Chapter 12: Madam X

Alex and 'Greg, ' The Traveler, sat around the kitchen table sipping coffee and nibbling on raw vegetables dipped in ranch dressing, while discussing the details of what they were planning for Madam X. She decided she couldn't call him 'Greg, ' since that wasn't his name, and if he wasn't going to give her his real name, she started calling him Trav. It was what she had been calling him over the months and years he had been coming to the DFW area.

They exchanged stories, but Alex's tale was short, because Trav already knew all about her. He, on the other hand, had an 'interesting' story. He was a former CIA spook who happened to be near Chernobyl when it melted down. Actually, it blew up and then melted down. He found MPC's notes, as well as those of several other scientists, before the Soviets came and took over. He slipped away and gave his controllers all that was of significance: the nuclear scientists' notes. He had gleaned enough from MPC's notes to know that the MPC program was a dangerous program to give to the government, any government. He kept it for himself. He left the Agency; they were sorry to see him leave and gave him a significant amount designed to last him through his 'final days.' He was expected to die.

It took only a few weeks to rid himself of the radiation poisoning. But to eliminate the toxins from his body was another issue. He had the most intense and horrific case of diarrhea he'd ever had the dis-pleasure to endure. Then he had to detoxify his liver, he used MPC of course, and all the herbal remedies he could find; the result – another week of diarrhea. Counting everything, he spent nearly a month in an Austrian hotel, violently sick. Then he retreated to a rented place outside of Memphis, Tennessee, to get his health back. Actually it was in the suburbs of West Memphis, Arkansas.

Well, MPC took care of the 'getting his health back' but he needed an enormous amount of calories and vitamins to provide the building blocks for MPC to work with. So he shopped – and ate – for a family of four for about another month.

And, of course, he puzzled about what to tell the CIA about his recovery. That's when he went to D.C. and found his first subject. Harvey Westheimer was in the records division of the CIA, and he was 'convinced' to alter the records to show that his new master had indeed died from radiation poisoning. His fingerprint and other identifying information were altered; and now the man called The Traveler by Alex was indeed dead.

He returned to his base in West Memphis and resumed his new life. That's when he met Monique Washington. He moved her into his farm house and pretty much lived like a king for a year and a half. He was playing with the MPC program, deciding whether or not to change Monique's skin color or just to enslave another woman, when he found a person that Alex would call an abUser. To top it off, he discovered that the MPC had spread, via the Internet, like a virus. Or, he thought to himself, like a picture of cute kittens.

The man, self-annointed 'Master of All', would capture young girls, fresh off the bus in Memphis or Nashville, and just destroy them. Trav had his eye on such a girl for his own use, when the 'Master of All' took her. He watched in horror – the 'Master of All' never even passworded her profile – as her mind was wiped clean, and her body was deformed into a parody of an inflatable sex doll. Her mouth was permanently shaped into an 'O' and he 'gave' her only his semen to eat. He made her teeth, of course, disappear. She was hosed off daily, and that was the only water she was allowed. She was dead within a few weeks. Her nude body was found downstream in the Mississippi River, her normal dimensions restored; apparently he'd unmodified her before she died. The police were baffled at the lack of teeth. This was the 17^th young girl found with all her teeth missing.

Trav decided to take another look at what he was doing to Monique. He didn't like what he saw, and he changed how he used MPC. That's when he changed careers. He was a newly minted Private Detective in Tennessee and Arkansas. Now, he decided, he'd become the nemesis of the 'Master of All' and any other like him. He found the 'Master of All, ' and took him out with a suppressed high-powered hunting rifle that he bought at a swap meet. The gun – in pieces – went into the Mississippi at various points.

For money, he just took over a band of successful bank robbers and they 'gave' him all the money they had. He took what they had, allowed them to do several more jobs, took all of that, too, and then caused them to be trapped in their non-working get away car – the driver couldn't figure out how to get it started, for some strange reason – and the police arrived. There weren't too many bank robbers in the Memphis area, so he started traveling around. He found what he needed.

The only abUser he hadn't been able to stop was Madam X. She'd killed a lot of children, the only one she missed was somehow immune to Master PC. He followed her around the Southeast U.S., and of course, stopped a lot of sexual crimes that were being committed via MPC.

And now, seven years later, here he was, sitting in the kitchen of Alexis Chatris.

"Well," said Alex, "that's quite a story. True, too."

"You've somehow got the ability to tell lies from truth?" Trav said with a note of doubt in his voice.

"Haha ... no. But I've given myself the ability to feel the pulse and read the respiration rate of people within a certain distance," she explained. "I now can do it subconsciously. I can be fooled by, for example, a sociopath. I don't think you are that."

"Must be my trustworthy blue eyes, huh?"

"Or something..." She smiled back at him.

They had been pretty sure that Madam X would find a new victim within a short period of time, so they decided just to wait. And wait they did.

Alex decided to offer her spare bedroom to Trav, and he moved all his stuff from the hotel near the airport into her house within the next two hours. Alex, herself, decided to take a few 'sick' days – the department could run itself while she had the 'flu.' That was three days ago.

He flirted with her throughout the 'waiting period.' They both knew that it was only a matter of time before Madam X would knock at their electronic door.

Alex abandoned all her work, except for Robbie Martinez. He was a multi-talented jock from South Central High in Dallas who liked beating up on women, girls, and weaker guys for that matter. Alex was 'coaching' him through some painful and humiliating 'lessons' in her dungeon and she felt she could easily take time from her Madam X hunting to tend to Robbie's problems.

To get the psychological changes in Martinez that she wanted, MPC couldn't be used – directly at least. Roberto Martinez was proving to be a difficult case, and she was close to writing him off completely when he came to the house as directed. It was the start of a week long vacation from school.

Trav, stayed in his room so as not to interfere, but during one of the breaks in Martinez' dungeon time – he was left alone with a long and large dildo pulsing in his ass – Alex came upstairs. Trav, of course, had seen her in her 'special' dungeon get up – through Spats' eyes – but it was somehow different in person. His dick became hard and the bulge was noticeable through the Bermuda shorts he was wearing, and he couldn't muster the mental focus to control it.

Alex was pretty worked up – she'd had Robbie licking her pussy, during his 'training' session – and she noticed Trav's increased pulse and respiration rate soon enough. She wanted to go into her own room and pound her pussy with the dildo she kept there. But Trav stopped her in the kitchen.

"Tough case, huh?" he said. His hand on her arm scalded her.

"Yeah. I can't seem to get through to this kid."

"Not everybody responds to sex. Or maybe he's gay and you're not pushing the right buttons," Trav suggested.

"He's not gay. It would have shown on his MPC record. He's just warped mentally. He was abused by his mother's boyfriend early on, and he's just taking it out on the rest of the world.

"Abusing him again would not undo the prior abuse – maybe it would reinforce it," Trav offered. "Have you thought that maybe you couldn't 'cure' everybody in the whole world. Just leave some people with the command to act nice to others and forget about sculpting their personalities to your own choosing. You know, you're not God."

"I'm the closest thing to God he'll ever meet." Alex had been turned off by her parents' strict religious attitudes, and was pretty much an atheist – or at least, she was anti-church, which she thought of as the same thing. She just didn't have enough faith to believe in a God who'd allowed her and seventeen others to be raped by the man who'd assaulted her. Not to mention all the other evil things 'He' allowed – if He was really there at all. She didn't think much about an all-powerful God who could run the lives of everybody. If she ever thought about it at all, she'd have seen herself in that role. Well ... now that she'd met Trav, perhaps she'd have to share the God-role.