Giving up, he was leaving the room when he almost bumped into Amraani. As he started apologizing, Shinji noticed the man wasn’t alone. Two stunning young women their age, with seductive facial expressions on, both linking arms with Amraani, made light of the offense. The curvaceous brunette on his left looked Shinji’s way with interest dripping from her blue eyes.

“Dr Onodera Shinji! Just the man I was looking for!” The broadly smiling Amraani introduced him to the women.

“Betsy and Maxine!” The women slightly bent their heads as he called their names. “This guy here is my pal, my treasured friend, Shinji-Patrick. Notice how his name is shrak!”

“We do.” Maxine replied quickly, her interest in him seeming to spike.

“Thank you.” He shook hands around and Maxine’s hung in his a little longer than he tried to let it. Amraani must have perceived Maxine’s interest too, for he continued, his voice holding a knowing undertone.

“Well, we are heading back to the ballroom. You coming?”

Maxine replied for him “Of course, he's coming.” As they were leaving, she moved from Amraani’s arm to his in such a fluid motion, it felt perfectly natural.

Back in the ballroom, Amraani disappeared right away, dragged from Shinji’s sight by the shapely redhead clutching him. A short, awkward silence fell on Maxine and Shinji.

Shinji shook himself.

Amraani is being himself. Why do I keeping feeling hurt? On the contrary, this helps me greatly. Having that beautiful girl looking at me like this, with adoration, it's my best chance to cover my feelings for the rest of the conference. Shinji turned his attention to the young brunette with the expressive eyes that hung on his arm.

“Miss, should we try the dancing competition there? I sense crazy laughs from the crowd.” And he flashed her a sensual smile that had nothing to do with comedy.

“Yes, thanks." She replied, looking suddenly shy. "When we came in earlier, Betsy and I, I couldn't believe my eyes. They resurrected that synchronized dancing antique and brought it from the Capitol Central Electronic Museum. I never thought I would get to see it except in data burst archives. Let’s do it. It might be djzics!”.

Shinji noted the expression that was mostly used by teenagers nowadays and felt a little old and a bit of a pervert. They reached the corner of the ballroom where the  game was set up. Shinji let Maxine choose their spot in the competition while he gathered them drinks and bites to wait for their turn. For the next hour, they danced and laughed till their jaws hurt and their evening apparel signaled them to go have their sweat extracted.

Another nice innovation of the society was that possibility to exercise wherever and whenever you felt like it without having to worry about your attire and sweaty smells. One could run a marathon in his coattails and spend the next minute having it extracted from the clothing. Sweat was absorbed directly from the surface of the skin by the cloth itself and didn't interact with skin bacteria, so no sweaty body odors. And dancing all night left the party-goer fresh as a pin if they went to the extractor and let it grab their most external piece of clothing for a minute.

Shinji was quite glad this sweat absorbent material was designed a decade before he was born. He disliked feeling sweaty and would have been in trouble if he had to exercise the way his ancestors did in the 21st century.

They kept on swerving upon the dance floor, moving from quick beat music to slow soulful jazz pieces that had crossed time. Maxine did everything to make it steamy and Shinji had trouble deciding where to put his eyes and his hands, or if he even wanted to keep her around longer. Dead in the night as the party lost its wind, Shinji got the lady back to her room, gentleman (or more certainly pathetic) enough to kiss-and-release her, despite her insistence. After he stopped her hands from caressing his torso and delicately peeled her from himself, he said.

“I do want you, Maxine Parker. But I don’t find it fair to you, having my way with you and then, leaving to go back to the one who owns –owned, he chided himself in aparté - my heart.”

Hurt flashed through Maxine's face.

“I see. Then, there is nothing more to add, isn’t it?! " Maxine replied with a look of sadness marring her expressive blue-violet eyes. Schooling her features, she said with an easy smile and laughing eyes. “Bye, Shinji! If she doesn’t appreciate you, please don’t hesitate to contact me.”

She had tried for humor, but he heard her sobbing a little while after she closed her door. Shinji felt like a B-word man.

As he walked back to the elevator to get to his floor, Shinji felt like kicking himself. He still remembered how he had messed up with his first girlfriend. He really had liked the girl, but he had been a true dagger. Gracie Saggs, who almost idolized him, had felt hurt and insulted by his impossibility to repeat their lovemaking performance, a mere week after their wonderful first time together. He had met Amraani Zander McAuliffe in the meantime. A week of knowing the beautiful, slightly muscular, honey-blonde teenager had left Shinji only capable of thinking about Amraani’s lips on his. Whenever they met on campus, he felt –no, imagined being- caressed by Amraani’s silver-grey eyes. He dreamed of the cries of pleasure that woman of the math department had let out when Amraani made love to her in the men’s room. Oh yeah, those sounds of pure sexual delight had been Shinji’s undoing. He started to fantasize of Amraani doing the same things to him. Shinji began seriously wishing for the young man’s hands on his body, missing sleep, growing restless, and distracted. In a matter of days, he couldn’t get it up with Gracie, couldn’t hide his loss of interest in her too. All of her. When they broke up, he had felt like the dagger he was, but hadn’t been able to stop himself. His pain at losing his first crush quickly drowned in his new, growing attraction and desire for popular, rich kid Amraani McAuliffe.

Shinji staggered, feeling very sleepy. I might have had a little too much of that old school punch. Better make haste to my room. Thank God, it’s the last day of the symposium. He stumbled out of the elevator into the hallway. Thankfully, his Renaissance-inspired suite was nearby. Still in his evening dress, with the collar standing ajar, he crawled under the covers, barely conscious enough to kick away his shoes. His last thought went to the vague and puzzling job ad letter in the folder on the immaculate night stand.

In the end, they never told us what this job ad letter was for.

Somewhere in the Constitutional Building, in a control room full of holomonitors, agents in lab coats worked in teams on and around clones that looked like the participants of the conference. Some pushed buttons and called numbers and codes to others controlling computers as well as the monitors, while another few gave vocal commands to automated tools in the screens. One inactive team watched biological signs of a participant for a while before the team leader sitting on the side said “It’s okay. We can start now. He is unconscious.”

Five minutes later, a square of the ceiling right above Shinji-Patrick’s head lit up. A scanning light moved slowly about his head, first. Then it stopped when it hit the bed covers Shinji had crawled under. When it did, the bedding retracted itself away from Shinji’s body. And the light started scanning again his entire body.

As soon as the scanning light stopped, his body started levitating above the bed. Then a set of tools, syringes full of various liquids, piercing and cutting instruments, and other laser heads came down from an opening in the ceiling, right by the source of the scanning light. A fast subatomic laser cut away all of Shinji’s clothes. Then, the other tools quickly cut, injected, prodded, and burnt Shinji’s face and body in an efficient ballet of clinking-clanking metal. A few seconds after they stopped, Shinji’s body seemed to redden and to sweat like he had a very high fever. He seemed to be in great pain for a short while, but he settled down after a syringe followed by another laser hit him square in the heart. He didn’t cry out or wake up. His body then shone bright for a few minutes. At that point, everything seemed to return to normal.

The scanning light did another sweep of Shinji’s body up and down before disappearing. The tools folded up back into the ceiling and a subatomic particle assembler appeared from the floor, positioned itself by Shinji’s side, put a different set of clothing on him, and went back into the floor. Then, his body landed back on the bed lightly. His breathing seemed to return at that instant. He settled completely. The bedding came back in place over him. Another square of ceiling detached from there and morphed into a cube hovering about Shinji’s head all night long, sending data burst information into Shinji’s head. Back in the control room, the team assigned to Shinji retrieved the automaton they sent to his room and reviewed the data it contained.

After 4 hours of data transmission, the type of light the cube sent into Shinji's head changed. It lasted 5 minutes. When it stopped, Shinji woke up. He rolled and groaned.

“What a headache! I swear I’m never drinking again.” He stretched, stood up, and headed for the bathroom. He didn’t seem to notice the cube hovering, moving away from his face, and then following him into the bathroom. He kept prancing around the bathroom, looking for his favorite painkillers until he noticed the soft whoosing of the cube's electromagnetic motor.

When he turned, the electronic, happy-smiley face on the flying robot’s screen was right there, very close to him. That startled him and he jumped away from the airborne device. Angry that such as small thing had surprised him as much and the head still reeling from the hangover, he threw his toothpaste tube to the device. It flew out of the path. Shinji looked to the device straight on for a few beats. He was opening his mouth to call in security when it split and the new part morphed into a bioclone.

“Misericord, Dr Onodera.” The attractive Sollen Jenkins was standing right there, in standard bioclone clothing –that drab grey just-au-corps snuggly fit to his body-, facing him and smiling good-naturedly.

“I hope you rested well. Please, do finish readying yourself. I will wait in the next room.” He bent his head slightly in salutation and left the bathroom.

Dumbfounded, Shinji pinched himself wondering if he was still asleep and dreaming, but the pain felt real. He turned to the mirror to finish cleaning up, wondering what had brought this siren of a man to his room so early in the morning. Looking at the mirror, he jumped in surprise at the other womanly face looking straight at him. The surprise and shock he felt appeared on the woman’s face as well. Shinji lifted his hand to his face and the woman in the mirror did the same with perfect timing and synchronization. One beat later, it dawned on him that he would not see his own face in the mirror and that the smiling siren out there knew why. Shinji came out of the bathroom howling anger and flames, pasted toothbrush in his right hand.

“What the mocks! Jenkins! What happened to me? I know you know why. So, don’t beat around the bush.” His toothpaste fell from the brush.

“Please, be calm, Dr Onodera. You are still under the influence of the medical relaxer, therefore if you stay in this state of rage very long, it will put you to sleep forcefully.” Shinji ignored the pointed look Jenkins gave to the side of the room where the monitoring cube was gliding.

“I said no delaying tactics, Jenkins. My question was about the new, girly face I’m sporting. Mocks! I’m not even my own clothes!” Shinji was pointing down with the toothbrush at the white satin pajamas he had on and oozing a menacing aura. Jenkins ignored him once more.

“Please, quickly get your temper under control or this conversation will stop because you will fall asleep where you stand.” Jenkins’ voice held the reassuring tone heard when they first met back in Boreau, Nageria.

As if on cue, an announcement that behavior control mechanism would be activated “if Participant 3712 doesn’t abate his physiological parameters of imminent violence in 15 seconds”. Shinji faced the origin of the sound. In the back, the flying monitor showed on screen a beeping countdown instead of the happy smiley face. A few counts went by before Shinji took a deep breath.

I hate being forced like this, but I need to understand what is going on.

He closed his eyes, hung his head, and let his hands slowly fall along his sides. His shoulders relaxed and tension hissed out of his entire body. He raised his head as the cubic monitor stopped his count and resumed his smiley screen. He leveled his lagoon-blue eyes onto Jenkins. They bore more friendliness than Jenkins had ever seen of Shinji. The grey-tight-wearing administrator averted his eyes briefly, uncontrollably.

Delicious Heaven, you die if those eyes watch you with desire! He continued out loud. “Thank you for complying. I know it must have been a trouble. The good news are now you are calm enough to hear me out.”

“Talk.” The curt tone cut away any doubt Jenkins had that Shinji’s irritation had evaporated completely. In truth, Shinji felt more shocked than angered. He waited.