'My name is Natalie Carpenter,' I tell the interrogator, for the umpteenth time.

I am naked, standing in a small white room, deep in the heart of a secret base somewhere in Virginia run by the Directorate of Science and Technology. It's an unnerving experience, as usual.

The official CIA web site says, "...to spend a day with the DS&T is to spend a day inside the imagination of CIA" and it claims that the Directorate "brings distinctive tools, capabilities, and expertise to our most difficult national security challenges." Isn't that just the goddamned truth! I should know: I am one of their distinctive tools.

'We've had the US Marines out looking for Natalie Carpenter,' the woman says, snapping off her vinyl gloves and staring at me for long seconds. When I don't respond (it wasn't a question, after all) she goes on: 'You've been missing for nearly a year, young lady. Where have you been?'

That's the crucial question. I know roughly where I've been, of course, but I'm not even going to attempt to explain it to someone like her. And I might have been absent for a year in Earth terms but, for me, it's only been a few weeks. There is a vast difference in time scales between the Dimensions.

'I've been deep undercover,' I say guardedly, looking straight ahead, chin held high, keeping my hands behind my back and my legs apart, the way they like it.

'So you say,' she says, glancing at the young guy who stands by the door. 'But Natalie Carpenter didn't report in once.'

I've never met these particular officers before (they seem to make a practice of rotating them, so you never see the same guy twice). The woman is severe, with a trim figure, a pinched face, and dark hair worn in a scraped back bun. Like the rest of them, she likes her subjects to be naked and humiliated, to soften them for interrogation - they learned that from Iraq. Little does she know it, but humiliation is wasted on me nowadays. She has just subjected me to a comprehensive, full cavity strip search, with her male colleague looking on, which I'm damned sure is an infringement of my constitutional rights, but I haven't complained. It would have bothered me once, but not now, not after all I've been through. In fact, I am quite turned on by it.

'You know that you carry a strange virus?'

'So I've been told,' I say. 'They say it's not contagious, not like chicken pox. You're probably quite safe... Who knows.'

The woman officer looks up at me sharply and I see momentary fear in her eyes. Oh, how I would love to push a couple of my fingers up her ass, if they weren't so precious.

Initially, news of the mystery virus came as a surprise to me too. CIA medics subjected me to a battery of medical tests after I turned myself in, and samples revealed the hitherto unknown bug in my system. Apparently, the ultramicroscopic agent lives happily in its discrete host (which happens to be me) but it constantly needs new buddy-bugs to replicate itself, and reduces the host to a fucking frenzy if it doesn't get them. That explained a few things to me: it's why I've become a rampant nymphomaniac.

'You say the suppositories are necessary to...' She pauses and glances at the file, and then looks up and goes on: 'to feed your inner monkey. That's a direct quote. What does it mean?'

'It means what I say it means.'

'Where did you get them?'

'The Alchemist gave them to me.'

She is referring to my supply of figging capsules - I've only got 25 of them left now - to be inserted in my rectum, one a day. I had to beg the doctors to give them back to me. They were initially reluctant, flatly refused in fact, especially when analysis showed the capsules to be teeming with the mystery virus; but they relented when I was on the very edge of madness and tearing at my clitoris.

The officer glances at the folder on her desk again and says, 'According to the record you have no tattoos or distinguishing marks. That was a year ago. You suddenly developed a tattoo fetish, at 26 years of age?'

'No,' I say, having decided to keep my answers short and to the point.

She points at my tits, and I glance down at them too. The Chinese master who tattooed me certainly had an aesthetic eye: he inked an artistic design on both breasts, each comprising a large, flame-licked star, one blue and the other red, with my ring-pierced nipples pushing through the centres. The rest of my torso, front and rear, is adorned with mathematical symbols; they include a pair of near-equations on my ass - one on each of my buttocks - drawn in near-symmetrical circles, matching the ones that encircle the stars on my tits.

'I didn't choose it - someone else did,' I say with a shrug.

'And what about Sir Malcolm's penis?' she asks, showing me one of the photographs I took of Jake Starr's tattooed cock and dutifully delivered to the DS&T bureau.

'That penis is Sir Malcolm - it's like a nickname. It belongs to a man called Jake Starr.'

She raises her eyebrows and says flatly: 'A penis with a nickname. And it's tattooed, just like your body.'

'Yes.'

'What's with the math on the tattoos, then?'

'They are equations but most of them don't quite equate.'

'What do they mean?'

'I don't know,' I say truthfully.

She smirks, raises one carefully-plucked eyebrow, glances at the file again, and says, 'But Natalie Carpenter has a doctorate in-'

'I have a PhD in Quantum Mechanics and Astro-physics,' I say, interrupting her as she sorts through the folder.

'Yet you don't know what the equations inked on your body purport to represent.'

'No.'

I'm telling the truth. I've studied the glyphs, of course, and at some length too. They are intriguing. Much of the quantum stuff makes sense, and some of it is quite basic, but other parts are new to me and there are a few indecipherable symbols there as well. Some of the elegant equations are obviously ground-breaking but tantalisingly incomplete, as if a meaningful and interesting road abruptly stops at the very edge of a cliff. The same goes for the formulae on Sir Malcolm, Jake Starr's magnificent cock.

'Well?' the woman asks, her sharp manner indicating that I'm testing her patience.

I shrug and say, 'It's a message.'

'Who is the message for?'

'It's a message for you, or for somebody in the D&ST.'

'Who is it from?'

'A young guy known as The Alchemist sent me here to deliver it.'

'The Alchemist,' the officer repeats, glancing again at the man at the door (who must be enjoying himself, ogling my bare tattooed ass). 'And you don't know his real name?'

'No.'

I've told this same story to three different interrogators now. They seem to have stopped pressing me too much about the real identity of the Alchemist.

The woman officer sighs, shakes her head, closes the file, and turns to the man at the door, saying, 'Get a photographer in here.'

I smile wryly, saying, 'How many more times will you want to photograph my naked body? A girl could get a narcissist complex, you know.'

It's the tattooed equations and strange designs that interest them, of course, not my svelte curves. I don't suppose the woman believes a word of my story, just like the others. Neither would I, in her place. But somebody, somewhere in the shady, higher reaches of the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology will believe it and recognise the Earth-shaking importance of the message, I'm sure of that. It will probably be the same person who despatched me on the fateful mission as a naive and unwitting sacrificial lamb.

I had known I was going as a part-time covert agent, of course. I happily volunteered for that. It excited me, and brought with it a great job opportunity too. But I hadn't realised just how deeply undercover I would descend and what it would entail. Now I have returned, infected with an apparently incurable mystery virus, and with almost indecipherable graffiti indelibly tattooed all over my body. They keep pressing me for an explanation, and don't believe a word of anything I say.

'Tell me again, from the beginning,' the officer says.

I sigh, and say: 'Look, I've already told you all I know.'

'The tapes are running.'

They still use tapes, in this digital age? I doubt it. Ignoring that, I prepare to again recount my version of events, most of which is true (I haven't told them about the bag of monkey shit, and don't intend to).

'There are many other people in this story, and they would have to give their own accounts for it to make any sense,' I say, parroting the opening sentence I secretly rehearsed in the privacy of my cell.

'Fine.'

'I can only tell you what happened to me and describe the things I personally witnessed.'

'But it will serve as some kind of an introduction, will it?' she says sarcastically, quoting the exact words I have said previously to other officers.

I sigh again. If it's all in the file, why do I need to repeat it again?

'It all began in September, last year, 11 months and 3 days ago, when I boarded an aircraft from New York to London to take up my first job. Then I first met Slaver Jake Starr...'

 

A caveat from the writer

 

Actually, this story began some months before Natalie Carpenter ever became involved, and certainly a considerable time before she turned up at the DS&T office in Virginia with her body covered in mysterious tattoos.

Much of the tale belongs to Jake Starr, the slaver who delighted in seizing beautiful young women, taking them to his own world, and transforming them into nymphomaniac slaves.

In the interests of completeness, what follows includes personal accounts recounted by other key characters, some of whom are rather more reliable than others.

There is undoubtedly more to come. This is just the beginning...