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Doctor Yin
🕑 Added 2018-04-14 02:39:15 +0000 UTC This is another story I started a long time ago and never finished. I knew where I was going, still do, but never got the energy up to finish it. I couldn't post such a lame entry at BC but maybe if people see it here and encourage me, I'll find the mojo to do more with it.Doctor Yin
Chapter 1
I found the advertisement in the weekly throwaway paper. “Meeting girls too hard for you? We can help,” followed by a phone number.
I showed it to my buddy Gordon French and asked him, “What kind of scam do you think they’re running?”
He read the ad and shrugged. “Who knows? Dance lessons? Vitamins? Speed dating?” He didn’t seem that interested, then again, Gordy never had trouble meeting girls.
We’d been friends since junior high but sometimes I could have hated the guy. Originally we were the class dweebs, short, skinny, into comic books and science fiction, covered in pimples; if you knew someone like us back then, you probably treated them like dirt, too.
Then Gordy shot up six inches our sophomore year, his face cleared up, his voice deepened, he made the debate team and the wrestling team--all while I remained trapped in dweebdom. By the time we started college, he had all the girls he needed. Six-foot-two with black wavy hair and blue eyes and a cleft in his chin; like I said, I could have hated him.
I didn’t reach puberty till I was sixteen, never quite got to six foot, had thin, brown hair and no-color eyes with a round chin and glasses. But we stayed friends. Gordy said it was because I made him laugh. “Ty-Hy, you’re a funny guy,” he would say and punch me in the arm.
So I would groan and take on as if he had severely injured me and I would walk with a limp for an hour. “I hit you in the arm,” Gordy would say, grinning.
And I would whine and say, “But you were standing on my foot when you did it!” Stupid stuff like that. He was right, I always could make him laugh.
The payoff for me was that I got his rejects, leftovers and overflow. Girls that is. So I didn’t have any trouble meeting girls either, I just hung around Gordy and picked over his scraps. Sounds terrible when you put it that way, like a failing of moral character. Still, any guy in my position would have done the same, Gordy just had more girls around him than he had time for. It would have been a crime to let them feel ignored.
But college graduation loomed. Gordy would be going off to law school back east and I would be hanging around State for another year, washing beakers and grading papers for the chemical engineer professor. That would get me my Masters and with luck and another student loan, I’d get into the doctorate program I wanted out on the West Coast.
After the first Saturday in June, I’d probably only see Gordy once every ten years or so, unless he got into politics or became a newscaster. My easy ride on the girls, girls, girls train was going to be over. And I had no idea how to meet women on my own.
I thought, what could it hurt? So when Gordy went out with his latest, I dialed the number. I got a recording asking me to leave a name and a number and “Dr. Yin or one of his associates will call you back.” Yen or yin, I wondered. But when the beep sounded I gave my name, Tyrone Highsmith, and the throwaway phone number I use to forward calls to my cellphone.
Surprisingly, someone called back in less than half an hour. Not Dr. Yin, but a female voice who called herself Susan asked how to spell my name, how old I was, if I lived in the city and if I could come in to fill out an application to join the program.
“What program?” I asked.
“Dr. Yin’s program,” she answered.
“Is this a university program?” I asked.
“Dr. Yin is associated with the state university,” she said. Which could mean he was a lowly postgrad like I would soon be, or a postdoc rather which might be rated a grade or two higher. Or he could be a janitor who got his doctorate from an online diploma mill. I’d never know if I didn’t try to find out.
“Okay,” I said. “When should I come in and how do I get there?” She gave me instructions and I agreed to an appointment later the same day.
Using the handy map function in my phone, I looked up the address I had been given and even took a peek both from satellite and street view. It looked like a low density industrial park, the kind of place that would be full of specialty car repair shops, furniture makers, glaziers and custom machinists. I could, in fact, in the street view see a sign offering “Hugs for Classic Bugs”.
I didn’t spend time wondering what a hug for a thirty year old Volkswagen might be but used the browser to look up Dr. Yin/Dr. Yen and the state university. It was Yin; Dr. Semweil Yin taught a class in sociometrics at State and had published several papers on the subject. One had the intriguing title of “Dysjunctive Mating Rituals and the Propagation of Extrinsic Character Traits in Social Isolates.” There were more like that; I tried to read one or two and got lost in the summaries. And I had thought chemical engineering papers had a lot of jargon to learn.
I couldn’t find a picture of the guy but his bio said he was 45, born in Hungary and had grown up in Hong Kong and San Francisco and graduated from UCLA with a degree in psychology. What the heck was he doing in Kansas? I guess professors go where they get jobs, like anybody else.
Two hours before my appointment, I drove across town in my second-hand Corolla and parked in the lot of the industrial park across the street. I had time to do this even if only because my curiosity itched. Dr. Yin and Associates had the third door from the street end and I kept watch to see who went in and out.
Within a very few minutes, I saw a snazzy new Miata pull up and a tall, slender, dark-haired girl get out. From what I could see across the street without showing myself, she was a real looker. She pushed her hair up and pinned it somehow then pulled a lab smock out of the car and slipped that on over her clothes. Huh? In she went and a few minutes later a different girl came out, an equally tall blonde I judged but one who favored tight clothes and had the body to show them off. “Yow!” I said to no one in particular. “Is that the girl I talked to on the phone?”
She climbed into a Cadillac SUV and wheeled out onto the street and was gone. Nothing else happened for most of a half hour then a beater pulled up, a Chrysler Corporation piece of junk with peeling paint and a windshield starred on the right hand side. Someone got out wearing a ball cap and entirely too many clothes for early summer in this area; I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. From the back view, I guessed a woman but she sure didn’t have the style of the last girl or even the grace of the first one.
I almost went to sleep listening to smooth jazz on my iPhone before anything else happened but about twenty minutes before my own appointment, the dumpily dressed woman emerged. She’d ditched the ball cap and her short red hair curled around what looked like a cute face from where I sat. She got back into the beater and disappeared.
Ten minutes later, after driving around the block and parking in the right lot this time, I tried the office door of Suite C.
It opened and I stepped into a surprisingly shallow room at the far corner of which the slender brunette sat behind a cheap desk, the lab smock hanging from a hook on the wall behind her.
She glanced at something on her desk and smiled up at me. “Are you Tyrone Highsmith? I’m Samantha. I’ll be doing your interview for Dr. Yin today.” Her eyes had a slight Asian tilt and I wondered if she might be Dr. Yin’s daughter. Semweil might very well name a daughter Samantha.
I said something neutral and looked around. She motioned me to take a seat and pulled up a form on the screen of her computer. Up close she had flawless skin and smelled like violets. Her eyes were a rich dark brown with green glints in them and one of her lower front teeth was slightly crooked. I watched her so hard I missed the first question she asked.
“Is that right?” she repeated.
“Uh?”
“Your name is Tyrone Highsmith, you’re a senior at State, 21 years old, you live off campus in an apartment on Chatauqua and your next of kin is Amelia Highsmith Long, your sister, who lives in... Kyoto, Japan?”
I nodded, “That’s all correct, the other girl took the information over the phone.”
“What does your sister do?”
“She’s married to an Air Force colonel who is attached to the Embassy. Military-industrial complex liaison or something. She teaches English on the side, I guess.”
“She’s older than you?”
“Oh, yeah. She’s thirty-four, no, thirty-five. Has two kids, both in grade school over there. Laurel and Isaac. I call him Hardy but he doesn’t get it, he’s only nine.”
She smiled at the joke then filled in blanks on the form and asked a few more questions and I answered them. My height I gave her as 5’11 and my weight at 155 then she asked me if I minded if she measured me.
Actually, that sounded kind of intimate and I think I gave her what was probably a goofy smile. “Sure.” I said.
But it turned out that I simply stood on a scale in the other corner and she lowered the level onto my head. But I did get closer to her and yes, it was definitely violets I smelled. I even caught a glimpse of a purple bra through the armhole of her sleeveless blouse when she reached up over my head.
“Five-ten-and-a-half and one-sixty-two,” she said.
I winced. “I’m taller in the morning.”
“That’s what he said,” she commented and I know I blushed but I had to grin, too.
Back at her desk, she continued with the interview, asking me how long had it been since my last date and how many dates had I had in the previous month. “Uh, Friday and um, eleven,” I said.
She looked at me. “Why are you here then? Do you think you don’t date often enough? I have to tell, you that is something like five times the local average for college seniors.”
“Well, there was a holiday in May and Gordy went home to see his parents and I had to work a—work a double shift that one long weekend.”
“Pardon?” She looked cute when she frowned but she probably couldn’t avoid that.
I explained about Gordy and how his social life intersected with mine and why this meant I needed to learn new dating strategies. Sad to say, this cracked her up. Maybe it was the way I told it.
“Okay, okay,” she interrupted when I started into deeper detail, hoping to keep her laughing. “I get it. Without your wingman, you think you’re Dweeb City.”
“Well, this is Witchita and I am an engineering student,” I said.
She showed me her dimples then filled in a few more boxes on the computer screen, ending with a click that appeared to save everything because the auxiliary drive on her desk churned. A printer chattered for a moment and spit out three copies of a one page form.
Samantha pushed them across the desk to me with a pen and said, “Sign each one at the bottom.”
“Is this going to cost me anything?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Not a cent, in fact, you get paid $30 for each hour you show up here and work in the program. First time is just an hour but after that, sessions are either 3 or 6 hours.
I signed in the places indicated.
”Okay,” she said. “You’re entered in the program unless Dr. Yin downchecks your application tonight.”
“Is he likely to do that?”
She shook her head. “Do you want to get started today?”
“Uh, sure.”
She stood and took down her lab smock. I restrained myself from offering to help her put it on. That would be a bit creepy, I felt pretty sure. But I did watch carefully to be sure she didn’t run into any unexpected difficulties with finding the armholes or tying the belt. It didn’t occur to me to wonder why she put on the lab coat.
“Let me show you the setup here and how this works,” she said, opening the door into the rest of the industrial space.
I don’t know what I expected but something that looked like the world’s most elaborate home theater was not it. It was a miniature IMAX, a bowl-shaped screen covering the back wall of the building, about thirty feet wide, and twenty feet tall extending along the side walls, floor and ceiling. And right at the center of this bowl on a dais sat a chair with what I guessed must be projection equipment above it. Someone sitting there would have more than 200 degrees of their vision field occupied by the massive screen.
I’m not normally someone who indulges in understatement but I did say, “Wow.”
“It’s a new thing, called immersive training,” she said. “The first video runs about half an hour, then we allow you a half hour for re-entry.”
“Re-entry?”
“Into reality.”
I glanced at her but she didn’t mean that as a joke.
“This first one is just a warm-up, we’ll calibrate the machine to you and fine tune the parameters of what you will be seeing in the actual lessons.”
“All right,” I said. “What do I do?”
“First take off your shoes and empty your pockets.” She gestured at a bowl for pocket contents sitting on a stand that also had a shelf to hold shoes. “You don’t wear glasses or hearing aids or a watch, so we don’t need to worry about those.”
“Uh, huh,” I said. “Do I leave my socks on?”
“Please do,” she said with a serious look but a twinkle in her eye. “We have to consider the health of the mice and roaches.”
I snorted.
She motioned to the dais, “Just climb up there and lie back in the chair. It will quickly mold itself to you.”
“Huh,” I said instead of something a bit more like, “The hell you say?” which is what I was thinking. But i climbed up the six steps and got into the chair, a bit of an awkward movement since it was more like lying down in a partially reclining people-shaped bathtub than actually sitting in a chair.
My legs and arms fit into their own separate cradles and my head into another. With no effort at all, I could see nearly the whole of the sideways dome of the screen. Even slight movements of my head were restricted so I could no longer see the edges. The screen filled all but a narrow strip at the bottom of my visual field.
Samantha climbed up several of the steps and moved around a sort of catwalk on all sides of the chair, making adjustments here and there. “The chair senses your movements and that will influence what you see on the screen,” she said. “So it’s important that the fit be snug but not tight. If anything I do makes part of the mechanism uncomfortably tight, let me know.”
“Okay,” I said, a little less sure of things. “This setup must have cost a fortune.”
“Dr. Yin has several industrial and government grants, this is just a proof of concept, sort of prototype of what the eventual virtualized trainer will be like.” She adjusted something and the soft feel of the chair became more firm around my hips and thighs. She moved on down, adjusting things as she went. “I’m going to close the cuffs at your ankles, it will feel as if you are wearing boots.”
“Uh, huh,” I said. I noticed at this point that the strip of floor visible below the screen had disappeared. Now I had nothing in my visual field but the bowl-shaped screen and…. I blanked on her name for a moment. Samantha.
“Actually,” Samaantha went on. “This is the Mark IV prototype; this version only needs one operator. The last two marks required teams of three and four to operate. They’re building the Mark V down in Norman.” I assumed she meant Norman, Oklahoma, almost 200 miles south and the site of another state university. “That will probably be done by the end of the summer.”
It did feel as if I were wearing boots now, tall ones; or perhaps more like the lower half of a wetsuit. Not that I had ever worn a wetsuit -- not a lot of use for one in southeast Kansas.
Samantha moved around the other side of the chair, securing the fit at waist and lower chest. “Wriggle your fingers,” she ordered me. “I’m going to tighten up the cuffs and gloves a bit.”
I did and it felt as if I had put my hands into some soft clay. The lining of the channels my arms and hands lay in closed around them as snug as the fit on my lower half. “Hey,” I said, realizing at this moment that I would not be able to get back out of the chair without a lot of struggle or some help.
She must have known what I meant because she said, “There’s a quick release, for like, if the place catches fire. Lift your head and push back and up quickly.”
I did and the tight fit eased suddenly, I could move my arms and legs again and I partially sat up just to prove that I could.
She grinned at me. “No panic?”
I shook my head. “I’m fine. Glad to know you guys thought of that.” I lay back and she started snugging things up again.
“Something else we thought of,” she said after the lower half was again as tight as a fetishist’s evening clothes. She took something out of her pocket. “Motion sickness patch. Most people get a bit dizzy when the images they are seeing move in ways that their bodies say aren’t real. Can I put this behind your ear? That’s where it will do the most good.”
“Sure,” I said and enjoyed the touch of her fingers as she put the patch in place.
“There,” she said. “Now I’m going to be directly behind you for a bit, you won’t be able to see me, but I’ll be running the calibration software. We’ll be able to hear each other so if something makes you ill or uncomfortable, let me know.”
“Uh, huh,” I said, still smelling her violets. It was going to make me slightly crazy to know she was just out of sight but I would still be able to hear and smell her.
“One last thing, the helmet,” she said.
It wasn’t exactly a helmet, more like two wings on the headrest. I really couldn’t see them but somehow sensed their nearness.
“These will take care of olfactory stimuli,” she explained.
“Uh, huh,” I said again, admiring the underside of her bosom as she reached across me.
She disappeared from view, I heard her flick switches and then the screen in front of me lit up with vague multi-color shapes at the same time as all the other lights in the room went out.
“Ready?” she asked.
“Ready,” I agreed.
