Chains in Mind

by S. May

  The professor was standing in a corner, alone, nursing a drink, and Patricia made her way over. Getting his attention simply took persistence. Patricia smiled determinedly, and ignored his prickly manner, and showed interest in his boring and incomprehensible talk about his work, and made big eyes at him, and told him how much she admired him.

  Nothing in his experience had given him the power to reject her. The only difficulty was persuading him that he could ask her out without being publicly humiliated by a put-down. In the end, she had to ask him out to dinner herself, and then drop very heavy hints about a second date. Soon, they were an item. He was pathetically happy. They set an early date for a wedding, each of them shocking their friends with the improbability of the match.

  The rest of her plan, though, didn’t work out so well. Donald’s salary wasn’t nearly as large as she’d imagined, and, after a year of marriage, he had yet to invent anything lucrative. He seemed, as far as she could understand, to be spending his time trying to find a cure for Alzheimer’s, sending cell-sized sensors into the brain. It didn’t sound promising to her.

  He was working long hours, and, since she didn’t have a job, came home expecting to find dinner on the table. There were frequent rows when it wasn’t there. Now that they were married, surprisingly, he seemed to think he could take her for granted, that she would stick by him, even if he had the effrontery to disagree with her, and ask her to pull her weight. He wasn’t nearly as diffident as she had expected. Patricia was used to men treating her company as a favour in itself, something that they should work for, and it hadn’t occurred to her that marriage would change that.

  She had no money of her own, and the modelling work had dried up: she needed to keep him sweet to get him to buy things for her, and he hadn’t turned out to be the soft touch she’d expected. She had tried demanding, then just asking, and then pleading, for her own allowance, so that she could go out as she pleased, but even the nerd that he was could see that if he gave her that, then he would never see his twenty-three-year-old wife at all. He never took her out, not that going out with a forty-eight-year-old, whose remaining hair was turning grey, was her idea of fun in any case.

  She was beginning to loathe him. She could try the modelling again, or get some other job, have money of her own, but dammit, that was the whole point: she shouldn’t have to work; that was why she’d married him in the first place. That was what men were for, to keep their wives in luxury, and he wasn’t delivering. She was ready to give up, get divorced (at least that should get her a settlement to spend as she pleased) and try again with some other guy.

  But then. The golden moment.

  Patricia heard the front door: Donald was home. She finished drying a saucepan and put the tea towel back on the radiator. For once, she’d cooked some dinner: the smell of a beef casserole permeated the house. Maybe if she buttered him up, he’d let her get that new Chanel suit she had her eye on. She came through to the hall, where he was taking his coat off.

  “Hello,” she said, not unfriendly.

  “Hello, darling.” His voice was low, distracted. She could see that he was deeply upset about something.

  “What is it?” she asked. “No, wait. Tell me over dinner.” No point in letting her work go to waste. She went back to the kitchen, and fetched the casserole through to the dinner table. When they were both served, she looked at him keenly, as he started to eat, and prompted him again.

  “Well?”

  He sighed heavily. “I’ve ... I’ve ... Oh hell, I have to tell someone.”

  Patricia raised her eyebrows. Donald never swore. Never.

  “Go on,” she said.

  “I’ve found something I wasn’t expecting.” he began. Patricia had to stop him once or twice, when he was getting too technical, but gradually she started to understand. Using his little nanomachines, he had found a biochemical signature, a marker, on the surface of certain nerve cells in the brain. Incredibly, unbelievably, it had turned out that these were the neurons involved in creating loyalty and obedience. Never would he have believed that something so apparently abstract and subjective could be encoded in specific brain cells, but there it was. Patricia didn’t follow the details about why he was sure. Apparently, learning loyalty to a tribe leader, or any leader, was as basic to humans as, say, language, which had long been known to have a dedicated brain region.

  As Donald’s dinner sat cooling, forgotten, on his plate, Patricia began to realise: the knowledge that humans were designed by evolution to obey an authority figure was not what had Donald so depressed. It was much more than that. He had understood almost immediately that, now these cells were identified, he could probably target them, boost them, create a drug that would make them work a hundred times harder, on command.

  “Don’t you see, darling?” he whined. “This could be the worst tool for oppression that the world has ever seen. Think what a dictator could do with a drug like that. Oh God. What have I done?” He put his elbows on the table, and literally put his head in his hands and pulled his hair, she noticed. She didn’t think people actually did that.

  She did see the point, very well indeed. “It’s not your fault, darling;” she said, soothingly, “you couldn’t have known.” Her mind was racing. “But I think you’re absolutely right not to tell anyone else. This must be kept totally secret.”

  She left it at that for a few minutes. Best to move him on one step at a time. And anyway, she needed time to think through her plan, herself. Over dessert, she pointed out that eventually someone else would rediscover the secret, even if he did nothing and destroyed his work. Over coffee, she mused aloud that, really, the only long-term solution was some kind of vaccine or antidote to defend against a drug attack. Later in the evening, she said she imagined that before creating an antidote, one really needed to create the drug, to see how it worked.

  She wasn’t sure whether that last point was true, so she was relieved when Donald didn’t dispute it.

  In bed, she held him, uncharacteristically tender, and told him it was his duty to try and make the drug, in secret, to see if it was possible. Could he do that? He moped a bit, but admitted he probably could. Enough for today, she thought, barely able to hide her excitement.

  In her mind, hope of a golden prize had been born. And it was possible: she could do it, but she had to play her hand with the utmost care. The tenderness she showed him in his distress, seemed to turn naturally into admiration bordering on awe, as the stature of his discovery, and of his genius, came home to her. Without being too suspiciously abrupt, she dropped her bad temper and became more attentive, much more eager to help him, to be near him. He wallowed in the attention, as happy as when they first met.

  After a fortnight, she dangled another prize in front of him: she would be his test subject. After all, who else was there? A dumb animal wouldn’t do, and they didn’t want to bring anyone else into the secret.

  “I trust you, darling,” she said, looking up at him with wide, innocent, eyes, and batting her eyelashes. “As soon as you see if it’s worked, then you can start working on an antidote, can’t you? It’s alright. This is what I can do to help.”

  In the meantime, of course, his beautiful young wife, who had been so spoilt and difficult up to a few weeks ago, would be his totally obedient slave. She didn’t mention it explicitly: she figured that he could work that out on his own. He dithered for a day or two, but she could see that he wouldn’t resist the temptation. Few men could have done, when she offered herself so willingly. He agreed to the plan.

  It took just five months before Donald came home with a purified dose of the drug. Patricia was waiting eagerly for him, and opened the front door while he was still walking up the drive.

  “Have you got it?” she asked him, her face flushed. She didn’t bother to hide her excitement. He would expect her to be on edge: they had both been waiting for
this day.

  In response, he just patted his briefcase. They kissed, chastely.

  She had made dinner that night as usual, and they ate before getting to work. Each of them, for their own very different reasons, so excited that they could barely force the food down. It was curry: not one of her favourites, but a strong taste that drowned out anything else. In particular, it disguised the big dose of sleeping tablets, ground up, in Donald’s meal. By the middle of dessert, he was blinking furiously, trying to stay awake, and swaying in his chair.

  “Darling,” he said, “I’m very ... “ He tried to focus on her. Patricia sat and watched him.

  “Problem, Donald?” she said, every inch the concerned wife: it wouldn’t be wise for her to gloat too soon. But it was alright: in another minute, he was slumped forward on the table, snoring loudly. She let out a long slow breath: she had never done anything like this before. She moved his bowl of apple pie out of the way, and waited. According to the sleeping-tablet packet, they wouldn’t have their full effect for an hour, and she didn’t want to wake him prematurely, and have him rampaging about. She got up quietly and investigated the contents of his briefcase.

  When Donald did wake up, much later, it was because Patricia was slapping his face, hard. He was in the sitting room, tied to a low easy chair. His arms were pulled uncomfortably round the back of the chair, where his wrists were bound together. His ankles were tied separately to the front legs. She had done a very thorough job, using a lot of nylon clothesline: there was no prize for elegance, and she’d be a fool to give him a chance to get free through her overconfidence: when he jerked, his body barely moved. She had also gagged him, and then sealed his mouth with duck tape. His nostrils flared as he pulled in air. He looked at her, wide eyed, as she lounged on the arm of another chair, watching him, in the low light from two table lamps.

  “It’s five a.m.,” she told him. “I thought I should leave you as long as possible: let you sleep off the effects.” She smiled a little. “You’ll be wondering why I drugged you, and why you’re tied up. Well, funnily enough, I’ve decided I don’t want to be your slave, after all. I think things would be much better if you were mine. As an experiment, that’s really just as good, isn’t it?”

  He couldn’t answer, but the muffled moan and the violent shaking as he tried vainly to free himself seemed to suggest that he didn’t agree.

  “Don’t worry about a thing, darling,” she told him. She picked up a syringe from the coffee table. Donald’s briefcase had contained a disposable plastic syringe in a sealed wrapper, and a tiny bottle of liquid, as expected. Patricia had insisted, a few days ago - ‘to calm her nerves’ - that he explain just what was involved in administering the dose; so she knew exactly what to do.

  She had already loaded the syringe. There was no needle: apparently, the nose was one of the most direct ways of getting something into the brain. She put her right knee on his lap, holding him down, and used her left arm to put him in a headlock, so that her forearm wrapped round his head and her hand held his chin; his cheek was pressed against her breasts.

  It was a bit awkward: she held his nose with the thumb and forefinger of her right hand, the syringe held in the curl of the other fingers. Desperate to breathe, he tried to struggle, but she was firm, and he was not a strong man: she could control him. His face turned red, and his eyes bulged. He stared frantically up at her, suffocating.

  She let go of his nose, and instantly stuck the syringe up his nostril. He exhaled violently, trying to sneeze the dose away. But she had tricked him: she hadn’t squirted out the drug. When he had no breath left, she squeezed down the plunger. There was nothing else he could do: he breathed in deeply.

  She dropped the empty syringe and turned his head to look up at her, gripping it with both hands, holding his gaze.

  It was amazingly quick. After a few seconds, he was no longer struggling, but she kept position for several minutes, to be as sure as she could be. The expression in his eyes was unreadable. She was gambling on his abilities as a biochemist. If this didn’t work first time, then she wouldn’t get a second chance. She thought he was unlikely to go to the police, though, given that the whole research was supposed to be deadly secret.

  “I’ve written a note,” she told him, conversationally, attempting a calmness that she did not feel, “and I’ve made a lot of copies. They accuse you of my murder, and they explain all about the drug. If you harm me, the police will definitely find one.”

  She held his gaze. “That will be enough to get you locked up. But maybe you care even more that the secret will be out. I bet the government will see the military possibilities straight away, don’t you think so?”

  He nodded, his eyes wide and staring, over his gag.

  She let go, and stood up. She didn’t quite know what to do next. She prowled about the house aimlessly for a couple of hours, while the early-morning light grew outside and filtered through and seeped round the still-closed curtains. She made herself a coffee, and drew back the curtains, letting the daylight in. She turned the lamps off. Eventually, she couldn’t think of a reason to put it off any longer: either it had worked or it hadn’t. She untied him and stood back. He groaned as he stretched his abused joints, and grimaced. He managed to stand up, ripping off his gag.

  “Patricia, I ... “ he said, and stopped. “Uh ...”

  Unsteadily, he dropped to his knees before her. “You are so right, Patricia. You deserve to be served,” he said. “Please let me serve you.”

  That was the beginning. To start with, she was alert for some trick: maybe he was just biding his time, until she showed him where those accusing notes were: but over days and months it became clear that there was no trick: he would do anything she ordered.

  She made him make more of the drug, and top himself up every forty-eight hours so that it never wore off. She needed to be there for that: he needed to focus on her while the fresh dose took hold; but now that she had his co-operation, that wasn’t difficult to arrange: it just meant she couldn’t go on holiday.

  The idea of finding an antidote had never been part of Patricia’s plan; instead, she set him working day and night, to find a more permanent method of achieving the same effect as the drug. To serve her, he worked with a dedication even greater than he had shown for his own research. In the meantime, she went shopping and spent his money, and spent time with handsome young men.

  She worried. It was clear that questions would eventually be raised at the university about how Donald was spending his time and the department resources. Fortunately, he also had funding ties with a mid-sized drug company.

  The company was an offshoot from research at the university thirty years earlier, an example of technology transfer from academia to industry that was quite common in the more commercial areas of scientific endeavour, and officially encouraged. Many professors dreamed of starting up such a venture and getting rich; fewer managed it. The original academics in this case had retired, and the company was now run by a venture capitalist who had bought in at the start. He wasn’t a scientist himself, but that wasn’t necessary: it was much more important that he knew how to run a business.

  The company still contracted a lot of research back to the university, and the head office was still on a nearby business park. That suggested to Patricia a bold solution. She checked with Donald that he could make enough drug to keep two males supplied indefinitely, given the equipment he had, and then she went along with him to meet the chief executive personally.

  It wasn’t too difficult to get the man alone, away from his office, and dose him with the drug. She made him her second slave. He was the major shareholder, and that solved all Patricia’s immediate financial worries: now Donald could quit his university post, and use all the resources of the company for his research. But still Patricia was not easy in her mind.

  She felt that she was teetering on the
brink of disaster all the time: the regular drug doses for Donald and the company boss seemed like a juggling act, keeping the ball in the air for another forty-eight hours. The penalty for dropping a ball, just once, was ruin, and prison. She couldn’t even stockpile the drug: according to Donald, it needed to be fresh. She actually had nightmares, in which the supply was interrupted for some reason. She made sure Donald had at least two, widely separated, labs containing all the equipment he needed.

  It took three years to come up with the nanomachine technique to maintain the new loyalty patterns automatically, so that her two slaves could end their drug doses. Patricia breathed a huge sigh of relief. She took stock of her situation, and found it delightful.

  Owning the head of the drug company, who was worth many tens of millions, made her, in effect, extremely wealthy. She had the house built, and installed Donald in the basement. At her direction, she had him come up with a treatment for dominant women, that would keep them loyal to her in a milder, more discreet, way: she recruited her best friend from college, Katherine Watson.

  Her household grew, as she enslaved attractive young men to wait on her, and she took a couple more rich men, to diversify her sources of funds. And she wallowed in her good fortune.

  ***

  Now, it was seven years since the original discovery, and only lately had she begun to feel unsettled again. It was true, what she had told Donald in the beginning: if she didn’t do something, then sooner or later, someone else would make the discovery independently. Either they would be rivals, or else it would all come out, and then there would be antidotes, tests to check who had been affected and who hadn’t - all kinds of stuff - and for her it would be all over. She had to protect herself.

  And there was another thing. She had always been beautiful, always been able to get men to do what she wanted - the first year of marriage had been a shocking failure, for her - and the huge power she enjoyed over her slaves (she had instinctively chosen only males) had entrenched and intensified her attitudes enormously: males weren’t really people: they deserved to be, they ought to be, slaves, and increasingly she found herself personally affronted that millions of them were swaggering about thinking they were as good as women. They had to be brought down.