Quaranteam: McCallister's Madness Ch. 02

One of the other benefits, however, was that the pairing seemed to be permanent, and I had successfully imprinted one rat upon another, and that pairing had lasted for over two years with no signs of dwindling efficacy.

All of this brings me to perhaps the most pivotal moment of life, the meeting that both saved humanity and subjugated it to live in eternal clench of my iron fist of science. I remember it with intense clarity, because the weight of it was apparent to me even then.

The Air Force wanted to broker a meeting between me and a team they wanted me to take over, a project that they'd been working on called Project: Impulse. Of course, it was my idea, but they did not know that at the time.

The leader of the project was a man named Doctor Philip Marcos, who had come up with they were calling the Root Serum, along with his partner, Doctor Bill McKenna. The two of them had devised the miracle that was the Root Serum as a sort of side effect of what they're been working on originally, which was an improved form of knockout gas. The knockout gas seemed like it was a thing the Air Force was still marginally interested in, but they firmly believed in Dr. Marcos' assertion that the Root Serum could be applied to other concepts as well.

They didn't know this, but when I'd come across the whitepaper on what the Root Serum was capable of, I knew that these two men didn't realize how powerful of a tool they'd invented. You see, the Root Serum, by itself, didn't seem to do all that much, but that's because what it did do was incredibly subtle. It was a smoothing/binding agent that had the ability to layer incredibly complex systems on top of it and get them to integrate, light years beyond anything I'd ever seen anywhere else.

During the first meeting between myself and Doctor Marcos, I remember the two of us arguing quite a great deal in front of our Air Force handlers, and I kept having to say to him, over and over again until it permeated his thick skull, "Think bigger."

What eventually sold the Air Force on the idea of putting me in charge of the project was my assertion that it might eventually be used to help build a neural link between a drone pilot and a drone operating system, reducing the need to control it by hand and instead let the pilot simply think at the drone to control it.

Keep in mind, what I was suggesting to them was definitely within the scope of what the Root Serum could do, although there would need to be quite a significant amount of time and money invested into it to get it to that point.              Which was exactly what I wanted. I needed them to sponsor the project for as long as I could, so that I would have unfettered access to not only their research, but Doctor Marcos's mind as well.

Within a month, I was already starting to do some testing on folding the Root Serum into the work I'd done, and the results were nothing shy of astonishing. The lock/key system was working ridiculously well, but as part of the improvements that the Root Serum did to everything, it was also allowing a single key to work with multiple locks and with complete stability. I had it working partially before, but, as I am unable to lie to you, my success rate before the Root Serum was a mere 43%. With the strength of the Root Serum, I was getting a 99% success rate. What this meant was that I could establish it as a one-way system, but with multiple points linking into the same person, and reliably enough that it could get wide exposure.

The short and sweet of it was that I would be able to link multiple women to one man, and I could now enshrine that as part of the bigger plan. It hadn't been part of my original design, but the benefits of it already started to boggle my mind. I could punish women, not only by restricting them to one man, but also making them share, something I had learned early in life that all women were loathe to do. The very notion of enclaves of women all tending to one solitary man still brings me great joy.

Again, however, I was presented with the same problem I was originally - distribution. How to get my creation into as many people as possible. It was stable now, but that meant nothing if I couldn't find some way to piggyback onto a widespread distribution.

In 2019, I sent scraps of research out to members of the Russian secret service, and offered them low-level secrets as to what was being developed in exchange for getting rough concepts of what projects they were working on, hoping that maybe they might be developing some form of chemical warfare that would be resilient enough to overcome my creation's failing to survive airborne distribution, even with the strengthening elements of the Root Serum.

We built a working relationship, and while I was, I suppose, committing treason by giving them state secrets, I was getting as much as I was giving, and through them I got the idea of how I could get my serum spliced onto something else.

I needed to put it into an inoculation of some kind. But there hadn't been a truly widely spread new inoculation in decades. But, I thought, if I waited and was patient, perhaps there would be a chance of something like SARS or Swine Flu spreading wide scale.

It's an odd sensation, spending each day hoping for a disaster to hit the world, but mayhap through all my hope, I manifested that chance eventually.

I continued tinkering with my creation while waiting, all while delaying the ability of Project Impulse to get the Root Serum working perfect with their drone/electronics system.

It would be some time before all my plans started falling into place, but in January of 2020, I saw a window which I seized on immediately.

Only a few days into January, the Air Force descended upon our little research center like a swarm of locusts. I remember thinking that I might have been caught, that we were going to be shut down and I was going to be hauled off in handcuffs.

All the project heads were there, along with Major Monica Peters, who had been head of operations for the Air Force on the small research base we had, with a larger, mustached man sitting next to her. His name was Major General Fielder, and he was there to retask us.

What I didn't know at the time was that Dr. Bridges had been running some various additional splice tests with the Root Serum and other things. He'd just decided to do it basically on a whim, and had scheduled a handful of clinical human tests on very mild things like steroids, opiods and, goddamn it, flu shots.

Had I know that the moron was going to recklessly engage in human testing, I would have lost my shit on him and prevented the tests from happening, but when it was going on, I was in the briefing room, being told all about the two plagues that were about to hit the world, Covid and DuoHalo. Covid was bad, DuoHalo was worse.

As such, they wanted us to develop some sort of way to get a vaccination against DuoHalo, and they wanted us to use the Root Serum to do it.

What they didn't realize was that at this point, we were working with an offshoot of the Root Serum that had my lock and key system folded into it. And Dr. Bridges had just fucking tested it with a flu shot on a woman named Kate Caselli, who was essentially the first test of the system.

And the damn thing worked.

There were a number of complications with it, things I hadn't anticipated. It sent her into a weird trance-like state, something that had happened when the lock and key system had started imprinting, but in this state, she'd become extremely sexually eager.

Phil and his colleagues were suddenly working to solve my problems for me, helping me with things I'd seen but hadn't been able to do on my own. As it turned out, my modifications had made the serum toxic to men when combined with vaccination suspensions, which had immediately caused people to panic, but within a few weeks, they had made a remarkable discovery - the benefits of whatever had been grafted onto the Root Serum could be passed on by a woman to her sexual partner, which meant it was causing locks to find a key.

The benefits to me were astounding. I had nearly all the solutions I'd been hoping and praying for, all rolled up into one. Firstly, it would cause a woman to go into a state of sexual need, which would encourage her to mate with a man. Second, it would pass on benefits to both the man and the woman, introducing some of the regenerative benefits on different levels each time. Thirdly, once we had a working counter agent for the DuoHalo virus, this would keep them constantly being exposed to it, reinforcing all of the effects.

A few weeks later, however, we found out that DuoHalo was increasingly lethal to men, far more than it was to women. As sad as this made me, it was also a remarkable opportunity, because it meant the need to get our serum into men was even more important, and with the death toll, it meant the military was willing to write off whatever side effects as "something we're just going to have to deal with."

When the Doctors Varma - Charlotte and Dev - showed up, the Air Force also brought on a new security detail, led by a woman named Captain Linda Hayes. The impression that Major Peters tried to give us was that she was just another member of the detail, but anyone who was even a little observant would've noticed that all the other members of the Air Force who had shown up at the same time were all reporting to her, and there were about a dozen of them.

As soon as the Doctors Varma had a theoretical version of their inoculation, I decided to jump ahead of them, and improved upon it, synthesizing a more refined and targeted version, spliced onto the Root Serum. I had a prototype and I needed to test it, so smuggled it out and gave it to Eve at home. There was so much going on in the labs that I was worried we would have some kind of problem, and DuoHalo would get around, so I wanted to make sure that both I and Eve were protected from it, so my wife was the first real human test of what you said is apparently being called the Quaranteam serum.

After giving it to her, she seemed to have almost no real effects, but when I came home from work the next day, she nearly sexually assaulted me as soon as I walked in the door, and we fornicated like we hadn't done since college, the sort of rough, flip over, push around, ass slapping, hip smacking carnal relations that, frankly, were better than the sex we'd had in college, because she wanted me.

No, she needed me.

The fucking thing worked.

When I released my semen inside of her, she orgasmed far more intensely than I had ever seen from her, all of her skin covered in goosebumps as she spasmed like I had connected her nipples to a live electrical current.

Once her orgasm had passed, she began to say, quite distinctly, the word "imprinting" over and over again. I, on the other hand, felt minimal impact at first, although I did notice that my sciatica was beginning to fade.

Each time Eve and I had sex, which started being a great deal more regular, I found my health getting better in minuscule amounts. Were I not looking for the improvements, I likely would not have seen them.

I had no idea exactly how lucky I was in choosing to give Eve the serum when I did, because two days later, there was an accident at the lab, and twelve of us were trapped in a room and exposed to the DuoHalo virus.

Nobody knew it, but I knew I was going to be able to endure through it with minimal impact, but the rest of the men who were trapped with me, they were dead men walking. It was a very difficult time for me, because I knew that theoretically, I could save all the men who were trapped in the room with me, but that would mean giving away the game.

Over the next ten days, I watched each and every one of the other men wither away and die, while the virus left me completely unaffected.

When I was finally let out of quarantine, they used the antibodies in my body to essentially recreate almost an exact copy of the version of the Quaranteam serum that I'd given to Eve.

Speaking of Eve, when I was finally released from isolation and was able to get home, my loving, caring and tender wife sexually assaulted me within an inch of my damn life. Her sexual need was so strong that she had her way with me three times before she finally took pause to breathe, asking me what was happening to her.

I said nothing, but of course, I knew...

* * * * * *

"Is it possible to engineer a version of the DuoHalo vaccination without your modifications on it?" Elle said, her eyes focusing on him with an uncomfortable intensity.

Adam laughed, shaking his head. "That's the thing - the inherent weakness of the Root Serum, being unable to graft onto an inoculation suspension, that was all there when I was first introduced to it, and it wasn't a problem I ever found a way to solve. I'm not even sure it's possible. On top of that, the Varma's vaccine wouldn't ever work without the research I'd already grafted into the Root Serum from Eve's work over at Ceravanatos. The vaccine is useless without the Root Serum, and the Root Serum won't work with suspensions in any fashion other than the one it's currently operating in. It's a perfect storm of chance encounters resulting in my triumph."

"What about the children?" Elle asked him, her voice lined with anger.

"DuoHalo's fatality rate for those who have yet to hit puberty is only around 25% in men and 10% in women, so yes, you are looking at a lost generation of people between the ages of 13 and 18, or a changing of societal norms. That's not of my concern. Also, everything in my research points to the fact that children born from two people who are imprinted upon one another will have a permanent and complete immunity to the virus. Given five to ten years, perhaps there's a method to find a solution that doesn't involve the Quaranteam serum, but by then, it will be too late, don't you see? My mark will already have been made..."

Elle looked extremely unhappy about this, wandering out of his field of vision for a moment, typing something into a keyboard behind him, before stepping back and around again. "Tell me about how the Russians extracted you from California..."