Altered Ch. 03

"So why the orphanage, isn't that kind of the same thing?"

"Not really, I rarely hang out with the kids there, most of my time was going to be spent with my grandpa working on cars and mending fences and such. Besides Maria, there really weren't kids there my age so there wasn't any temptation."

"What about all that stuff about how you make the women around you super horny? Wouldn't it affect the kids too?"

"First of all, I didn't know that I affected anyone like that until recently. If I did I would have never come here, besides I think it affects adults more than children, maybe it has to do with their system still growing or something. I have never seen a kid affected by me in that way. On the other hand, older adults seem to be hit by it hard, especially women 20 to 45 years old. I mean I didn't know it at the time but now that I think back it explains a lot. I had a lot of older women hitting on me all of the time but none my own age."

"Was your mom affected by it?"

"Oh god, I hope not. If she was she never let on."

I didn't really feel like talking about this subject, but the tangent seems to keep her mind off of things so I went with it.

"I'm not a child molester nor a rapist... I mean if you give a woman a drug that makes her less inhibited like alcohol and then have sex with them in California it's considered rape, so wouldn't me having sex with a woman who is under my 'influence' also be in the same league?"

I probably shouldn't have mentioned rape, she became quiet again all of the sudden. After another ten minutes more of walking she finally broke out of her reverie and said, "Ok... so go on."

"You sure?"

"Yeah, I'll be ok. I need something else to focus on, go on please," she said, a little perturbed.

"Well, kids at school didn't seem to be affected by me the way the adults at the camp did, but I constantly had teachers hitting on me. Some were as young as 22 and fresh out of college, and others were much older, the oldest was close to 50. Luckily, I had mostly self-study courses where I was in an office by myself, taking college classes remotely, so no one got fired for harassment."

"Did you ever do anything with any of them?"

"I was tempted. However, I didn't get a chance to. I think maybe the society was keeping tabs on me because we always got interrupted before things got out of hand."

"You still haven't told me how you escaped, did you dig a tunnel?"

"Actually no, it was more smoke and mirrors. You ever watch The Truman Show?"

"Yeah, a long time ago."

"Well I escaped like he did. I set up an unusual routine where I would sleep completely covered up. I had my blackout curtains set up so they were close to my bed... well you get the point, I snuck out and whatever camera was watching me didn't catch on. I snuck a set of my clothes out in my gym bag every day throughout the week and left them in my Jeep. It was like a prison break and had everything ready to go by the time I left."

We didn't talk much after that, she looked deep in thought. We made it to the road, about a mile south of the pool so we actually had to walk north back towards her car. Once we got there we saw Irene leaning against its side, smoking.

"Hey," I proclaimed.

She looked up at me surprised and her eyes cocked at my state of dress. She saw Tanya and immediately knew something was wrong, Tanya ran towards her and threw herself into Irene's arms.

"Is Tanya alright?" she mouthed to me.

I shook my head no and she went into mothering mode and started comforting her.

"George insisted the police go find you two and he left a couple hours ago. I couldn't go with him, I can't get arrested or I'm as good as dead."

"Understandable... Tanya is... there was a psychic and she fucked with our heads, she had us rape each other..." I replied, looking downcast.

"How did you break free?"

"I think I'm a psychic too and I was able to do a 'psychic scream', although I thought it was more of an annoyance."

"What do you mean? A psychic scream wouldn't be painful to someone powerful enough to control you."

"Something deep within me shot out what I would describe as a scream, followed by a tornado of sorts. The psychic was screaming in pain as boulders and debris were thrown about as if there were a tornado. One of the rocks hit her hard and broke her spine."

Tanya looked up in surprise, she was unconscious when that happened.

"I need to find a psychic to learn how to control these powers..."

"I wish I could help you, we did have one on staff but she will more likely be after me."

Irene opened the door to the back seat of the SUV and let Tanya lay down. She grabbed a blanket and covered her up.

"The police took George into custody. I don't know if he is going to be charged with anything or just kept for questioning. He may need a lawyer," I said.

"I'll make some calls, I have a few connections that might be able to help him." She opened the back door and revealed my clothes. "I thought you might want these."

"Oh my god, you're a lifesaver. I would have been screwed if they got my ID."

"You might be screwed either way. The news has some kind of grainy security pictures of you from when you were in the brothel before the fight. They will be looking for you at the border check crossings."

She tried to comfort me and say everything was going to be alright but I must have looked doomed because that's how I felt.

"How is my grandfather doing?"

"He's going to be ok, he's pretty tough. The doctors said, other than swelling and bruising all over his body, he doesn't appear to have any major injuries."

"I don't want to leave him but I think might be putting him in more danger by staying."

"What do you want to do?" she asked.

"I need to get out of here. I don't know if I should just leave you to fend for yourselves or take you with me where I can protect you. If you stay and they know who you are they might go after you anyway."

"Let us decide. I will talk it over with Tanya. Where can we go in the meantime?"

I was thinking we could drive down Highway 3 to Tecate, it's the next city east of Tijuana. It's not a big city and it's up in the hills next to the mountains, but they do have a border crossing there, so if you want to part ways that would be the best place to do it."

"I can't go back home right now, maybe not ever... they are coming after me I won't have any chance against them without you," Irene looked morose but hopeful that I could help her.

"I'll protect you as best I can, but I don't think they know about Tanya."

"I'll talk to her while you drive," she said, throwing me the keys.

She got in the back seat and had Tanya rested her head in her lap.

I drove down the highway back towards Ensenada until we got to the road crossing where the toll road, Highway 1, Highway 3 and the road into Ensenada all meet then headed north-east toward Tecate.

I put on some music so that Irene and Tanya could talk privately. I don't know what they were discussing but there was a lot of hugging and crying and looking over at me.

Tecate, Mexico is on the US-Mexico border and is surrounded by hills and mountains nestled in a valley. There is a port border crossing there that goes to Tecate, California and is a better alternative than waiting hours to cross the Tijuana port. Because the roads leading to Tecate are mountainous it remains an unpopular crossing point.

It didn't matter anyway, I couldn't leave a trail of me coming back into the States. I didn't have to show my passport coming into Mexico but I would have to on my way back. I paid cash for everything and at El Faro they just took your money daily and never asked your name.

I checked the news sites before we took off and there was no mention of the man who the Mexican police were looking for in connection with the killing at the brothel, but that didn't mean they wouldn't be on the lookout for me at the border.

I got a couple of motel rooms in town, paid with cash and supplied them with a fake ID I used to use to get into over-18 dance clubs. Irene took Tanya into their room and told me that she would come to me when she was ready to talk. I finally got a good shave and a shower.

After I was cleaned up, I went to bed since it was still dark out. I didn't expect to sleep but soon I found myself drifting off.

*******

Tanya didn't know what to think or what to say; as Nate walked back towards her she felt a jolt of fear, lust and excitement, all at the same time, rush through her. It repulsed her, that after what had happened her body could continue to betray her.

She stared at Nate blankly as he talked. Roaming over his physique with half an eye of want and half of disdain. He continued talking, she leaned in, pretending to listen. Immediately she felt that spot beneath her left thumb tingle. Crossing her arms, she ignored the new wetness forming in her panties and leaned back again. It was something about his scent.

Actually, it had been the psychic Nate explained to her, she'd gone all Emma Frost on them and forced them to do it. Tanya frowned. Though she had felt the heavy pressure of the psychic compelling her Killgrave-style, she'd also seen how quick Nate's anatomy had responded. She felt him brutally take what was hers. She could still feel the soreness below. As soon as the initial pain had subsided, pleasure of the most perverse sort had overtaken her and she'd found her hips thrusting back to meet his, lips muttering obscenities most foul.

That had been the Lady Killgrave, making her say those things, trapping her within her own mind... Nate, now Nate...

Gina and the others had mentioned this, gathered in the tent. This strange musk of lust that overcame them when near Nate. Sure, he was hot but it was far more than just that. It was visceral, unbidden, as if a switch had been flipped.

Hugging herself, thinking over Nate's strange power, Tanya shivered again. He'd more or less admitted he knew he had them. Maybe he knew how to use them, maybe he could have stopped that Lady Killgrave from... from... at the thought of the word she burst into tears again. Nate moved to comfort her, she shrugged him off and continued down the desert path.

*******

I woke with a start, "That was not MY dream," I thought. "Somehow, I tapped into Tanya's dreams. She thinks I'm a monster."

I felt horrible, everything I worked against in my life was falling apart, using my intelligence to help others, protecting women against monsters. Instead, I WAS the monster and my intelligence was being used for the benefit of others. Nothing felt real to me anymore. I wanted to go home but I had no home to go back to.

It was pretty early in the morning so I looked up an internet cafe online called Chat-Land where they rented computers with internet at $12/hour. I stopped by the room and left a note under the door, telling them where I was headed and if they needed anything they could charge it to room service and I took off.

When I got to Chat-Land, I paid for six hours of computer usage and although their computers weren't anything to write home about I was able to hack past their security and install software that I needed to VPN and TOR to the Deep Web. I extracted the unencrypted files I stored on my private site and started reading and watching associated video with the studies.

*******

Subdermal body armor (summary)

The idea of creating a body armor to protect heads of states and the wealthy has been in place for probably hundreds of years. Even today, researchers are just discovering what the Illuminati has already discovered and perfected, subdermal body armor.

With the discovery of Kevlar research was immediately done to create a better Kevlar. It's a really strong plastic that is five times stronger than steel by weight, its tensile strength (measured in Megapascals [MPa]) of Kevlar is 3750 MPa compared with steel at 650 MPa. The problem with Kevlar is that it is really heavy and not as flexible as human skin, creating body armor suits out of Kevlar had a huge drawback in that it limited your movement and slowed you down. Also, it takes 20 layers of Kevlar to stop a bullet. Although advanced prototyped suites were made and are years ahead of what they have today, it wasn't good enough.

The next area of research was with Nanocellulose. To put it simply, they purified wood pulp and other sources of cellulose to form a substance that had a higher MPa rating than Kevlar. It was lighter and organic but tended to absorb 100 times its weight in water which, suffice to say, was not good for the human body.

Finally, research was carried out on a substance called graphene which is a fullerene consisting of bonded carbon atoms in sheet form one atom thick. Graphene can be stacked in layers forming a crystal lattice, essentially the same thing a diamond is made from. Graphene has a tensile strength of about a 130,000 MPa which is 35 times stronger than Kevlar. As far as weight goes, a single layer of graphene covering a football field would weigh less than a gram. A 100-nanometer thick layer of graphene can stop a bullet going three times faster than an AK-47.

Suits were created out of graphene as of recently but they were tremendously expensive to produce (100 million dollars per yard of fabric), so only a few elite Illuminati wear them. Creating a subdermal body armor was even more expensive and almost impossible to do with human biology, until new research surfaced allowing them to artificially create a graphene sheet using specialized nanobots within the body.

There were many complications getting nanobots to work in the human body, the immune system would often attack them or vice versa. Nanobots had to bond the graphene to specific DNA sequences so that the graphene layer would be created under the skin and not around the heart, lungs or some other vital organ. The graphene layer also had to be created in a way that allowed tiny micro holes so that the skin wouldn't simply die. The cell structure of humans mutate constantly, so getting a lattice to bond specifically to a DNA sequence was constantly out of whack and never could form correctly in human trials.

Only when they created a new being that didn't suffer from mutation problems were they successfully able to grow them under the skin. There were two problems with it, first they had to introduce the nanobots once the subject was fully grown, and second the amounts of nanobots that were needed to grow the structure took years to create within the body. Even after the structure was completed the nanobots were needed to repair and morph the armor as needed.

According to the study, once the initial few layers were created in the body then the growth of the number of layers needed to create an effective armor would increase exponentially - almost overnight. The nanobots would have a good foundation to add more layers and the numbers of nanobots would also be close to optimal by the time the first layer was complete.

*******

So, the cactus pricks were no fluke. The graphene was just showing signs of fully forming. It said that once it was close to fully formed that it wouldn't take long for it to finish. I wondered if I was bulletproof. I needed to test it out.

I went back to my motel to get a few things to test out my skin's vulnerability. First, I stabbed myself with a fork on my forearm. It hurt but it didn't penetrate my skin. I stabbed harder and harder with the same results. Next, I took out my boot knife and stabbed myself and same results; no penetration, just a little initial bruising and a little blood that seeped up to the broken skin that went away immediately. I started stabbing myself in different places, it was scary at first but after a while it turned into a game. I even stabbed myself in my cheek with the same results.

"Very nice, this could come in handy," I thought.

I need to see if I was bulletproof. I mean that's all relative anyway, depending on the caliber of the bullet and the energy behind it; not all body armors can withstand every bullet. However, the Glock I had with me had a silencer; it was a 9mm, one of the lowest caliber bullets, so I decided to start with that.

I went outside and found a little nook hidden behind some garbage bins. I stepped forward with my leg extended in front of me, half kneeling down and pointed straight down, with the silencer on I shot myself in the leg. It was excruciating, like being hit with a baseball bat to the leg. Once I opened my eyes, I realized that the bullet didn't penetrate and all that was left was a huge bruise that was quickly healing.

Well it looks like I am immune to 9mm bullets at least. I didn't have a .38 or .45 handgun to test out, and I wasn't going to use my assault rifle out in public so I would have to be satisfied with this for now.

After I put my gun away I headed back to Chat-Land. Luckily no one had used the computer I was using before, I was able to quickly log back on and read more.

*******

Graphene lattice bone structure (summary)

Because bones and muscles no longer have to support the body against gravity, bone loss and muscle atrophy occurs in the weightless environment of space. With my super-healing ability, it was determined that regular exercise with a resistance band in space would solve muscle atrophy. I had the advantage that I could workout, tear down my muscles, and heal them in seconds rather than days. However, the issue of bone loss was still an issue the Illuminati wanted solved.

The research went a whole bunch of different routes. They tried metal bone grafts; not only did it make the user heavier, it was impossible to do on a large scale throughout the body. They did have a few candidates successfully have their major bones grafted - like the fibula, tibia and femur bone in the legs, the humerus, radius and ulna of the arms as well as some spots on the hand, such as the knuckles.

This seemed to have mixed results. First, their legs tended to be misshapen and less attractive. They had issues with metal detectors, and after a couple of years they started having issues that were common with metal degrading in the human body. Also, since it did not cover their whole bones, the bones would still get sprained or damaged despite the metal bracing. The metal also could bend and break away from the bone, causing even more issues if they ever did encounter damage to the bones. Ultimately, it did nothing to stop bone loss in any way, so that project was ultimately scrapped.

Next, the researchers tried using an exoskeleton which to some extent did work; in a weightless environment the exoskeleton was able to apply pressure to the body, simulating gravity. It helped mainly with the legs and spine but did nothing for arms, hands or skull areas. There was a definite military advantage with the exoskeleton but they were heavy, bulky and took a tremendous amount of energy to power. Exoskeletons were cool-looking but militarily it was more cost-and-resource effective to use other devices such as remote-controlled robots and drones; since it didn't do a good enough job with bone loss in space, it too was scrapped.

Finally, a solution was presented when the subdermal body armor was invented. They took the idea of using graphene to strengthen bones. Rather than have them just wrap the bone in a graphene cover, the researchers developed a method to inject nanobots directly into the bone marrow. They then formed cylindrical structures and the cylinders crossed in a lattice-like structure inside of the bones. The bones were found to experience no bone loss in space and the force needed to break them increased one hundredfold. The inner lattice structure also acted like a shock absorber so that impacts from jumps and falls had their energy distributed to lessen the damage to tissue and marrow. The smaller bones - like in the hand - that only took about 25 newtons of force to break, so when their breaking force was increased to 2500 newtons they became just as hard to break as a normal large bone would. If the bone did break, unlike the other 'solutions' the bones would simply need to be set and the bones would heal themselves. Whereas the actual bone would take a couple hours to heal, the nanobots repair to the graphene damage would take weeks. This meant that if there ever was damage so severe that it could somehow break my graphene strengthened bones, they wouldn't be as strong for a couple of weeks.