Agreed? So, gang, are you satisfied? Heard enough about what you missed ‘cause the Program’s gone now?”

There was general agreement that their curiosity was sufficiently slaked and some of the younger ones were visibly shaken by the stories.

Then Marcia raised her hand and Barbara apologized, “Ah, I didn’t ask if there were any questions. My bad. What’s up, Marcia?”

“Um, maybe this is too embarrassing...” she faltered.

“Hey, you’re with friends here; just ask and we’ll just give you the naked truth,” Barbara reassured her and Marcia laughed, together with the others.

“Um, it’s something my boyfriend told me. Tom mentioned it earlier—it’s blue balls. My boyfriend’s been urging me to do sex with him. He says that if I go to a nudist resort, I should know all about having sex and I’ve been teasing him by refusing. He says I’m giving him blue balls from frustration.”

Theresa was incensed at hearing that. “Marcia, he’s disrespecting you! You told me that he also doesn’t like that you come here, that he should be the only guy to see your naked body and you’ve refused to get naked with him. Besides, the old ‘blue balls’ line is just a guy’s ploy to get into your panties.”

“Hold that thought for a few seconds, Theresa,” Cindy broke in. “But first, Marcia, this guy’s bad news. The pressuring you that he’s doing is a red flag. Guys who do that are all about themselves and you’d just wind up as a conquest at best or with a bad rep at worst. You need to drop him, you hear? But about blue balls? Guess what? Medically, that’s a real thing and not a boy’s myth. One of the medical names for the condition is ‘epididymal hypertension.’ I know, giving something a medical name makes it more real...”

Laughter.

“... but this one is really real. Certain conditions, and sexual stimulation is one of them, can cause a buildup of fluids in the epididymis of the scrotum. Here’s an anatomy lesson for you. The epididymis is a tightly coiled ductile organ in the scrotum that receives and stores the sperm manufactured in the testis. It travels from there on to the seminal vesicles via ducts called the vas deferens. Each testis has an epididymis attached to it. These parts of the scrotum can become engorged, causing a feeling of pressure or even a dull pain in the groin. So ‘blue balls’ does exist, but no one has ever observed that any parts actually turn blue. But the discomfort does happen and it’s real.”

“Huh, I didn’t know that,” Tom said. “Is there a treatment?”

Cindy started to laugh. “Oh, certainly. Very simple and effective. An orgasm. Works every time.”

Everyone else began laughing too.

“Seriously, Marcia, is your so-called boyfriend really pressuring you?” Cindy asked.

“Um, yeah... it’s why I don’t want to be naked with him too. I’m uncomfortable with that thought.”

“See? There you go; your subconscious is warning you,” Cindy told her. “All couples’ relationships are based on mutual respect and that seems to be lacking with this boy. Tell him directly and firmly that you don’t want to keep seeing him. He’ll try to convince you that he’ll change; don’t believe that for an instant. They don’t change, at least until they mature more, but that could be years later. Just tell him you’re done.”

“Yeah, Marcia,” Theresa said. “But he might start spreading rumors or lies about what you did with him or that you were an easy lay. I had that happen, remember? Remember what I did?”

Marcia giggled. “Oh yeah, that was epic.”

Now the others were clamoring for details.

“Go tell them,” Theresa said.

“This guy claimed that Theresa was a slut and whore when he came onto her and she refused him after they had been dating for six months, right, Theresa?” Theresa nodded and motioned her to continue. “She was in his house doing schoolwork and when they finished, he began trying to make out with her and then started demanding that she let him fuck her. Then he tried to pull off her top. So she grabbed his crotch and squeezed it hard, then grabbed her backpack and got out of there.

“When he started bad-mouthing Theresa the next day, claiming that she was a nympho and an easy lay, she started a rumor with the girls in school that when she tried to give him a handjob, she had a problem finding his cock, it was too small to find. Well, that rumor spread like wildfire.”

Everyone chuckled as Theresa nodded. “Yep. After what I said, people would look at him and snigger and he had problems getting dates. My family moved away from there maybe four months later, so I don’t know what happened since then.”

Everyone agreed that Theresa had handled that problem creatively and soon the group broke up.

Tamara went over to Peter. “That was a really intense bunch of stories,” she sighed, “and even from the limited sample size here, the problems they mentioned show that the Program did way more harm than good.”

Peter agreed, saying, “That was my own experience too, sweetie. Glad it’s all in the past now.”

“Say, I want to head to our cabin now to check on my latest patent application. I want to see about modifying the claims to include your idea and add you as a co-inventor,” she told him.

“Okay, I’ll come with. I haven’t paid much attention to patent apps, so this will be educational,” Peter said.

After Tamara fired up her laptop, she did a brief search for muscle characteristics.

“Sonny told me that he can make the polymer fibers pretty much as long as I want, but as they get longer, the amount that it contracts decreases,” she told Peter. “So if we try to make an actual muscle to use in a prosthetic, he needs to find a way to bind shorter fibers together so that they all act in concert...”

“... yeah, and my control circuits need to activate the entire bundle together,” Peter finished.

“Exactly. Ah, here’s something.” Tamara read the screen for a minute. “Cool. This article says that the maximum force that muscle fibers can exert is approximately 30 to 40 newtons per square centimeter of the cross-sectional area of the muscle fiber, and the polymer Sonny developed exerts 32.5 newtons, right smack in the muscle-fiber range. Perfect. So Peter, your assignment is to study muscle-nerve physiology and learn how nerves trigger muscle contraction.”

“Sure; I already found some papers on myoelectric prosthetics,” Peter said. “In one technique I read about, a small amount of muscle tissue was grafted on the end of the amputated limb and then it was surgically attached to the end of a severed nerve. That allowed a small electrical signal to be detected, amplified, and recorded, and was used to control a prosthesis. So an engineering method to do the biological interface is possible.”

“So what’s left is a control circuit to operate the polymer muscle bundle,” Tamara observed.

“Right. This project will take more than just Tom and me working on it to fully develop, you know,” Peter said.

“Oh, for sure. I think it will warrant a full division in my manufacturing company alongside of the turbine operation. I’ll email my industrial consultants and have them add this to their planning. Now let’s check out that patent app. I’ll show you how they’re structured, if you’ve forgotten the stuff from that class.”

“Um, we didn’t actually learn how to write up a patent, honey. Just how they work to protect inventors, the sections patents need to have, and the timing rules.”

“Good enough. Let me show you the writeup for this one.”

They spent the next hour at work, which is where Barbara found them and chased them back out to play.

“You guys are on vacation!” she scolded. “Get back out there, your job duties for these two weeks are to have fun!”

~~~~

Saturday was the first volleyball clinic day for this season and members of both resort teams, the men and women, were there, including Dawn Simpson, the volleyball coach from the University of Maryland; this was her second year at the resort. And Barbara and Tamara had convinced Cindy to join them in doing the clinic. Denise and Amelia also participated, but it was Cindy who was the standout. It turned out that Cindy’s height, athleticism, and strength combined to make her a powerful player and the members of the women’s team were salivating at the idea that Cindy could be persuaded to join the team.

Alas, that was not to be.

“Sorry, guys, I really am,” Cindy apologized. “This game’s a real blast and I enjoyed every minute of it—but beginning on August 25^th, I’m entering my fourth year of med school and that day starts my first clinical rotation where I begin taking almost complete responsibility for patient care under clinical faculty guidance. It’s going to be an intense term and the competition for local residency positions will be intense, so I can’t miss a single day.”

Barbara had to disappoint the team too, because she had learned that she had to attend a four-day teaching-assistant seminar at Maryland right after Labor Day. As part of her assistantship, she would be beginning to lead undergraduate recitation sections this year, and the seminar was to prepare the graduate instructors for their teaching duties.

Tamara’s schedule was more open, but she had decided that she wasn’t going without Barbara. But there were two college girls at the resort clinic this year, both new to the resort, and they both had decent skills. Each said that they could join the resort’s team at the Volleyball Superbowl this year, so the resort would still be able to send two teams.

Peter had gotten Kevin, Tom, and Jeremy to do the clinic too, and while they had fun, and despite their athletic abilities, they were still average novice players.

“Guys,” Peter told them, “your weakest skill, all of you, is passing and serve receive—which is passing too, actually. You attack well and block, um, that needs work too, but blocking is the hardest thing to learn to do well. Did you guys watch Tamara? She’s a blocking genius. She’s at about 85 percent, which is just about world-class. You saw her in the spiking-blocking drill. In the games later, watch how she follows the ball when she’s on defense. She always keeps herself square to the ball and maintains great balance so she can explode to where to ball’s gonna meet the attacker’s hands—and she’s right up there too with the ball. You’ll see how many of her blocks become jousts too. That means she knows where the ball will be before it even gets there.”

“Erm, what’s a joust?” Jeremy asked.

“That happens when the attacker and blocker get to the ball at the same time. They’ve both hit the ball at the same time and each tries to force it past the other. Tamara’s body is usually moving lots faster than the attacker, who’s setting up for a spike, so her momentum is much greater than the attacker’s, and she just stuffs that ball. Watch when it happens.”

“How do you get better at passing?” Tom asked. “Any tricks?”

Peter laughed. “Like how do you get to Carnegie Hall. Practice, practice, practice. Remember the principles of body position and balance. Square to the ball and feet evenly planted. Let the ball meet your linked forearms while you gently shrug your shoulders toward your target, the setter. Try to have the ball below your waist when it meets your arms; that gives the best control. You pass using the motion of your whole upper body. Try not to swing your arms because you’ll get less ball control doing that. Eventually you’ll build the muscle memory and your aim will improve. Ah, they’re starting another set of serving drills now—this one will be for just serves, no receives, so it goes fast. Let’s join them.”

After the clinic and the games were over, the ten friends met at the lunch stand for a snack. The energy they used in their volleyball activity needed replenishment.

They were all talking about the last game, where the best men played the best women. The women had murdered the men, 25-12 and 25-8.

Tamara, Barbara, Cindy, Stacy, Dawn, and Robin played for the girls; the other girls on the women’s team wanted to see how Cindy played in a game—they were hoping to get her hooked to come play the following year. And everyone loved to see Tamara and Barbara play together. They worked like one mind in two bodies, especially how they ran their fakes. Dawn told them that she figured that they were all “A” level players and the guys were mostly “BB” level.

“I couldn’t believe what I saw in that third-from-last point in the second game,” Jeremy said. “Tamara, when did you learn to fly, anyway?”

Jeremy referred to a wicked fake the men had pulled, bypassing Barbara’s and Cindy’s block and hammering the ball to their side. Somehow, Tamara, who was about six feet away and had been moving toward the net to back up the girls’ block, suddenly leaped the six to eight feet sideways just as the spiked ball came over the net, met the ball, and hammered it down on the men’s side. Defending that kill attempt looked impossible, yet out of nowhere, she had appeared to cover the open zone.

Tamara giggled. “I saw the setup for their fake and could tell where they’d send the ball. I just jumped to get there when the ball did.”

“How many blocks did you get in game two?” Kevin asked her.

“Didn’t count. I was having way too much fun,” Tamara laughed.

“The gals got at least 12 points off her blocks,” Denise remarked. “She also had six kills. A one-woman wrecking crew, 18 of the 25 points.”

“She’s just awesome,” Cindy said. “Tamara would be an unstoppable point guard in b-ball—she’s everywhere at once and has the best sense of how the play’s developing that I’ve ever seen. I played on Avery’s women’s basketball team and coached kids in high school too and never saw anyone who had a better ability to get to the ball.”

“Guys, enough. It’s embarrassing. Playing is just fun,” Tamara pleaded. “Barbara’s just as good as me, and Cindy, you’re simply scary when you attack. The guys must have bruises from where your spikes nailed them.”

~~~~

During the following week, various members of the Winsberg clan arrived while others departed, but all the cousins had convinced the parents to let them stay till the last weekend. And on that weekend, the remaining older cousins, the college and grad school ones and their significant others, came on Friday afternoon and left on Sunday, when most everyone else was departing too.

Kevin and his group told Peter and Barbara that they had a marvelous time and enjoyed the various activities. The massage couple staged a repeat of their nuru massage session and the five couples all participated. Amelia didn’t mention her age and no one asked. Everyone loved that session and Denise especially was hooked. Peter—and Tamara—discovered that Denise could indeed project her sexual energies, so the following morning, Tamara got Denise in private to see if she could sense how Denise did whatever it was that she did. Now Tamara had some interesting ideas and things to try with Peter.

Tamara’s thoughts were now returning back to her work. She still had three more dark energy experiments to do to work out one minor mathematical oddity of her theory and then she’d be able to assemble all the parts into a coherent whole. Research articles had been appearing in physics journals which all confirmed her mathematics; the sole controversy was the interpretation of what the math physically represented. Something very similar to that had occurred in the physics world when quantum mechanics was introduced about a hundred years earlier; trying to describe in real-world terms what the math showed was one of its biggest controversies.

She wanted to move forward with her commercial plans as rapidly as possible too; then that would allow her to expand operations to Haiti—she needed to see how the technical education piece of her project there was progressing. There was also her land acquisition plans to review and the progress of the old quarry site’s reclamation. She still had a number of MRI collaboration projects in the works and one in development to study the electrical signals that the brain produces. She felt that she had pursued the pheromone identification and action as far as she wanted; other research groups had picked up on that work and they were far better able to continue that work than she was.

Tamara and her engineering staff, still two people as of now, had found ways to enable a number of mechanical and electronic devices to operate inside the G-force field, which opened up more development possibilities. And finally, she was feeling a strong desire, a need to reconnect with her spiritual sense. It was her pwen calling to her, she realized. She needed to talk with her mother about doing her personal kouche, her ritual seclusion, very soon now.

She also wanted to continue her work with Greta, whom she sensed was a extremely powerful channel of spirituality.

Early September

Tamara’s and Peter’s friends returned to their own schooling; Cindy, going into her fourth year of medical school and Tom, in his own doctoral engineering program; they both had only one year remaining in their formal education.

Kevin started on his graduate program in international relations with a focus on political science at Westphalia University and Denise began her medical school studies there too. She was in the MD-PhD program and at Westphalia, it was a seven- to eight-year program, with two pre-clinical medical school years consisting of basic science and clinical focus studies, followed by the PhD graduate training through the doctoral dissertation, and then two years of the training program’s clinical rotations completed the program.

Amelia began her undergraduate university program while continuing to work for the Coris Foundation. In a special arrangement with Gerston’s Columbia Institute of Economics and Westphalia, which was being handled like a kind of internship, she would manage a local office of the Coris Foundation which Kevin and Janet Hadad had set up, staffing it with four employees from their other sites. This office would initially undertake a pilot project to serve the medical and legal services needs of the homeless and spouse-abused population of the capital area, and Amelia’s role in her first year was minimal to allow her to concentrate on her studies.

In her second and subsequent years she would take a more active role in first, developing a project to study the issue of bringing health care to poor rural communities in the U.S. in cooperation with Columbia Institute. At some point during her third year, she would become the managing director of the U.S. office with the mission to develop training materials for conducting cultural and aid missions in third-world countries. And the first country that was chosen for the office to study was to be Haiti. This schedule would allow it to become operational as physical facilities for Tamara’s own educational and economic development work in the country would be under construction. It would also run concurrently with Nadine’s project to develop her micro-finance entrepreneurship program.

~~~~

It was her Haiti development plans that were causing Tamara her greatest concern. Many of the people in power in third-world countries achieve their power using ruthless means, she knew; these are typically people who are motivated more by power and wealth than by service to their country. Tamara had learned, that when she had fully activated the limbic systems of Peter, her parents, and Greta and Werner, the single trait that they had in common was sensitivity to people lying. This had given her an idea; she had thought about the problem for some time, and she wanted Greta’s advice about the possible solution that she was considering. Greta might have some suggestions.

It was during the Labor Day weekend that she had a chance to speak to Greta alone.

“Greta, I’ve noticed that your, ah, aura, has gotten lots stronger than before the summer,” Tamara told her. “That comes with the use of the talent, I think. And you only came out to the resort that one weekend. I know you were traveling but we never got to talk.”

“Tamara, it’s like I’m a different person—Werner is too, thanks to your ... shall we say, upgrade?”

They both laughed.

“You’re using your new senses then.” Tamara prompted.

“I have. And the new sensitivity is just amazing. Werner and I spent seven weeks in my ancestral areas of Denmark and I spent a lot of time with my sister and niece there; also with the völur my family knows. The new sense I have has added a whole new dimension to the seid rituals when we did them. And to other things, too,” she said, blushing.

“Greta! I take it Werner likes the new sense, then, judging from your blush.”

“He does. Also, he’s, um, much more attentive to me now—like he was as a newlywed. Oh, goddess, did I really say that?”

“Yep, you did. I think our being physically close to each other must lower any inhibitions in sharing personal information,” Tamara mused. “You know, Kevin mentioned something like that happens in face-to-face encounters and told me about Emmanuel Levinas’ interpersonal philosophy; what he told me sounded interesting, so I looked him up. He talks about the face-to-face encounter of two people in his Totality and Infinity, and offers the idea that the encounter involves more than just the two people; the circumstances are also dictated by the set of rules that govern that social situation. And that involves the moral structures of the society too, so I believe that must include spirituality as well. The two of us share an enhanced spirituality, so our interaction has created a kind of bonding, which has allowed our usual barriers of personal privacy to drop.”

Greta stared at her, smiling. “Did you study philosophy too, Tamara?”

“No,” she giggled, “not formally. But I read stuff. I read lots of things and interpersonal stuff interests me ‘cause of what I can do with my ability. Talking with you now, I feel so close that I can confide anything in you, and I wanted to explain why that happens using philosophical reasoning. So here’s my response to what you said about Werner’s, what? Regained physical attraction? Sharing my own deep personal experience, I will say that when we’re intimate, Peter and I can feel each other’s sensations.”

“Goddess! Then what happened was real. We thought we had gotten carried away and were hallucinating,” she blushed again.

Tamara smiled. “No, it’s real, and that shows that your empathy—both of you—is very strong. I assume that you’ve gotten sensitive to being told untruths like Dad?”

“I have, and Werner has too. He really appreciates that ability, I must say.”

“I’m sure. It’s useful in lots of ways. Anyway, I need to ask you about a matter that’s been concerning me lately and it has both practical and ethical implications.”

Greta looked at Tamara expectantly.

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