Palms greased and papers signed, Carterson built her a warehouse complete with prison-grade security necessary to satisfy prison officials. Starla herself handpicked her staff, the majority of which would be for prisoner control. Male screws might be too sympathetic to the plight of the prisoners she'd be harvesting, so she insisted on an all-female staff of prison guards. Many were picked from the ranks of retired special ops of one sort or another, former police officers and female prison guards she'd lured away from other penal institutions.
Her lab staff was all female, recruited with the understanding that they would be bound by non-disclosure agreements. The pot was sweetened with profit-sharing deals of a generous sort that would continue beyond their employment as long as Starla's company remained in business.
Operations finally started eighteen months later. The prisoners were recruited on a voluntary basis, kept in a six-month rotation, and cycled back into their home prison. To make all parties happy, only non-violent offenders were offered the opportunity to be harvested. Of those, only those younger than forty were used in order to keep the quality of the semen high enough to be of use.
Soon it became evident that controlled harvesting would be difficult. At any one time, there were a thousand or so men in residence to be harvested. Allowing them to masturbate themselves proved to be inefficient, and the rate of production was unpredictable. Some, out of spite, would refuse to collect their semen properly or contaminate it in some way. Many batches of the formula were lost to this latter problem.
The next attempt to create consistent and high-quality production consisted of restraining the men and using a huge staff of trained personnel to harvest the prisoners in a controlled way.
This approach caused multiple problems Restraining the men was an ordeal in itself, often necessitating threats or outright corporal discipline to ensure compliance. Male physiology being what it is, that problem caused another. You could restrain a man but you couldn't necessarily get him to produce. Some would outright refuse to ejaculate, much less get erect enough to be harvested. At any given time, a third or more of the men might exhibit their rebellion in this way and production was once again unpredictable.
The last problem of this approach was the harvesting of upward of three hundred men at any given time was exhausting for the staff who might spend up to a half-hour trying to get a single prisoner to produce. Even with a rotating twenty-four-hour harvest cycle that reduced the number of men to ten to fifteen at any given time, the harvesting process was exhausting.
Lab staff walked away from the whole inefficient operation leaving StarCo on the verge of failure.
