A part of her wanted to yell at the blonde. It was the same thing everyone else had told her. Her parents tried to scare her with stories of Japanese ...annibals who liked to eat the skin off teenage girls who squirmed around while still alive. Her teachers kept telling her how good her grades were and encouraging her to go into engineering. The one person whose support she'd always hoped to count on was now here with the same tired old platitudes, making the Irish girl want to shout and tell her. But what is the exact energy of the rays we are using? It is important to me. Nobody at the hospital seems to know."Julie hadn't considered that the energy was important.She browsed into the source-code repository at Physical Sciences., but the firmware for the Taubett machine was missing.Julie was surprised. She'd only been looking at Stefan's image processing code for the Taubett machine just before the holidays.Then she remembered.The firmware for the Taubett machine had been removed from. I place my hands on the mattress next to the hips and lean forward, lowering my head until I feel my lips against the stomach, which tenses with the contact. I begin by sticking out my tongue and running it upwards, stopping at the belly button, probing it with my tongue, feeling the body beneath me squirm with each swipe. I feel movement as arms are shifted around to get comfortable.I gently nibble at the flesh of the stomach, and the belly button, gently pulling it into my mouth and caressing. Aid would have been welcome before I had this collar clenched around my neck.The soulless man shifted slightly in his place by the windowsill ... distracting me from my ruminations."You can't see the front garden from that window," I said, with some of my anger bleeding into my voice.The strange human shrugged without looking at me. "I don't particularly want to watch," he said mildly.The man had been quiet and withdrawn since his return, after telling me about Devnikolus's sun shield and his.