The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Adam couldn’t help but smile a little as Elle frowned at him, her eyes wanting to rip a hole straight through him, he could tell. The last thing the woman wanted was to hear that he’d done this intentionally, maliciously, and yet, he had just confirmed to her that he had not only done it deliberately, but that he’d worked towards the goal for quite some time.

“So you are not denying that that you intentionally made women attached to men, that you made their survival dependent upon a man’s?”

Adam laughed, shaking his head. “Deny it? I am proud of it. My dear, you must realize that whatever horrible things you may think of me, I am not responsible for the DuoHalo virus. That horrific plague was not one of my creation, and all I did was simply piggyback my own wants onto the solution designed to keep mankind alive. If you want to lay blame for that part of the tale, you should look more at the Russians.”

Elle stepped in closer, as if the detail intrigued her very much. “The Russians created DuoHalo? Tell me more.” Her voice had a British tinge to it, but he felt like she wasn’t English, merely educated in Oxford or some other British college.

“I don’t know that for certain,” Adam said, feeling the effects of the truth serum still pulsing through his veins. “They never admitted to creating the virus, but I feel certain that if it wasn’t them, it was definitely someone. The virus is complicated, crafted with far too much adaptability and flexibility for it to have been naturally occurring, by my estimate, although I am no virologist. It might be beyond my scope of knowledge in the field, but I am relatively confident in my read. I did ask my Russian handlers about it a number of times, and while they insisted they weren’t involved in its creation, it was extremely difficult to discern if they were speaking for themselves singularly or on the behalf of their country and government. They didn’t have sodium pentothol running through their veins, now did they?”

“Therein lay your mistake, Doctor McCallister,” Elle said to him, leaning against the table a little. She had unzipped the top of her jumpsuit some, to put her non-negligible amount of cleavage on display for him, the tops of her breasts exposed invitingly. “You seem eager to ask questions, but never the right ones.”

Adam looked around the room, his eyes having slowly adjusted enough to get a better sense of his surroundings, although without his glasses, he was still lacking for finer details. There were five people in the small room with him, Elle, three other women and one man, although it seemed very clear that Elle was in charge of the whole situation. The entrance/exit to the room was somewhere behind him, and he couldn’t turn well enough to get a good look at it. The floor was metal of some kind, and the table was affixed to it, not just fastened, but actually welded to it, something that he found especially odd, at least at first.

The air was filtered coming in, but the airflow was heavy and constant, keeping the inside of the container relatively cool. There wasn’t a scent to it, but if there was, he was certain it would’ve been tinted with salt and brine.

At first, he had written off his vertigo as a side effect of either disorientation or whatever chemicals they’d used to keep him docile and obedient, but now he had decided that wasn’t it at all. It wasn’t that he had vertigo—it was that he wasn’t standing on solid ground.

They were on a boat.

Based on the amount of time he’d been unconscious and the fact that he was fairly certain he hadn’t been transported anywhere by plane, that left four options—he was on either the Barents Sea, the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea or the Caspian Sea.

If it was the Barents Sea, which was basically part of the Arctic Ocean, he could be headed anywhere, so he decided to dismiss it as a useless option. That wouldn’t help him narrow things down at all. He did, however, feel as though the surrounding air wasn’t cold enough to be in the Arctic, although he was forced to admit he could be in a heated container.

If it was the Caspian Sea, the only real contender was that they were heading to Iran, with Tehran being on the south side of it. He didn’t have any idea what Iran’s current status was or how they had managed the DuoHalo crisis, but as he considered how patriarchal the society there was, he thought it unlikely that Elle was part of their efforts. Also, she seemed too white. It was, perhaps, a racist assumption to make, but he decided he was operating with whatever facts he had at hand.

If it was the Black Sea, then he expected their final destination would be Istanbul, although he supposed that heading up towards Bucharest was also an option. Both Turkey and Romania had taken DuoHalo serious eventually, although both countries were several steps behind where they should’ve been, because ‘eventually’ hadn’t been soon enough. Again, however, Elle looked too light of skin to be Turkish, although he did have to allow for the possibility that Istanbul was simply an extraction point to take him even further.

Odds were, he decided, that he was likely on the Baltic Sea. If they had taken him from Moscow to St. Petersburg, then put him on a ship of some kind, it would give them the most options of where they could head. Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were all definitely viable options, and Elle seemed like she could easily be from any of those countries.

“Allow me to try the right questions then,” McCallister said. Playing coy had done him no favors, so perhaps it was time to be more direct. “Are we on a boat on the Baltic Sea?”

Elle smiled, bringing her hands together in a tiny, polite clap. “That we are, Doctor. But that should come as no real surprise, so I am afraid it feels like significantly less information that you might have obtained if you had asked a more poignant question. Now, tell me about how you came to join the Quaranteam Program.”

“Don’t call it that,” he snarled. “If anything, you can describe it as Project Impulse. That was what it was called when I was brought on to manage it, anyway.”

“Then tell me how you came to become part of Project Impulse.”

After Eve and I graduated with our doctorates in 1995, we were presented with a great many opportunities, bolstered by the fact that we were Stanford graduates. Instead of rushing in to work, however, we took on residencies at Stanford’s Children’s Hospital, each of us working on different things. Eve spent her time researching how neural pathways were formed during the developmental years, studying to see if there was a way to help manage and correct for aberrant occurrences. I, on the other hand, was studying to see how neurochemistry could be adapted and adjusted. We were working on adjacent projects, but not the same project.

It was a quiet time in our lives, I suppose, the six years we spent there, from 1995 to 2001, with both of us mostly head down in our work, spending ten to twelve hour days five or six days a week in the research labs, which meant Eve and I were generally too tired to do more than exchange pleasantries and fall asleep next to one another before getting up the next morning and doing it all over again. We were apart together, and that seemed to be enough to sustain us both.

We did talk, ever so briefly, about whether or not we wanted to have kids, but the thought was that we were too busy to entertain the option. I did learn many years later, however, that at some point during our tenure at Stanford Children’s Hospital, she had had a fertility study commissioned, and that she had turned out to be somewhat infertile. The odds of her successfully carrying a child to term were somewhere between 5-10%, which may have contributed to the chasm of distance between the two of us, and why we both became so lost in our work. She didn’t tell me about her condition, and I wouldn’t discover it until far later. I also am unaware if she ever had me tested, to see if my sperm were viable.

Then, on a cool September morning in 2001, the world changed. Eve’s mother called, waking us up, telling us to turn on the television, just in time to see the second plane hit the South Tower of the World Trade Center. It wasn’t until later in the day that we found out one of Eve’s sisters, the youngest, Charity, who had been only 22 at the time, had been on American Airlines Flight 11, which had crashed into the North Tower in the very first strike of the attack.

Eve was shattered, understandably, and we decided to take some time off from our research projects, although it turned out during what was supposed to be a hiatus, we decided to leave the hospital permanently. We felt like we had no choice.

For several months, Eve was nearly in a fugue state, the loss of her little sister weighing heavily upon her soul. To be fair, I also mourned Charity greatly, as she had been perhaps the most welcoming member of the Merriweather clan to me. She... Charity had an indomitable spirit, a contagious sense of enthusiasm and optimism about the world. She had accused me of staring at my own shoes too much, and was constantly forcing me to dance, something I always told her I hated but secretly brought me great joy. In moments where life was throwing challenges at me, I would always think “How would Charity look at this?” and from that worldview, I could endure and persevere. Now that light had been unfairly snuffed out.

Perhaps my only strain of optimism about this world and those who inhabit it died with her in that plane crash.

When we finally crawled out from our depression, both Eve and I decided to pursue different paths, although both of our paths made sense. Eve started working for a company called Ultratics, who were studying bone diseases.

I, on the other hand, went down a different, rather more radical path.

I began to investigate where I could apply my skills in regards to the American military-industrial complex. I decided I needed to be surrounded by people for whom ethics were, at best, guidelines. I needed to not be constrained, to be allowed to work down whatever dark corridors I needed to follow.

As it turned out, bioengineering was a field that all the various branches were starting to see potential in, and I interviewed with all of them. After a few months, I decided that the projects the Air Force were working on aligned themselves the best with both my skillset and my interests.

I won’t lie—at first I thought they might have been working on biological weapons, and if that had been the case, I would’ve been able to incorporate what I’d been working on in my spare moments into that work.

Because I had made progress on forcing women to need a man more than a fish needed a bicycle, although as of 2001, it was still mostly in its infancy.

In 1999, as I’d been working on something entirely unrelated, I stumbled across a way to essentially link two sets of DNA. It didn’t do anything in particular yet, other than connect two individuals on a genetic level. One person’s DNA could recognize and authorize another’s, sort of like a lock and key. There weren’t any consequences for using the wrong key, nor any benefits for providing the right one, but it was the very beginning of my eventual endgoal.

One person’s DNA could look at another person’s and, on a fundamental level, go “Yes, that’s correct.” Once I figured out how to make that have repercussions, I would be in business. I knew, however, that it was no small leap I needed to take, to find a way to make that work.

With this in mind, I joined what was known as Project: Cattle Foot in the summer of 2002. At the time, we were tasked with developing injections that would make fighter pilots more resistant to G-forces, able to endure more and more pressure before blacking out.

It was a far cry from what I expected to be working on, but it did several important things—it granted me access to much more powerful tools and with much less oversight. As the project was being developed by a private company partnered with the Air Force, we were given access to all sorts of information and resources we wouldn’t otherwise have been able to get.

One of the very first things I noticed was that there were loads of other individual projects I needed to be reading up on. The amount of work I was actually doing as part of Cattle Foot was astonishingly light and didn’t occupy large portions of my mental resources, so I was able to spend time digging into all of the other various projects that not only the Air Force, but the military at large was supporting development into.

If asked, the American government would naturally say that chemical and biological weapons weren’t things they were doing research into, but you have me under sodium pentathol, so I can assure you, they were and are researching these things, and in spades.

At this point, I was starting to consider how I might piggyback my ideas onto one of these other projects, but I still faced two larger problems, the first being that I did not really have anything that did what I wanted it to yet, and the other being that weapons development, by its very nature, is designed to have even greater impact on its targets than what I had been intending.

What good would my project be if it was attached to something that killed its target? None at all. I needed to find some way to get it to be used on large groups of women, and, as much as you may dislike hearing this my dear, women still only make up a marginal amount of fighting forces.

It was not, as one of my military colleagues might have said, a target rich environment.

This put me in a holding pattern for quite some time.

In 2005, my next discovery along the path was something to allow the recognition between the lock and key to have a genuine impact. I discovered a way to cause two sets of DNA to recognize each other, and if exposed to another set of DNA other than the key to its lock, a rejection process would happen, causing minor necrotization of the DNA.

This might sound minor, but it was the fundamental building block upon which my research was laid foundation on.

By 2009, I had come a long way. I had been able to extend this to be one-way, using the sex chromosomes to attach as both lock and key, where the key could work on multiple locks, but the locks would all point to the same key. An XY chromosome (male) would function as the “key” to unlock a paired XX chromosome (female) in a challenge/response pattern.

I had even gone so far as to make it work exclusively with sexual fluids, essentially bonding one woman to one man in concept, although I definitely hadn’t done any human testing. All of this was purely theoretical, but the research seemed to indicate that all of this should and would work, if I could find a way to introduce it to two people, both a man and a woman. The lock/key pairing only seemed to last a month or so, but it was a start.

In 2013, the Air Force decided to scrap Cattle Foot, and I found myself panicking. I did not want to be removed from all these useful tools and assets I had, so I needed to think fast. My security clearance was going to be revoked and all of my research impounded, something I desperately could not afford to let happen. There was a strong possibility I could smuggle out what I’d been doing on the side without getting caught, but I didn’t want to risk that unless absolutely necessary.

That was when I realized that manned aircraft wasn’t the likely future for air combat, and started working with a variety of other teams, some working on preparing for space, others working on drone research. By not specializing on any one project, I sort of became a freelancer, drifting in between teams, helping out on a variety of projects without really leading anything.

Over the next several years, I worked on whatever they wanted to throw me at while I kept on trying to hammer my research into something better, more resilient. I kept looking for gaseous weapons being developed, but couldn’t find anything that was both viable and a good match for melding my existing research with.

The key problem I’d found was that my work wasn’t easily aerosolized, meaning that trying to put it into a gas weapon meant the lock and key system wasn’t going to work. I couldn’t expose a woman to enough of a concentration of it in an airborne form to make it do what I wanted, and after years of trying to figure it out, I simply realized that it wasn’t likely something I was going to be able to make work, despite my staggering intellect.

I needed a different path to realize my goal, and that angered me.

In some ways, those years were the biggest setback I’d ever encountered. I had the core of something that would do what I wanted it to, but with no way to get it out into the world undiscovered, what I had was essentially nothing, even if it was mostly everything.

In 2015, Eve moved to work for a start up called Ceravanatos, working on anti-carcinogens, trying to engineer a bio-organism that wouldn’t just cure cancer, it would restore cells to their original status. It was ambitious and heady work, although their CEO was prone to great over exaggeration, promising things far beyond his ability to deliver.

The promises, however, were more than enough to keep the money flooding in, which kept both Eve and I afloat, although I was making decent money from the various projects the Air Force had me on, even if they were never great or large successes. We had a decent sized house in Pleasanton that we spent almost no time in.

Eve and I were still basically two separate people co-inhabiting one life, fighting all the time when we were together, but still so invested in our work that neither of us wanted to make the step to officially separate from each other. I think, had one or the other of us not been engulfed in our work for a period of time longer than a few weeks, we might have decided to divorce. That we never had that much time might have been one of the things that brought us to where we all now find ourselves, because as loathe as I am to admit it, I benefited greatly from Eve’s work at Ceravanatos, although I think even to this day she remains unaware of that.

I suppose I should confess that I stole some of the research from Ceravanatos for my own devices, because if they were going to miss steps that were right in front of them, why would it be my obligation to help them instead of simply taking what they had built and were wasting, incorporating it into my own work for greater purpose.

By 2018, I had taken the nugget of the idea Ceravanatos was working with and had, unreliably, spliced it onto my own project. Sometimes when being introduced to the lock and key system, when the key was imprinted on the lock, the lock would go through a massive burst of cellular regeneration, repairing damage that had been done to it, and in fact, restoring problems within the host organism that had seemed insurmountable.

My thought, at the time, was that if I could find a way to graft my lock/key process onto the Ceravanatos restorative program, I could gift it to my wife, and people would be so caught up in the joy of using the anti-carcinogen properties that they would completely accept the secondary cost of being sexually imprinted onto only one man, especially since there seemed to be a decent enough chance of the male also getting some of the restorative process.

The problem, as it always was, was consistency. I couldn’t get the damn thing to have predictable and manageable responses. Sometimes it would bind exceptionally well; other times it would short circuit and cause mishaps to both the lock host and the key host.

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...”