AND THE SCIENCE GETS DONE (IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN)
by Kiyoko
by Kiyoko
Once upon a time, there lived a test subject named Kiyoko and a beautiful role. They met, they fell in love, and they fostered an intimate if slightly inactive relationship.
This is not that story.
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Carolynn watches the test subjects with eyes that sparkle like surveillance cameras in the night, sharper than any scalpel, fuller of wisdom than any database. Every so often, she purses her perfect, fire-hazard-red lips and scrawls notes upon a clipboard balanced against one delicate arm. Her handwriting is perfect, like every part of her is perfect. Meticulously dotted I’s, gracefully crossed T’s. Carolynn and her perfect handwriting are the backbone of this testing facility.
She paces the length of the one-way mirror, one leg crossing another, delicate feet in lab-safe closed-toe shoes. When she brushes her silky straight hair over one shoulder, the movement sweeps her perfume into the air, infuses it with olfactory bliss. Carolynn smells of flowers and sunlight, of science and the experimental method, of intelligence and poise, of the sharp alcoholic scent of their hand sanitizer, and of (curiously enough) potatoes.
Jave Cohnson is not a man of emotion. He is a man of results. Of triumph and huge success. He doesn’t cave in to earthly desires, neither intoxicating alcohol nor delicious cake nor beautiful lab assistants with perfect handwriting. He never caves in to anything. His name is not Cave, after all.
But sometimes when Carolynn reaches past him to lay a report on his desk, he can’t help but observe the physical dimensions of her mammaries and other relevant human bodily appendages. Pretty as a postcard. He breathes in her floral, sunlight, scientific, potato-y scent and his thoughts fill with her. Just her, and him, and occasionally if he lets his mind circumambulate, he finds himself conceptualizing experiments the two of them might do with one another. To one another. In the privacy of their own domiciles.
“Say, Carolynn,” Jave comments off-handedly one day, literally waving the detached hand of the plastic display skeleton in his office until the bony limb breaks off. “Do you have plans this Friday after the experiments are done?”
Carolynn, who is insightful and sagacious and discerning, and many other words as plucked from a thesaurus that all mean the same thing, sees straight through him. Though maybe that is the prototype invisibility lab coat he is user testing for today.
“I’m flattered, Mr. Cohnson,” she answers, her voice smooth as a waveform and sensual as an afferent nerve fiber, “but I consider myself married to science.”
The CEO of Eruptea Designs turns to his computing device and pulls up an SSA legal change of identity form. “That should not be an issue,” Science Cohnson replies.