Okay, folks, this one is long, a bit geeky, and has a lot of exposition before the payoff. Stick with it and you'll get a treat. I can't believe I'm still up at this hour and not having sex... - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - I've heard it said that intelligent people make better lovers. If this is true, then my Nadine is the best lover in the world. It all started when some friends invited me to a local dive that hosts a swing dance every Saturday night. Having seen "Swingers" three times, I figured it was worth a shot. Now, Nadine wasn't the first girl that caught my eye. The room was filled with model-class women curvier than the West Virginia Turnpike, many of them dancing with whatever men happened to be in the room. My kinda place. Nadine, on the other hand, was this geeky little thing, thin but not without a few modest curves of her own, her long black hair tied into a ponytail, and large tortoise-shell glasses covering her face. When she arrived with another girl and a guy -- her boyfriend, I assumed -- the three of them looked like they fit in better at a comic convention than a swing dance. Of course, that was before the dancing began. As soon as she hit the floor, she owned it, improvising things that you would have though were choreographed weeks in advance. She knew most of her dance partners, already, and it showed. She could be fun, athletic, seductive, whatever her lead wanted. Being the rank East Coast Swing Amateur that I was, I was a little intimidated. I could ask the most beautiful woman in the room to dance with me, but for the longest time, I couldn't ask Nadine. By spiderj on Thursday, May 20, 1999 - 02:41 am: I asked her to dance, and to my surprise, she made me feel right at home. Even when I wasn't sure what to do, she helped me out without missing a beat. I enjoyed it so much that I stuck around for at least three songs. Afterward, we grabbed something to drink and sat down to chat. We were on the same wavelength -- chatting about movies, exchanging on-line war stories. Her knowledge of computers was even more intimidating than her dance moves. Then I asked her where she worked. "Transmetro," she replied. I was floored. This was the same company that had spawned an Internet legend. They were quietly working on a new CPU that would turn the computing world on its ass, revealing nothing to the public and letting the rumor mill work overtime. Big names from big companies were funneling billions of dollars into this project. She was sworn to secrecy about the project, but she told me enough to let me know she was a pretty important part of it all. "I am so jealous of your boyfriend," I told her, pointing him out on the floor. She just about did a spit take. "You think that's my boyfriend?" she said. "That's my cousin. I needed a partner, so I dragged him to the dance classes against his will. Now I can't keep him away from this place." I blinked a few times before I could finally say something. "You wanna go see The Matrix again with me?" She smiled and pulled me back out on the dance floor. By spiderj on Thursday, May 20, 1999 - 02:42 am: The next three months were one of the most blissful times of my life. Nadine and I monopolized each others spare time -- dancing, cooking, movie- watching, or just talking. We could talk about anything; nothing was taboo. Often we went swimming in the pool at my apartment complex. The more I watched her underwater, her long black hair flowing behind her, the more beautiful she became. Kissing her in the deep end of the pool was a wonderfully sensuous experience. I stopped by her house at least every other day. She had a modest little two-bedroom ranch outside of the city. Her computer room was would have made any self-aware geek jealous as hell -- a network of four PCs (all AMD-based systems -- being anti-Intel was corporate policy at Transmetro) and an old Next workstation. Her MP3 collection put mine to shame. No question I was in love. Then came the day I dreaded -- I accidentally left one of my drowning cliptapes in the VCR, which she found and started playing when I wasn't looking. I walked into the room, saw what she was watching and froze. Every past girlfriend ran away from me after finding one of those videos. I braced myself for the worst. "Have you ever wondered what that feels like?" she asked me. "What, drowning?" I said. "I read somewhere that once you start inhaling water, you feel really cold at first, and then after a few seconds, when your body adjusts to the temperature of the water, it gets very comfortable, to the point where you just feel like drifting, and you forget about breathing entirely." I sat down next to her on the couch. "You make it sound almost romantic." "Well, I try to forget that death is involved." We watched another scene from the clip tape together. "What was the first scene that ever got you aroused?" she asked finally. Even with our relationship, I was a little surprised that she was getting into this. By spiderj on Thursday, May 20, 1999 - 02:44 am: "Would you believe 'Strange Brew'?" I said. "You're kidding." "It was this really short scene where this really cute woman struggled for a while, then went under. You watched her sink to the bottom, then some guy kisses her and pushes her back up to the surface--" "And the guy looks like he drowns, but the McKenzie Brothers give him oxygen in beer bottles? That was the one?" "Well, I hung out in the pool a lot. The girls got tired of me dunking them all the time. How about you? You have a scene?" She looked at me and smiled. "Liz Mastrantonio in 'The Abyss'," she said. "That moment where she kisses Ed Harris through the mask, then lets herself drown so he can save her later. It was typical Cameron manipulation, but something about the gamble she took there was just really hot." I shook my head and laughed out loud. "You're fucking amazing," I said. "You're the first person I can talk to about this without feeling embarrassed." "Well, we all have our little secrets." We talked about it for a while that night, then made out for what seemed like hours. I thought we might actually have sex that night, but as usual, we drew the line at mutual masturbation -- which was fine, really. I knew she would be worth the wait. I didn't know the half. By spiderj on Thursday, May 20, 1999 - 02:45 am: Another blissful month or so passed, and one night just before midnight, Nadine called me. "I want you over here right now," she said. "Now? I look like dogshit right now." "I don't care if you smell like dogshit. You get over here." My eyebrows shot up. "You're going to make me late for work again, aren't you?" "When you see what I've got for you, employment will be the least of your concerns." I hung up the phone, threw on whatever clothes I could find and ran to my car, driving over to her house at speeds much higher than the posted limits. I was lucky I didn't get stopped; traffic cops don't accept the concept of "radar love" as an excuse. They might have if they had seen Nadine at the door -- she wore a tight black, midriff-baring wetsuit top, zipped up in the front, and black bikini bottom that showed off her slight figure nicely. She handed me a pair of baggy swim trunks. "Follow me," she whispered in my ear. By spiderj on Thursday, May 20, 1999 - 02:47 am: We walked around to the backyard, and she opened the big wooden doors to the cellar underneath her house. When we reached the bottom of the stairs, she flipped two switches -- one to turn on a hanging light bulb, the other to uncover a wide manhole in the floor. She pulled me close and gave me a deep kiss. "Do you love me?" she asked. "Yes, I love you." "Do you trust me?" I looked at her curiously for a moment, wondering what she was up to. "Yes," I replied, "I trust you." "Change into those trunks and follow me." I turned my back to her and took off all my clothes. She made a flirtacious comment about my ass as I slid on the trunks. Then I watched as she climbed down the ladder. A blue light illuminated the tube, revealing a perpendicular tube underneath that was almost filled with water. She climbed down into that tube and gestured me to join her, and I watched as she ducked into the water and swam off to some unknown destination. I took a deep breath, still wondering what she was up to, and followed her through the comfortably-warm liquid. After a short downhill swim through the tube, I arrived in a fairly large tank, shaped like a cube and filled to the top with the liquid. There were two good-sized liquid crystal displays waterproof keyboards underneath on either side of the painted concrete walls. The blue screens gave almost a cathode-ray luminescene to the liquid, and to Nadine herself, who held on to a pair of handles on the ceiling and stared at me for a moment. Her smile hinted of a big surprise waiting for me. By spiderj on Thursday, May 20, 1999 - 02:49 am: The surprise came when she closed her eyes, leaned her head back and coughed, letting loose a flurry of bubbles from her mouth. Her body convulsed a few more times as less and less bubbles floated toward the ceiling, and I watched as she let go of the handles and floated down peacefully. I was aroused at first, until it hit me what Nadine was doing. She was letting me watch her drown. She was dying in front of me. Reality slapped me hard, and in a panic I rushed toward her. She was too important to me to die like this. When I reached her, however, she kicked me away and swam back up toward the top, hovering for a moment above me. She wasn't dead, wasn't even close. I was struck dumb for a moment until my own lungs started aching for air. That's when she floated down toward me and gestured for me to inhale. I was surprised, but again, she mouthed the words, "Trust me." I closed my eyes, let the rest of my air out, then finally let the liquid in. When I began to convulse, Nadine grabbed me and held me tightly, cradling my head in her hand and gently kissing my ear. Within a minute, I realized that I wasn't dead either. I floated for a moment, getting used to the heavy sensation of liquid in my lungs and nasal passages. Nadine smiled at me and swam away, letting me chase her around the tank for a few moments. When I caught up with her, I asked her how this was possible. She led me to one of the LCD screens and started typing on the keyboard. "Remember The Abyss?" I nodded. "It's not water," she continued typing, "it's perflubron. Like the breathing liquid at the end. High oxygen content, so we can breathe it in. Used mostly as medical treatment, actually." I took to the keyboard myself. "How long have you had this tank?" By spiderj on Thursday, May 20, 1999 - 02:50 am: "Finished it six months ago. I come down here a lot for meditation, sensory deprivation, sometimes to work. I e-mail you from here a lot." "How do you keep it clean?" "I built the filtration system. Converts CO2 back to oxygen, gets rid of dirt. Transmetro helped fund it." My curiosity got the best of me. "Come clean, dammit. What's Transmetro up to?" Nadine then typed one word that answered almost all of my questions -- nanotechnology. It turned out that Transmetro had heard about her work with nanotech at the University of Washington, and they offered her a big salary and the best toys in the world. Their big secret was a process for building three-dimensional processors, which operated at speeds thousands of times faster than current technology, yet could be kept cooler than other CPUs with a couple of built-in heat sinks. Nanotech figured heavily into their process, and since Nadine was their chief nanotech expert, she was given the leeway to work on a side project -- the filtration system that let us breathe while submerged. The questions were abuzz in my head, and I started typing out of control when Nadine pulled my hands away from the keyboard and dragged me back to the middle of the tank. She pulled me toward her and looked into my eyes, leaving me struck dumb yet again at her floating figure and her long black hair floating around her face. My hands pushed her hair back and pulled her lips to mine, and she sank backwards to the floor. By spiderj on Thursday, May 20, 1999 - 02:53 am: We rolled around a bit until she positioned herself on top of me, then pushed off the floor and floated above me. I stood up as she continued rising and grabbed the zipper on her top, gently pulling it down and revealing her small but firm breasts. She tossed the top to the side and took my hand, leading me toward the ceiling and running her hand down my side into my trunks. Her other hand reached in, and I kept swimming up until she was left holding the trunks. She dropped them and twisted around to see me, running her hands up my thigh toward my chest. She then reached down and took my penis, now even more erect than usual, into her hands. I felt myself wanting to moan out loud as she planted kisses along the shaft, but the breathing fluid cut off my vocal cords. That turned me on even more. I lifted her face back toward mine and kissed her, pushing her upward as I floated down. On my way down, I grabbed her bikini bottom and slid it down her legs, letting it drop on the floor with the rest of our clothing. As she playfully kicked away, it hit me that this was the first time we were both completely naked in front of each other. We swam around for a bit, intertwining with each other in a multitude of ways until we met at the handles on the ceiling. Nadine grabbed on to the handles as I ran my tongue down her neck, across her chest, down her stomach and came to a stop between her legs. As my tongue played there, I could feel her hips tense and twist in delight. I tried to position myself so that I could see the look of pleasure on her face, and the way her hair swayed in the liquid. I had almost hoped that she might have had a pockets of air left in her lungs, so that I could watch more bubbles rise up from her mouth. By spiderj on Thursday, May 20, 1999 - 02:54 am: Her hips began to grind above my face, and as she reached orgasm, she let go of the handles and relaxed, letting herself float downward. I floated down with her, catching a glimpse of her body pretending to drown, sinking to the bottom of the tank. I crawled away and let her relax there on the bottom for a moment, resisting the urge to masturbate over her still body. I swam back over to her and turned her over. She remained still, her mouth slackened, her eyes pretending to gloss over. I stood up lifted Nadine's face toward mine. As we kissed, she slowly came back to life, wrapping her arms and her legs around me. We looked into each other's eyes and realized the moment had arrived. She pushed her hips back and spread her legs, allowing me to enter her. She bit her lip as I pushed into her, then gently pushed her hips into mine. She threw her arms back and floated perpendicular to me, her hair shadowing her look of ecstacy, as I put my hands on her hips and pumped them back and forth, trying to hold my orgasm back long enough to satisfy her. Her small body swayed effortlessly in the liquid, and her eyes looked back at me in wonder. She finally lifted herself up and wrapped her arms around my waist, and I lifted us off the floor and swam toward the ceiling. Again, she reached for the handles, and this time I grabbed hold of her hips and began pumping furiously. Her body convulsed in pleasure, her mouth wide open like mine, wanting to scream out with each thrust. For a moment, I thought I was beginning to feel dizzy, in need of more oxygen than the fluid in my lungs could provide, but the excitement of the moment pushed me further to orgasm. By spiderj on Thursday, May 20, 1999 - 02:55 am: She knew immediately when I came into her, and her eyes shot open to see me looking up at her in amazement. Quickly she let go of the handles and held me tightly, kissing me deeply as we both floated back to the bottom of the tank. We came to rest there, spent physically and emotionally, bathing in the blue glow of the tank. We finally came up a few moments later. Nadine rose up into the manhole first, expelling the liquid from her lungs into a separate portal next to the ladder. She then lifted me up out of the tube, holding me steady as I bent down on one knee and threw up the fluid that sustained me briefly. I gasped and let my lungs adjust to breathing air again, then looked up to see her smiling back at me, a twinkle in her eye that I hadn't seen before. I quickly stood up and kissed her again, this time with such force that I pushed her back against the tube wall, holding her tightly by waisting and pushing her as close to me as possible. When I finally pulled away, I asked her to marry me. When she said yes, I spent a moment cursing the weeks that I was too intimidated to ask her for a dance. She may not have been the best-looking woman in the room, but with a mind capable of concocting a fantasy like that, she was the clearly best lover of them all.