Starco

For two years, Starla worked at Gorman Food Sciences formulating artificial flavors--a field having nothing to do with the cosmetics industry. During that time, she procured a supplier for the virgultum and arranged for it to be delivered via a forwarding service in the name of a foreign corporation so that no one--especially her former employer--would link her with the shipments of the botanical ingredient of the failed cleanser she'd worked on in their lab.

When the two years passed, Starla--with the assistance of multiple ignorant men--began synthesizing the compound. Two years later, she acquired the patent. Once the cosmetics companies satisfied themselves that the compound did indeed work as Starla promised, they courted her with offers to license the patent with absurd sums of money.

"What about the FDA?" she asked of one of the representatives of a company that had offered her a nine-figure deal.

"We'll worry about the Feds," the man from Carterson Pharmaceuticals told her. "You just produce the compound."

Starla leaned back in the overstuffed chair. "There's one major problem with production."

"We know," the rep said glumly. "You can't synthesize the--how should I put this--the 'human element' artificially."

"No, I've tried since I discovered the reaction to figure out a way around that problem. I even researched the semen of other animals, even higher primates. No dice."

The rep sighed. "We can't do it for obvious reasons. It raises too many questions, ethical, legal, and moral. But if you produce it, we can hide the real ingredients in so much chemical mumbo-jumbo in the FDA filings that nobody will know the source. After all, everything in the patent occurs naturally, right?"

"Yes," Starla nodded. "But it doesn't occur anywhere else in the right combination." She remembered Brady and all the men that followed who unknowingly donated to the cause of making her a rich woman. One ounce of the compound required fifty or more milliliters of raw human semen distilled and combined with the virgultum extract.

"So the problem lies mainly in producing the quantity of semen required to meet the demand," the rep went on.

"That's the only problem!" Starla said sharply. "I need a fucking dairy!" The mental image of hundreds of men on their hands and knees being milked like single-teated livestock caused a low hum of arousal that was completely unexpected. Starla smiled. "That is exactly what I need!"

The rep laughed. "Miss Gravestone, really? Where are you going to get enough men to produce enough semen to meet our needs? You'd have to find a lot of willing, desperate men to do that."

The answer hit Starla like a wrecking ball and she slammed her fist down on the table hard enough to make the rep jump. "Fucking hell! Where could I find a concentration of willing, desperate men to produce enough semen? Prison!"

Starla, along with the people at Carterson, spent the next year making discrete inquiries of the different state prison systems Inquiries alone got them nowhere, but inquiries with the suggestion of "reimbursement" began to open doors. For one reason or another, the deals did not work out in the end and Starla spun her wheels another six months before a severely cash-strapped state prison system in the Southwest offered to make a deal with Carterson.

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.