Let the rest of the world go to hell.” Alice hooked her hands on his shoulders and put an ear to his chest. She listened to his strong, steady hear...beat. How did he do that? She wondered. In the space of a few seconds he had made her feel secure. A ball of warmth formed deep inside her core and began to spread through her body. The bands of muscle and fiber beneath her fingertips put thoughts in her head that caused a flutter inside her stomach. She smiled up at him, cursing her lips for. OK let me tell the story from the beginning. We are three friends; myself, Atu and Dilu. Our wives were friends too; my wife Lana, Atu’s wife Asmita and Dilu’s wife Sanjana. We often do party in our houses in rotation, where two families go to the third family’s house and spend time. So we were quite close. We three were software engineers and became friends at our workplace first, which was later extended to our families too. We were just newly married and had nuclear families, so we found it. Again.I ran back and sputtered some broken French at the girl who'd rung up mygroceries, and then heard a familiar voice behind me. "Wally! Youforghet the puhrse!"I turned around to see my checkout girl holding a rather larger blackrectangle than I was expecting. Maybe she'd put my wallet behind thecustomer service counter or something, I thought, but then she skipped upto me, all smiles, and draped a thin leather strap over my shoulder sothat the black rectangle could rest at my hip. I. "I feel really guilty. Yousee I am the head of the neural database section - it was me whodeveloped the technology to interpret your neural net at MIT. They wantedme on site to better understand what was going on inside your head."I retched. Here was the person responsible for the invisible leash thatbound me to their system. Part of me was utterly appalled, yet theoverwhelming part of found comfort in the closeness I had with her. Ifshe had oversight of the data, then surely it wouldn't fall.