He had agreed to meet me at my hotel, in the restaurant. I thought again about what the AI had told me about him.He was going to discover a process in...which a new anti-viral injection, which was eighty percent effective against that all-pervasive enemy: the common cold. Now, in my mind, having suffered colds over the years; this was a great discovery!Of course, the big pharmaceutical companies were trying to dissuade him from pursing this line of research. It was easy to figure out why, too.. It didn't normally take her long to get through the security checks, but other people in the same queue were often delayed for much longer, especially those that looked slightly foreign or were dressed in a fashion that bothered the security staff. It wasn't just a person's skin colour or accent (especially Scottish or Welsh) that might earn special attention. There were other characteristics such as hair that was too long or too short, too many tattoos or body-piercings, or clothes deemed to. .. Let’s get a game in tomorrow morning, Lissa. I bet half the town would show up to see us play.”“Don’t embarrass your girlfriend,” Lissa scowled. Uh-oh.“I’m sorry. Really. I couldn’t stop him,” I whined. Yeah, Melody doesn’t have a corner on the whining market. I’m pretty good at it.“Stop who? What?” Melody asked.“Tony?”“Dad,” I said. “He’s so excited to have you here to visit he arranged to have a court for us tomorrow morning for a kind of local exhibition.”I pulled into the Y parking lot. This was, I thought, the blemish on the apple, and it was my duty to paint over it, or at least conceal it. I was considering the best pose for Miss Mullins when she looked at me seriously. ‘It means I’ve never been fucked,’ she said, unsteadily. Now fully undressed she looked shaky and vulnerable and wonderful. ‘When a man gets near I can’t bear to show him, so I’ve never got far enough to have sex… and I doubt that a virgin makes a good model. Not if I can’t be confident when I’ve never been.