Chapter 10

Carol was supercharged as she stepped into her office on Tuesday morning. Carol had never really got into the details about it to Lizzy but Carol was more than a researcher. In addition to her being a scientist herself she actually ran a team whose entire focus was biochemical human interactions. They got a great deal of funding from the government and quite a bit from various private industry sources as well so there was pressure to deliver concrete results and she had a feeling that this unknown effect would lead to real breakthroughs.

“Good morning Julie, please cancel all my meetings for today, something urgent has come up.” Carol said to her assistant as she breezed past on the way to the labs.

“Good morning! Yes, Ms. Conrad. Anything else?” said Julie, her longtime admin assistant.

“Could you reserve lab 2 for all day today and have Jim set it up with a complete set of steroidal and hormonal testing kits,” Carol added. “I’ll be working in the extraction lab for the next hour or so, no interruptions please.” Carol knew that her arrangements were going to cause some chaos in the lab today, but she also knew that her team trusted her to set priorities and that they would somehow deal with it.

Carol wound her way through the labyrinth that was her domain in the Molecular Biology center finally reaching the area that they primarily used for extracting testable samples from various biological tissues and fluids. She carefully unwrapped the rumpled t shirt that Lizzy had entrusted her with. She held it up briefly, puzzled by the simple design in white letters across the red and yellow background of the t shirt.

’When it absolutely, positively has to be destroyed overnight- USMC’

“Men can be so weird sometimes” Carol chuckled to herself as she debated how to get the most out of this testing opportunity. She decided on an ethanol bath for one underarm segment hoping that it would yield enough material for several tests. She wanted to keep the other for some ad hoc human behavioral testing. This was absolutely not the stringent methodology used by her team, but for some reason she felt there was an urgency here that mandated extraordinary measures. They could always be more thorough when they could persuade the subject to come in for in person testing. Truthfully, she was also a little worried about her ‘niece’ Lizzy. She hadn’t been exaggerating when she mentioned how powerful and pervasive some of the hormones she worked with could be. Many of these hormones could make permanent physical changes in the neurological and reproduction systems of subjects.

An hour later she had 8 test tubes with testable enzymes and had sectioned out the other underarm into an anonymous looking “sniff” pad for human behavioral testing.

She dialed up Julie on the interoffice phone. “Julie, can you have Kerri, Samantha, and Mary wait outside of interview room 1 for me. I need them right away for some ad hoc test interviews.”

“No problem Ms. Conrad, on it now,” Julie replied cheerfully.

It took 2 more hours to go through interviews and ‘sniff’ tests with three women and three men. All women had a marked reaction to the underarm section. Two of the three women had near orgasms and almost fainted. Carol smiled to herself, they had also badgered her for more info on who the subject was. She also suspected that the affected women were quickly producing heightened levels of their own pheromones. The room was quite ripe afterwards. She’d have to check for this effect in the formal follow on testing soon to follow. The men had no reaction at all except ‘smells like sweat’ or ‘it stinks’.

The most interesting results though were from the test samples. The levels of Androstenol and other other Androstene compounds were exponentially greater than she had ever seen in a human sample. These series of compounds can increase female perception of male attractiveness. On a whim she had also tested for estratetraenol which has been found to increase female attractiveness for both males and females but is normally found only in female urine. The topper was the presence of extremely high concentrations of oxytocin, which to her knowledge had never been found in sweat. Oxytocin is known to produce any number of reproductive and behavioral changes in both men and women but is most known for its mother to child and mate to mate binding effects.

All of this was enough to nearly overwhelm Carol in speculation. Then she ran a spectrograph on the samples and was stunned to see the presence of several unknown organic acids and other compounds. These simple acids were very close to the normal acids found in adult human sweat but their signatures were distinctly different. She was going to have to wait to determine the molecular structure of these compounds but she thought it safe to assume that they either helped produce or deliver the androstene, estratetraenol and oxytocin.

Carol rubbed her eyes, got up from the spectrograph and started pacing. She was starting to see some of the ‘how’ of this incredible effect. What she couldn’t come to grip with was ‘why’. As a scientist she hated to guess about anything. But to her it looked like this subject had been somehow engineered specifically for enhanced sexual and reproductive functions.

Now what was she going to do about it? First she had to warn Lizzy off. After seeing these results Carol was afraid Lizzy could get pregnant just from breathing the same air as the subject. It wasn’t much of an exaggeration to think he was that fertile! Then she had to find some way of getting him to come in for more testing. Above all she had to keep this entirely confidential. She didn’t know what was happening but this subject could have been bio-engineered by a government, either the USA or a foreign government. The implications of that were truly frightening if you considered government efforts to develop various mind control methods on project MKUltra. She had to keep this under wraps, the last thing she wanted was for Lizzy or her ‘subject’ to end up imprisoned at some black site and subject to human experimentation.

Carol strode back to her office and fired up her secure desktop environment and began writing up her personal confidential notes on what she found. These notes were her eyes only. Her official research notes would be much more thorough and complete. She’d figure out a secure way to keep the identities hidden when the time came. But for now she added the description that Lizzy had provided for him. As an afterthought she also added a name. Lizzy thought she was being clever but Carol knew there was only one 40 something year old man of that description that Lizzy would let anywhere near her. Ben. Ben her white knight and protector. Every day since the day of her menstrual problem Lizzy thought that Ben had hung the stars. Truthfully, he did seem a pretty nice guy to do what he did with such sensitivity for Lizzy’s feelings. Carol had never met him but she did some discreet checking up on him using her government contacts just to be safe. He seemed well liked by staff and students and there was no hint of inappropriate behavior at any level.

Carol smiled to herself as she thought of how cute Lizzy’s crush was. In a way she was glad that Ben had filled in a small part the role her father, Jerry, should have been taking. As she thought about it she shook her head in dismay at Lizzy’s father’s avoidance of anything parental. Carol thought she loved Jerry but it was becoming a real problem for her. Maybe it was because Lizzy was becoming the spitting image of her mom and the pain was still too much for her dad to handle.