Parasite, A Love Story
By Helotage
CHAP 2: Do You Feel Me, Dr. Hands?
Later that evening, after an exciting day of hearing other people’s research and being ignored by almost everyone as usual, she attended a cocktail reception, wondering if she was officially a pariah. After standing in line with her complimentary drink ticket, she noticed that the other scientists avoided her. Her isolation combined with her natural shyness meant she ended up standing all alone, sipping her shitty wine while leaning against a far wall.
Then she spotted him, Dr. Franz Hanz. He was a renown entomologist and tomorrow’s keynote speaker. She recognized him from his picture in the conference guide, but he needed no introduction. She was fully familiar with his extraordinary advances in the field. She was also fully familiar, as was every young woman at this reception, with his extraordinary advances on female graduate students. He was known universally as “Dr. Hands.” To accept his caresses was to earn a stellar reference or a coveted post-doc. To reject him was to find every career avenue closed. He could literally make or break a budding female entomologist’s career. Here, in person, she saw that he was short and old and ugly and, by the glint reflecting from his left ring finger, married. He was just about guzzling his wine as he lecherously scanned the room. The other young women huddled together to fend him off as a group, so he settled on her standing there all alone.
As he shuffled toward her, she wondered at how desperate he must be. After all, what was so enticing about her? She was dressed in a drab sweater and slacks, both of which hung loosely on her skinny frame. Since she never left the lab, her skin was pale. Her hair was mousey and unkempt, her breasts tiny. Sure, some acquaintances told her that a little makeup would make her very pretty, but she never understood how covering your face in paint enhanced it. Still, some might find her attractive in a geeky, no-makeup way. He drew nearer, his gaze fixed on her, pausing only to slurp his wine, which dribbled a little down his chin. She tried to look even more unappealing. She wondered how lesbians got out of this trap unscathed. Maybe they didn’t. Still, she resolved that she had no intention of sleeping with Dr. Hands.
To be sure, she was no prude. She liked boys. She had had a few boyfriends, even, in high school and college. They were never serious relationships, but she was not a virgin, not by a long shot. Since starting grad school, she did not date because she was too busy and because so many men her age were just not interesting to her. She downed the last of her wine.
Dr. Hands introduced himself and paused to give her time to express her admiration. “Oh, please,” he said. “I’m not that big a deal. Just call me Franz and treat me like a regular guy.” He offered to get her another wine, which she declined, and he asked her about her research. He had not been at her talk. Upon hearing her mention neuroworms, he raised his eyebrows and leaned in. “You like courting controversy, I see.” His voice had grown lasciviously conspiratorial. She glanced around the room desperately, hoping that another woman would come over to rescue her. No luck. So much for the sisterhood. She had to give him the slip right away before he grew too interested and bothered to learn her name. She told him she was not well after the stress of giving her talk. She had thought the wine would calm her, but it just made her nauseous. This was all a little true, which was good because she hated lying and preferred to avoid it out of habit. She excused herself, saying she had to get some sleep. Dr. Hands seemed somewhat disappointed as she moved past him, but no matter. She already caught him eyeballing another female graduate student who had just walked in. He would have plenty of time to bed another victim.
As she left the room, she saw her mentor for the first time at the reception, Dr. Fell. He was fairly handsome for a man in his fifties, but he did not tempt her. Besides, she knew his wife socially and liked her very much. She even thought of her as a friend, a good friend. She noticed he was having an intense, almost intimate, conversation with another student from her lab, a buxom dyed-blond Fox News type. He leaned lewdly toward her, and the blond smiled her encouragement. Seeing him with this blond, she was never more disappointed in Dr. Fell both because of his unfaithfulness to his wife and, even more so, because she hated that stupid blond so much.
The good news, she realized, as she reached her room, was that she would likely be alone that night because she was, in fact, sharing the room with that very same blond in order to split the cost. They had struck a temporary truce as a nod to their mutual grad student penury, which overruled their mutual female rivalry. She figured the blond would spend the night with Dr. Fell, so she could enjoy her privacy doing what she did most nights—indulging her fixation (or was it a fetish?) on erotic mind control. She loved to locate new internet videos, snippets of movies, photos, and, especially, stories of mind control. The videos were usually lame and consisted of bad actresses pretending to be robots or something. The mainstream movie snippets were more professional but far less graphic. The photos mostly were dumb, consisting of glassy-eyed women staring blankly at the camera with their heads tilted and arms straight out. The stories, though, were the best. She preferred the ones that took a long time to build, that spent a good while establishing the scene and the characters’ personalities, even over a chapter or two, before describing their inevitable sexual slavery. She especially liked them when they were a little icky and gross. Still, there were plenty of times when she just wanted to enjoy a quick hypnosis and fucking story to get herself off although poor writing could be a real buzzkill. That night she found a good one and settled in for a long read, idly worming her fingers into her panties as the story slowly heated up.
Her favorite fantasy, though, was from her own imagination. It was the one she most often indulged as she masturbated, and it had to do with her neuroworms. Ever since she first heard tell of their mind control powers, her most cherished sexual dream was of being controlled by the collective imperative of a worm family as it invaded and relentlessly colonized her brain. Under the influence of the neuroworms, she would lose all inhibitions and become a slave to the irresistible desires transmitted by her parasites. The worms would surely strip her of her own will and judgment to substitute their own, but she would perform their bidding willingly. She could get really worked up over this daydream.
If only infestation did not mean certain death!
Her proximity to and scientific knowledge of the neuroworms did little to dampen the power of this sexual fantasy. Intellectually, she knew it was silly, but the fantasy of neuroworm mind control possessed her emotionally and dominated her every sexual thought it seemed. Sometimes she wondered if her obsession played a role in her unbidden celibacy since college. Still, as the world’s foremost expert in neuroworms, she knew that they didn’t even have brains of their own to speak of, just a cluster of nerves. Yes, theoretically, their attachment via their neuralweb could constitute a crude neural net of sorts, and she had become convinced that the worms could cause hosts, even human hosts, to alter their behavior. But, what if the neuralweb itself, as it transmitted the worms’ messages along it filaments and tapping into the host’s neurons, could facilitate communal thoughts? Arguably, the merged mental activities of worms and host would constitute a separate consciousness that could override the host’s singular consciousness. The host would become at once an integral part of the collective and its slave. The host might not even know it was a slave, or it might, as directed by its master collective, not even care. This theorizing is where her scientific research and sexual desires converged. As for the sexual fantasy, it got her off every time.
No, she did not miss her roommate that night at all.