Christmas Jones sat back in her chair at the International Atomic Energy Commission and stretched -- then swiveled to her right and glared at her office-mate, Dr. Jarrod Merither, who had loudly sucked in his breath, then slumped back down, arms crossed. Her penchant for comfortable, fitted clothing had put her co-worker into hormone lock again, she thought angrily. Her khaki shorts, torn along the seams and her tank top shirt didn't help much.

"Just stop that, will you?" She pointed to three piles of reports psychological profiles and papers looming over his desk. "Don't you have enough to do without ogling?" Jarrod at least had the decency to flush, she noted, before replying. "Sorry, but, ummm... uhhhh... I was just doing some eye exercises. You know, to get a break from all this reading?" he ended lamely.

It wasn't that Jarrod was ugly, or a featureless geek. He was just so, so... surreptitious about relating to her. Not that she'd go out with him; she never dated folks at work. But it would be nice to be appreciated for more than her boobs. He was actually kind of cute, in a lanky, dark way. Black wavy hair that spiraled down his forehead, and a dark, tanned neck beginning to line, from all the years he'd spent sunscreen-free in Los Alamos. He had this farmer cum cowboy look to him: plaid shirts (flannel in the winter, cotton in summer) and straight-leg jeans, with the boots that you can only find at western stores like Shepler's. Christmas tended towards the cerebral, teddy bear type -- angled men were hard to snuggle against. It was an odd dichotomy, as Dr. Merither was in charge of field investigations and psychological profiling of key individuals with sensitive nuclear access, an ostensibly touchy-feely task, while Dr. Jones worked with field compliance with IAEC and UN directives among member countries.

"I'd say the way you were 'exercising ,'" she continued, giving him an over obvious once-over, "you were well on your way to tearing a tendon. It bugs me, I've told you so, so please stop. Move your desk or something." She made a shoeing motion with her hand and Jarrod ostentatiously made a show of moving his chair back towards her while still trying to sit at his desk.

'Upside-down Christmas,' they called her: in at 5AM, out at 2PM, a play on the 25th date, except when she was in the field, and then she worked straight through from landing to take off back home. She smiled inwardly. Not that she wasn't tempted by the brilliant people with whom she worked, but she'd learned the hard way, in graduate school, that fooling around with co-workers was a recipe for disaster. It cost her a transfer from Cal Tech, and a two year stint overseeing nuclear missile disarmament all over the defunct Soviet Union, almost getting killed in some stupid British spy idiocy before she got her career back on track. Almost on track, she amended, going over reports wasn't exactly up her alley.

As she moved the completed manila folder to her "out" box, it jiggled her computer mouse and the screen saver froze.

"Shit," she muttered, and tried clicking the mouse button, then the keyboard keys in a vain attempt to 'wake up' her PC. "Damn Windows fanatics can't see the use of a good Macintosh." She banged her head once, gently against the monitor, then reached beyond it to the computer and pressed its well-worn 'reset' button.

"Computer problems again, Dr. Jones?" It was Jarrod again, looking sympathetic.

"No, Jarrod," she snapped back, "I just enjoy the smell of a rebooting computer." She paused for a moment. "Sorry, Jarrod, you didn't deserve that. I just wish we could get the agency to agree to using Macs instead of requiring PCs. These machines get hosed at least once a day."

Jarrod smiled in agreement. "Yeah, I've got a souped-up Mac at home; it's like culture shock coming home to it every night." He was also smiling at having instigated her computer's crash with a well-placed worm that wrecked her screen-saver regularly. "I used to get those crashes a lot with that screen saver, until I switched it with this one," he said, waving a diskette in his hand. "Now the machine's gotten a lot more stable."

"I don't know," Christmas replied, "you know how auditors go nuts when they anything non-standard on our work machine." Jarrod kept his hand out, jiggling the diskette in her direction. She paused a moment longer, then sighed and took in from him. "So what's different from what I have?"

'More than you could ever believe,' he thought, but said: "this looks like the standard screen saver, only it's actually helping out the folks in Berkeley with their SETI project." The SETI group based at U.C. Berkeley had developed a screen saver to process data from a radio telescope in search for extraterrestrial life, on volunteers' computers. Their screen saver took that data and sent the results back. Jarrod knew Christmas was an ET buff, and counted on this piquing her interest. "Look, just try it, and see how it works for you. Stick it in the drive and use it to boot up." Her machine was still counting RAM while rebooting.

Christmas sighed, then violated every rule of safe computing, and slid it into her diskette drive, a second before the BIOS went looking for its boot code. It found the disk and executed it. Jarrod imperceptibly relaxed; that was the hardest part of his ploy.

In addition to loading a perfectly normal version of the same screen saver she had been using, the diskette also loaded a replacement driver for her video monitor. The monitor screen flashed brightly once, then slowly faded as the diskette redirected the remainder of the boot to the hard drive, then erased itself. The flash caught Christmas' attention: she slewed her head around to look at it, staring at it until it dimmed to black. Jarrod nodded: that indicated a good subject for mind control. The diskette added a small piece of code to the video driver file, redirecting it to load code in a file in a hidden directory.

"Yeah, it always does that when it first loads, Christmas," Jarrod said, startling her from her daze. "It's how you know the screen saver's been successfully loaded."

"Oh," Christmas said, "okay... Thanks, I appreciate it. Ummm, how does it get and return the SETI information?"

"Automatically, I run it on this computer," he said, patting his desktop, "and I'm up to 700 units processed." He turned back and typed in his screen saver password and smiled, honestly this time, as he had several computers at home working on the SETI project. The same computers he'd use to develop and refine the software about to reprogram the luscious Christmas Jones, Ph.D.