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The Institute Stories Set 01

By: elsol



How To Tell Her: Michael's Story

"I got tested," I announced. My grip, on the velvet box in my pocket, tightened.

"Excuse me?" Sarah asked looking up from the menu with a smile. I loved her smile. It wasn't the perfect curve of her lips but the way her eyes glowed when she looked at me.

"I got tested," I repeated. "The results arrived this morning."

"Tested for what, darling?" she asked putting the menu down. I looked out the window to avoid her eyes. She reached out to put her hand on top of mine.

"I'm EMC-Positive, Sarah," I whispered. Her hand pulled away; my nails dug into the box.

"The Institute started testing everyone at puberty over ten years ago, Michael," she insisted.

"An exception is allowed if the biological parents and the child refuse the test," I informed her.

"Who would do that?" she asked horrified. I turned to stare at her.

"But even your parents have to be reasonable about some things, Michael!"

"No, Sarah, they don't," I sighed. "They thought that the Institute was just another government conspiracy. They still do."

"Everyone gets tested!" she spat.

I didn't have anything to say to that; I had been dealing with the repercussions of my parents' political beliefs since I moved out of their home.

"You had to say no for the exception to apply," she said furiously.

"I was fourteen, Sarah," I reminded her. "Every kid talked about refusing the test."

"But no one does!"

"Parents do not refuse the test," I said. "I thought it was cool that I could do what everybody else only talked about."

I warned the waitress off with a small shake. Sarah sat in silence for a few minutes.

"Are they sure?" Sarah asked. "There could have been a mistake."

"No mistake, Sarah," I said.

"There's drugs though," she said staring at me. "I've heard they suppress this."

"The drugs are rare since the Institute threatened to Quarantine anyone working for a company that manufactures them. It doesn't matter though, if I were Telepathic or Symbolic, the drugs would work," I said. "Hell, even an Empathic can be trained not to project. Not me."

"What are you?" she asked raising her voice.

"Pheromonic," I told her.

"That's impossible, Michael," she said. "They're the easiest to detect. We had a Fem-Pher in my high school; she was always flocked by boys."

"For all my parents' political beliefs, they wanted the best for their little boy," I said staring out the window again. "The best schools in my city were the single-sex grammar and high schools. Nobody thinks to ask why one boy is more popular than another in that environment."

"What about college?"

"I attended The Castle, Sarah," I stated.

Her nails scratched at the tablecloth. I picked up my napkin and wiped my brow.

"Do you need another couple of minutes?" the waitress asked approaching the table.

"Yes, please," I said.

She smiled and turned away too quickly, losing her balance. Her hand came down on top of my napkin when she tried to catch herself.

"I'm so sorry!" she said.

"It's okay," I told her.

Her face changed expressions as she looked down at the napkin. She picked it up and brought it to her face; a deep breath seemed to fuel something inside of her.

"Excuse me!" Sarah hissed.

"I'm sorry!" the waitress said blushing.

"It's okay," I said taking the napkin out of her hand gently. Sarah watched her flee.

"Is that how it's going to be?" Sarah growled at me.

"That's how it has been since my military discharge," I said. "I just didn't know why."

"Waitresses fawning over you?"

"And co-workers," I said. "Your friends. Your mother."

"I have to use the bathroom," she said getting up and walking away.

I pulled the box out of my pocket and stared at it.

"Would it be crass to ask for your number when you're getting ready to pop the question?" the waitress asked from behind me. I put the box back in my pocket before replying.

"A little."

"It doesn't seem to be going well," she pushed.

"It's not going at all," I admitted.

"You're one of them? A mind controller," she asked in a voice laced with an excitement she could have only felt around 'one of us'. "I've never felt like this before!"

I settled into the pattern of conversation I had unwittingly begun to use with women after meeting Sarah. The waitress spent the next couple of minutes being frustrated by my refusal to exchange with her.

"I'm not going to be able to leave you alone for a minute without some woman coming on to you from now on, am I?" Sarah asked sitting down. "And the Institute will insist that you do whatever comes naturally to your kind!"

There was no point in answering the question, if it even was one.

"I always knew there was something wrong with this," she said sitting back and staring at me.

"Wrong?" I asked with a thumb stroking the box in my pocket.

"I feel too much for you," she said angrily.

"I can't make you love me, Sarah," I told her.

"You're EMC-Pos," she said dismissing my protest with a wave of her hand.

"It's the little things," she said. "I don't even like the taste of semen, and when we had sex, lying in your bed felt like I was surrounded by warmth."

She always said 'made love' before.

"If there's nothing we can do about it, then we'll have to deal with it," she said raising her chin.

"No, Sarah," I said. "I'll deal with this; I'm sure the Institute will help. You've already decided not to."

"Let's just eat, Michael," she told me. "We'll discuss this at your apartment."

It was no longer our home.

I understood the height of our stupidity at that moment; we had been living an abnormal life and thinking we were somehow exempt from the new laws of nature. No one just had sex anymore, not in a world that needed the Institute and its growing army of Erotic Mind Control Positives.

I let the box in my pocket go.

END FLASH

=====

The First Motherless Child Institute Story

Case File #36: The Smell of Vengeance 

Stares and silence confronted me as I stepped out of the gravcar. The Director said Operatives got used to it; I disliked raising my voice so the silence was useful.

"Sir," a young police officer said, coming to attention what he must have thought was a safe distance from me.

"I'm not in your chain of command," I told him. "Relax."

"Yes, sir," he replied, ignoring what I said. I shook my head and studied the expensive hotel behind him.

"Is she up there?" I asked quietly.

"Room 313, sir."

I nodded.

"Why not the penthouse, sir?" he blurted. "I thought Positives always took the best."

"She didn't know to ask," I said. Walking past him, I counted far too many of his fellow officers. One to keep an eye on a late blooming Positive (the testing exemption had been repealed too long before for it to be anything else) until the assigned Institute Operative arrived was the standard procedure handed down by the Director to local authorities.

"Sir!" the cop exclaimed. "The Captain ordered you to come see him."

I froze and turned back to him.

"That's what the Captain said!" he rushed out.

"In that case, the girl can wait," I said. "Where is the Captain?"

He nodded towards an ambulance. I gestured for him to walk ahead and wondered how many people would witness the heavy-handed treatment the Director expected when someone gave orders to an Operative. It was necessary, but I wished people who did not understand the limits of their power would make it unnecessary more often.

"Captain," the young officer said approaching a man wearing a uniform more appropriate to the Policeman's Ball than the street.

"Are you the EM-Cop?" the Captain asked, giving me an unfriendly glance. There was no point in answering the question; the gray uniform was intended to be a sign of danger. Most of us considered the uniform silly, and the others had to endure the jokes from non-Operative Positives. It did make us recognizable enough to avoid problems, though this particular person was ignoring the warning.

"Erotic Mind Control Operative," I said. "EMC-Op if you must shorten it. I prefer Institute Operative or just Operative, which is how the Director addresses us."

He shrugged my point aside.

"I understand you ordered me to attend you," I said.

Everyone near us took a couple of steps back. They made sure to stay close enough to hear how the exchange ended, while making it a point to look elsewhere. The Captain gave the young officer an angry look but refused to back down.

"That's one of mine in the ambulance," he spat.

"I'm not fond of emotional outbursts, especially angry ones," I said. "Moderate your tone, or you will scream in pain for the next year or so."

"You can't do that!"

"Institute Operatives are always Telepathics," I said; no one could be that ignorant, but I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.

"Even Telepathics have limits," he insisted bravely.

"It isn't one of mine," I said.

"Only the Director's Bas..." he stopped as his eyes flared in recognition.

"Finish the word," I said.

"Bastard!" he said. I had to give him credit-- his voice barely wavered.

"Were I any other Operative, you would be screaming at my feet for having thought of giving that order," I said. "Because I am the EMC-Op who people so lovingly refer to as the 'Director's Bastard', I have the luxury of letting it slide."

He looked ready to continue speaking, but fear held his tongue. It was better for him to be afraid; even a non-Operative Positive would have handled the situation more roughly than I chose to.

"She's one of mine," he said finally, looking at the ambulance.

"What's your point, Captain?"

"She's..." the young officer said stepping forward. He seemed lost for a second, "Horny, sir."

"Why didn't someone say that to begin with?" I asked. "I wasn't aware the girl had gotten to one of you."

I stepped around the Captain and opened the ambulance doors. A female officer was strapped to a gurney, struggling to get free.

"I've never seen anyone like that," the young officer said peeking around a door. The curiosity was common; few people had witnessed someone that horny. For the most part, Institute Positives kept the extreme forms of their fun behind closed doors.

"FUCK ME!" the female officer yelled.

"What's her name?" I asked.

"Shannon," the Captain answered. I nodded and stepped into the ambulance. I sat beside the gurney to study her; she was pretty with long brown hair and vibrant blue eyes.

"Hello, Shannon," I said.

"Help me!" she begged. Her eyes bored into me as she strained against the straps. "Please, fuck me!"

"I've got an appointment with the young lady who did this to you, so I can't take the time right now," I told her. "But I can be of some help."

She gritted her teeth. I jacked into her mind with enough force for her to be aware of the invasion.

"I'm going to function as a wall between you and most of the horniness, Shannon," I said, erecting the barrier in her mind. "It's going to allow you to make some decisions without interference."

She relaxed and closed her eyes as the mental wall took the brunt of what had been done to her body.

"The girl is a Pheromonic," I said.

"How can you tell?" the young officer asked from the ambulance door.

"The four Positive powers require different approaches to abate their effect," I told him. "With a Pheromonic, the signals being sent from the body need to be blocked or functionally siphoned off. Basically, I've increased her pleasure tolerance."

"I like the pleasure," Shannon said pushing her chest toward me.

"What?" the young officer gasped. The Captain stomped away.

"We had a Symbolic Positive in my freshman dorm," she said staring hungrily at me. "I was her favorite."

"So you know about the decisions you need to make in this circumstance, Shannon?" I asked. She answered with a firm nod. It made things easier; no one could deny or hide from what had happened to the human race like in the first twenty or so years after the Event, but it did not stop people from being willfully ignorant to the consequences.

"Why does she have to make any decisions?" the young officer asked. "You fixed her."

"Where did you go to school?" I asked him.

"Red Falls is a little strange, sir," Shannon told me. "They don't... have a lot of respect for Positives."

"I don't understand," I said.

"The Captain sent four of us after the girl, sir," she explained, refusing to meet my eyes. I sat quietly for a few minutes. A quick scan proved the veracity of her statement meaning the Captain had tied my hands. As lenient as I chose to be in some areas, I had been not been baptized the Director's Bastard for the open questions about my lineage.

"Officer," I said looking at the young man at the ambulance doors. He straightened into attention at the tone of my voice.

"Tell your Mayor and the Captain, I will be questioning them as soon as I've made arrangements for Shannon," I told him.

"I don't know where the Mayor is, sir."

"Find him," I said and turned to study Shannon again.

"If you have previous experience with a Positive, I don't have to explain much to you," I said to her. She gave me a big smile and another nod.

"The Pheromonic in the hotel is good," I told her. "Not powerful, but she's got a naturally subtle touch. It's going to take a week for what she's done to flush out of your system."

"I missed it," she said with her eyes beaming.

"What do you want to do?"

"I have a fiancée, James. Our Institute Application is pending," she whispered hopefully.

I activated my earcell.

"Yes, Jason," a warm female voice answered on the other side. I reached out to straighten Shannon's shirt so I could read her nameplate. She pushed up and rubbed her breast against my hand. I let her enjoy the contact for a few seconds.

"I need an Application pushed through processing," I said leaning away from Shannon, who pouted.

"Name?"

"Shannon Davidson."

"Shannon Davidson from Red Falls; Application Partner, James Hutchinson," the voice said. "The Application is pending the required blood re-test. I'll get a bio-tech on it, sir."

"How long will it take?"

"I've got the on-duty tech inline, and she's pulled the blood samples. A few minutes, sir."

"I'll wait then," I said.

"Yes!" Shannon hissed when I reached over to unbutton her shirt. I pulled the knife off her belt and cut her t-shirt and bra open so I could have access to her breasts. The position was not flattering, but I could tell Shannon's breasts were exceptional. 

"No wonder you were that Symbolic's favorite," I said circling a hard nipple with a finger.

"The wall... please, the wall!"

"I'm glad to see your experiences with us have been positive," I said. I shortened the barrier so her body could send sexual signals over it.

"Oh My God!" she cried. "It's been so long!"

I leaned down and took her right nipple in my mouth. I sucked hard on it. Shannon had not complained about being strapped down so her Symbolic must have enjoyed her in that fashion.

"Sir," the voice in my ear said a few minutes later.

"NO!" Shannon screamed as I pulled away from her. I heard a snicker from the doors and looked. I would not have been surprised if everyone on the street was peeking into the ambulance to see what I was doing to Shannon.

"Shannon and James's Application has been approved," the voice said happily. "Please congratulate the happy couple for me, Jason."

"Thank you, I will," I replied. Shannon perked up at my words.

"Susan and the Institute would like to extend our congratulations," I told her. "Now, where can we find James Hutchinson?"

"Here!" an officer said from outside the ambulance. I turned to watch him step up to the doors.

"Well, I seem to have all the requirements for wedding," I said. "Are you two ready to get married?"

"We're New Christians," James replied.

"I thought it would help our Application," Shannon informed me.

"I'll call our priest," James said. "He could get here in fifteen minutes."

"Why bother?" I asked. "I can marry you."

They looked at each other in surprise. I undid Shannon's straps while they communicated silently. It took a minute for James to untangle himself from Shannon's enthusiasm when she was finally free. I helped him by raising the barrier in her mind to its original level.

"Is it true?" James asked holding Shannon at arm's length. The question made her focus on me.

"Is what true?" I asked.

"That we'll have a normal life if we're married by an Institute Operative," Shannon asked eagerly.

"No, Shannon," I replied. "You'll have a very abnormal life. The only limitation on children will be the Institute approved number for your combined physical, psychological, and social profile. You'll also receive a Conjugal Visitation Ration Card."

They hugged tightly for a long time. The people around us whispered loudly about the couple's good luck.

"Does that mean you don't wish to wait for the NC priest?" I asked after they stepped apart.

"No!" Shannon replied smiling. I activated the earcell.

"Yes, Jason."

"Please witness the Institute marriage of Shannon Davidson and James Hutchinson."

"Recording."

People crowded around, as Shannon and James stood hand-in-hand before me. I took their joined hands in mine and jacked into them with enough force to make them aware of my mental presence.

"Will you love this child?" I asked.

"I will," James said. His voice cracked the tiniest bit.

"I will," Shannon said with tears pouring out of her eyes.

Their overwhelming sincerity came through the link.

"Will you love every child the Institute gives you?" I asked.

"We will," they replied together.

I nodded with the solemnity the ceremony deserved. They hugged and kissed as people applauded loudly. I waited until the congratulations were over before approaching them again.

"You can still have a public New Christian ceremony if you wish," I told them.

"It's not necessary," Shannon replied. "A pregnancy announcement is the important ceremony; our parents will understand."

"Fine," I said. "Are you ready, James?"

"Yes, sir,"

I had not released the jack into either of them so it was only a matter of pushing against James's mind. He sighed and dropped to his knees; Shannon tried to hold him up but could not.

"He's a virgin," she explained unnecessarily. She helped him back to his feet when he managed a grip on the sensations coursing through him for the first time.

"Get them a room in the hotel," I told a couple of nearby officers. "Shannon, I'll hold the wall up until you get inside."

"Sir, the girl is still in there," one of the officers protested.

"It didn't stop anyone when your Captain ordered it," I said.

They decided retreat was the better part of valor and led the newlyweds towards the hotel. I waited until I could release the barrier before looking for the young officer I had sent on my errand. He was standing a few feet behind me.

"Sir," he said in a significantly more respectful voice. "I found the Mayor. The entire city assembly came with him."

I followed him to the small crowd of people surrounding the Captain and a man I assumed was the Mayor.

"Gentlemen," I said, coming to a halt in front of the two men. "I'm going to jack into this officer because he asked a very stupid question about Miss Shannon's encounter with the Pheromonic. Am I going to be disappointed by what I find?"

"I don't know what you expect to find," the Mayor said angrily.

One of the women gasped. I jacked both men: painfully... for them. They fell on their stomachs and screamed hard enough for everyone to jump. The Captain puked on my shoes, while the Mayor puked and pissed himself. I wiped my shoes off on the Captain's pants when he was done screaming.


The Institute Stories Set 01



"Clean them up," I told the crowd.

"Let's try again," I said when the two men were brought back.

"You already know, don't you?" an assemblywoman asked. "You did something to their minds."

"If I take what I need, I can't give you the opportunity to hang with them," I said.

"The Institute classified them as genetically anomalous," she offered. "The Mayor's been in power for longer than the young officer you sent has been alive."

"He threw his support behind the Captain when the position became available," someone else spoke up with. "They've been messing with what's taught about the Institute and Positives for years."

"The Institute had no right to deny me a child!" the Mayor screamed at me.

"We know the Institute prevents research into other solutions," the Captain said, made brave by the Mayor's foolish act. "The Institute is only interested in protecting their power."

"I see," I said. 

The entire assembly set themselves. No Positives, no sex -- no sex, no children. The men's actions should not have been tolerated; non-Positives had lynched people for less.

"Since Red Falls is obviously populated entirely by Geddonists, let me provide your heart's desire," I said. "The city is now under Institute Quarantine."

They roared accusations at each other. They had reason to be scared; the last Quarantine leveled at an entire community had been to destroy a company caught manufacturing Positive inhibiting drugs over thirty years before. The city had imploded into violence with the city leaders and company executives quartered. 

I silenced them by raising my hand a minute later.

"But since your Captain has so much confidence in other solutions," I said. "I will allow the bio-techs to experiment with in-vitro fertilizations here. They'll be pleased to hear so many have volunteered; women who want to try the method have been few and far between in recent decades."

"Please!" the woman who had spoken before said. "Don't do this to us!"

"We can do it if they give us the scientists, Marcia," the Captain said. "This is what we wanted."

"Shut up, Marcus!" she screamed in fury. "They tried! They tried and failed so many times with so many women that WE voted to give the Director everything he asked for. He convinced women first that Positives were our only hope, you fucking idiot!"

"It worked once," the Mayor protested.

She gave him a look so full of venom I was surprised he did not collapse in immediate cardiac arrest.

"One successful in-vitro pregnancy since the Event," she said sadly. "And in the twenty-two years since his birth, those records have been sealed by a unanimous vote of the House and Senate with every President since confirming it. The Supreme Court has accepted every case challenging the seal and unanimously voted against unsealing the records EVERY time."

Everyone was looking at me.

"I don't know what the records say," I told them. "The Director hasn't let me read them either."

"You're lying," the Mayor accused. "You are that baby; the Director would tell you. He's very fond of the truth, isn't he?"

I sighed and shook my head.

"What do we have to do to avoid a Quarantine?" Marcia asked.

I put a bullet in the Mayor's head, and one in the Captain's.

"A good place to start is everyone stop trying to annoy me," I said after the bodies stopped twitching.

"PUT THEM DOWN!" Marcia yelled at the cops pointing guns at me. I holstered my weapon and looked around to see how many more were going to have to die over the men's stupidity. The assembly members dispersed and talked to the officers making sure the guns were put away before I took any more action.

I stood between the bodies to keep the results of challenging the Institute's authority fresh in the gathered assembly members' minds.

"Do you want to avoid a Quarantine?" I asked.

They nodded in unison.

"I have just finished mentoring a new Institute Operative," I told them. "I will have her based out of Red Falls and task her with ensuring the damage is undone."

They nodded eagerly; I did not need to use my power to know what they were thinking.

"While normally getting a Positive to live in Red Falls would be a boon, believe me, not if they're an Operative," I said. "New Operatives are prone to enthusiasm. I'm sure the Director will have some strict instructions for Sheila after he reads my report. Considering the Director's orders are zealously administered by the most experienced Operative, I can't imagine the lengths Sheila will go to put a smile back on his face when he hears the name Red Falls."

They winced and with good reason; I was the least destructive of five active Operatives.

I turned to walk towards the hotel, only to be stopped by Marcia's hand on my arm.

"Lucinda, the Positive, has my daughter," she told me.

"So?"

"My daughter has given Lucinda reason to be angry with her," she said carefully.

"How much reason?" I asked.

"A lot," the young officer answered when the assemblywoman would not. I turned to stare at him.

"Jennifer has a reputation," the officer told me. "Lucinda was her favorite victim in high school."

I turned back to the assemblywoman.

"Jennifer is the daughter of a Positive," she said as if it explained her failure as a parent.

"Do you understand what 'stop trying to annoy me' means?" I asked.

"We always thought that she would..."

"I'm going to let you in on a little secret," I said. "If the Director believed the statistic the bio-techs throw around about the children of Positives being more likely to be born Positive, he would have every single one of us on a breeding schedule."

"But the studies?"

"The studies are interpreted by bio-techs too eager to please a man they've canonized," I said. "There are enough statistics to say that only one out of five hundred thousand children are born Positive. There are not enough children of Positives to say with any surety that it improves those odds. We could have gotten lucky. Even if the bio-techs are right, twice as likely leaves two hundred forty-nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine chances that your daughter was not born Positive."

I turned away and gave some thought to how the information altered the dynamics of the situation.

"How long have they been up there?" I asked.

"A couple of hours, sir," the officer replied.

"Okay," I said nodding. "I'm hungry so I can give Lucinda another hour with Jennifer before I pay her a visit."

"But my daughter!" the woman protested.

"My case loss ratio being half of everyone else's makes me the best Institute Operative ever, as if being only 2 million children behind were an achievement to be proud of," I told her. "Lucinda has to enable five hundred thousand babies that grow up to have babies of their own for us to stay at population G-Zero."

She took a step back as I put a hand on my holster.

"We haven't achieved G-Zero since the Event," I said. "I'm not here to fix the problem you created; I'm here to fix the one your daughter might have."

"I want everyone off the street," I told the officer. "Have a cop watch every exit from a distance in case Lucinda gets bored before I get back. If any of you gets within fifty feet of her, you'll be burying another body"

I walked back to the gravcar.

------

The door to Room 313 was unlocked so I let myself in. A tall brunette with body proportions falling on the thick side was standing at the head of the bed with a blonde between her legs. Both were intensely focused: the blonde on her duty, and the brunette on the effects of the blonde's diligent attention to that duty.

I closed the door loudly to get their attention. The blonde jumped, but the brunette cut off any further movement by grabbing a fistful of a blonde hair.

"Lucinda?" I asked the brunette.

"They sent another cop?" the brunette asked sneering.

"You don't recognize the uniform?" I asked. She looked me up and down, but shook her head.

"I'll have to give Sheila instructions of my own about Red Falls," I said.

"Who's Sheila?" Lucinda asked. "You know what, never mind! I want to see Jennifer stuffed with cock. Come here!"

An Institute Positive would have known better than to try their talent on an Operative, and the thought of using it on me terrified most of them.

"That smells good," I told her. Lucinda had a delicate touch with her pheromones; they did not assault, instead tried to undermine. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Every Pheromonic had a signature, regardless of the effect they were trying to engineer. Lucinda's signature was written in tropical citrus.

"Come here!" she ordered as the pleasant scent overcame any other smell in the room. I tilted my head and stared at her.

"Come here" she said unsurely. Lucinda was too new to her talent to have real confidence in its ability.

"You're not doing anything wrong," I said. "In fact, you're very good; a little less than average in strength but that could be a lack of training. You have a naturally slow and subtle approach, which makes for the best Pheromonics. You're going to be the apple in quite a few of your instructors' eyes, Lucinda. You'd be amazed how many of your kind think they need to use the sledgehammer approach like a Telepathic."

"Who are you?" she asked pushing Jennifer away. Lucinda was ready to bolt and would have if I had not been standing between her and the door. I smiled and stretched a hand out to Jennifer.

"Come...here," I said slowly. The hand gesture and voice were a touch of drama necessary to break through Lucinda's confusion. Jennifer's head and eyes rolled back as my jacking, gentled for this purpose, infused her with pleasure. She leaned towards me, and the pleasure increased. Jennifer got the idea right away and crawled toward me. She struggled with each movement: her body wanting to stay and enjoy the sensation while her mind told her it would only get better. She stopped at my feet and rubbed her face against my pant leg.

"Interesting," I said. Sifting through Jennifer's mind, I discovered why she managed to finish the crawl of pleasure. "Well, aren't you popular with your father's best friend! 'Uncle' Charles has been a very nice man to you."

I looked at Lucinda while I stroked Jennifer's hair. The blonde put her hand on my zipper and lowered it.

"Well trained also," I said looking down at her. "Let's not ruin another Positive's hard work. Proceed, dear."

She smiled up at me, and worked my pants open. The abundant satisfaction in her sigh as she took me into her mouth surprised Lucinda. I closed my eyes and enjoyed the time and effort that Uncle Charles put into Jennifer's sexual education.

"You're the Institute Cop!" Lucinda said finally. Jennifer was busy working my testicles with her tongue so it took me a few seconds to respond.

"The Cop thing is a misunderstanding of an Operative's enforcement role," I told her. "In reality, our enforcement duties make us the Institute's executioners."

Her eyes widened, and she looked around frantically. There was no way out except through me, but I had pushed too hard. Lucinda jumped off the bed. I waited for her feet to touch the ground before jacking into her harder than I had with the Captain and Mayor. Like Jennifer, Lucinda's head and eyes rolled back; her body went with them though. There was nothing her consciousness could do except flee the pain I caused her.

Jennifer had not paused in her efforts. I pulled her head back and looked into her eyes.

"I'm going to tie your pleasure to mine," I told her. "Except I'm going to multiply yours, and to make it better, the closer I get to orgasm the higher the multiplier becomes. But... you can't come until I do."

I built the switch in her mind, and she felt the immediate effects. Jennifer gasped and dug her nails into my thighs. It was painful enough to reduce my pleasure, thereby reducing hers. She pulled her hands away from my skin quickly and leaned forward to lick at the markings her nails left behind.

Jennifer was not the delayed satisfaction kind of girl so she took the head of my dick in her mouth and worked the shaft with her hands. She whimpered as the pressure of my time with Shannon and her own efforts bubbled to the surface.

I was already close, which Jennifer felt as a sudden explosion of sensation as I let myself into the moment. She grabbed my hips and pushed her face into my groin until she had my dick completely in her mouth. Her movement was too fast to get me to orgasm, but she was beyond coordinated action. Her actions became more and more desperate until I intervened to guide her body with my mind.

Jennifer relaxed as I also reduced the pleasure coursing through her. It made her more focused on the prize; her hands moved under my shirt. Her hands played along my skin trying to rush the sensation towards a quicker exit into her mouth.

I leaned my head back, took a deep breath as I hung at the very top of mountain, and released into her mouth. She screamed around my dick and fainted.

I looked down and sighed. Somehow, I always got stuck with the cleanup.

-----

I was sitting on the bed leaning towards her when Lucinda regained consciousness.

"Hello," I said. She sat up slowly and backed away until her back touched the wall. Her eyes moved to the door.

"We have things to discuss," I told her. "I would appreciate if you didn't try to run again."

"What did you do to Jen?" she asked looking behind me. I had placed Jennifer on the bed thinking she might prove useful in convincing Lucinda to do what was best for everyone involved.

"Pretty much the same thing I did to you," I said. "With pleasure instead of pain."

"So what did you do to me?" she asked putting her hands on either side of her head. She did not feel the pain anymore, but the memory of it was strong.

"My equivalent of a Telepathic Scream," I said. "The Scream is one of the reasons that only Telepathics can be Operatives-- Positives are still human so the Scream affects them."

She obviously wanted to ask more questions but was afraid to.

"I guess we should cut to the chase," I said. "You have two choices; three in reality, but we'll get to that one later."

"What are you talking about?"

"You are Erotic Mind Control Positive, Lucinda," I said. "It puts you under the authority of the Institute."

"You're a bunch of power-hungry freaks!" she accused.

"There is a failure in the educational system of Red Falls, which I'm certain Sheila will correct," I said. "Technically, we are freaks considering how few of us there are, but unfortunately for the people that think we're just freaks, EMC-Positives are a necessary part of the human race's ultimate survival."

"It's all your fault!" she said. "You freaks caused the Event."

"A stupid theory, no sane person could believe since Positives are a direct result of the Event," I told her. "You are smarter than that? Or do I have to use words with less syllables?"

She bit her lip and looked at the door again.

"I was tested in high school," she protested angrily. "You would think with over half a century of testing the Institute would get it right!"

"The Director made a choice, Lucinda," I said. "Better a few late bloomers getting missed than a lot of young Positives being put in untenable situations." 

"What do you want?" she asked suddenly.

"I want you to come back to the Institute and make five hundred thousand babies," I answered. Her face blanched.

"You're not going to have five hundred thousand babies yourself," I said shaking my head. "But you're going to enable others to have them with your power."

"I don't want to go to the Institute," she said.

"You don't have to be affiliated with the Institute once your training is complete," I told her. "But you will be trained; the Institute has enough problems without rogue, untrained Positives on the loose."

"What if I don't want to go?"

"It's option number three and would put me another five hundred thousand children behind," I replied.

She gave me a confused look but was distracted by movement behind me. She stared at Jennifer, her face twisting with something close to hatred.

"Jennifer's very pretty," I said.

"No, she's not!" Lucinda yelled at me. I waited until she calmed before speaking again.

"Should I make arrangements for you to take her back to the Institute with you?" I asked.

"What?"

"You wouldn't be the first Positive to show up for training with a friend," I said. "Most adult trainees do."

Her suddenly curious eyes met mine.

"I'm not here for Jennifer, Lucinda," I said. "If the only thing in the way of you becoming a productive Institute Positive is this childish hatred, I will go buy the hooks for you to hang her intestines out the window."

She pushed against the wall trying to create distance between us.

"Are you a lesbian?" I asked.

"What?!?"

"They sent four cops in here, but Shannon, the female, was the only one to feel the effects of your power."

"I didn't do anything. I think she got hit with what I was doing to Jen," Lucinda whispered.

"So are you interested in males?" I asked.

"Why do you want to know?"

"A homosexual Pheromonic needs to be paired with their sexual opposite," I said. "It needs to go in your profile so we can try to get you paired as soon as possible."

"I'm no lesbian Geddonist!"

"Being homosexual does not make someone a Geddonist," I said. "In fact, I have respect for any lesbian who decides to become a biological mother. The only way for them to get pregnant is the equivalent of licking shit, or at least that's how they describe having sex with a man."

"I'm not a lesbian," she insisted. "I like... liked..."

I waited for her to finish. She gave Jennifer a very angry look before she spoke the name.

"Brad."

"Jennifer's boyfriend?" I asked.

"He used to be mine until Jennifer stole him!"

"Definitely cause persecutus," I said. "Are you still interested in Brad?"

"NO!"

"Not even for a little payback?" I asked. "As long as you agree to come to the Institute, I can afford to give you a few hours or days with the two of them."

"You really don't care, do you?" she asked in amazement.

"I live for the Institute's Mission, Lucinda," I said. "What a Positive does to keep themselves entertained is irrelevant as long as they serve the Mission."

"I can keep Jennifer as my pet?"

"I'll make her mother pack the bags, if you want to keep her clothed that is," I said. "Some Positives prefer their special friends to walk around naked. Weather permitting, of course."

She smiled a vicious smile but shook her head.

"I don't want her or that asshole, Brad," she announced. The way she kept staring at Jennifer told me differently.

"How is Shannon?" she asked. "I didn't mean to hurt her."

"A Positive using their power on someone in a sexual fashion is a legal right; you did no injury to Shannon," I said.

"What?"

Lucinda was asking too many questions; I changed my mind about talking to Sheila. When the Director read the case file, the town of Red Falls would learn what it meant for an Operative to be the vessel of his wrath. There was no way to fan the fire any hotter.

"You were in this room using your power in a legally permitted fashion. Interfering was against the law," I said. "It's besides the point though, what you did to Shannon was your right even if she had not been following an unlawful order."

"You're joking!"

"Human extinction is not a joke," I said.

"Is everybody at the Institute as crazy as you?" she asked jokingly.

"Mostly the Operatives," I said. "We have to be; it makes it easier on Positives if there's a boogeyman people are more afraid of. What's a little nookie-nookie compared to dealing with an annoyed Operative?"

"Anyway," I continued. "Shannon and her new husband, James, are happily enjoying the honeymoon you made possible."




The Institute Stories Set 01



"James is cute!" she said sitting up.

"Would you like to say congratulations, and maybe join them for a bit?" I asked.

"You're a pervert!"

"It would answer the lesbian question with finality," I pointed out. "I'm sure they would like to thank their benefactor."

"I didn't do anything."

"You gave them the opportunity to have a baby, Lucinda," I said. "Most people are grateful."

She looked at Jennifer again, but her face was a lot calmer than any other time she had done it.

"Shannon does have very nice tits," she said softly.

"And James is gravity-free young man," I said. Lucinda had passed her moment of crisis; I needed to get her out of the room. I jacked into Jennifer and made sure she stayed asleep.

"Do you really think they wouldn't mind if I..."

"They'll love it," I said. I did not think it would be necessary to make them love it either; Shannon and James understood the reality of a world that needed the Institute.

I pulled a blanket off the bed and handed it to Lucinda. She stood up and wrapped it around her body. I gestured towards the door.

"They really won't mind?" she asked.

"No," I said opening the door.

"You're not going to do anything to them, are you?" she asked narrowing her eyes.

"What a Positive thing to say," I replied.

"You didn't answer the question," she retorted.

"And you've already picked up that wonderful Positive attitude towards us self-sacrificing Operatives," I said. "You're a natural."

Shannon and James were two floors down. She was lying on top of him with a sublime smile of satisfaction on her face.

"Hi," Shannon said with as much brightness as she could muster.

"Hello," Lucinda replied looking at her feet.

"Did you come to make our honeymoon better than it already is, Lu?" Shannon asked.

"Now, that's the second best thing I've heard today," James said with excitement. I put my hand on Lucinda's shoulder to gently push her towards the bed.

She was in good hands so I made a quiet exit and headed back to Jennifer. The girl was awake when I entered the room. I had held the jack during my walk downstairs and felt her arousal become conscious.

"Hello, Jennifer," I said taking off my shirt.

"What are you doing?" she asked holding the blanket up to her chest. Seconds later, she dropped it as Lucinda handiwork took its full effect again.

"You pissed off the wrong girl," I told her. "She's going to be busy for awhile, and there's no chance you would be approved for a child at this stage in your immaturity, but there's no reason to let you go to waste."

"Get out!" she said, but her voice was too weak for her to have meant it.

"Shannon and James are young and as much control as Lucinda has, she might keep re-dosing them," I said. "It's a vicious cycle so I could be here for a couple of weeks or even a month. Don't worry; I bore easily. If it comes to that, I'll find other ways to pass the time, like your mother."

She got out of the bed and tried to run. I let her take a couple of steps before using the jack to throw her back on the bed. Her eyes screamed as her body betrayed her. In their depth, a different kind of arousal rose.

"I see you've played this game too," I said. "Have you played the mother-daughter game?"

She shook her head; it was a lie.

-----

I sat staring out the window of the Institute lounge. Most Positives gave me wide berth so no one was sitting near me.

"Good work with Lucinda," the Director said parking his gravchair next to me. His assistant Stephanie sat down a respectful distance away.

"Thank you, sir," I replied with a nod. He gave me a wide smile that stretched his parchment skin. He was old, and done enough in his life to be considered ancient.

"I read your report, son," he said staring out the window. "I decided it was time."

He put a folder in front of me.

"Paper?" I asked surprised. "No one uses paper anymore."

"I kept everything on paper because I knew that someday the record of your birth might have to be completely destroyed," he said turning the chair around. "I won't outlive everyone who knows."

I watched him glide away before I picked up the folder.

END CASE FILE

To Be Continued in THE INSTITUTE STORIES SET II 



The Institute Stories Set 02



The Second Institute Flash

Why Not To Tell Her: Miguel's Story

"My breasts are probably bigger than hers."

"No, Susan!" I replied automatically.

"This is the last time," Susan whined. "I promise."

"It was the last time with Michelle! It was the last time, the last dozen times. I should never have told you about the Institute test!"

"I can't believe I've been wrong every time," she complained. "It's so unfair!"

"Look at who you keep comparing yourself to," I said. "Which one is it this time?"

"Her," Susan said pointing.

"Jennifer Gottos! Those aren't tits; they're landmarks!" I told her.

"It could be a padded bra," Susan insisted.

"You take gym with her," I said. "Don't tell me you haven't peeked."

"Yeah," Susan shrugged. "But I need to touch them to make sure they're real!"

"Sixteen year old girls don't have fake boobs," I protested. "Especially now! What's the point?"

"Shows what you know!" Susan said with all the superiority sixteen-year old females claim over males their age.

"I'll let you touch them," Susan offered.

"Suse! I'm the Symbolic," I said exasperated. "I'm the reason Jennifer will let us compare."

"I meant mine," she whispered. I stopped, and someone walked into me.

"Watch it, asshole!" the guy growled.

"Gerald!" his friend said, pulling at his arm. "That's the Positive."

"Dude!" Gerald said, brushing off where he bumped me. "I'm sorry."

"It's okay," I replied.

"Are you sure?" he asked worried.

"Yes, I'm fine," I said with a fake smile. "Thank you."

"This sucks!" I said when he walked away.

"A jock apologizes to you, and it sucks!" Susan exclaimed.

"They know about the test," I said.

"Everybody knows about the test, Miguel," Susan said. "One out of five hundred thousand people are Positive! If the Institute doesn't move you, everyone around here will be assured Institute acceptance of their Applications unless they fail the genetic anomaly test. My mom is already planning what to name my new little brother. Our New Christian priest has been asking when you're going to stop by to 'talk' to him!"

I stopped in front of my locker and input the combination.

"It still sucks, the way they look at me," I said.

"You're too sensitive," she replied leaning against the locker next to mine.

"A few weeks ago, I was nobody," I said. "Now, every guy wants to be my best friend, and every girl looks at me like I'm the god-jock of the state. If I find out who let my results out, I'm going to kill them!"

"The Institute probably makes sure people find out," Susan said thoughtfully.

"Why would they do that?" I asked in shock.

"You're bound to do stuff," Susan said shrugging. "They have to prepare us for it."

"I wouldn't do anything if someone didn't keep asking me to," I said eyeing her. She waved my words away and slammed my locker door shut.

"You're EMC-Pos!" she said. "You're expected to do wickedly naughty things; we need you to do wickedly naughty things, Mig. It's the only time any of us can do wickedly naughty things anymore."

"Did you get into your grandmother's romance novels again?" I asked.

"The Institute gave me some reading material, asshole!" she said over her shoulder.

"Why did they do that?" I asked grabbing her arm and turning her around.

"A lot of people still have problems with Positives, especially the Zero-Gens or Geddonists," she said. "But NOBODY wants the Institute to send that Santos guy around; everybody says Operative is a just fancy word for goon. Anyway, the Institute said I would be your most likely 'experimental' subject, and they wanted me to know what to expect."

"I would never do anything to you!" I spat.

"Why not?" she asked pissed off suddenly. "I'm a girl! It's because of my tits, isn't it? You like them as big as Jennifer's!"

I had never won an argument with Susan, so I turned away only to end up face-to-face with Jennifer.

"You like my breasts?" she asked.

"Not me, her!" I said pointing at Susan.

"You don't like my breasts!" Jennifer said disappointed.

"Hi, Jen!" Susan said smiling brightly. "I was just trying to talk Miguel into playing with your Symbols."

"Are you crazy?" I yelled.

"Cool!" Jennifer said staring at me.

"Fuck!" I breathed. "You're all crazy!"

"Do you even know how to read, Mig?" Susan asked. "It's in the manuals the Institute gave you."

I had read one of them but righteously decided not to inform Susan. The manual explained why a certain Symbol came into focus when I looked at Jennifer and Susan. I turned away from them and walked into my next class.

"Are you going to do anything with my breasts?" Jennifer asked from the doorway.

Everyone in the room looked up with interest.

"No!" I bit out.

"Do you need time, Miguel?" Professor Johnson asked.

"No!"

"The law requires accommodation for Positives," she reminded me. "If you need time with Jennifer and Susan, the class can wait. The survival of the human race is more important."

"Are the Sex Symbols really broken, Miguel?" Susan asked.

"Not yours," I answered without thinking.

"Why not Susan's?" Jennifer asked from behind her. My Institute mentor had helped me understand what I had done to Susan.

"Every Symbolic subconsciously fixes the broken Symbols of his..." I looked at Susan before continuing. "His Susan! It's a permanent fix; the only one that anyone knows of. You see, I can too read!"

"So that's why I wanted to look at those girls' tits!" Susan said laughing.

Jennifer and Susan's Symbols floated into my vision again. I saw them as Kanji characters of a language only I understood; Susan's was complete and glowed slightly, while Jennifer's was missing a connecting slash.

I couldn't help it! I reached out and put a pair of fingers on Susan's.

"Ohhh!!!" she gasped getting up on her toes. Those breasts, that I thought were perfect, pushed towards me with their cherry drop nipples pressing against her shirt. I reached out with my other hand and drew the slash to complete Jennifer. Her knees buckled, and an addicting feminine sound of pleasure escaped her lips.

I pressed against their symbols. Susan collapsed onto Jennifer as they experienced something only an EMC-Pos could make possible anymore.

Orgasm.

I let their symbols go and turned around.

"Oh shit!" I whispered.

The hand gestures were unnecessary; I had completed every Sex Symbol in the classroom. Unlike Susan, the effect was only temporary, but the manual had been clear about what would happen in the meantime.

"Hey!" Susan said around Jennifer's lips. "My breasts are bigger than that girl's, and that one too!"

END FLASH

=================

The Second Motherless Child Institute Story Case #57: Signs Of Healing By ElSol

"So where's the fire?" Sheila asked before sitting next to me in the Institute lounge.

"Shouldn't you be reducing the number of idiots in some town in the middle of nowhere?" Robert asked her with a superior smile guaranteed to get under Sheila's skin. Her work in Red Falls made her the designated liaison when a community lost its way but could still be saved. She had been working on her third town when the Director recalled us.

"All five active Operatives in the Institute at the same time," Albert said. "The last time it happened was when Jason received his grays."

"The Director called all of you in too?" Lianne asked.

"Obviously, there's something wrong," I told them. "There's no point in talking about it until the Director decides to tell us."

"You're not even a little curious?" Robert needled me with.

"Someday Robert, you're actually going to piss Jason off," Sheila told him. "If the prospect weren't so terrifying, I'd love to be there."

"Jason understands his duties," Lianne said staring at Robert. "Unlike some people!"

Robert winked and blew her a kiss. Sheila and Albert looked away, pressing their lips together.

"Each of us has our own style," Sheila said to Lianne.

"I heard you asked the Director if he had anything brighter when he gave you the grays," Albert said to Sheila, trying to forestall an argument between the youngest and oldest Operatives.

"Gray is so gloomy," Sheila said patting her uniform. "I did not ask the Director if he had something brighter, I merely suggested yellow might make us seem less goonish."

"I like my Operatives to look like goons, Sheila," the Director said, gliding up to us. "If they look like goons, they don't have to act like goons quite as often."

"Where is everyone?" Sheila asked. The Director raised an eyebrow at her.

"I know the presence of five Operatives can empty entire counties, but this is the Institute, Director," she said quickly.

"Jason was practicing his 'I'm the Prince of Broodiness' act, Sheila," Robert said. "Positives positively flee in fear for their lives whenever he does that."

"Why are we here, sir?" I asked the Director.

"There's a situation, which we'll get to later," he said turning his chair around. "First order of business is my personal assistant, Stephanie. She's playing with the trainees again."

The other Operatives groaned as we stood up to follow him; Stephanie managed to get kidnapped a few times a year.

"Whose turn is it?" Sheila asked.

"I saved the trainees last time!" Robert said immediately.

"The girl has inhuman stamina when she gets going," Albert sighed. "She can fuck two Positives unconsciousness and look around for a third to keep the orgy going. I wonder if new trainees think chasing her around a bedroom is a graduation requirement."

"There's a ribbon," Sheila told him. "Blue if you managed to catch her; her favorite in each training class gets a red ribbon."

"There aren't that many trainees a year," Albert said.

"There's only been one Trainee who didn't get a ribbon since she started working for the Director," Sheila said. Everyone glanced at me.

"Sometimes, son," the Director sighed. "You make me wonder."

There was no point in saying anything.

"So whose turn is it?" Robert asked.

Stephanie knew more about the Institute than a majority of Positives and far more than any politician or New Christian priest. Like the Director's assistants before her, she became the most valuable source of information about the Institute for outsiders. Her ventures into the trainee dorm non-coincidently corresponded with one of the Director's private meetings, which must have been frustrating for anyone using her. Everyone involved knew what was going on, especially Stephanie, but the Director was adroit at making people play the game by his rules. Anyone complaining about the system discovered the hard way that Stephanie only gossiped into a list of approved ears; getting cutoff had ended several political careers.

We walked into the trainee lounge to find Stephanie sitting in the middle with a number of trainees lining the walls. Four trainees, each at a cardinal direction to Stephanie, stood a few feet from her.

"What are they doing?" Lianne asked curiously. She was the oldest Operative and had tested Positive when the Institute was still willing to use mentors rather than bring all Positives to the Institute for training.

"It's a competition," Sheila said staring at Stephanie.

"Four Positives, one of each type, use their power to wrestle for control of someone," Robert said.

"Why do they bother?" Lianne asked. "A Telepathic shouldn't lose if he has enough brains and power to get a mental command through."

"The other types don't usually win, especially with someone of Operative potential like Elijah," Robert said looking at the Telepathic Trainee fighting for control of Stephanie. "But a very good Symbolic can neutralize Telepathic commands before they become fully inscribed."

"Telepathics lose often enough to keep things interesting for the others," Sheila added.

"Elijah's good," Robert said. "He wants to be an Operative so he doesn't like to lose these and hasn't yet."

"He'll lose," I said.

"To who?" Sheila asked. "None of those three have enough power."

"The Symbolic understands her power better than Elijah understands his," I said staring at Stephanie. "She's playing for a stalemate, which makes it easier to stop his commands from inscribing on Stephanie. The Empathic is the youngest and has the least amount of control; it's a destabilizing combination. With Elijah having to deal with those two, Lucinda will win."

"You brought the Pheromonic in, Jason," Robert pointed out. "You're biased."

"They set Elijah up!" Sheila said studying Stephanie.

"Given time a Pheromonic hold is as unbreakable as a Telepathic command, probably more so," I reminded them. "You can only put the subject down and keep them down until their system purges the pheromones."

"Why would those three work together?" Lianne asked.

"They must have bet on the outcome," Robert told her. "No one will bet against a Telepathic; but if they set Elijah up, and he doesn't know it..."

"He has individual bets with the girls and thinks none of them know about the others," I said.

"He didn't!" Sheila exclaimed. Her eyes snapped at Elijah with annoyance.

"If he wins, he gets the girls until he graduates from the training program," I said. "If he loses..."

"They get him," Albert said shaking his head. "The fucking idiot!"

"Positive on Positive sex, that's disgusting!" Lianne said. "And willing sex slaves! The perverts!"

Lianne had New Christian doctrinal views on the role of Positives and their interaction with others.

"He had to have set it up so the girls wouldn't find out," Robert protested, "or he's not Operative potential."

"Elijah needed a lesson in humility," the Director said. "I asked Jason to take care of it."

"Still..." Sheila started to say.

"Elijah thinks the girls hate each other," I said. "They've spent the last three months baiting him into the bet."

Robert, Albert, and Sheila broke out laughing.

"At least, we know he respects the minds of others if he didn't look to make sure his plan was working," Sheila said nodding towards Elijah with respect.

"He would have gotten the surprise of his life," I said, "and ended his chances of becoming an Operative."

"If you didn't kill him for it," Albert said seriously. I shrugged at the obvious.

"Elijah believes his power makes him special," the Director said.

He did not have to continue; an Operative's rite of passage was killing or dying at the hands of a Positive who thought they were special.

"That's surprising," Albert said when Elijah took a step back and nodded at his opponents.

"He can still win," Lianne said.

"He could," Sheila said.

"But it's not just about Stephanie," Robert said smiling. "He could win, but the ladies beat him. A man takes his lumps."

Sheila and Robert shared a warm smile. With only ten percent of Positives being Telepathics, few were in the same Training class. Sheila and Robert entered the Institute the same day; the chaos they caused made most pray we were never so lucky again.

Stephanie let out a frustrated gasp as the other competitors released her. She looked around to see what had happened. Her kidnappings usually ended much differently.

"I guess there's no one to rescue this time," Robert said.

"Jason," the Director said loudly. "Show the trainees how it's done."

Everyone in the room turned towards me; Stephanie's eyes lit up, and she leaned in my direction. I nodded to the Director and walked up to Stephanie.

"Stand up," I told her.

"Make me," she purred.

"The Director wants privacy for a few hours, darling," I replied. "You need to go to sleep. We can do it your way or mine. Which would you prefer?"

She got on her feet so fast the chair tumbled behind her.

"Are you sure?" I asked. "My way is quicker."

"And miss the opportunity to see the Director's Bastard in action," she said. "I've got a lot of experience with Positives, Jason. Can you live up to my expectations?"

I got close enough for her to feel the warmth of my breath against her cheek.

"Do you know why I never touched you, Stephanie?" I asked. She would have touched my skin with hers as she shook her head except I moved away. "Because for you, this is a game, and I would have spoiled it."

"Spoiled it?" she asked leaning back so she could stare at me with her warm brown eyes.

I let her become aware of my jack. Most of the time, I made it feel like I was coming in through the base of someone's skull. It was an illusion but a useful one.

Stephanie spread her feet apart as her mind told her I was getting inside through her pussy. She closed her eyes as I drove the tentacle up her spine and into her brain.

"Arms, dear," I said gesturing upwards with my fingers and taking a step back. Her eyes opened, and she looked at her arms as they followed my instruction. Her pupils widened, and her nostrils flared as she struggled to keep her arms in position. I let her think she was making it a fight to heighten the sensation of being trapped by my power.

With arms akimbo, her brow furrowed as she continued to send commands that went unheeded. I waited until drops of sweat formed on her forehead before stepping forward again.

"Let me take a guess about your experience," I said putting my hand on the top button of her blouse. "Telepathics said come, and you came."

I undid the button and the one below. I took a step back and held my hands up for her to see. She felt the third button being worked on by unseen hands; she looked around to see who was touching her, while I blocked the awareness of her hands doing my work.

"That's so easy though," I said bringing her focus back to me. "Come."

Her knees would have buckled except an instant before her pussy tried to grasp the link that only existed in her mind I slammed a wall between her and the pleasure.

"No!" she whimpered, fighting to push past the barrier. She thought she was moving but stood frozen.

"Then there's Pheromonics," I said walking behind her to undo her skirt. "But at their best, it's only your body."

I stood in front of her and tilted my head.

"Like this," I said. Every nerve awakened outward from her spine, each screaming signals of sensation at her mind. The wave spread upward, downward, and around her torso until it felt to her like she was covered in a silky web of physical bliss. I opened her mind until it could process all the pleasure I was giving her.

"But that's just physical," I said. "Your body feels to the point of need, but it's not really you. The Pheromonic isn't really in control, are they?"

I pushed her up until she got to a point that felt twice as high as the one my order to come had taken her to and cut it off again. There were tears in her eyes when she looked at me.

"And Symbolics are so..." I said. "They make you feel like one second you're going about your business and the next you're standing in your bra, panties, and heels. Like that."

She tore her eyes from me and looked down. She was standing in her bra, panties, and heels. The experience of her entire body being bathed in feeling had been in her mind; in the meantime, I directed her hands to take her down to essentials.

"Empathics are my personal favorite," I told her. "You feel what they feel; they feel what you feel. It's like sharing, but YOU don't want to share, do you?"

Her eyes bored into me. She bit her lip to the point of drawing blood. I smiled before walking behind her. I put my hand on her bra, making sure I did not touch skin. I undid the hooks and walked back in front of her. I pulled on the front of the bra, and her arms moved forward to allow me to slip it off.

Stephanie's eyes widened as she witnessed counter-evidence to what her mind told her, that her arms were still akimbo.

"What's the point of being with a Positive, if they don't take?" I asked. She bit her lip again.




The Institute Stories Set 02



"Take the panties off," I ordered. Her eyes turned fearful again as her mind said she was standing still, but her hands followed my instruction.

"You've been playing with Trainees because they're safe," I said. Stephanie shook her head hard; I smiled and shook mine.

"When I'm done, Stephanie," I said. "A part of you is going to stay with me."

I inserted a second link, making it feel like a ruthless invasion coming in through her anus, an invasion of power and pleasure. I lifted her mind with my holds on it; through the ceiling, over the building, up into the sky until there was only emptiness, the warming light of the sun, and my jacks into her. I held her there, letting the sun pleasure her with its warmth, letting her get hotter and hotter until she thought it would be over with the next degree of heat.

I dropped her mind back into its body.

"You've been playing with children getting their first taste of freedom and power, Stephanie," I told her. "I grew up in the Institute; my lessons about power were taught by the Director."

I stared into her eyes for a minute allowing her to catch her breath.

"Goodbye, Stephanie," I said.

"What?"

"You're not going to be same person anymore," I said and dropped her into the Abyss. Stephanie screamed as I closed my links into a loop taking away the sensation of anything except her mind. From her perspective, she floated in a sea of nothing but herself. I pushed her mind into an endless cycle of increasing pleasure, but without the connection to her body it could only grow. I waited fifteen minutes, which to Stephanie felt like several eternities.

"Are you ready, Stephanie?" I asked through my links, the voice of God cutting through the darkness. She was in no state to put together a coherent answer; I dropped her awareness back into her body.

Stephanie collapsed as her body received the totality of what her mind had experienced. Stephanie convulsed and spit up as her mind stretched into insanity to process an eternity of pleasure.

The only Trainee, other than Elijah, who was not puking or lying unconscious walked forward and put her hand on Stephanie. She pulled the hand back immediately and curled into a ball as the backwash of Stephanie's experience took her under.

"The Trainees tried to break your hold on Stephanie," Albert said coming to stand close to me. "What were they thinking?"

"The Director had reasons for choosing me to put his assistant out," I replied.

"We're been losing control of the Trainees?" Albert whispered in shocked tones.

I turned to look a Lianne.

"People are conspiring to break our hold," I said.

"The New Christian Church?!?"

"Among others," I said. "The Trainees needed to have the consequences of becoming an Operative case file illustrated, especially one of mine."

"Ten Trainees," Albert said looking around. "They could have broken anybody's hold, except yours or David's."

He looked at Elijah, who was studying the fallen Trainees, and then his eyes moved to the Trainee who had touched Stephanie.

"At least, our future Operative and the new Healer weren't a part of it," he sighed.

"The Healer has the advantage of being in daily contact with David," I said. I turned and walked towards Elijah.

"You want to be an Operative?" I asked him. He nodded confidently.

"Stephanie is mine," I said. "If by the time you graduate, you can make her hesitate to say my name when I ask who she belongs to, without giving her a command to be yours, I will sponsor and mentor you."

"When is she going to stop having that orgasm?" he said looking at the still twitching Stephanie.

"Soon," I said.

"Operatives," the Director said. "Join me."

Outside the Trainee building, the Director turned his gravchair towards the Institute laboratories. Robert and Sheila walked to the side engrossed in conversation. Lianne tried to make it seem like she was not watching me, while Albert watched her.

We entered a conference room where an Institute technician waited for us.

"Sit down," the Director told us. "This is Jeremy, a population tech; he has some findings I want investigated."

"Operatives," Jeremy said nervously when we took our seats. "What do you know about Geddonists?"

"What is there to know about a suicide cult?" Lianne asked sarcastically.

"Enough, Lianne," the Director said. "Jeremy, frame the issue and your findings. The Operatives have time to hear it all."

"Yes, Sir," the pop-tech replied, feeling more comfortable with instructions to follow. "Geddonists believe Armageddon has arrived or more generally that the human race's time on Earth has come to an end. They're not a suicide cult, so much as a 'lie down and die' cult."

"Lie down and die," Robert snarfed. "Is that the technical term?"

"Robert, this is important," the Director admonished.

"Yes, sir," Robert replied sitting up straighter. The Director did not use the word important often.

"Geddonist can register with the government, and while it is not codified into law, it is Institute policy that Positives avoid them," the pop-tech continued. "For their safety and to make it easier for the Institute to stay clear of them, Geddonists form enclaves: neighborhoods in large metropolitan areas, a specific building in towns, etc. Large enclaves are rare but not unexpected so the county of Summertown being populated mostly by registered Geddonists did not raise an alarm."

"An entire county?" Sheila asked.

"We've had towns with one hundred percent Geddonist registration," the pop-tech said. "The psych-techs believe the behavior is a form of mental disease, a contagious one. The solution has been to isolate the outbreak before it spreads out of control. Summertown was isolated and if worse had come to worse they would have been allowed to die out."

"So what makes Summertown different?" Robert asked.

"There are two unexplained phenomena," the pop-tech said. "First, the presence of a New Christian Cathedral and two priests."

"The Church sends missionaries to Geddonist enclaves," Lianne said. "We've converted many who lost their faith."

"Yes, Operative," the pop-tech replied. "But Geddonism took a seat in Summertown seventeen years ago, and has continued to grow rather than recede. The Church has kept the same two priests in place the entire time, and the Cathedral was built after the county achieved nearly ninety percent Geddonist registration."

He paused to see if Lianne would say anything.

"In every other case where Geddonism has continued to spread like this, the Church has changed the priests that could not stop the disease and increased the number of missionaries," he finished.

"What does New Christian Policy have to do with the Institute?" Albert asked before Lianne could respond.

"Nothing if it were the only strange thing about the county," the pop-tech admitted. "The real problem is Summertown's population statistics."

He projected a population graph on to the wall with a curve none of us had seen outside of a classroom.

"The Positive mutation and our requirement of it to consummate human mating was unquestionably the worst of the Event effects but not the only one. A greater number of miscarriages and a climb in infant mortality made the situation worse," the pop-tech said looking at his graph. "The reaction to Positives was best in this country due to the Director's ceaseless efforts to convince the people in power of the Event's reality, but there are nations that killed off most of their Zero-Gen Positives. Worldwide we haven't come close to achieving a population growth of zero since the Event."

He stared at the graph as if it were a map to the Holy Grail, which population G-Zero was to pop-techs.

"We've discovered the higher rate of miscarriages was only among the two Zero Generations, people alive during the Event and those born of people alive during the Event. The Institute's genetic testing for viability between matched males and females has brought down the infant mortality rate, though it is more likely counseling is what really turned the corner in that area."

Geddonism was not the only form of mental despair people suffered after the Event.

"The truth is even in areas most accepting of the Institute, we have yet to reach G-Zero," he said turning back to us. "Therefore a Geddonist enclave of this size having a population growth of Zero-Plus is an anomaly of monumental proportions."

Even I sat up and leaned forward.

"Migration of new Geddonists to Summertown," Sheila suggested.

"People without children are ten times as likely to become Geddonists as those with children," the pop-tech said. "Summertown's expenditures on schools is growing and not receding. Those financial numbers is what brought Summertown County to my attention."

"But people with children do become Geddonists," Robert pointed out. "So it is possible, especially if the enclave is recruiting, which has been known to happen."

"The Summertown hospital recently expanded their maternity wing," the pop-tech replied. "These people have been obscuring their finances for years, but it was easy to find a host of things no other Geddonist enclave spends money on."

"Positives are far from saints," Lianne said. "A few could be using Summertown as their personal sandbox."

"The Director has assured us, it is not happening here," the pop-tech said looking over at him. The Operatives turned towards me instead.

"These people can't be this stupid!" Albert said. "Someone had to know we would notice."

"Actually, Operative, an expectation that we would not notice is reasonable. I only ran into them because of a pet project," the pop-tech said. "A Geddonist enclave is a waste of our resources."

"Geddonist enclaves were a waste of our resources," the Director said.

"Do we know what IS happening in Summertown?" Lianne asked the pop-tech.

"No, I do not; but I want an answer," the Director said turning his gravchair towards us. "No controls, Operatives; dissect the residents of Summertown County if you have to."

He turned his gravchair and glided out of the room. The pop-tech nearly ran after him when five Operatives turned towards him like we were going to start the dissections with him.

-----

"They're angry," the Healer said.

"They have a right to be," I replied watching Robert and Sheila's gravcars seem to vibrate with emotion.

"I guess I understand the pain of the people in Summertown," she said.

"No," I said. "You understand the pain the world feels over their crime. Selfishness when everyone has sacrificed is cancer."

"Robert and Sheila are so angry," she said rubbing her temples.

"They had hope; maybe it was something in the water or anything, as long as it showed the human race was healing," I said. "They did not expect to find such a base answer in one sweep of Summertown."

Since the first Operative, Santos, our gray uniforms identified us. There were jokes among Positives and non-Positives about Operatives fucking in the uniform. It made things easier when Operatives needed to go unnoticed during investigations. No one in Summertown County thought a couple looking to buy a house was something to worry about, especially with their mental powers pushing people away from asking too many questions.

"Are you sure calling David in from the Euro-Institute wouldn't be better?" the Healer asked. "I haven't finished the training program."

"He has confidence in you," I told her. "Institute training isn't just about your power."

I watched in the mirror as Albert's gravcar came to a hard stop and turn to block the road behind us. He stepped out of the car and put his hand up. The vehicles had been following us since we entered the County; they halted as Albert's mental command gripped the drivers.

A few minutes later, our four gravcars came to a halt in front of a building. I stepped out and walked towards the front door with the Healer following me. Robert, Sheila, and Lianne fell into step at my sides with the three most powerful Symbolics at the Institute walking behind them.

There was a large crowd in front of the edifice looking like they were building up the courage to mob us. Robert hesitated in his step, and I felt the shockwave as rage fueled the power of his Scream. Everyone in the crowd grabbed their heads and shouted in pain. We walked around them until we were at the doors. Sheila turned around and waited a few seconds before layering a Scream of her own on top of Albert's. The people passed out from the Operatives' combined effort.

"Was that really necessary?" the Healer asked rubbing her arms. "Either of you could have knocked them out."

"It wouldn't have hurt as much," Robert told her while holding the door open for us. 

I walked in first, people were pouring out of offices. A man stepped in front of me.

"You can't come in here!" he shouted. The other occupants screamed as my bullet entered between his eyes. I put two more bullets into his chest as I walked by.

"Stop!" Lianne ordered. The fleeing people froze in their tracks. I halted and waited for the Healer to finish walking through Lianne's statues, putting a hand on each of them.

"They've been Healed," she said in amazement. "All of them!"

"But he's a Symbolic!" Sheila protested.

"The Director has always considered Symbolics and their form of Healing our best hope," I reminded her.

"Then he knows how to Heal consciously," Robert said, "and not the way other Symbolics do it."

"Or he loves all of these people," I said. "There's been documented cases of Symbolics Healing their parents and friends so it does not have to be 'in love', just love."

The Healer closed her eyes and stretched out her arms. I felt her reaching out with her power.

"There's too many," she said opening her eyes. "Everyone in my reach has been Healed. That's more than the combined total of ALL people Institute Positives have ever Healed. One man couldn't have done this!"

"If he's powerful enough, he could," one of the Symbolics said with tears in his eyes. "He's in there, Operatives."

He pointed to doors at the end of the hallway. I walked to them with everyone a couple of steps behind me. I opened the doors and took a few steps inside.

The room had once been a gymnasium so the space was wide open. In the middle was a platform with a high chair placed in a position of honor. Seeming to wash from the platform were naked bodies rolling around in various states of coitus. There were at least two hundred people participating in an orgy of mindless lust. In the high chair, a middle-aged man watched all the action while clapping happily.

We wended our way through the bodies until we stood in front of the high chair.

"Hello, Simon," I said.

"Simon says! Simon says!" he shouted gleefully and hesitated before reaching out to me. "Simon says, you fuck!"

His fingers danced as he attempted to manipulate my Symbols to the shape he wanted.

"Oh my God!" Sheila gasped putting a hand over her mouth as she finished a study of Simon. Her reaction was not surprising; in front of us was a vision no one had seen since the advent of the Institute's genetic testing and the discovery of our first Healer.

Simon's face was misshapen with eyes set too widely apart and a forehead too large for the rest of his face. His teeth were malformed, and he had trouble breathing. The biggest shock was the innocence in his eyes; it spoke of an inability to process the pain of life.

"You evil! You evil!" Simon accused after he discovered one of the mysteries surrounding me; my Symbols were immutable.

"Distract him," I told the Symbolics before Simon could make a decision to run. They lined up at angles to him and stretched out their hands.

The four corners tug of power game Trainees played was not the only one Positives entertained themselves with; each power had an iteration of the game Positives with others of their type. Symbolics created a special Symbol and challenged others to change it while they tried to maintain its form.

"Game! Game!" Simon said settling back in his chair. He looked at each of the Symbolics before stretching his hands out. "Simon always wins!"

"God Apart!" the oldest Symbolic said. "He's too powerful; we won't be able to hold him long!"

"Healer," I said without looking at her. She walked around the platform until she could approach Simon from behind. She put a hand on his shoulder and closed her eyes. I watched Simon to ensure he did not notice her.

"It's not genetic," she announced. "Most of it is pre-natal. His mother must have been exposed to a toxin, but something went wrong at birth too. Oxygen loss."

"Can you take care of it?" Lianne asked harshly.

"He's dying," the Healer said ignoring Lianne's words. She let Simon go and stepped back to stare at me. "Positive-Drain, Operative. Less than two weeks before his body ceases to function."

"What have these idiots done!?!" Robert shouted looking around the room.

The Healer took a deep breath and stepped towards Simon.

"Do not, Healer," I told her.

"I can do it!" she insisted.

The other Operatives preferred modern weapons, but I thought the noise of an old fashioned gun was more intimidating. The ability to stretch out the realization of intent by cocking the hammer was also useful. The Healer's hand stopped moving when I pointed the gun at Simon's head.

"Your Elder has stated the most likely result of trying to heal PD is a dead Healer and a still dying Positive," I said. "If you insist on trying, I'll kill him now rather than let him have the two weeks you are predicting."

"David says 'most likely', Operative," she argued. "There's still a chance. It's worth the risk!"

"The Director decides what risks are worth taking, and Operatives make the decision in the field," I said. "I've made it. Step away from him!"

She looked at Simon again but took a step back. The Symbolics crumbled to their knees as Simon overpowered them. I jacked into them, pushing through the burst of energy necessary for them to break free of his hold.

"Cheater! Cheater!" Simon shouted at me.

"Take them outside," I told the other Operatives gesturing at the Symbolics and the Healer after holstering my gun.

"The girl is right, Jason," Sheila said after everyone left. "It's worth the risk. He's obviously capable of Healing on a scale we haven't seen before in any Symbolic. Simon is what we've hoped for, more than we've hoped for!"

"Do you think the Director will order us back to try what the girl suggests?" I asked.

She did not reply.

"I know you don't understand, Simon," I said stepping forward to touch his cheek. "I'm sorry they abandoned you. I'm sorry I have to abandon you."

"Simon says! Simon says!" he giggled. I turned around and followed Sheila out.

Two New Christian priests were at the head of a crowd confronting Lianne and Robert when we stepped out of the building. An old woman stepped out the crowd and approached me.

"What you have done to my Simon?" she asked in tones of accusation.

"How old is he?" I asked.

"What did you do to him, you Institute Bastard?!?"

"You're his mother?" I asked.

"Darla, no," one of the priests said putting a hand on her shoulder. The other priest took a position at her other shoulder.

"The oldest teenagers around are about eighteen," Sheila said to me. "No one in Summertown has been Institute approved for children since Geddonism began to spread here. He's got to be in his mid-thirties."

"Why didn't you bring him to us?" I asked the woman.

"You would have killed him for being born that way!" she spat.

"An interesting view of the Institute," I said. "How did you arrive at it?"

She looked at the priests, but tightened her lips.

"Oh!" I said glancing between the priests. "Now, I'm curious."

"We don't answer to the Institute," one of them forced out between his teeth.




The Institute Stories Set 02



"If I don't like the answers to my questions, I'll speed your journey to the one you do answer to," I replied. I jacked into the mother and ensured she would only speak truth.

"What hospital was Simon born in?" I asked her.

"A New Christian mid-wife helped delivered him," she answered. My link forced her to answer what she knew I was really asking even when my words were not exact.

"She couldn't have been Institute certified," I said. "At the time of Simon's birth, the Institute had a Healer. She would have known to bring him to us, in case we could have done something for him."

"She said you would kill him for being born like that," she said.

"How did you hide him from us?" I asked.

"I told everyone he was the son of a Positive, so the Institute had let him live," she replied.

"She spread that disgusting rumor about us with her story of our mercy," Sheila said stepping towards the woman.

"What about Positive testing?" I asked the woman. "It's administered by Institute techs."

"I didn't allow Simon to be tested," she answered.

"When you discovered he was Positive, why didn't you bring him to us?" I asked.

"The New Christian priests told me not to," she said. Everyone from the Institute took several steps away from me. I did not bother to ask; I jacked into the priests and ripped the answers out of them.

"Jason!" Lianne warned.

The bullet went through the priest I shot and hit someone behind him in the crowd. The people closest to him were assaulted by blood and brain matter.

Lianne took a step towards me as I pointed the gun at the other priest.

"The law is simple," I said. "The Institute has total jurisdiction over Positives. Making decisions for Simon and about his power means you do answer to us."

Whatever Lianne's religious ties were, it had been the law since the Director created the position of Operative. She walked through the crowd and got into her gravcar.

"Do you know why I killed him instead of you?" I asked the priest. His eyes had followed Lianne as if with her left his salvation.

"No," he answered looking back at me.

"He believed in his Creator as much as I believe in mine," I said. "He was happy to die in HIS service. He even thought he was doing his God's Will instead of serving the power-hunger of your Episcupus."

"How do you know about the Episcupus?"

"The only secrets are the ones the Institute lets people keep," I said. "I let you live because I need a messenger to tell the Epispucus, I'm coming for him. It will give you the opportunity to discover your faith before I kill you."

I wrote the instructions of what he was to say to the Epicupus into his mind and sent him running.

"Are you really going to kill a New Christian Episcupus?" Robert asked.

"Had they just been hiding Simon's power, I would have let them live because at some point it would have been his choice," I said. "They knew we could heal Simon though, and they kept him imprisoned in his body."

"But why?"

"Listen to them," I said gesturing at the gathered crowd.

He turned and took down the shields he had been trained to use to protect his mind from others.

"Is everyone like that?" he asked me.

"I jacked into every resident of Summertown County," I told him. "Everyone here believes the New Christian Church is the only way to save the human race."

"Lianne has the same opinion," he said erecting his shields.

"Can the Church control you?" I asked. He laughed in response.

"How about Sheila?" I asked. He shook his head.

"Maybe the young Healer," I suggested.

"Not even her, Jason," he replied, putting a hand through his hair.

"If they can't control Positives..." I shrugged and made my way through the crowd.

"Operative," someone said loudly. "The girl said Simon's dying?"

"He is," I said facing them.

"What's going to happen to us?" a female voice asked.

"Geddonist enclaves eventually die off," I replied.

"You can't abandon us without Simon," someone yelled.

"Institute policy is to have nothing to do with Geddonists," I said.

"The priests made us!" someone protested. "I'll drop my registration."

"Any one of you could have stopped this, you chose not to," I said. "You will live with the decision; everyone in Summertown County is Quarantined."

"Jason," Sheila said. "There are children here; some of them could be Positive."

I stared at her.

"We'll test every child over the testing age in a month," she announced to the crowd. "At the time of testing, any child willing to walk away from Summertown will have their Quarantine lifted."

"You can't take our children!" someone yelled.

"At every yearly testing, any child can make the same decision. If I were you, I would convince them leaving Summertown is the best thing for them," she said smiling viciously.

I turned only to have the Simon's mother put her hand on me.

"What about my son?" she asked desperately.

"You did this to him," I said. "Make his last days comfortable."

"How could you do this to us?" she asked in tears. I reached out and pushed a loose lock of her hair behind an ear. I jacked into her and stripped away anything that would let her ignore the truth of my words.

"You were given a gift beyond imagining," I whispered to her. "Simon is the most powerful Symbolic I've ever heard of. He's dying of Positive-Drain. The Institute killed Positives with PD early on, but none survived longer than five years. How long has your son been doing this?"

Her eyes widened, and she tried to hide from my words.

"Symbolics Heal, but Simon seems to do it at will," I told her. "It's been our hope to find someone like him! Each Symbolic sees symbols in a unique way so he couldn't have taught others how to do it but matched with a Healer equal to his power, like David..."

I put my hands on either side of her face and rested my forehead on hers.

"Together they could have healed every child in this country," I said. "Those children's babies would still be affected by the Event, but Simon and David would have been there for them. Your son could have bought us generations to focus on finding a solution rather than surviving."

I let her go and stared into her eyes.

"Your son was in a prison, and you left him there to rot," I said. "I used to be teased at the Institute because everyone knew I didn't have a mother. Trainees would get those wonderful care packages, daily calls, and visits. I used to feel..."

I sighed and shook my head.

"You've made me glad I was born without a mother," I told her and turned to leave Summertown County to its fate.

-----

"Simon's dead, son," the Director said gliding up to where I stood in the Institute gardens.

"Entire nations have expired, and still they fear us," I said staring into the distance. "They'll jump into any hole that will justify hating us."

"Positives are their only hope, and the Institute the only chance we have of controlling Positives. There are good reasons to hate your only hope," he replied. "Chief among them is maybe the hope will decide not to save you."

I nodded; it was a warning he had been giving to Positive Trainees as long as I could remember.

"Plus I have been a cruel..."

"Savior," I finished for him.

"And a lot of them think I'm actually..."

"Satan," I said smiling. It was a game we had played since I heard someone call him both in the same sentence.

"At least, you didn't have to kill the Episcupus," he sighed.

"The Trainees tried to break my hold on Stephanie in part because of the Church's campaign to undermine our power," I said.

He leaned back in the gravchair and closed his eyes. He looked the most exhausted I had ever seen him.

"I made a lot of deals after I discovered what the Event had done to us," he said. "I made every deal that let me take one more step in the direction of what had to be done. I ducked away from or danced around paying my side of those bargains when the cost was too high. I outlived a lot of people that had papers on me; some I even forcibly outlived. The Church was very useful at the beginning; I might have failed without them."

"They've got hooks into most politicians," I said. "They want control of the Institute."

"It would be perfect," he said. "The first Church in history to have direct control of sex."

"It wouldn't be just sex they would control," I said.

"No," he agreed. "I've focused Positives on sex, but there's more to their power than that. Telepathics can make someone do anything."

"We have to deal with the Church soon, sir," I said.

"The question is how, son," he said. "I owe them a great debt. Humanity owes the Church a great debt. Its founders were men of faith trying to do what was right."

"They're dead," I said. "Converting would relieve the Institute and you of the connections to the Church."

"I have said we will not speak of this," he said infuriated.

"If anyone other than your son had founded the God Apart Cult, would this be an issue?" I asked. Behind us from her customary position near the Director, Stephanie gasped.

"It doesn't have to be the Cult," he said turning his face away from me.

"Joshua's teachings are advantageous to your cause," I said.

"God does not love everyone," Stephanie intoned. "God loves each individual one."

"Like that drivel?" the Director asked me.

"He taught bringing God into the world outside of ourselves is to poison our internal relationship with him," I said.

"More drivel," he said.

"Your son was brilliant," I said.

"And he wasted his time with religion instead of helping me here," he said loudly.

"The Prophet Joshua had nothing but the kindest words for you, sir," Stephanie said.

"The Prophet?" the Director asked looking at me.

"What else would they call the oldest son of the individual God sent to guide them from the damage man had done to himself?" I asked.

"What do you mean to himself?" he asked Stephanie.

"The Prophet taught that we caused the Event," she replied. The Director turned to meet my eyes.

"Joshua served," I told the Director.

"Aren't you the Trainee gravbed?" he asked Stephanie. "How does that sit with your religious views?"

I had never seen Stephanie blush before.

"The God Apart religion has certain advantages," I looked at Stephanie before continuing, "built into it to serve a world trying to survive the Event."

"Advantages?" the Director asked raising an eyebrow.

"Read the God Apart Texts, sir," I said. "Joshua served you well."

"But did he have to call them a Cult? How is a Cult supposed to be a viable alternative to a Church?"

"The Prophet taught that God's humor was boundless," Stephanie said.

"Do I have to call my own son the Prophet?" he asked me. "And how do I get a hold of one of their priests to discuss my imminent religious crisis?"

"They're called Leaders," I informed him.

"Cult Leaders?" he asked in disgust. "You overestimate Joshua's intelligence."

"Stephanie is one," I said. He turned his gravchair to study her.

"My daughter recommended you for this position," he said drumming his fingers on the chair.

"Jason's confrontation with the Church comes as no surprise to Cult members," Stephanie said. "It was prophesized."

"Prophecies?" the Director asked me in complete shock. "Joshua gave them prophecies!"

"Religious people like prophecies," I said. "Especially the ones that say everything is going to be okay."

"My daughter is a Cultist?" he asked.

"Joshua was her beloved older brother," I answered.

"She has many beloved older brothers and a younger one," he told me. He sighed and looked between Stephanie and me. "Converting to my son's religion does not mean you can go around killing any New Church Episcupus who is dumb enough to get in your way, son. We were lucky this one killed himself rather than face you."

"You mean the Church was lucky he died before I questioned him," I said.

"A lot of people would have been angry if what you found in the Episcupus's mind made you kill the New Christian Abbas. I doubt he was not involved in this considering it guaranteed a confrontation with them when we found out."

"The Abbas was probably looking to be a martyr to the advancement of the Church's agenda," I said.

"And you would have made him one," he said.

"For Simon, yes, I would have," I replied. "But more because I've heard some New Christian priests call you Satan."

"I might be," he said before spinning his chair around and shooing Stephanie ahead of him.

I stayed in the gardens to watch the sun set.

The Geddonists were right. The end of the world had come, and now it was time to bring about my God's Armageddon. Everyone would have to choose to die or walk on into His Promised Land.

The truth about my birth would be the catalyst.

THE END

To Be Continued in The Institute Stories Set III



The Institute Stories Set 03



The Third Institute Flash When To Tell Her: David's Story By ElSol

"You can tell me about it," I said.

"No secrets, huh?" Elizabeth replied, putting the menu down.

"Empathics still have to guess what feelings mean," I said.

"So what's your guess, David?" she asked.

"I would guess it has something to do with me being Positive," I answered.

"Not everything has to do with your power," she said. "This is a relationship thing."

"I don't understand," I replied.

"I don't need to be empathic to know you aren't telling me something, David," she said.

I tapped the table with two fingers. She cringed, along with everyone in the area. I reined in my emotions as my watchers stared down anyone taking too much interest in me.

"An interesting stew of feelings," Elizabeth said shaking her head to clear it. "It is unfortunate Healers are a combination of the most powerful projectives with the least control over their projections."

"The Director has asked me for a favor," I said.

"And like every Institute Positive, you feel obligated to go where he points," she sighed.

"Positives are servants of humanity's survival," I recited.

"Institute propaganda," she said. "Or more accurately, the Director's propaganda."

"Is that what you think?" I asked coldly.

"No," she replied carefully. "But I'm a woman whose man is keeping secrets."

"Assigning a Healer to the Euro-Institute is a large enough gift that they have to accept the terms of the Director's proposed merger," I told her.

"I had to get involved with the only Positive who can, at will, heal a person's sex drive," she said studying me.

"I'm used more effectively in a hotel full of couples, but the hope of a cure IS useful propaganda," I said.

"So when did you plan to tell me you're leaving?" she asked.

"I've Healed you," I told her.

"Without asking me!" she said sitting up.

"I don't have to ask," I said.

"You violated the Lottery," she insisted. "The Institute only allows one Heal a week because of its affects on you! One couple every two weeks, David; that's the Lottery!"

"Read the fine print," I said. "I decide!"

She sat back and stared at me.

"Why did you decide I needed Healing?" she asked.

"I'm being based out of the new Euro headquarters," I said. "I wanted to leave you able to have the life you wanted."

"What's the use of Healing me when only Positives, someone a Symbolic has been in love with, and those you've Healed have normal sex drives?" she asked.

"The last Positive testing identified another Healer," I said. "The Institute has agreed to a Healing for the man of your choice."

I looked out the window when something hit me.

"You said Healers, why?" I asked. "The discovery of a new Healer hasn't been announced yet."

She smiled and shook her head at me. The wave of her satisfaction struck me, putting me on alert. Next to the Director or his youngest son, Jason, Elizabeth was the most focused person I knew.

She reached out to turn my hand over. Her fingers lightly ran circles on the inside of my wrist and down to the palm of my hand.

As a Healer, I was not a more powerful projective than a normal Empathic, but my gift of absorbing and healing physical damage meant I had a heightened ability to reflect physiological reactions, like arousal. Unfortunately, it made me prone to the EM-Loop.

Elizabeth's Healing allowed her to reach out to me with her hands, emotions, and physical desire. Her feelings mixed with my lack of control caused a projection, which pushed Elizabeth higher but also set everyone in the area off.

Most Empathics used shutdown to defend against an EM-Loop, but it worked against the Institute's purpose. I pressed my hands on the table and set for the backlash to my projection.

I absorbed the shockwave of sexual heat from the people in my range, magnified it with my own feelings, and blasted it outwards. This time I kept pushing, using my continued projection to deflect any response. I needed to project until everyone burned out or fled.

"Enough, David," Elizabeth said, raising her head from the table much later. "Fuck! They're going to feel the residue of that for a week."

I relaxed into the chair and looked around. Most people made it out and were probably searching for somewhere more private, but a few lay under their table in the warm embrace of satiation.

"Take care of the restaurant," Elizabeth said to one of my watchers.

"Yes, ma'am," he replied before walking away slowly.

"You initiated an EM-Loop," I said trying to stay calm. "You know how dangerous that is!"

"Properly motivated Positives make the most babies. A person who can put a Healer into an EM-Loop, at will, has a certain amount of bargaining power," she told me. "The Director agrees."

"The Director?" I asked.

"You're looking at the new director of the Euro-Institute," she said smiling widely. "Although I think I'm going to adopt a different title, director seems presumptuous."

"You have a corporate career," I said.

"It's getting worse, David," she replied, staring out the window. "I'm no Geddonist, but I didn't think we were going to make it."

"What changed your mind?" I asked.

"Jason," she said meeting my eyes.

"He's just a boy."

"The child has a profound affect if someone is willing to listen," she said smiling.

"He certainly changed the path of Joshua's life," I replied.

"Jason believes we'll make it, and I have faith in what Joshua has said about him," Elizabeth said with a sigh. "In light of that, success in the corporate world has become unimportant to me. I have a different job now, plus did you really think convincing people to buy stuff they don't need matches up against being with you?"

The last was asked with enough of an edge I did not need my power to tell me answering it would be a mistake. I was still feeling the effects of the EM-Loop's original trigger so I focused a thin projection at Elizabeth.

"That's a good place to start your apology," she said pushing the table towards me.

"Not again!" one of the watchers exclaimed.

End Flash

==========

The Third Motherless Child Institute Story Case File #69: The Insanity of Emotions By ElSol

The doors of the Institute shooting range opened, allowing two men in dark suits to enter.

"Holster your weapons!" one of them yelled at the Trainees. With an Operative watching, the Trainees knew better than to obey.

"Do they get agents from the stupid factory now?" Jacob asked, walking in.

"Mr. President!" the presumptuous suit exclaimed, stepping in front of him.

"This is the Institute, agent," Jacob said patiently. "If someone here wanted me dead, you couldn't do anything about it. Besides, someone from the Institute would only kill me at my father's orders, and he prefers public executions."

"The Director wouldn't do that, sir," the agent insisted.

"You'll live longer if you assume my father would do anything," Jacob said pushing past him.

Elijah stepped in front of me as Jacob approached. He took his responsibilities as my protégé seriously, even the ones out of his purview.

"Sir," Elijah said to the President putting his hand up. The agents took umbrage to his tone and stepped forward. They immediately collapsed, holding their heads as Elijah's lips tightened.

"Our sister is going to get here any second, Jason," Jacob warned with eyebrow raised in amusement.

"Elijah," I said. He released the agents and stepped towards the range to continue directing the weapons training.

"I thought only Operatives carried guns," Jacob said after a look up and down the line.

"Violence against Positives has escalated," I replied.

"No one told me," he said staring at the agents as they got back on their feet shakily. "It can't be good."

"You're a politician, Jacob. People don't tell you a lot of things; for your own good, or at least that's the excuse," I said shrugging.

"Is there anything else my people aren't telling me?" he asked.

"The New Christian Church is campaigning against your plans to have Sarah become the next President," I told him. "The agent who ordered the Trainees to holster is a spy for the Washington Episcupus. That's one priest with an almost unhealthy ambition to become the next Abbas."

Jacob turned towards the agent. The man took a couple of steps back and looked at me with hatred.

"My baby brother isn't known for leaving enemies of our family ambulatory, agent," Jacob said to him. "I would appreciate your resignation, but only because having Jason shoot you would disturb Sarah."

"Why would Jason shoot this nice man?" Sarah asked sneaking up behind the Agent. Her smile let him know she had been aware of his extracurricular activities.

"He's been spying on us for Episcupus Matthew," Jacob said.

"Father did teach us to sacrifice for the greater good," Sarah pointed out. "If Jason feels the need to put a bullet in the traitor, I'll have to deal with any negative emotions. This would be the best place for it; with so many Empathics around, someone will help me find my center again."

The agent took a step back.

"You're not running, dear" Sarah told him. The man's eyes widened before he fled.

"That's one problem," Jacob said turning back to me. "So what's this about the New Christians campaigning against Sarah."

"They don't want me to be President?" Sarah asked. "How wonderful! I don't want to be President either!"

"Should I tell father?" Jacob asked her.

"I'm sure if Joshua had not been assassinated, as the oldest, he would beat the crap out of you for saying that!" Sarah told him.

"Two old men punching each other's lights out over their little sister is probably not the image we want our family to project," Jacob said. There was sadness in his voice at the mention of Joshua's death.

"I'm sorry, Jacob," Sarah said putting her hand on his arm.

"It's okay," he said. "I'm glad I will finally be able to say he's still my big brother."

"Only the Director's conversion to the God Apart Cult was necessary, Jacob," I said. "Your conversion could destabilize the political landscape and bring things to a head much sooner."

Jacob and Sarah looked at each before turning towards me.

"Jason, the voice of reason?" Sarah asked.

"It could cost you the election," I told her.

"In that case, let's announce I was the second Cultist ever," she said brightly.

"In due time," Jacob said. Sarah gasped and turned to stare at him.

"You planned to tell everyone about it?" she asked amazed. "Before the election?!?"

"Little steps, Sarah," Jacob said with a shrug. "We can get everyone over the hurdle of voting for someone not New Christian, if she happens to be the Director's only daughter. After all, they passed a Constitutional Amendment to allow any member of the Director's family three presidential terms. There are a lot of people assuming you'll be partaking in the privilege that Amendment allows."

"Maybe everyone will go insane and I'll lose," Sarah said hopefully.

"People like to think the most powerful man in the world will pay more attention to a President who eats Christmas dinner at his table," Jacob told her.

"Why are you here?" I asked Jacob.

"A Gift Plane has landed," he replied. "They will only talk to you though."

I nodded.

"I need to speak to father about a few things," he said. "He'll probably want to go to the airport too; nothing like getting the despair of our situation on the news while at the same time showing that the Institute is the only hope for a future."

"Go talk to daddy, Jacob," Sarah said pushing him gently towards the door before facing me. "Take me to the graveyard, little brother."

I nodded and extended my hand to her. I felt her age when she took it; I also felt her strength.

"Who has been maintaining the grave?" she asked angrily. There was no reason to reply; no one could have cared for her husband's gravesite well enough to satisfy her. She knelt down and spent a few minutes making it match the perfect vision in her mind.

"Sometimes I think my father shouldn't have tried so hard to save us," she said later.

"Santos would be disappointed to hear you say that," I told her.

"My husband was a better human being than I am," she said. "At least, better than the one I became after they killed him."

"As the First Operative," I said looking at Santos's grave, "I don't think he would have chosen a different fate than to die for duty. It lets every new Operative know what it means to walk in his shoes."

"He might have died after doing his duty by me," she said. "I would have liked a baby."

"You could've had a child any time," I said.

"Not without Santos," she said between her teeth.

"We should be getting back, Sarah," I told her.

"Are you ever going to call me sister?" she asked.

"Technically, you're not," I said, repeating an answer as old as the question.

"And spiritually?"

"Remember what you said once: with Joshua dead childless, Jacob genetically anomalous, and your Santos murdered, the Director's line was ended," I told her.

"I was very angry at daddy when I said it," she whispered. "I didn't know you were there. I'm sorry you heard it."

"There's no reason to apologize for speaking the truth," I replied.

The Director and Jacob appeared on the path to the graveyard.

"We've decided to move Joshua's remains," Jacob said coming to a halt in front of Sarah. "Everyone in the family will be buried here."

He looked over at the gravestones of his wife and adopted son. Sarah put her hand in his and walked with him to the graves.

"My enemies have taken their toll on this family," the Director said staring at the backs of his children.

"Their time draws near, sir," I replied, making him turn the chair to study me.

"Sometimes, son," he said finally. "You scare even me."

-----

"Sweep, Elijah," I said stepping out of the gravlimo and onto the airport tarmac.

"Already done, sir," he said. "Everyone is clean."

"Deep-level?" I asked.

"No, sir," he replied blushing.

"The Director's life is in your hands, Elijah," I said without looking at him.

"I'm sorry, sir," he replied. He stepped in front of me and looked closely at everyone in the crowd. They took a couple of steps back knowing what he was doing.

"They're clean, sir," Elijah told me.

I walked forward to give Jacob, Sarah, and the Director space to climb out of the gravlimo. Jacob's Agents fanned out facing the crowd to back them up with their presence.

"Are you ready, father?" Jacob asked looking at the Director, who took a deep, calming breath and nodded. Most people saw Gift Planes as cause for celebration--to the Director, they were defeats.

I walked in front of our group and got bombarded with questions.

"Jason, what country is the Gift Plane from?"

"Would you really have killed the Episcupus?"

"How is the Director's health?"

"Any comments about the Abbas's sermon at the Mount?"

An overly eager reporter with a holo-camera on his shoulder stepped in front of me. I put a bullet through the camera lens before he realized his mistake. I tracked on his head until he was out of my way.

"Maybe we can have someone with Operative status assigned to the White House," Sarah said to Jacob.

"You see," Jacob replied. "We need brilliance like yours in the hot seat."

"Sir," an airport executive said as we walked up to him.

"Tell the tower to signal the plane," Jacob ordered. "My brother is here."

I looked at Elijah.

"Deep-level, sir," he said. "The plane is clean."

A couple of minutes later, the door opened and five people almost as old as the Director stepped onto the steps leading to the ground. Four of them walked down and approached us.

"Are you the one the Prophet called the Director's Hope?" their leader asked staring at me.

"Yes, he is," Sarah answered. "How did you hear that name?"

"A missionary came," the old man replied. "We have brought you a Gift."

I nodded, and the old man turned to signal the one they had left at the door of the airplane. Children poured down the stairs suddenly; from their energy, the flight must have been tough on them.

"The remaining wealth of our nation," the old man told me. "Our Gift to you."

I signaled the assembled staff to move forward and make sure no child needed immediate medical attention.

"We thank you..." I stopped as someone wearing white stepped out of the airplane. She was young, at least eighteen but not much older, and her uniform clearly tried to imitate David's use of a white Operative uniform to mark him as a Healer.

"She is our Santera," he said. "I believe your word is Healer."

"There are no words to express our gratitude, sir," I said, bowing respectfully at the enormity of their generosity.

"We killed our first Positives," he said reaching out to straighten me. "We have earned no gratitude."

"Where are the parents?" Sarah asked. Usually, a Gift Plane did not include only children.

"A price must be paid for our sin," the old man replied. "They have chosen to pay it."

"The children will be raised by parents who respect your past," Jacob assured them.

"It is unnecessary," he replied. "We destroyed our only hope of survival. We deserve to be forgotten."

The Director turned his gravchair around and went back to the gravlimo.

"It is not your fault," I told the old man when he looked about to shout after him. "Every time he hears of a country that killed off their First Generation Positives he sees it as his failure, not theirs."

"There was nothing he could have done, we would not listen," the old man said desperately.

"You will not convince him," I said. "How can we make you comfortable?"

"A spot where we can watch the sun set over water," the lone woman in the group said. "Our task is done."

"I will sit with you," I said.

"There is no need," she replied.

"I define what is needed differently," I told her. "I know a spot."

-----

It would have taken them longer to die except for the freezing rain; only the old man who had spoken was alive after the third night.

His eyes signaled me so I jacked into him.

Take care of our children

I nodded.

Do you believe God will forgive us?

"Mine does," I said. "I cannot speak for yours."

The missionary, he spoke of your Purpose. Are you strong enough?

I looked at the spot where the sun was beginning to rise; there was no harm in telling him the truth so I did.

Es justo that at my death, my failures be held up in the light of your father's successes.

"The Director is not my father," I said.

No, you would not see him as such. He was truly sent by my God.

-----

"Did they suffer?" the Santera Healer asked, sitting down next to me in the Institute dining hall. Most of the table was covered with the remains of my first meal in days.

"Yes," I said, shocking her. She turned away and sobbed.

"Old bones don't take freezing rain well," I said. "It was a better death than dehydration and starvation."

"My name is Amada," she said.

"Jason."

"I know," she said. "They speak your name like you are..."

"Whatever anyone says about me, Amada," I interrupted. "I'm either much less or much worse."

"You sat with them so you're probably more," she said staring into my eyes. "Everyone I've spoken to here says to be careful with you so you're probably worse."

"You're eighteen?" I asked.

"I've seen a lot of death," she said. "There are more people in the Institute than I saw in my country."

"I'm sorry," I said.

"You're not though," she said studying me. "You don't feel..."

"I don't feel what you feel, Amada," I said.

"It's comfortable to sit with you," she said looking around the room. "You don't affect me."

"David will teach you how to adjust to having so many people around you," I told her.




The Institute Stories Set 03



"Empathics can't shield," she said.

"David can show you something almost as good," I said. "For now, it will be easier if you spend time around me. You cannot project what I feel so it will reduce the feedback."

"There is one thing coming from you that I do recognize," she said putting her hand on top of mine. It was a mystery; I had never felt sexual desire as hunger before.

"Are you doing this?" I asked seriously. She shook her head and looked around the room for someone who might be. It was impossible, but I jacked into everyone within Emphatic range to discover the hunger came wholly from within me.

"Interesting," I said.

"Do you want to do something about it?" she asked. "I am of age, and it is time for me have a child. A Positive would be the preferred father and you, the best."

The Director was going to like Amada.

"I am biologically incapable of having children," I told her.

"Then you can help me celebrate life," she replied.

"Positives and Positives don't do well together," I said.

"I'm a woman first, a Santera second, and somewhere far behind those, whatever the Institute calls me," she said smiling. "I'm sure I won't be the last woman to jump into bed with the wrong man."

"How much death have you seen?" I asked.

"I didn't want to get on the plane, Jason," she said meeting my eyes like no one ever had. "My father killed my mother and himself in front of me, to take away any reason I had to stay."

"That has to be the worst intro to foreplay I've ever had to overcome," I told her.

"The only things left for me are the children I will have, the pain I can heal, the hope that someday I will be unnecessary, and a few precious seconds I can steal for myself in someone's arms."

I jacked into her and took away the moments after she had put her hand on mine. They would come back to her after we were done, but I could give her more of the seconds she craved with just the offer of pleasure lying between us.

"Do you want to do something about it?" she asked. I sent a wave of affirmation through my link. Her eyes lost focus, and she took a deep breath before looking around.

"This way," I said standing up still holding her hand.

Amada deciding she did not want to wait to get to my room before she started stripping had less to do with the looks we got than was healthy for the human race. Positive/Positive relationships happened, but most were kept secret or public enough to maintain a lack of seriousness, like Elijah's wagers.

I keyed Amada's desire to grow by leaps and bounds with each step that brought us closer to my bed. There was something inside of me growing on its own, and I wanted her on the same mountaintop when it exploded out of me.

I slammed my door open and pulled Amada in front of me. Her nails dug into my shoulders as my lips crashed into hers. There was no time for anything other than feeding each other's hunger.

Amada's lust was mad: my jack pushed her, but she also received what was burning everything out of me.

I picked her up and threw her on the bed. Her back arched as the trigger I set went off. I was naked before her pleasure completed its cycle. She looked up at me as I grabbed her legs and pulled her to the edge of the bed. Amada's eyes seemed to glow as I fucked into her with no control. Her nails cut into me as what she received a direct skin-to-skin connection to what I felt.

"DIOS!" she screamed. It would have been blasphemy for me to scream that in his house so I made do with biting my lip until I could taste blood.

"No!" she whispered as the pain gave me a semblance of control. She locked her ankles behind me and tightened her thighs around me to push against our joining.

It was in her mind; nothing would please Amada more than to have those few precious seconds be ones even I could not control. There was no reason to hold back. I grabbed her hips in holds tight enough to bruise. I pried us far enough apart to thrust into her hard. The stroke made her release the pressure she held me with so I could give her another.

I did it for myself; I took what I wanted from her body, whatever it was that seemed to feed me. She screamed as one last thrust let me discharge what was inside of me into her.

"I see why Positive on Positive relationships are frowned upon," she said minutes later, as we lay beside each other staring at the ceiling. "You'd fuck each other to death."

I would have to ask the Director what was wrong with me, but first I wanted to string together enough seconds for Amada to last a lifetime.

-----

"Sir," Elijah said, opening my door. I had been awakened seconds before by Amada's writhing.

"Robert's been killed," he continued before I jacked into Amada.

"Where's Sheila?" I asked reaching for my robe. Robert's death explained Amada's restless sleep.

"What's wrong, sir?" Elijah asked.

"Where is Sheila?"

"She is in conference with the Director; they're waiting for you," he said.

"Sit," I said pointing to my bed. He had learned to follow my orders without question and immediately climb onto the bed. "Tell every Telepathic in the Institute to put up the strongest shields they can and stay behind them until I give word."

"Yes, sir," he said closing his eyes.

I ran towards the Director's conference room. Sheila was staring at the table as an Institute tech set up for the download of Robert's earcell.

"Jason?" the Director said without taking his eyes off Sheila.

"What's wrong with her?" Stephanie asked getting up from her chair.

"They were a couple," I said walking towards Sheila, "from the moment they met."

"She'll kill every Empathic in range," the Director said, "and they'll kill everyone in theirs."

I put my hands on Sheila's shoulders and jacked into her--nothing, and Sheila diving deeper into it. I set my feet and jacked into Amada. Sheila's loss was dragging the Healer into an EM-Loop. I followed the echo of Amada's emotional projections to every Empathic in the Institute and for the miles their ranges overlapped.

I had no choice; Sheila had dragged them down too far. I jacked deeper into each Empathic and focused their talent on me. They could not feel what I felt; I spoke a different emotional language. It made me a filter through which Sheila's emotions became bearable. With the Institute protected, I turned on Sheila.

"I will not allow this, Sheila," I said.

I LOVED HIM

"I will not allow this."

WHY?!?

"Because Robert wouldn't have wanted this, Sheila."

LIAR! YOU'RE THE DIRECTOR'S DOG!

"Of course," I replied, infusing each word with scorn. "Always first is the Institute."

A woman in love and lost turned on me as if I were the one who had taken her love away.

"I will hate you for the rest of my life," Sheila said hours later as she got out of her chair.

"I'm sure it will be longer than that," I replied. Amada walked in after Sheila left and stared at Director and me.

"Is that why you don't allow Positives to have relationships with other Positives?" she asked.

"It's a policy, whose time has come to reconsider," I said.

"Yes," the Director said sitting back in his gravchair.

"They're still human, sir," I told him.

"If you hadn't been here..."

"I was," I said. "Amada can you talk to Sheila; I did not handle her gently, and she needs someone who can."

"I would say rather, she did not handle you gently," she said to no one in particular.

"How old is that girl?" the Director asked when she walked out of the room.

"Old enough, sir," I replied.

"This is impossible," the tech said looking at his gear in shock.

"I wonder why so many people say something is impossible at the exact moment it is proven not to be," the Director said impatiently. If the tech had straightened any faster, he would have needed a gravchair of his own.

"Sir, the earcell's transmission was blocked," the tech said. "We have nothing after Operative Robert entered the institution's grounds."

"Institution?" I asked.

"Someone stuck an Empathic in a mental institute; Robert went to take him off their hands before any damage was done," the Director informed me.

"We're supposed to believe an insane Empathic could kill an Operative?" the tech asked.

"Actually, we're NOT supposed to believe that," the Director replied staring at me. "Someone has gone to a lot of trouble to meet you, son."

"Load Robert's case file to my gravcar, tech," I said walking out.

-----

"If you were going to be this clumsy, a written invitation would have saved time," I said walking up to the mental institution's doors. The grounds were abandoned, as was the approach to the building; no one sat at the reception desk either.

Every door except the one at the end of hallway was closed. The open door led to the dining hall with a table set for one in the middle.

"Turn towards me, animal," someone said from behind me. I turned around to watch three groups of four people walk around the dining hall; one group took position behind me, and the other two to my left and right. At the door, another group of four stood in front of a man wearing a uniform.

"It didn't take sixteen to kill Robert, did it?" I asked.

"The mind reading animals were enough to kill your owner's dog," the uniform said. I sat on the floor in a half-lotus position and studied the people surrounding me. The scars on some of their faces told the story.

"You chose slavery," I said to the uniform.

"There are no other choices for humanity!" he spat.

"Let me guess," I said. "Holding the tiger's tail with one hand and using the whip with the other hasn't worked out, especially with Telepathics."

The Positives growled at my tone of voice and some took a step towards me. The aggressive position revealed collars around their necks.

"Your Director lies," the uniform told me. "Only by enslaving these animals and their power can we survive."

"How many did the Telepathics who broke free kill?" I asked curiously. The uniform stared at me with fury pouring out of him.

"To really hurt you, other Positives would have been their first targets," I said.

"The renegades destroyed entire stables," the uniform admitted. "We need new slaves, and the Institute is greatest deposit of animals in the world."

"To take over the Institute, you need either the Director dead or in your control," I said nodding. "But it's not something I'm likely to allow."

"You're a smart animal," the uniform said laughing. "It's too bad we cannot spare your life to train you to a beast's proper place."

"These are your best," I said looking around the room.

"Enough to kill even you," the uniform said. "Though I'm told you are not the most powerful Positive, just the most loyal of your master's dogs."

"Sixteen Positives," I sighed. "I was so close to breaking even. You're going to put me eight million behind in one shot."

The Empathics were the first to look nervous; those had always known within seconds that I was different. I nodded towards them so the uniform would notice their discomfiture.

"Animals!" he yelled, focusing their attention back on me. His eyes turned to me again. "You can't believe you can control this many!"

"I have to give you credit for the willful ignorance necessary to try this stupid a plan," I said. "A bullet would have served better, but I guess I shouldn't expect much from someone who tried to enslave a greater power than their own."

"What are you talking about?"

"A mouse trap to kill a Positive except..." I said and looked around the room again. "Ask them."

He stared angrily at a couple of them. They tried to reply but no words came out of their mouth; their masters had cut out their tongues.

"You don't let the Telepathics enter your mind even if it might save your life," I said. "In that case, I'll be the bearer of bad news. They're trying to tell you the Institute's classification of me as a Positive is inaccurate."

The uniform was smart enough to take a step back. I drew my gun from the holster.

"Kill him!" the uniform yelled and they tried. The Empathics rolled waves of despair at me; the Telepathics used their Scream; the Pheromones dug into me with power; the Symbolics grasped my symbols to twist them.

I put a bullet into the uniform's leg to keep him in the room and put the gun on the floor.

None of the Empathics were the equal of an untrained Healer like Amada. The Symbolics total power did not add up to Simon's. The others were weaker than the Institute's average Positive of their type.

I jacked into the sixteen and studied their lives. No one deserved what they had been put through; I pulled the jacks and their lives out of them.

The uniform screamed in fear as his slaves collapsed around the room. I picked up the gun and walked to him. A bullet in his arm became necessary when he reached for a weapon. I jacked into him to mitigate the pain; he could serve the Institute by staying alive a little longer.

"What are you?" he asked with the false courage I lent him.

"A thing. A creation," I answered. "But that's not really what you're asking. I think the best classification for me would be Positive-Killer. The Director probably thought it too dramatic."

I knelt down next to him and waited for the question I made inevitable.

"What do you mean creation?" he asked; his words were my words.

"The Director made me, though I prefer created," I replied.

"Clone?"

"No," I said. "I do look like him, but even your God created you in his image so the conceit is forgivable."

"I don't understand."

"Centrally, I am derived from the Director's genome," I told him. "He augmented the blueprint with others: Michael, Miguel, Santos, and David. At least, two of those should be familiar to you. The important thing is they were each of a different type of Positive power."

"We tried to combine the animal powers," he said surprising me. "We failed."

"Excuse me for a second," I said and flipped through his mind to find out what he was talking about.

"You misunderstand," I said after some thought. "The Director was not trying to combine the Powers to create a fifth. He sought to create a limit on the ones that already existed."

"Why?"

"How successful were you in controlling your slaves?" I asked. "You must have power greater than the one you are trying to control to succeed. I am a gift of power to humanity."

"But we cannot control you?" It took only a little push to get those words out of him; the failure of his nation had stripped him down to almost nothing.

"The Director constructed a single cell embryo," I said standing up and pointing the gun at his head. "There was no ova or sperm involved in my conception. No cell cloned. No woman's womb to carry me. Can you imagine the breadth of problems he had to surmount to hear my first cry?"

I tilted my head and smiled down at him.

"God walks up to the bar, sits beside you, says 'I am the Lord God, thy Creator!', and asks a favor," I said. "What would you do for him?"

I put a bullet in his head when he did not reply.

"What wouldn't I do?" I asked the corpse.

With Operative case files open to the public, I had given the Director's enemies the excuse they needed to wage an open war against the Institute.

Against me.

THE END of The Third Motherless Child Institute Story

To be Continued in the Final Set of Institute Stories



The Institute Stories Set 04



The Final Motherless Child Story

Case File #101: Child Of The Mind



My return caused enough panic for people to cut corners, which were better left rounded. I did not have time to step into a much-needed shower before the wolves arrived at my hotel room door.

I turned when the door opened and studied the women who entered. Twins were an elegant touch, brunettes with dark brown eyes. Five years had passed since my last woman so I appreciated the effort spent on tempting me to lower my guard.

"May I help you?" I asked.

"Are you Jason, the Director's Hope?" the one on the right asked. They reached for each other to hold hands tightly, as if the question drained their courage.

"Yes," I replied after taking time to study them. Their bodies were symmetrical, with curves no amount of athleticism could make unfeminine. They wore clothing that hugged the relevant parts and hung loosely everywhere else.

"You're back," the one on the left said. I nodded and turned to stare out the window.

"What are your names?"

"Can't you read our minds?" they asked at the same time.

"With lovers, I prefer proper introductions," I replied.

"We're not here to..."

"I know why you're here," I said turning and leaning back against the window. "I have a better use for you."

"You can't..."

"By law, I can," I said. "I'm glad they sent two; one would have it rough."

"I don't understand!" the one on the right said. 

"You've been programmed not to," I told them. They turned to look at each other in fear.

"Put the knives down, ladies," I ordered, reinforcing it with a directive through my jacks. Stilettos were drawn from sheathes sewn into their clothing. They walked to the bed and stabbed the blades into the headboard.

"We didn't know," they said, stepping away from the bed. I nodded; their programming was excellent but not everything had been as carefully done.

"Let me help," I said.

I jacked them into each other and reconstructed what had been done from the bits and pieces left behind in each. Not only was the mind-wipe sloppy, but it had been a mistake to choose two girls, one would not have been enough to build a complete picture. 

They fell to their knees as I finished weaving their memories together. The men in their lives enjoyed seeing them like that, on their knees with tears staining their cheeks. There was beauty in it, but nothing like when I used my jacks to inject them with thin rivulets of pleasure.

"How could they do that to us?!?"

"What are your names?" I asked again.

"Mary."

"Magdalene."

"What are you doing to me?" Mary asked curiously.

"I'm blocking your mind from processing what has been done to you," I replied. "You need an Empathic to help you cope, but I need to... I need."

"A Positive did this to us," Magdalene said glancing at the knives.

"Telepathic programming to kill," I told them. "She did a good job. Blanking your conscious awareness is a subtle addition; most don't bother, instead relying on the lack of hesitation to land the strike."

"What are you going to do with us?" Mary asked.

"I want your bodies," I replied. "Then we'll go downstairs and see what the penalty for that is."

They did not understand, but I had not expected them to. I pushed their worries aside and made them aware of my jack as a bolt of pleasure lancing down their spinal column. They had been used before with no attention to their pleasure. I did not have the patience for unselfishness so I chose the hammer instead of the razor.

"Come with me," I said and walked into the bathroom. Like with many things, I had not been clean for a long time.

I linked the girls to each other and myself in a triangle-loop; the excitement each felt would increase the other's but not as much as my pleasure would increase theirs. I used my jacks as leading reins so they knew exactly what I wanted and did it without words needing to be exchanged.

I wanted the twins naked so as soon as they stepped into the bathroom, they began to remove clothing slowly; Magdalene took Mary's clothes off, and Mary returned the favor. I guided them to take mine off without me being consciously aware of anything but the desire to remove the clothing I had worn for three months straight.

Mary stepped into the shower and turned it on. She did not flinch as the cold water hit her; she adjusted the temperature to what she knew I wanted and let it wash over her body. Magdalene stroked my dick as her sister painted herself with water. Mary turned and leaned against the back wall in an open invitation to join her.

The water and heat felt good; months of sweat and dirt sloughed down to stain the white of the shower floor. The twins put soapy hands on me and chased away the filth that would not go willingly. I knelt down, and Magdalene pulled my head back to wash my hair while Mary applied another layer of soap on me.

They took a step back, like I wanted, and let me enjoy the water taking away the last five years of my life for a few minutes. I did what was necessary, but even I could wish it had not been.

Magdalene pressed up against my back while Mary came around front. Magdalene pushed her body against mine, and Mary brought my face down for a kiss. Their hands met at my dick, and they used fleeting touches to excite me nearly to the point of emptying myself.

Mary kissed her way down my chest. Magdalene wrapped her arms around my torso and pulled me backwards. It pushed my dick towards Mary, who took it into her mouth.

Their minds were intertwined with mine; their need was my need; my pleasure was theirs.

Mary stroked me with her hands and mouth almost violently. Magdalene dragged her nails across my chest. When it came, my release was almost absolution. 

The twins could not handle the feedback striking them through the loop. Mary fell back; Magdalene released me and stepped away. My dick shot cum onto Mary making her convulse as she experienced an orgasm for the first time in her life. Magdalene screamed behind me, crumbling against my legs. A second shot of cum hit Mary and through the jacks I felt them lose consciousness.

"Get dressed," I said when they came to. I wanted more time with them, but it would have to wait until we arrived at the Institute. There were people coming for me and others waiting to see what happened with the twins.

Everyone turned towards us when the elevator doors opened, and we stepped into the hotel lobby. There was disappointment on the faces of three men. A couple of others stepped forward with holo-cameras on their shoulders; my return was newsworthy but the excitement on their faces said they expected more.

"What did you do to my sisters?" the youngest of the three men said.

"This is the best you could do?" I asked the one wearing the robe of a New Christian priest.

"Mary, Magdalene," the oldest male said looking behind me. "Did this monster hurt you?!?"

"I expected better from Abbas Matthew," I said looking into one of the cameras, knowing he would be watching. "But New Christians like sending lambs to the slaughter."

I tossed the stilettos the women had been armed with at the father and brother.

"Elijah will be here any minute," I said to them.

The twins were a distraction; the real focus of the attack was the men. Their training was Telepathic-aided; no one else could move as smoothly and work together so seamlessly.

But they were still human.

I moved to the left so the boy, who was a hair quicker, stepped in front of his father. I danced outside the reach of his blade and passed him while sliding my knife on the inside of his thigh. I kept going, under the blade of his father and behind him. My knife penetrated at the base of the man's skull, stabbing into his spinal cord. I turned and moved to stand over the brother. I stepped on his knife hand and watched life pour out of his femoral artery.

I took a deep breath before looking at everyone in the room.

"You are a monster!" the priest said from behind me.

"I don't think you really believe that," I said. "If you were going to make a monster, wouldn't you make it something to fear?"

I walked up to him slowly. He tried to move; my jack ordered his body to disobey.

"If you really believed the Director created a monster, you would have run when they told you to try this."

I put my hand over his forehead and slid it down to close his eyes.

"I'll give you the time for a last prayer, priest," I whispered into his ear.

"You can't tell me that wasn't murder," Elijah said from the door.

I pushed the arm of the priest's robe up to expose his hand.

"The feint, the strike, and the subtle knife," I said nodding at the twins, the fallen father and brother, and to the dead priest. "Abbas Matthew has certain preferences."

"I don't get it," Elijah said. "Not one confrontation with the New Christian Church in five years; your ship docked less than two hours ago and already a dead priest."

Being the Operative the Director drew when a situation got ugly aged Elijah prematurely.

"The ladies are coming with me," I told the room and used the jacks to direct the women outside. Elijah raised an eyebrow.

"They did their job," I told him. "It's not their fault their men couldn't."

"Someone had reason to believe the men could?" Elijah asked holding the door open for me.

"Telepathic trained," I said.

"Who?" Elijah asked in an angry voice.

"An Operative," I replied.

"Not one of mine," he said between his teeth.

"Before your time," I said.

"There's only..."

"It's my responsibility, Elijah."

He opened the grav-car door for me, and I sat inside. The twins had company in the backseat.

"And you are?" I asked the woman.

"Eleanor is my Watcher," Elijah answered, getting into the driver's seat.

"What's a Watcher?"

"You don't know," Elijah asked surprised. "I thought you kept in touch with the Director and Sarah."

"I don't think the President considers us important enough to mention to the legendary Jason while he's doing his master's bidding," Eleanor said with no inflection to her voice. 

"Legendary?" I asked.

"I have to admit to disappointment," she told me. "I was expecting sharper teeth."

"My brother and father probably thought his teeth were sharp enough," Mary said.

"At least, his knife," Magdalene added.

"And then there's the dead priest," Elijah snorted. Eleanor stared at me for a few seconds before looking out the grav-car window.

"You should try to be more like your mentor, Elijah," she said.

"Taking a sabbatical was a good idea, Jason," Elijah said, ignoring her. "The God Apart Cult has grown and so have the Zealots. I was free to recruit because the Church hasn't tried anything with me, like they did in the hotel."

"It wouldn't be worth it," I said. "You might be the leader of the Institute Zealots, but you're human."

"While something as inhuman as Jason lives, there's no point in trying to bring you down, lover," the Eleanor said to Elijah.

"So what is a Watcher?" I asked her.

"An illusion to let people think they have some say in the nastier things Operatives do," she replied smiling.

"What's the point?" I asked.

"Between Eleanor and me," Elijah said laughing, "I'm the reasonable one."

"You're too gentle, my love," Eleanor said softly. "I'm glad Jason's back. The Director is right--survival shouldn't be left to chance."

"All the Watchers are that crazy," Elijah said starting the grav-car. "I can't wait to see who Sarah hand-picked for you. Someone who can make Jason seem reasonable? I'll remember not to piss her off."

"Are all Watchers women?" I asked.

"We're paired by sexual preference," Eleanor replied. "You'll be assigned a woman. You have to love a President who takes the time to play matchmaker. Obviously, Sarah has her priorities straight."

"Why have you been gone so long?" Elijah asked carefully.

"I had large mess to clean up," I said and closed my eyes.

-----

He was waiting at the entrance to the Institute grounds. I knelt beside his grav-chair.

"You haven't been eating," he said. "Is it done?"

I nodded.

"How many children are you behind now?" he asked.

"I stopped counting, sir."

"I was afraid of that," he said. "Take a week off, Jason."

"An Operative programmed assassins to kill me," I told him.

"I saw the holo-cast," he replied. "She can wait. Take those lovely ladies and lock yourself in a bedroom."

"Yes, sir."

-----

The twins had a busy three days between nights with me and days being rebalanced by Empathics. It would have been a busy week, except that on the fourth morning the shepherd's flock stampeded.

The Scream cut into my sleep; I got out of bed after putting the twins down hard and dressed in my grays. Outside the door, the hallway was full of Positives.

"Go back to bed," I said.

"There was something wrong with that Scream, Jason," a Telepathic said.

"I think it was a baby," another said. 

I nodded and walked past them. Elijah and two other Operatives waited with the Director in the main conference room.

"I'm sorry, son," the Director said. "I'm going to have to cut your vacation short."

"Sir, the Scream came from a baby," an Operative said. Elijah had mentored both Operatives in the room.

The door opened behind me; Eleanor and two men entered.

"I heard the Scream," Eleanor said sitting down. "I've been hit with a couple on case files; this didn't feel anything like those."

"It was a baby," Elijah said.

"But a baby can't..." she stopped and looked at the Director. 

"Only Pheromonics manifest solely upon bio-sexual maturity," he informed her. "Empathics and Symbolics need other things to occur."

"Empathics need to achieve some level of emotional maturity," Elijah said. "Symbolics have to come to an understanding about the world around them."

"But what about Simon?" a Watcher asked.

"A Symbolic's mental language needs to describe their world, not yours," I said. "Entire books have been written about death; Simon needed one word, 'Gone'."

"You didn't include Telepathics in your explanation," Eleanor said, staring at the Director warily. 

"Telepathics develop in two stages," the Director told her. "In the first stage, they are only able to communicate with others of their kind. The second stage allows them to exercise their power on anyone."

"Is that a theory?" she asked.

"It was," he said. "One out of five hundred thousand people is born Positive, but it's almost one in five million for a Telepathic. With those odds, we needed a Telepathic child to be born within the walls of the Institute to prove my theory."

"Amada's daughter in the Asia-Institute," Elijah said to Eleanor. 

"A secret?" she asked him between her teeth. Eleanor was smart enough not to question the Institute keeping secrets, but Elijah had no excuse in her mind. "We had a talk about those."

"I tell you mine," he replied staring at her hard. "Not the Institute's or anyone else's."

"Amada's daughter gave every Telepathic migraines with her complaints about being taken out of her mother's tummy," an Operative added, trying to hide a smile.

"Except for Operatives, Telepathics tend to stay near the Institute," the Director said. "So, unlike Amada's daughter, they don't get the opportunity to develop their mental voices as children."

"I'm not Telepathic, but I heard the baby's Scream," Eleanor argued.

"A certain amount of trauma is needed to push a Telepathic into their development stages," the Director said. "Birth takes care of the first, further trauma is required to force a Telepathic into the second."

"But that would mean every Telepathic needs to suffer to come into their power," she said.

"Being a teenager can be pretty rough," Elijah said gently.

"Tell them," I said.

"The tests are run the way they are because a Telepathic is required at each," he said to the Watchers.

"We Scream in a mental range only Telepathics can hear," an Operative said. "Anyone who reacts is one of us."

"If they're not second stage, we take care of it," the other Operative finished.

"If this baby is manifesting this early, he or she is suffering!" Eleanor said connecting the dots.

"Suffered," I said.

"This can't be the only child to have ever suffered badly enough to be pushed into their next stage of Telepathic development," Eleanor said, ignoring the implication of my words.

"The child abuse laws," the Director said. She leaned back and stared at the ceiling.

"They're so strict it requires a psychological pathology to break them," she said. "Combined with the Institute profiling for hopeful parents, there are very few incidents. Considering the odds of being Positive and on top of them the odds of being Telepathic, it is possible it never happened before."

"Santos," the Director said in a toneless voice. "His experiences and full Telepathic maturity at eight is what made my wife shove those laws down the throat of any politician she got her mind into."

"What are we going to do?" a Watcher asked.

"I jacked into the baby," I said. "I don't know where she died, but I know what it looks like."

"She's dead?" he asked. I chose not to repeat myself.

"The inside of a house isn't going to do much good," Eleanor said after a few seconds.

"She was stoned in the town square," I replied. "They knocked her unconscious before I could jack from her to someone else."

"If non-Telepathics heard it, the range is limited, at least somewhat," Elijah said.

"She had power, Elijah," an Operative said.

"We can query federal employees to get a search circle," Eleanor said.

"She might have shouted directionally," Elijah warned.

"Don't bother," I told them. "I'll do this alone; I want to give the storm time to gather."

"What do you mean?" Eleanor asked.

"They wanted a war," my Creator replied. "My son wanted a crusade."

-----

It was a beautiful day: a cloudless sky with a crowning sun, a cool breeze from the north, the air smelled of spring standing victorious over the last vestiges of winter.

I walked through the middle of the main street while eyes followed me, their hatred palpable. The brave ones formed a group behind me as I entered the Children's Cemetery.

She was buried next to the only tree in the small plot of land. A New Christian priest, head bowed in prayer, knelt at the foot of her grave.

"So tell me, priest," I said. "Who has it the worst? A man of faith who loses it, or a man of the cloth who finds it."

He looked behind me to see the entire town had found the courage to face someone bigger than a newborn.

"Go home!" he shouted at them.

"What's he doing here?" someone yelled back. I stabbed the shovel into the ground and started digging.

"How dare you!" the priest screamed.

"I mean no offense by undoing your work," I said looking at him. "I need physical evidence to punish the people involved. I must admit surprise at needing a shovel."

"She was just a baby," he replied with tears forming.

"Put the shovel down!" someone said, cocking a shotgun. I sighed and extended a hand. The shotgun was deposited into it. I took the time to study it; it was an antique unlike my own gun, which was a faithful re-creation using modern manufacturing. I shot the man who had given me the order. Before tossing it aside, I emptied the shotgun into him.

After a quick study of the crowd, I pointed to a young woman and waved her forward. She weaved through the crowd until she stood in front me.

"You can't do this to us," a man in the front shouted at me. His eyes were terrified as his body refused run away from me.

"The penalty for child abuse is death," I said. "It requires physical and Telepathic confirmation, if both are available the sentence is automatic."

Everyone in the crowd could hear my words through the jacks in their minds.




The Institute Stories Set 04



"You can't tell who killed her!" the mother of the baby spat at me.

"Anyone who did not throw a stone is free to go," I replied. 

No one moved.

"The girl suffered before she died," I told them. "You will too." 

Everyone except the priest and I collapsed. Their mouths opened to let out screams of pain but made no sound.

"Why spare me?" the priest asked.

"You dug the girl's grave with your hands," I said. "Pain would be a sanctuary from your crisis of cloth."

"There are cameras watching," he told me.

"It wouldn't be much of a trap without them," I said and looked at the grave. The work would be hot; I decided musical accompaniment was called for and turned the screams on.

I took my time.

Opening the casket made the priest crawl away to retch.

"You didn't have to make me look," he said finally. "I put her in there."

"I'm sorry," I told him. "I'm not human, so there are moments of awkward social behavior. No one told me justice couldn't be fun. I'll remember that punishing the murderers of children is a somber event."

The screams died suddenly; the priest looked at the townsfolk.

"I have the body, and I have the confession of their minds," I said. "The sentence is death."

"Why don't you get it over with?" the priest asked when the strongest recovered enough to look around. 

I did not reply.

He ministered to his congregation as more shook off the effects of my punishment. The ones who understood what was still to come knelt in prayer. I did not let anyone beg for his or her life.

"How did they know the child was Telepathic?" I asked the priest when he was done.

"You like to play games, don't you?" he asked angrily. I patted my earcell.

"The public Operative case files," he sighed and nodded. "Answer this first, how did the girl manage to Scream?"

"The child abuse laws are for your protection also. It's not a good idea to harm a child," I replied. "They might harm back. You were unlucky that she cried for her mother instead of lashing out."

"Is that what she did?" he asked.

"I don't know," I replied. "Maybe it was your God she cried out to."

He nodded.

"The Zealot Operative, Elijah, visited us with his Watcher," he said. "They entertained themselves in town for a couple of days. As instructed by the Church, I used the incident and the pregnancy to... I didn't know they would go this far."

"You pushed for ten months, priest," I said. "Where did you expect this to end?"

He fell to his knees.

"I would have liked to let you live; you would have suffered more," I said. "Unfortunately, the murder of his daughter could make it necessary for me to kill an Operative they already speak of in the same tone as Santos."

I shot him in the head and turned towards the townsfolk. I pulled the jacks out of them and jacked back into them painfully. They were adult babies when I finished my first wave of manipulations, innocent but with a full understanding of their pain.

Their mother threw the first stone.

Their mother threw the stone that killed them.

Unsurprisingly, it took time for the others to build up the bravado to come for me. The reporters were first, but they were more interested in close-ups of the bodies than asking me questions. When I did not kill the reporters, the federal agents felt it safe to approach me.

"You murdered a whole town," an agent said.

"I'm glad to see your talents were not wasted," I told him. He was the agent whose spying I reported to Jacob.

"I've waited a long time for this," he said almost crowing. "You've gone too far. The Director and the President cannot keep you from justice now."

"Is it the townspeople Abbas Matthew and his political allies expected me to kill or all of you?" I asked meeting his eyes.

Every agent took a step back and put a hand on their weapons. I shook my head.

"Lead," I said. "I am a willing lamb."

------

I stood chained by my wrists to a small platform. The politicians were speechifying for the holo-cameras. Abbas Matthew's view of justice did not seem to include anyone speaking for the condemned.

The roll call of politicians and supporters of the Institute who had seen the light and therefore needed to show avid and public support for the Church gave me time to try getting used to the orange prisoner's jumpsuit. I had seen the Institute tapes of the Director taking me out of my incubation chamber, and Sarah wrapping me in a blanket of Operative gray. The trial was the first time I remembered wearing anything else.

Finally, the politicians wound down and Abbas Matthew stood. He was not a man to gainsay advantage so he did it slowly as if age bore him down; the act faltered some when he walked towards me with strong steps.

"Are we certain he is contained?" the Abbas asked over his shoulder.

"Every Operative and Operative candidate from the Institute, the Asia-Institute, and the Euro-Institute is holding him in place, Abbas," Elijah said. "It is enough, even for Jason."

"Can you trust him?" I asked, leaning towards the Abbas. "You did kill his daughter."

He slapped me.

"Silence, spawn of Satan!" he said with fire and brimstone. 

"I should have killed you sooner," I told him.

"God protected me."

"I guess that's true. My Creator had more important things for me to do, and it kept you breathing," I replied and went back to studying the horrible color I was wearing.

The Abbas was an incredible orator with natural rhythm, a beautiful flow of words, and a voice that rose slowly towards a towering crescendo. It helped that he probably rewrote the speech several hundred times praying for this day to come.

"What has this abomination been doing for these last five years?" he shouted at his audience near the end. "Why are we kept in the dark about the Director's instruction to his--his--, this thing which calls itself the Director's creation?"

"Killing Positives," I replied. He froze, unsure of himself. The curiosity was naked in his eyes but to ask would distract from the climax of his speech.

"My trials are quicker," I explained. "I don't have to ask questions."

"What?" he asked. "He sent you to..."

"Kill Positives," I said. "I've spent the last five years killing Positives in countries outside the world-regional reach of the three Institutes."

"But why? They are..."

"In the eyes of my God, they were sinners," I interrupted. "Not all of them exhibited the hubris and cruelty of minor deities, but the ones who did are dead now."

"How many?"

"There were countries I walked from one end to the other killing every Positive," I said. "Some tried to flee into the ocean, but it did not put them out of my reach. Those I drowned though."

"But why would you do this? They were God's tools, tasked with the continuation of his greatest creation!"

"Because I knew I had to turn around and give their victims a merciful death," I replied. "It did not seem enough to just kill them; I wanted them to suffer some of the pain they brought into this world."

"That's not what I meant!" the Abbas yelled.

"Oh! I understand," I said smiling and looking into the holo-cameras for the first time. "I was sent from this Garden, the Director made for you, to bring justice to those Positives who forgot their humanity."

"You and your father go to far!" the Abbas whispered in horror. "You go too far!"

"I gave mercy to thousands for every Positive I hunted down in my Creator's name," I said.

"I have seen a man with her power, considered the weakest," I continued pointing to Lucinda, "erect an altar of Abraham and make women pour their children's blood on it to be his. Speak to me of too far, priest, when you have lived the least of what I witnessed these past five years."

"I SAID HE WAS TO BE STRIPPED OF HIS UNIFORM!" the Abbas screamed at Elijah. I had discarded the orange.

The Operative studied my uniform and shrugged. He preferred to see me in gray even if it meant the Abbas spent a few breaths ranting and raving at him.

"It does not matter what you wear, demon," the Abbas said turning back to me. "Your maker has abandoned you. The Institute has abandoned you. Your time on this world has come to end. I will set everything right in God's name."

"But even Satan can speak truth," he said turning to his audience. "Positives can turn against God's mission. The Institute and its sexual privilege guarantee it. It has made them sinners, taking advantage of the gifts God gave them to serve us."

"Only the Church can guide them in God's work!" he pronounced.

The chains holding me in place struck the ground, making an almost musical sound. The Abbas turned in time to see me step off the platform and point to the left edge of the audience. As my hand moved to the right edge, I made everyone I had jacked aware of my backing out of their mind. To all of them, the political hall changed to the Institute auditorium; the politicians became a gathering of all Institute Positives; the Operatives and Operative candidates from other Institutes disappeared to leave Elijah and the Operatives he mentored surrounding Lianne. 

Elijah's face flowed from the serenity of accepted duty that the Abbas imagined to one of destructive hatred aimed at the Church. Eleanor's hand on his arm seemed to be the only thing that stopped him from storming the stage to kill the Abbas.

Most of the holo-reporters dropped their cameras; the Abbas took a few steps back while his entourage looked around madly. I waited for the holo-reporters to recover their instincts and point the cameras at me.

"Can you imagine what your sheep have thought during these weeks of my 'captivity', priest?" I asked without looking at the Abbas. "Listening to sermons shouted from Church pulpits, hearing the reporters talking about my prison uniform and my shackles, and yet their eyes saw..."

"The truth," I said turning towards him. "You are right; Positives are something to be feared. I have walked across miles populated by soulless flesh a Telepathic called his kingdom so I know better than any of you how much they are to be feared."

I turned and walked to stand in front of the Abbas.

"You are evil," he whispered.

"Kneel, priest," I ordered after jacking into him. He collapsed at my feet.

"It was never Erotic Mind Control Positive," I said. "The sex was a reward the Director convinced you to give, and them to accept for not--."

I sighed and stroked the man's cheek.

"It was always about power but you knew that, didn't you?" I asked. "It's why you want control of the Institute."

I turned at looked at the cameras.

"Now that they have watched the Church and holo-press dance at the end of my marionette strings, I hope they understand. I have shown them power, and what it would be like to live in the world of one man's creation."

"You are not a man," the Abbas said.

"No, I am not," I said kneeling with him. 

"You are nothing," he whispered. "God hates you! You have don't even have a soul. You will not escape God's justice, demon. He will strike you down!"

I grabbed the Abbas's face in both hands and squeezed.

"I've always wondered who had it better or worse, priest," I said smiling. "You walk this earth asking 'Why am I here?' Your priests say what they do is a 'calling' yet in someone like you, at your center where God should be, I find doubt. I can walk into his office, kneel, cry out 'Lord, I beseech thee, what is my Purpose?', and he replies."

"He is no God," the Abbas said spitting in my face.

"But you have never looked upon the face of God and seen disappointment at your failures," I continued. "Disappointed, not in you, but himself for not making you better than those failures and forcing you to suffer for his inadequacies."

I sat back and made him feel like I was invading every part of his being with my jack.

"The day will come, priest, when I will know your doubt," I said. "I find it unfair I will experience that, but none of you will ever feel the smallest part of what I have."

I put my hand over his heart and shoved what it meant to be a flawed creation in the eyes of your God into him.

He screamed.

I stood up and watched him writhe around while continuing to scream in despair for a few minutes. I turned and climbed down from the stage to stand face to face with Elijah. He continued looking over my shoulder at the Abbas.

"I cannot have children, nor do I feel the things you do," I told him. "The only vengeance you will have is what I have already given you--except this."

I extended my gun to him. He took it and walked past me. I grabbed Eleanor's arm as she tried to follow him onto the stage. Our eyes met; she understood how it would end if Elijah did not let it die there. 

"His salvation lies in the reflection he sees in your mind," I told her. She nodded and walked to stand beside Elijah.

I almost killed you after the twins, Lianne.

BASTARD!

You were usefully subtle at the beginning, but the more lead I gave, the sloppier you became. I had to improvise those 'weeks of captivity' to make up for your flawed work or I might not have gotten my point across. 'Spawn of Satan'! Did you have to let the idiot write his own lines? I'm disappointed in you, Lianne.

You knew! YOU USED ME!

The gunshot from the stage made me turn around. Eleanor had her hands wrapped around Elijah's; she helped him pull the trigger and empty the gun into the Abbas.

Another generation or two, and the Church could have grabbed what you made them reach for too soon, Lianne.

"You were a good Operative once," I said kissing her forehead. The holo-cameras moved to give the audience a view of the Operative-to-Operative confrontation.

"I did God's work," Lianne said, exactly like I instructed her to through my jack.

Had I allowed the Church the time, destroying it might have taken the Institute down. I don't need the Institute to fulfill my God's Will, but it would make a fitting monument to him.

I reached down and pulled Lianne's weapon from its holster. 

Not an easy problem to solve. I was about to resort to snuffing the brighter lights in the priesthood when you triggered the shields I maintain on the Director.

What shields?!?

"You have enabled so many transgressions by the Church, Lianne," I said meeting her eyes. "An Operative so diligent in stamping that kind of thing out, and YOU helped a father rape his daughters, a brother rape his sisters."

I gestured towards Mary and Magdalene. Some of the holo-interviews had been real even if the content was not what Church bureaucracy and reporters heard.

"The Abbas was right!" she yelled at me. "You are evil! Whatever had to be done to destroy you, God would have forgiven!"

I killed my first Positive when I was three years old. He was subtle like you were at the beginning. He got by the Operative shields on the Director but had the bad luck to choose a time during my lessons.

"By your religion, I am evil," I replied. "In mine, I have served my God's Purpose."

There were no shields!

Until you, Lianne, no one survived coming into contact with them. It was a close thing; I would have killed you if the residue of your playtime with a pair of priests weren't fresh. I would have killed you anyway, but the little prize you left in their minds made me curious about your religious affiliation.

"The Institute thanks you for your service, Operative," I said solemnly to her.

You were exactly what I wanted. I only had to kill any other option you might take to grab power, and you ate your way up the Church hierarchy.

"I thank you for your service," I said taking a step back and pointing the gun at her head.

"You are an abomination to God," she said raising her chin proudly.

No matter what you call him, Jason, your father is not God. He made you to stay in power!

My faith does not require yours, but who did you serve in all of this?

You made me do it.

"Not to mine, Lianne," I said.

I allow you to die believing that.

Her blood and brain matter spattered Positives ten rows back from where she died.

Kneeling down, I put Lianne's gun back in the holster. I turned around, walked to the center front of the stage, and looked around at the audience of Positives.

"You have power. They..." I said gestured towards the holo-cameras and to the audience beyond. "Need that power. Need you."

I jacked into every Positive hard so my words would echo in their minds as I spoke them.

"I was sent into the wilderness to learn what you are capable of. I will kill any who sets foot beyond the privilege given to them. If necessary, I will kill all of you and allow your race a dignified extinction."

I released my jacks letting them breathe again. Turning to the holo-cameras, I addressed everyone watching.

"You do not have to understand me," I said. "But know this, someday all I will have of my... father...is you."

The Director was waiting when I exited the auditorium. He nodded towards the back of his grav-chair.

"Push me to the gardens," he said smiling as I got behind the chair.

When I was young, I measured my growth by how high I could put my hands on his grav-chair and how easy it was to guide it where he wanted to go.

"You've served me well, my son," he said. "Very well."

The End of the Final Motherless Child Institute Story





The Institute Stories Set 04



"She was carrying my child," I said, "A secret the Director wanted kept."

"How many children do you have?"

"Eleven."

"It's impossible," she insisted. "You can't keep that kind of secret from Telepathics, especially you."

"There is a way," I sighed. "Most Telepathics use the hammer, which tends to leave things in a mind-wipe, but a careful one won't even leave ripples behind."

"The bio-techs still have to do the work, Jason!"

"Symbolic programming."

"The Symbolic programs the behavior, and the Telepathic wipes any trace of what happened," Eve said. "It's too subtle for Operatives, even Santos."

I turned to look at her.

"The Director's wife," she said finally. "I keep forgetting she was a Telepathic."

"How did you figure it out?" she asked.

"Mary and Magdalene are the mothers," I said.

"Those two are unforgettable," she snorted.

"A quick scan of them revealed the truth," I continued. "I watched the bio-techs edit the results of the children's genetic lineage without realizing what they were doing."

"Some of those bio-techs have to be new," she said.

I tilted my head.

"Positives programmed to program others," she said leaning her head back. She broke out laughing.

"You father was a piece of work," she said five minutes later. "I wonder which HE thought he was, our Savior or Satan."

She stood up and undid the buttons of her blouse.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Have you seen my poll numbers?" she asked, dropping the blouse beside the seat and working on her pants. "I'm getting killed on not doing my maternal duty. Why would I let those years of holding your Operative leash go to waste? You're already trained." 

"Concentrate real hard on making our son Telepathic," she said walking towards my bedroom. "I want to yell and have him hear me in the next state!"

I learned through years of working with her that while my policy of not having sex with my Watcher was a good one, orgasms were the only way of getting a word in edgewise sometimes.

Eve gasped as I made her forcefully aware of the jack I maintained in her at all times.

"God Apart!" she screamed, collapsing in the doorway of my bedroom. The first orgasm was only a distraction so I could map her nervous system.

"FUCK!

The second orgasm wrapped around her like second skin and sunk deep into her core. She watched as I undid my robe and dropped it; I was naked underneath.

"You knew," she breathed.

"As you are fond of telling me," I replied, "I am the mind reader."

"Bastard!"

"I told you about the twins having the same Symbolic language days ago and that they figured out how to Heal with their power," I said standing over her. "Their Healer cousins were your favorite though."

"I only had to touch my father to be Healed. With family Healers behind them, your Symbolic twins will be far more effective."

"Stand," I ordered. She bit her lip and tried to resist my command to no avail.

"So why did you pick here?" I asked. "I know you don't like the cameras."

"Women can fuck you, even have your children, but you belong to me," she said addressing a bank of holo-cameras.

She danced back at my command and threw herself backwards onto my bed. The fall lasted a minor eternity for her during which she crashed through levels of heightening pleasure. I was above her, looking into her eyes, and entering her when she landed on the bed. Her hands caressed my sides as she gazed inside me. 

"What were you thinking when you fucked into me?" she asked much later.

A Telepathic's secrets are not all their own; this one, though, belonged to Eve.

"So--this is hope."

The End of The Institute Series