not
Karina.
Make no mistake about it; I admired Karina. She was a beautiful Russian woman in her early 40s, blonde and muscular but with an innate sense of winter about her. Those cold blue eyes of hers had watched many men and women die, and I suspected that just as often or not, it had been by her order, or, rather, by the direction of her husband under her order.
If Aleksi didn't follow anything, Karina followed
everything
and any time I was worried I might have been getting too technical or in danger of her not understanding, she would ask me to either slow down or stop and start again but in simpler terms or drawing more analogies. We wouldn't move on until she felt like she had a fundamental comprehension of whatever it was I was attempting to explain to them.
They had settled us in a converted college laboratory, with makeshift accommodations just next door. Despite the fact that my bedroom was a converted lecture hall, they did their best to make it as plush and decadent as possible. I had been given seven additional partners, in addition to Eve, Anya and Sofia, a combination of models and female soldiers, although I suspect one of them, Dasha, was a backup FSB officer, to help support Anya and Sofia, whose opinions had continued to change of me the longer they were imprinted to me.
I had known that there was a certain level of emotional mood stabilizers that would happen as part of the imprinting process, but I hadn't realized quite how impactful that would be, especially in terms of shifting one's loyalty. The women became much more trusting with me, willing to answer basically any question I had for them, as long as I was tactful and gentle in my approach to it, something I must confess took me longer to get a handle on than I would have liked. As the months passed, Anya and Sofia began to tell me more about the state of Russia, despite the fact that I wasn't being allowed to travel out and see it, and the picture they painted was grim.
It had turned out that Putin's control over the oligarchs of Russia had been tenuous at best, and once he'd died, as I said earlier, the whole thing went to shit. Everything turned into smaller, warring factions, and nobody wanted to agree with anyone over anything. Within a month or so, it was clear that the Ivanovich's faction was the only one that was keeping its men alive with any decent numbers, and once that fact started getting around, people began flocking over to their side quickly.
The damage, however, was already deep and severe. In their rush to try and solve for the virus, they had
spread
the virus fast and frantically across most of Russia, and somewhere between 57 and 60 million Russian men were dead, leaving only 8 to 10 million remaining, far faster than almost any other country, at least as far as the data provided to me said. I suspect another million or so was lost during the time between the Ivanovich solution being accepted and its eventual deployment across all of the country.
Russia had gone into total media blackout early on in the pandemic, cutting off all information pipelines, locking down all borders and severing all communication channels. They were in an utter panic and didn't want anyone aware of just how weak and vulnerable they truly were. A group of weekend warriors from Paris could've taken over the whole country in a few weeks, at least for a few months there.
When Karina realized I couldn't modify the serum to take away any of the side effects, they redirected me towards doing what I could to make the serum as portable as possible. One of the early problems with the... eyyuch... Quaranteam vaccine, if you must, was that it needed to be kept ridiculously cold, so transporting it everywhere was a problem. Had the weather been colder, Russia's harsh climates would've nullified this, but within a few weeks of tinkering, I had developed a version of the serum that could withstand a day or so of non-refrigeration, and was easier to mass produce. With that in hand, Karina usurped her husband and began to take active control over the remaining Russian military-industrial complex. Under the guise of not wanting to put Aleksi at risk, Karina took full control of the generals and began dispatching her own orders, and they were more than a little ruthless.
Unlike reports of what was going on in my home country, where some sort of algorithm had been developed to pair people into compatible pods, Russia had no time for such niceties, and just began pairing women onto surviving men based on one thing and one thing only - likelihood to carry a child to term.
Russian men were told that until every woman they were associated with was pregnant, their duty to the country consisted of one thing and one thing only - fucking.
Based on that, the military was restaffed completely with women. The same for the police, the secret services and the diplomats. The only area where men were allowed to continue to function identically as they had before was in the field of medicine, simply because it was considered safe enough, and there had been a dearth of women in the medical profession in Russia. Thankfully, the doctors had taken the plague very seriously, and most of the hospitals had been staffed by men living in hermetically sealed bubbles once it was clear how toxic it was.
On the plus side, the efficiency of the Russian system was incredible, and I am certain that the remaining Russian men were immunized much faster than their American counterparts were, simply because when it came right down to it, the Russians wanted to get everything done more than they wanted everyone to be happy.
The size of our working lab increased, and no longer was I the only scientist engaging in the research. Eve was given her own division to work on, trying to find some form of reassignment trigger which would allowed a woman to be transferred from one man to another, a concept I told her was biologically unsound and extremely unlikely, but Karina had insisted someone work on it, and so I'd given it to Eve, mostly as something just to keep her busy.
I must confess, once I had control over my wife, she held little draw to me anymore, so the only real time we spent with one another was when we were fucking to give her her dose, something she did as efficiently as possible.
In retrospect, I see now that I should have paid more attention to her, because in early November, she fled the facility in the middle of the night with the aide of a couple of Russian men, Sergei Petrov and Andrei Ivanov.
We didn't learn about Andrei until several days after the breakin, but I'd actually spent some time with Sergei, because he'd been sent to us by field doctors who didn't know what to make of him. The first time they had tried to imprint a woman onto him, when she'd gotten the first taste of his semen, which would normally provide a priming orgasm and would set the body into a sort of accelerated wanton need for a large dose of semen from the man to start the imprinting process, she hadn't been primed, but had instead gone feral.
You may not be familiar with this, but the longer a woman goes between doses from her partner, the more her logic and judgment are impaired. We referred to this base at New Eden as 'going feral' and it wasn't exclusively seen between doses, but also between priming and imprinting, although I had been very careful to keep those results quiet, so as to not alarm anyone at the base. I simply stressed that once a pairing had begun, it needed to be seen through to completion and imprinting as quickly as possible, and no one had really asked much about what would happen if it didn't.
In our one test subject on this matter back in New Eden, we'd given a woman a taste of her partner's semen to start her priming, and then denied her the full dose, until about twelve hours later, when even my scientific sense of curiosity lost out to my dwindling sense of humanity. By that point, she was climbing the walls, threatening to harm herself if she wasn't put with her partner immediately. The look in her eyes made it clear she was serious, so we relented and brought her partner to her.
When Sergei arrived at our lab, I wondered if he was some sort of rogue offshoot, and was also incredibly worried that he might contract DuoHalo, so we did our best to keep him isolated, at first. Then it became clear - he had some sort of natural immunity towards the DuoHalo virus, and the exposure to the Quaranteam serum via his first failed partner had somehow mutated the serum itself. I was fascinated, infuriated, thankful and appalled all at once.
