Chapter 16 - Dealing with guilt

Dealing with guilt.

I confess I struggle a lot with morality and feelings of guilt and remorse. I really wish I could adopt Marie’s cold and calculated total nihilism. I do agree with her position, philosophically, but then my brain goes and fogs up that window into objective reality and clouds my perspective with subjective sentiments. On the one hand, I want to just let myself go and indulge in absolute depraved nihilism, and on the other hand, I want to feel good about myself. I had decided to live a life where I got to fulfil all my sexual fantasies, but now I was beginning to realize that I probably couldn’t do that without suffering some serious bouts of depression, guilt and self-loathing.

After our brutal act of retributive justice, I had qualms about having taken it too far. Marie tried her best to get me thinking straight, but it was hard. When we met with the four girls from Annika’s batch of beauties, however, I took great comfort in their reactions. Now that Annika had spoken to the police and her family about what had happened to her, she talked about it with us too, and seeing her open up and let her pain out was heartening. The girls were all really empathetic, and they had absolutely no forgiveness for the four young men, and felt they deserved every bit of what they were now getting. Some even thought they were getting off too easy just going to prison.

But what was becoming more and more clear to me, in the hours that I spent alone with my thoughts, was that I’d have to work out some plan that would let me collect my harem of young teens in a manner that caused them and their relatives and friends the minimum amount of suffering. I had originally had the idea that I would just make them disappear, to resurface again years later when they had ceased being sexually attractive to me. But that just wouldn’t work. Now that Marie was in the picture - and I was really developing strong feelings for her - we had other goals to pursue than mere sexual hedonism. More than that, though, it wouldn’t work because I would feel too much guilt about doing that to the girls and their families.

This meant I now had a problem. Were the goals of having a harem of beautiful fuck-puppets and to have them be intelligent enough to contribute to the development of NanoRep medical applications and to have them split with their families for years without causing too much harm simply incompatible? Was that like saying I want to eat pizza and drink beer every day and I also want to be fit and I also don’t want to take exercise?

While I wallowed in decadent hedonism during the days, trying out the last batches of girls that I had prepared for taking each morning and revisiting groups of girls I had been with before during the afternoons, I spent many evenings and lonely nights trying to think my way out of the problem.

By the end of the six infection-weeks, when the NanoRep systems in the city were starting to dissolve except for in the people I had made them permanent in, I was at my wit’s end. Marie, who was spending the evening at my place to work on understanding how the NanoReps recognized different cells, sensed that my mind simply wasn’t in it any more. She put the laptop aside and looked at me seriously.

-”Hey, Karl. I can tell something’s bothering you. Wanna talk about it?” -”That obvious?” -”You’ve been moping for days now. Weeks, even. Do you still feel you overdid it with those guys?” -”Yes and no, but I think I’ll forgive myself for that. It’s just that I don’t see how this is going to work.” -”The cell recognition? I think I’ve got it figured out, actually.” -”That’s great, but that’s not what I meant. I mean all of it. The research institute, the harem, combining it all. Making the project work.” I explained my doubts about the feasibility of combining all parameters I wanted to achieve.

-”Ok, let’s back up, “ She said; “let’s back up and consider each problem one by one.” I sighed.

-”Oh, come on! Lighten up! How many millions do you have now?”

-”Something like fifty-five or sixty million Euros. It will keep going up for a long time though, since people have signed up for subscriptions. Also, I invested part of it in BitCoin a few weeks ago, and that portion has already quadrupled in value.” I did perk up when I heard myself saying that.

-”So money is definitely not a problem. If you want to build a school and a palace from scratch, you can do that.” -”Absolutely.” I shook my head and smiled to myself. Because I still lived in my old house, I really didn’t feel like a multi-millionaire yet.

-”So starting a research institute also wouldn’t be a problem. The problem is rather that it would be very difficult to do it with a bunch of young girls?” -”Yes, and for a very simple reason, and since you’re a maths-wiz you can probably express that better than I can.” -”Because you’re thinking about finding and recruiting girls like me, and I’m something of an anomaly. A statistical outlier not just on one parameter, but on two, to put it simply. You find me exceptionally attractive and I’m smart enough to qualify. Let’s calculate the odds then?” -”Ok, sure. I’ve found around thirty girls in each of the five large schools that I sat outside. Around a thousand pupils in each school” -”Less than that. Eight hundred at the most. That gives us thirty girls out of four hundred. That’s 7.5% that qualify by looks, unless you intended to be even more restrictive with looks for your collection.” -”Let’s say ten percent - all were probably not there those days. If you say you’ve got the NanoRep cell-recognition figured out, I could always tweak the looks of some girls a little to my liking, as long as they are pretty to begin with.” -”You’re so special, Karl.” -”Yes. But the question is, how special are you, pet?” -”Around one in a thousand by brains. 99.9th percentile.” -”Really? I would have guessed another nine would be needed.” -”Perhaps, and thanks for the compliment, daddy, but I think you’re probably right now that we’re doing the maths. My idea was overly ambitious. But then, let’s back up and rethink the premise that all the girls would need to be bright enough to contribute to the NanoRep project. Where did we get that premise?” -”Wasn’t that your suggestion, pet?” -”I think what I said was that you’d be egotistical if you just gathered a hundred girls or more and just used them as mind-altered fuck-puppets for a few years and then tossed them out. That they’d have fallen behind their peers in all but sexual experience, wasn’t that what I said?” -”You you may be right. Go on.” -”And then I suggested you recruit some really good teachers or make sure there was a good school nearby.” -”Was it I who suggested that the girls should get to contribute to the NanoRep project?” I asked.

-”I don’t remember, but that’s just not realistic, now that we’ve done the math. We need to separate the research institute from the harem. Build the institute, recruit real scientists - by real recruitment or with some NanoRep persuasion - and simply have that as an ethical alibi, if you will. Because what that project is really about is for you to handle your guilt and remorse by feeling you give something back to humanity.” -”You make it sound so unflattering.” -”I guess. But you’re not going to deny the truth of what I said, are you?” -”Nope.” I sighed.