The rest of the council held their breath and finally leaned toward their consoles eagerly, with the exception of Faust, who sat scowling down at Jason. He said, “Leave me out of this little experiment, if you don’t mind.”
Jason suppressed his revulsion at the thought of touching Faust in that way.
The others requested the same, with the exception of Yao Chin, who’s extreme age made him entirely too delicate. Faust reiterated that he wanted to be left out, making sure Jason understood. He gave a snort of disgust. “Please hurry up, then. I’d prefer to have Doctor Emerson working on more important things, not performing parlor tricks.”
Jason steeled himself and then reached out and assessed each of them. He agreed that Chin was entirely too fragile. In his opinion, several others shouldn’t be included either. However, he took a deep breath and slowly brought each of them up to a level of desire he thought suitable for the demonstration, then enhanced it for the stronger members. For a few, he brought them to a fevered pitch. He reached out further, experimentally touching all the staff and security in the area.
These people were all younger, healthier, and more receptive to being put in a near frenzy. From several security staff members, he felt a resistance he’d never encountered; recognition of what they were feeling as a falsely induced sense of lust. Unconsciously, they fought to normalize their bodies. The unconscious fight shocked Jason, though he found their response extremely useful to know about: his emotional pushes could be fought, after all. He overcame those who resisted, but only let it last a few minutes and then slowly brought the signaling level down to normal for everyone. He wanted it perfectly clear to other people what the Council was forcing him to do, so he included all the staff. If there was to be any hope of a public outcry, it could start with the people in this building. By including so many others outside the room, he hoped to send a strong warning to the masses. He might never be given another chance.
When he finished, he shivered and had to grasp the bars of the balcony to stabilize his legs as a wave of fatigue swept over him. He furrowed his eyebrows and pinched his nose, experiencing a stabbing pain in his head. His nannies quickly rushed to alleviate the problem. The exertion had cost him.
Yes, it had cost him, but he had gained insight. Behind their polite smiles, their insistence that Faust was alone in his tyranny, he detected greed and urgency. A need for the research to restore their youth. Jason realized they were simply playing good cop, bad cop with him.
The Council babbled excitedly amongst themselves, most of their conversation inaudible. He heard other voices in the background, though they were too muted for him to discern the nature of what they discussed. He could read these others, however. Probably aides and high officials. Jason could tell were all excited, though some were afraid. After a few minutes, Faust finally told Jason he was dismissed. Having gotten what they wanted, the Council became so involved in their discussion that they ignored Jason entirely.
The door behind him slid open and two security personnel stepped in. For a moment, both guards appraised him, their hands clenching and unclenching unconsciously. Their clear upset took Jason aback and he felt some panic, then felt ashamed at having included them in his test. He resolved not to read them or interfere further.
They had not asked for this, and he should not have included them, despite his belief it would help raise awareness. If he could passively get the word out about this research, it might excite the public enough to ask more questions and keep the Council under tighter scrutiny, but despite these good intentions he felt dirty. He couldn’t meet their eyes.
They handled him carefully as they directed him back to the transport. They headed back to his lab. The security people wore helmets, which kept their faces hidden, and he respectfully kept himself from reading them, so he wasn’t sure how they felt about him.
He hoped they weren’t angry.
At last, one of them reached out and touched his arm in a friendly, reassuring way. He sensed they could both tell he had become ashamed of his actions. Jason smiled. “I owe you both an apology. I shouldn’t have included anyone besides the consenting members. I’m really sorry, I just—I thought you might need to understand what was being researched in case . . .” He trailed off. How could he express his fears this technology could get out of hand? Convey the fact they might need to recognize the dangers?
He didn’t need to continue. They both nodded, their mirrored visors reflecting the light. The one who’d reached out to touch him let the touch linger and then the fingers of his glove slid down Jason’s arm as they let go. Without a word, they turned and left.
Ten
ANOTHER MONTH PASSED.
His team had given him enough input that he could selectively control his emotions and those of any individual around him. His light depression, which had come about both because he had heard nothing from Tarien, who he’d secretly been hoping would find him, and because they drove him to rush his research, became an unacceptable indulgence.
The other doctors on the research project had made great strides and continued making large steps as subsequent months passed. By the end of the year, they were ready to try altering volunteers with the longevity genes and the nearly invulnerable physical changes. Jason voiced his concerns. He still couldn’t ensure enough control and he couldn’t fix the emotions in place. He worried they were pushing too fast.
The Director’s increased hostility toward Jason, borne of his inability to find out the purpose behind the Tech’s visit, flared up at Jason’s suggestion that they slow down. He had Jason removed from the lab during some of the discussions.
The Council eagerly authorized the physical modification testing on test subjects and the research crew cheered. They celebrated their progress and congratulated each other on all the hard work. Jason quailed at the wanton disregard for proper safety and understanding.
They selected four subjects, two men and two women from the pool of volunteers. The injections and new nano-technology were introduced in phases, the subjects carefully monitored. They were housed in a five-thousand-square-foot section of the lab, which became their semi-permanent home during the tests. They were not allowed to leave, but were given every indulgence.
The volunteers were striking in their changes, both physical and emotional. In the first few weeks, they became gorgeous idealized versions of themselves, which only vaguely resembled their original physical bodies. Jason watched the rapid changes with amazement.
Sexually charged, their physiques began to reshape in response. One woman, who started out mousey and somewhat plain, with a distinct overbite, shrank down to a mere five-foot-four inches, with a tiny waistline and large breasts. Her face became like that of a porcelain doll, with a pink rosebud mouth and long, thick lashes over hazelnut-colored eyes. She walked with a distinct and provocative sway of her hips, and became prone to giving tantalizing, sultry glances and a downcast gaze which forced her to look up through her thick hair. Her voice rose slightly and became breathy and seductive. She invited all the male researchers to come in and dally with her, an invitation the Director quickly denounced. If anyone so much as entered the research quarters without permission, they would not only be fired, they would be charged as criminals. Several of the younger crew discussed how it might be worth having their employment terminated.
The other woman grew to over six-and-a-half feet and became Amazonian in her looks, with hair that had grown rapidly down to the middle of her back and had changed color from thinning light brown to a stark, glossy black. Her musculature became defined, her face sharply angular. She aggressively and lewdly showed off for the cameras, masturbating in front of the assistants, and occasionally yelling at them that they were too weak to come in and satisfy her. She demanded to service all the men in the lab.
The frustration of the male lab assistants became almost palpable.
While both the female and male subjects spent large amounts of time engaged in intercourse with
each other, a strange hostility developed over time and none of them were ever satisfied, no matter how often. Their desires became increasingly desperate as they begged for more partners and a greater variety of them.
The men in the experiment both towered above the staff, having grown to nearly seven foot in height. For a few weeks, they were overwhelmingly beautiful, muscular and smooth. Supermodels. They continued to change, however, and became too alien to be viewed without fear, their torsos elongating and their upper body skin becoming nearly translucent. Stranger still, they increasingly began to mirror each other in a lot of ways, only resembling their original looks in small details. Jason found their changes creepy as he watched them daily become twins of each other. One would develop an attribute the other would mimic without conscious control. At first, they changed toward lithely athletic, almost feminine, with sooty lashes and no body hair. They were graceful and languid, though strange. The lab had them try to change specific features, and they had some success, though if one of them changed anything, the other soon followed.
However, as they became more immersed in the chemical cocktails of their hormones, they shifted toward becoming heavily muscled to the point of vulgarity, with sharp, cordlike ropes crisscrossing their arms and legs. Still tall, they became increasingly bulky. Within two months, their brows grew heavily and became mongoloid, giving them a Cro-Magnon look. Their body hair grew everywhere, thick, black and wiry, covering them like apes, including their backs and knuckles. These changes were appalling, but the subjects claimed to have no control. They started to show signs of despair and panic.
They also stopped cooperating with the staff as their communication skills degraded. The two female subjects deferred to the men in almost everything. The stronger willed of the two, the “Amazon”, defied them at first and actually got in a few fights, which were fantastic to watch. The brute force of all four of them was astonishing. The fact they could heal from nearly anything made them vicious. However, the alpha female soon allowed them to dominate and began to rebuff the staff with angry comments and threatening gestures when asked to refuse to allow the males to control her actions.
The men continued to have sex with the women almost constantly, often ignoring their other duties until threatened with having their food supply cut off. Finally, they became completely volatile in their emotions, raging wildly at the staff, and weepy uncontrollably at times. Jason had been forced to overwhelm them to prevent them from killing themselves or one another. His control over his abilities had grown to the point of outright dominance if he wasn’t careful. The fact he had to override their natural state of emotions, no matter how distressed or complex, made him feel like he’d bathed in raw sewage. He could adjust one or many emotions, fixing any one of them in place. Like a panel of slider controls on a sound board, each emotion could be moved in any direction, or he could move many at the same time.
One unexpected side-effect of his abilities was being able to feel the emotional state of those around him. Increasingly, the concerns and worries of those around him bombarded Jason. At night, he had nightmares and often awoke in a cold sweat. A few times at work, he had to retreat to the men’s room where he broke down and cried, shivering though he wasn’t cold.
This increasing receptiveness and ability to control fascinated both Emma, who poured over the data Jason produced for her own research, and impressed Director Faust, who became increasingly obvious in his envy of this power. Jason hated himself for what the Council forced him to research, knowing the Director and the Council intended to use it when he discovered how to impart his gifts. Using the nannies, it was thought, Jason could directly transmit detailed instructional data sets so someone like Faust or other Council members would then possess the same abilities.
That wasn’t so.
His suppression of the test subject’s increasingly erratic emotional states could not be sustained when Jason wasn’t present. He could not—at least yet—permanently override them or force them into a fixed state of compliance. They became so crazed, so animalistic, they had to be sedated with some of the most powerful sedatives available.
But sedation proved a mistake, compounded by the fact they should have been separated.
The lab assumed they would remain under sedation until revived, buying the staff time to experiment with enforced reversion, but the subject’s enhanced bodies threw off the chemicals in a short period of time. Their metabolic processing, coupled with the new nannies, cleansed their system in a matter of hours. Upon waking, one of the men killed his companions and wreaked havoc throughout their quarters. He destroyed most of the furniture and electronics, tore out most of the fixtures and monitoring equipment, and tried to break through the observation glass.
Since the other subjects were nearly impossible to kill, he had torn them to pieces and burned their bodies. Then he’d wrapped himself in every flammable material in the room and set it on fire. He’d even gone so far as to use the refrigerator door, one of the only large remaining objects left after his rampage, to direct the fire suppression water flow away from his body so he would have time to burn.
When the staff came running to deal with the emergency alarms, they were stunned and appalled. The volunteers’ deaths meant many of the staff had to be put on leave to sort through what had happened. Some of the staff had simply quit in shock. Jason sat in the nearby kitchen with Emma over coffee the whole day, doing nothing. Monica became incredibly angry when he told her that evening. She had no idea they had progressed with their testing so far, and this made her furious. Jason had been so immersed in his work, he’d been remiss in updating her. The violent deaths of the subjects were a complete setback.
The next day Jason and his peers who were leading the project were summoned before the Council.
As expected, the Council members were outraged, even the mildest among them. They had not been able to contain the press and the resulting media coverage threw the public into a panic. Angry citizens were clamoring for answers. None of the details had been leaked, so the public only knew an experiment had gone very wrong, resulting in a fire in the lab and the death of several test subjects. Speculation ran rampant and demands for an explanation mounted. Protests about illegal human testing broke out around the hospital.
The research doctors were accosted by the media and had to be put under guard. Jason had suffered a severe blow to the head when one of the angry people outside his apartment had thrown a rock, hitting him in the temple and causing him to stagger and fall to the ground.
Mom had erupted in a furiously protective tirade, covering his body with her own and angrily demanding protection from her adopted brood. The neighbors, reluctantly, stepped in to rebuff the attacks. They had stuffed Jason in a vehicle, which tried to take off through the mob, but was forced to a standstill as protesters surrounded and leaped on top, stomping and hitting the chassis, their numbers increasing every minute. As part of the safety protocols, the antigravity transport would not take to the air while people were so close. His head bleeding profusely, he huddled in the seat, curling up in a ball. He could feel the anger, the danger that people outside represented. Mom and her gang had little to no effect, and they were forced to retreat, leaving Jason even more alone. Fearing for his life, Jason had moved to the front and tried to manually fire the gravity boosters, despite the fact it would hurl people away from the vehicle and those on top, trying to smash through, would fall. As he changed seats and swiveled around toward the manual overrides, he could see the anger in their faces.
Moments later, the crowd broke and ran. Jason had looked up through the glass. Sector Seven—Tarien—had personally appeared over the masses, his imperious gaze sweeping the crowd. Suddenly, Jason saw robots, vehicles, sirens, personal communications, and even cleaning equipment harassing the demonstrators. They did no harm, but the frightening display as all the local technology obeyed the Tech, moved the crowd back. An area opened around Jason to allow his vehicle through to where Ta
rien could aid him. Jason helped Tarien scatter the crowd by elevating their anxiety and fear levels. The mob finally fled. While Tarien could have overridden the locks, Jason had sensed a protective and towering anger in the Tech that, apparently, required a physical outlet.
Instead of unlocking Jason’s vehicle, Tarien had torn the door from its hinges, still hovering slightly above the ground as he reached in and pulled Jason out. Wrapping his arms around Jason protectively, Tarien flew toward the nearest medical facility, wasting no time to speak. With a pained look on his face and a gentle touch to Jason’s jaw, he surrendered Jason to the staff, then flew away as the medics ushered Jason to a healing pod. Jason’s wound was cleaned and site-specific nannites applied to knit and repair the skin, a process that completed in minutes. The medics, however, did not let him leave. His head had suffered a jarring impact and they wanted to keep him out of the public eye, prevent him from being exposed to a still-angry mob near his home. They gave him a sedative and overriding instructions to his nannies to prevent it from being purged. Jason had fallen asleep quickly.
While Jason recovered the next day, he received an emergency summons and robots brought him before the governing Council to explain what had gone wrong.
More than the upset over the catastrophe, which they were now playing off as a system-wide malfunction of the new laboratory equipment, they were angry over the loss of their hopes. The dropped their pretenses at being patient and understanding and became accusatory.
The Council members had expected this process to have been near completion at this point, their greed for life and youth overriding their moral senses. Without the emotional control to prevent the degrading and crazed problems that had overtaken the subjects, they could not be given the nannies that granted youth and vigor. Accustomed to power, the Council demanded the problem be fixed immediately. Many of them were frail, clearly short on time, and desperate. Their attitudes reinforced Jason’s opinion that the Council was completely wrong for this gift of science. He wished he could somehow prevent things from progressing.
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