Alice's Point of View
So this was what it felt like to be satisfied! Alice had been feeding the evil within little snacks and treats, just to tide him over. Chip Lackland had been a gourmet full-course meal. She was clean. She was light. Food tasted wonderful; orgasms with Alex came easily, and above all she could sleep.
God, the red ruin of that bastard's face, the eruption of blood from his crotch, it made her wet even now. This was a lesson for the future. A quick death would not do. The target had to suffer, and Alice was perfectly okay with that. It was just a man, not like he had feelings or anything. Only Alex. Always Alex. Would that every other man on Earth had but one throat to cut! Her knife hand twitched, such a delicious thought.
Far from feeling anxious, Alice's little vacation from assassination work had been a dream so far. If only everything else in her life was going so well.
There was a big bucket of fried chicken sitting in her passenger seat. Alex was stressed about work again and her big boy needed something to take his mind off of it. When she pulled up to their apartment she noticed her boyfriend's truck was already there.
Shouldn't he still be at work?
"Alex, I'm home!" she announced happily, bucket in one arm.
Wait. She smelled burning. "Baby, are you okay?" she asked warily to the seemingly empty apartment. Then she saw it.
Junk was spread out on the floor of their living room. There were piles of beads and wooden rods and boards on one side, wires and electrical components on the other.
Not junk, organized, she realized. Alice looked down.
Her hulk of a man was sitting on the floor, putting something together. Alice watched as her boyfriend turned their apartment into an assembly line.
"Hey honey," he welcomed her home, not bothering to look up from what he was doing.
"Babe, why aren't you at work?" she asked uneasily.
Alex sniffed the air. "Is that fried chicken?" A charmingly boyish smile formed on his face. "You know just how to take care of me," he said fondly. "As for your question, I'm on leave, paid leave, but this is probably the prelude."
Alice's heart sank. "Prelude to what?"
He sighed. "Getting laid off," Alex said quietly. "We have a few months, but since Chip Lackland disappeared the whole ANIS project is in jeopardy. Congress hasn't appropriated funds and everything is on hold. I've sent job applications to Baetheon and a few other places but don't get your hopes up."
"Why not?" she asked sharply, the awful realization that she was the cause of her love's troubles dawning on her all at once. The guilt bit deep. Why oh why hadn't she picked a target no one would miss?
"Election, probably," Alex said, sounding oddly at peace with his imminent unemployment. He put down the soldering iron in his hands. "Nobody wants to make any big hiring decisions until after they're sure what's going to happen with the country."
Fuck, the Corps was the same. What would they do if Alex lost his job and her assassination missions dried up at the same time? Student loans, rent, the cost of living, all of it was kicking their ass. It didn't look good at all.
"What about all this stuff?" Alice swept her hand across the room.
"Side hustle," Alex explained. He handed her a strange-looking object, two boards connected by a row of rods with beads on them. There was a partition with one bead on top and four beads below on each rod. It looked like a child's toy.
"What is it?"
"Electronic abacus. Here, let me show you." Alice noticed USB port on the underside of the "abacus". Alex plugged the toy into a tablet that was on a little stand holding it upright. "The final version will be wireless. Okay, now I'll open the app."
The tablet lit up. She saw a white screen with a zero in the middle. "It's super easy. Each rod represents a place value. On the far right are 'ones', and then 'tens', 'hundreds', and so on, just like regular numbers." Alex moved a single bead to the top of the leftmost rod. The "zero" on the screen changed to "one".
"But there's only five beads," Alice said.
Alex looked like he was happy she said that. "Just watch. The top bead is 'five'." He moved the beads up one by one. "One, two, three, four. Now this is the key." His hand moved the bottom beads down and the top one up. "Five. Now the bottom again, six, seven, eight, nine. The max value in the 'ones' place is nine." Then he moved them all down and raised the first bead on the next rod.
Alice's eyes went wide. "That's 'ten' right?"
Alex nodded happily. "You get it. An abacus is great for doing arithmetic. This little app I coded up can give the user random drills, guided instruction, even supply analytics." He spent some time teaching her how to do various operations, like addition and subtraction. "Good, good. You're ready for a little practice. How about adding two two-digit numbers for five minutes?"
She just nodded. Alice didn't have any reason to refuse. Hopefully the chicken wouldn't get cold.
"Okay, go!" Alex cheered her on.
It was slow at first, but the way numbers worked on the abacus was oddly intuitive. It helped that the tablet always showed the number the abacus beads added up to and let her keep track of her work.
"And...stop," Alex said. "Now let's look at the analytics." He swept his finger across the tablet screen. "See here? It shows you got way faster towards the end. The rate at which you solved the problems massively increased, accuracy too."
Alice blushed at the praise. "That's great, but what's the point of all this?"
"Abacus drills make you better at math, period. They really help with an intuitive grasp of numbers and place value. There is even data that doing something physically, with your hands, helps you learn better, activates a different part of your brain compared to just doing math problems on paper. My electronic abacus will be able to interface with any smartphone, tablet, or computer with the companion app. Kids across the world will use it...if I can get my Youwatch channel to blow up."
Alex turned around and she followed him to what looked like a little film studio set up in a corner of their apartment. There was a camera on a tripod, a microphone, and a lighting setup.
"Say hello to 'Mr. Math', that's my Youwatch name." Alex sounded so proud. "I'm making Youwatch videos where I teach kids, or anyone really, how to do math, but in a new way. It's about developing a 'computational mindset' and abacus drills are a big part of it. I want to teach other people how I do math in my head. I'm also on NikNak and a few other places. The videos will essentially be a commercial for the abacuses. I just need to assemble a few hundred before they go on sale. If they sell well then we could expand, but that's not guaranteed."
Leave it to her go-getter boyfriend! There was no way Alex would just sit on his ass if Lockhole-Merlin laid him off. He already had a plan. Maybe the whole Chip Lackland affair would blow over and they'd be alright after all.