Book Title: KaeLF Skin: A Nanotechnology Techno thriller
Author: John Jurek.
ISBN 1-58898-034-0.
Publisher: www,greatunpublished.com.
Formats: Trade Paperback, US $15.00+s/h; Adobe PDF PC/MAC Version, US $7.99.

Biography: John Jurek is an electrical engineer of some 35 years experience and a registered P.E. in the state of Wisconsin. Besides software and hardware design, he has worked in technical communications, and has also freelanced, writing articles for various publications on the arts and other non-technological topics. He is both a classical and jazz musician. KaeLF Skin is his first novel.

Book Description: High-tech meets high-fashion in this meta-concept nanotechnology bio-thriller about wearable computer fabric. A tactile human/computer interface stimulates a whirlwind of industrial espionage, manipulative big business tactics, tantric sexual coercion, and the full range of human folly and heroism.

The introduction into American markets of a new European "smart fabric" undergarment fashion which secretly pleasures, addicts, injures and kills seems inevitable until a young holistic doctor risks his career to take on not only its inventors, but the CIA,the military, a powerful US synthetic textile conglomerate and his own father.

CHAPTER 1
After Hours Research
Frankfurt Am Main, Germany

Frau Doktor Lindeström felt naked in the air-conditioned control booth. But it was not a feeling of vulnerability or exposure. She wore a full-length lab coat and high-heeled shoes. Underneath the white coat, despite the chill of the room, she was dressed only in her underwear. She let herself indulge in an involuntary shiver, then peered through the angled observation window at the staging area below. The facility was formerly a sound-stage studio for video taping fashion promos. She noted with satisfaction that the staging floor had been cleared and set up with the required equipment, and that the instrument racks were bristling with her own special nanotechnology instrumentation. Alles in Ordnung, she thought, pleased.

She turned her attention to the control booth console. Amidst the standard video and electronic equipment she surveyed with pride the monitoring instruments she'd had designed to her specifications. A door opened and a man stood leaning in its frame.

"Oh, Heinz Liebchen," she said, appraising him from head to toe. He wore coarse faded Levi's, low on his hips, but from there up he was in a skin conforming garment. Tight stretchy material covered his broad chest and arms. Doktor Lindeström admired the tufts of manly chest hair spilling out incongruously over his scooped feminine neckline. "Du siet hubsch aus!" she said, "very handsome."

"Ja, doch," said Heinz in his low voice. "Are you about ready? I have something to do tonight. A date. As soon as we're done here of course."

"A date? Yes, of course, Liebchen. But is Fraulein Köenig ready?"
Heinz paused a moment, leaning in the doorjamb and idly picking at a small connector attached to his sleeve. "Do you fully trust this woman?" he asked finally, looking up.

"Resi? Why of course, Liebchen. She's been with my father for nearly twenty years."

"Ja, well that's what I mean."

"Don't worry, Liebchen. She's solid. Besides, she's well recruited, nicht wahr? She's been wearing my little gifts, no?"

"Yes, I suppose."

"Gut und stimmt. Then let's proceed. We'll have you on your date soon enough."

She watched below as the heavy soundproofed door to the stage opened and a woman in her mid thirties emerged. Theresa was dressed in a white full-length body suit, a tightly fitting stretchy unitard that covered her from neck to toe like a second skin. Joining her, Heinz got out of his Levi's to reveal himself dressed in the same attire, dotted here and there with small black connectors as if locusts had alighted on them. They pulled on matching white hoods over their heads, adjusting the small oval around their faces.

The pair helped each other connect their cables, adjusted bulky headphones, and then took their positions leaning on padded slant-boards. Positioning their feet about a half-meter apart, they reached down at their sides and gripped horizontal chrome bars behind them.

They reminded Doktor Lindeström of the living sculptures she had seen in a Berlin street theater, totally covered in white and motionless, holding classic Greek poses. As the lighting dimmed and amber spots came up, their white unitards were cast in an eerie golden glow. They stood on the darkened stage like luminous initiates in some exotic rite. How beautiful is the concept of the human skin, thought the doktor. A sensate border between self and cosmos.

Neither of the subjects knew that Frau Doktor Lindeström was to be a third subject. She undid the top two buttons of her lab coat and reached in to grasp the neck seam of the leotard she was wearing underneath. Feeling along the edge, she found a slightly hard area about the size of a match head. She took the free end of a fine cable that was jacked into the console, found the minuscule connector on the end of it, and carefully probed it between two layers of fabric at her bodice. She felt it click home on the hidden terminal in her undergarment.

"Liebchens," she spoke softly into a microphone that fed into their ear phones, "listen carefully to this tape." It was one she had made herself, in her own voice, with her training agenda for the subjects. She switched off the speaker monitor. The VU meter needles twitched silently as the audio rose and fell in their earphones.

She consulted instrument clusters on several of the computer monitors, and some stand-alone medical instrumentation. Various body parameters such as heart rate, blood pressure, EKG and musculature metrics were sampled and recorded second by second. On the main CRT was a composite index plotted out on a screen oscillograph readout as a black line against a green grid. It was following a pre-programmed profile in blue.

She watched as the black line slowly made its way up the blue line, as if locked on a track. Her attention turned to a large display showing a real-time grid-model rendering of Theresa's torso. The researcher selected a button to rotate the image 45 degrees in azimuth. The stimuli were depicted by area groups, as white points on the drawing, each with a numeric index. She switched to Heinz and watched the grid lines over his chest undulate in real time as he breathed. The volume of his breath was calculated and displayed in the upper left-hand corner. She selected an item from a menu, and the grid-model display now had surface and color, depicting localized skin temperature as a spectral-thermograph.

Back at the oscillograph readout, she could see both of their black lines climbing up the shallow blue Phase-I slope of the program. She smiled with satisfaction to think that they were both tracking the same gradient. She "zoomed-out" to see the whole profile, with its ramp, several level holding stages, and then a long extended plateau with the caption "ISES." It went on indefinitely.

She looked out the glass to the two subjects below. They had their eyes closed and their lips slightly parted and moist. Because of the way the spotlight glanced off the sheen of Heinz's suit, she could verify the localized tumescence indicated on his wire-model display. An erection is unusual at this stage in his training, she thought. Perhaps I should back off a bit. Then she changed her mind. She'd push the envelope.

She didn't bother looking at them anymore. She had more interest in "watching" with the readouts, the way a pilot with zero-visibility would rather follow his instruments than try to peer through a whited-out windshield. The data seemed more real, more crucial and intimate. She suddenly felt light-headed and had to sit down. She was starting to feel euphoric and didn't want to get dizzy and black out during the run.

The tape continued suggesting to them softly, as she watched the indicators climb. By now they would be entering a sort of ecstatic trance, which their breathing confirmed. She felt it herself. She was beginning to lose it. She was suddenly aware of a soft beeper going off. The first derivative on the tracking screen had reached a critical slope. Red markers were flashing on Theresa's screen, then Heinz's, within seconds of each other. The black lines on both subject's oscillographs had turned red, and were climbing sharply, departing from the blue plateaus. She was shocked to see nearly an hour had elapsed since she last checked the instruments. She had zoned-out during the "ISES" plateau. She had pushed the profile too high this time, even for her. She fell back in her chair and felt the waves moving through her.

When it subsided, she got her senses back enough to attend to the console. She pulled the wire out of her bodice, smiling at her foolishness in thinking she could resist. She leaned forward and spoke into the console microphone. "Danke schön, Heinz, Theresa. We've got a lot of solid data on that run. Heinz, be sure to come in early tomorrow and secure the equipment down there. I think there's a photo shoot happening here tomorrow. I'll take care of the control room." Her voice raised melodically, "Bis Morgan, Tschuss!"

Heinz nodded, and she could see he was happy to comply. She watched them exit through the anechoic padded door. Heinz never minded working late and then coming in early the next day. He would do anything for her. He was grateful. She alone had discovered his unrecognized electronic and computer genius, and restored his self-confidence with her "special projects." But now he was beyond that, beyond ego. And yet his mention of a "date" disturbed her. She turned a rotary switch and a monochromatic view of the dressing room appeared on a monitor. Turning to her keyboard she started a tape back-up of the evening's data and watched it for a moment, smiling. Then she glanced at the monitor to see that the couple had arrived and were starting to undress.

They peeled off their white connector-studded unitards, oblivious to each other's nudity. Per procedure, Heinz put them and the two hoods into a heavy leather courier satchel and snapped the lock. The doktor smiled as they put on their personal unitards, colorful gifts from her, and started to pull their street clothes on over them. They wore their skin-tight suits around the clock now, she knew, even when they slept. Theresa steadied herself for a moment in the doorframe. Dr. Lindeström turned up the audio.

"Are you all right?" Heinz asked, "Would you like a lift on my Beamer to the Strassenbahn stop?"

"Nein, danke," said Theresa, "I'm a little dizzy. I don't feel up to a motorcycle ride. Are you meeting with your friends then, your 'Hautengers'?"

Heinz nodded, putting his leather jacket on over his unitard top. "You should join us some time, Theresa. You'd like our little group."

Dr. Lindeström nodded and turned off the monitor. Na so, such a date is it? she thought, smiling. I shouldn't have worried. She dug into her bag and retrieved an electronic makeup-compact sized address and memo device and entered a secure name and password. Gaining access to the directory, she opened a file. She found the entry "Heinrich G." with a nine-character alphanumeric code next to it. Heinz was her engineer, and had designed most of the interface electronics and software for her. She had brought him up from an obscure position in manufacturing, giving him the recognition that had previously eluded him. But now he was beyond ambition. She put a check mark beside his entry in the column headed "Fertig". His training was complete. Theresa Köenig would take longer.

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