"Your conclusions are... different," the teacher capitulated, and adjusted his spectacles. Laser eye surgery was readily available, of course, but a good pair of bifocals gave off a certain image.
"And your creativity is... commendable," another added, and for a second their target let himself feel a spot of self-confidence.
"Thank you. I-"
"However," came the interruption he should've been expecting, "your methods are laughable."
"I couldn't-"
"Your reasoning is flawed and incomplete."
"The results of my-"
"Your results," a stern-looking professor replied, "are nonexistent."
"My findings-"
No chance to get a word in edgewise. The barrage continued.
"Your adherence to teenage-level rebellion is sophomoric."
"You lack proper perspective for your paper's broad statements."
"Most theses at least pretend to have a logical course of reasoning."
"Don't you know? Criticizing the military is out of vogue!"
The men laughed, unintentionally giving their charge a brief second to speak.
"I-I-well, I never intended to criticize, only to suggest that maybe-"
"Maybe what? Maybe a theoretical physics graduate student might have figured out something that years of military research hasn't?"
Forced into a corner. No way out but the truth. All he could do was stand by his principles.
"That is my contention, yes."
More laughing. More jeers.
"We'll get back to you," the man who'd voiced the first objections said. "We have to... network with our colleagues-"
at that point he broke into a guffaw. The holograms switched off. The room went black.
We have to laugh about your life's work and toss it in a wastebin. That was the gist of what that meant, he thought fiercely. The pencil in his hand tensed and threatened to crack; he released his grip and put the thing away. Violence was wrong, even when following the sudden nosedive his life had just taken.
-0-
This fellow was Gavin Rochester, not that he liked the name much. He was 24 and had no hobbies. His personal life wouldn't have filled up an Extranet dating profile: no living, non-extraneous relatives, no previous romantic relationships, didn't watch much besides the news, didn't particularly like long walks in the rain and had never touched a piña colada in his life.
In fact, Gavin had never imbibed a drop of alcohol or used a stimulant: a natural squeamishness and nervous personality had effectively quelled any desire for the stuff.
Plainly speaking, the only thing on that dating profile (non-fictional: he had long ago been forced by his roommates to make one, though he'd never received even one sincere reply) was a simple statement: I love physics
And so on this auspicious night, the night of his thesis presentation and defense, it's perhaps not so surprising that Gavin was getting rip-roaring drunk at one of the seediest dives in town.
"Hey, can I get some stout?" The bartender nodded and served up a foaming mug. A bleary-eyed and wobbly Gavin clapped his hand down on the man's arm as he reached for his drink.
"Buncha... buncha old fogeys," Gavin griped. His heart wasn't in the grip, so the man was able to snatch his hand away. The bartender shot him an apologetic but resigned look, like this wasn't the first time this sort of thing had happened. Not that Gavin knew anything about that.
"Bioticsh're..." he struggled to find the words, waving his hands to try to illustrate his point. "...'re compli... complick... com-pil-ated." The bartender, a fuzzily blue person-shaped blob, found somewhere else to be.
"They sure are," a soft and smooth voice agreed from beside him. Gavin started the motion that would become a turn, realized it would instead turn into an undignified flop onto the floor, and thought better of it.
"You know bioticsh?" He slurred, trying to peek at the new arrival from the corner of his eye.
"I do. The name's Maria." She held out a hand and managed to catch his when it veered a few inches off-course.
"Want to par... partish... be in my shtudy?" He chuckled before she could answer. "Not that it exishts anymore." Gavin frowned and took another drink. Not the smartest decision he'd ever made, but then all his supposedly intelligent decisions so far had ended up with a mess of a career and a mountain of debt he was trying hard not to think about right now.
"Tell me about it," the silky voice implored. "What happened?"
Gavin squinted at her, trying to puzzle out why she was so interested in his work: no other women had been before, though he hadn't stopped trying to ploy them with military this and biological research that. Women were, beyond their textbook qualities, largely a mystery to Gavin. He'd never gotten closer than a kiss from a drunk girl at a High School party and had been extremely flustered by the teasing that he endured afterwards. In the end he'd decided that women were a completely perplexing equation that he just wasn't built to solve; he felt like Turing's Enigma Decoder posed with a Keyword cipher. Nothing short of brilliant, but unsuited for the task.
As it happens, it might have been for the best that Gavin's beer goggles had turned into beer bifocals and finally some sort of foggy beer window panes. He had no experience with the fairer sex, but this inexperience turned into babbling and mind-melting nervousness when confronted with a particularly attractive female specimen. He simply didn't have the experience, and what he did was all bad: teasing, harsh jokes and bullying. Nothing Mass Effect technology could do about human nature. So he didn't notice eyes popping when she walked over to him, nor her figure or just how much she looked like some half-forgotten celebrity. All she looked like was a fuzzy outline with pink on top, white in the middle and black on bottom. Frankly, his certainty that she was female at all came from her voice. So perhaps this was better. Or perhaps, worse.
"Biotic connecshuns," he explained, "with nerves." By habit he was being careful. In the cut-throat world of biological science, spilling experimental secrets was tantamount to career suicide. If you could figure something out, someone else could just as easily. Easier, since they knew there was something to figure. Often the only advantage you had was surprise. "I shpoke out againsht the military. They didn't like that."
"I'm sorry to hear it," she coolly replied. "The military can be so... rigid."
"Exshactly." He waved a finger in what he figured was her general direction. "No... flexshibility."
She giggled and rubbed his arm, leaning into him. He felt something soft but couldn't really identify it. "Good point!" He nodded and grinned lopsidedly. It had been a good point. He was glad she'd noticed.
"Well," she murmured in his ear. "I'd love to hear more about your research, but this is a little too public. How about you come back to my place and we can... talk."
He narrowed his eyes. "Ishn't that code for sexshual inter... intra... secksh?"
He heard what the bartender would later describe as a world-weary, exasperated sigh. "Yes. Sure. Come back to my place and we can talk about which I meant."
Gavin thought about this proposal. Even drunk to his eyeballs, he wasn't stupid by any means. He was wary of sharing his secrets, but then again he didn't see much point in keeping under wraps a thesis project that had pretty much got him laughed out of the field. And after all, wasn't tonight about forsaking all his principles? A one night stand (he'd studied the terminology at one point) sounded like the perfect end to the evening. Almost a little too perfect.
Gavin considered that thought, but dismissed it. What did he stand to lose?
-0-
They took an aircar back to her apartment, which he could tell was extremely expensive and nicely furnished in a blurry sort of way. He complimented what he thought was a painting and turned out to be a statue, but tried not to let the mix-up get himself down. She guided him more like a dog than a lover through several rooms and pushed him back on her bed. He bounced back up and snapped his fingers.
"Sho it wash secksh! I knew it," he crowed. It felt good to be right. Always had.
"Sure is," she replied. Somehow her voice was getting less silky and more irritated. Or maybe that was the booze talking. "Turn around and we'll start."
Gavin frowned. He'd seen many diagrams, some more academic and some less. He was pretty sure this wasn't how it worked. "Shouldn't we be fashing each other?"
She let the irritation seep through. "Turn around or I'll find another cute student to take back to my home and screw the brains out of."
He didn't need to be told twice. Gavin turned and waited. Instead of anything out of Formax's more vanilla issues, however, he was met with a sharp crack to the head and then, darkness.
-0-
When he awoke, he was met with a tremendous headache. This was something he'd expected as an outcome of his drinking spree, but he hadn't thought the pain would be quite so splitting. Perhaps, he reflected, he'd drunk more than he thought. He rolled out of bed with a groan, holding his head, and tried to recall just what had happened last night.
The slow trickle of memories was spurred by the unfamiliar walls that met his squinting gaze, and then unleashed by a feminine yawn from the soft-far softer than his own!-bed he sat on.
"Come back to bed," the voice implored, and he turned to see his supposed lover for the first time.
To him, she was a bombshell. Others might have described her as a picturesque beauty, the kind that was popular nowadays in Asari films. The kind that turned ten out of ten heads. Maybe nine. And she was half naked in the same bed he'd crawled out of.
Gavin's brain struggled for something, anything intelligent to say. His mouth reviewed the options and settled at last on "Bwah."
The woman giggled, shifting her auburn hair over her white skin. She looked utterly at home and even slightly predatorial under her milky sheets. She beckoned him with a fiery look. "Last night you passed out before we could get anywhere. Care to finish what we started?" She bit her lip slightly. "I know some good home remedies for headaches."
Instead of falling into bed with her, as Gavin surely wanted to do, he slowly stood and started to back away. She pouted and leaned forward, exposing a very lacy bra which Gavin figured was having lower back problems of its own. "What's wrong? Am I not good enough?" There was even a tear in her eye.
"Please," he frowned. "I'm not stupid. A girl like you takes a guy like me home and wants to hear all about his research?" He shook his head. "That's a nice idea, but only an idiot would fall for that trick." Or a drunk, he thought to himself. He didn't remember spilling anything too important, but there were still large gaps in his memory.
"Why so paranoid?" She chided, and sat up fully. Gavin didn't quite know where to look. "Isn't it enough that I like your type?"
"Not a chance. The improbable is improbable for a reason. Hope makes people forget that." he stated it like a litany, and she sighed.
"Alright. I guess we do this the hard way. Easy for me, hard for you." She slid a tableside drawer open and pulled out what looked like the kind of electric baton that riot police carried.
"Hold on." Gavin held his hands up and backed into the wall. "You're with the police? I'm not in trouble, am I?" He couldn't remember doing anything illegal, but maybe with the drinking last night... "may I remind you that under your martial code, outstanding force is prohibited unless warranted by resistive actions."
"No on both questions." She smiled and fired up the baton. The electrical activity was pretty, in a sort of remove-all-opposition-semi-humanely kind of way.
"Phew." Gavin relaxed. "Wait, but then-"
And the baton hit him, and he was out. Gavin fell to the floor in a crumpled heap with absolutely no grace.
In time, he would learn this was how many first meetings with Cerberus went.