Chapter 8: Introspection

25 September 2025

The drive home was a blur of sodium lights and the occasional metronomic clicking of the indicator. Jenny usually found comfort in the quiet calm of her Nissan Leaf. But tonight - or was it morning, since the digital clock read 00:15 - the car felt like a pressurised chamber. Rebecca’s silken whisper of a voice reverberated in Jenny’s mind, louder than the hum of the tyres on the road surface.

“This subject would recommend an extended, methodical breaking. No VR goggles. No voices. No flashing lights. Just the sensation of your own breath until you realise it doesn't belong to you.”

Jenny pulled into a parking spot not far from her flat and powered down the car, but she didn’t get out. She sat in the dark, her hands still gripped at ten and two. Even miles away from the lab, she could feel a phantom thrum in her blood — perhaps some sensing mechanic of the virus — tethering her to Rebecca. She looked at her knuckles, pale and sharp under the dim overhead light. She had always been a creature of intent. From the moment she entered her doctoral programme, Jenny had been a scalpel: focused, cold, and designed to cut through the messy noise of human biology to find the underlying signals.

She had been a passionate scientist for nearly a decade. Passion, however, was a misunderstood word in her lexicon. To others, it meant heat, fervour, and perhaps a touch of madness. To Jenny, passion was a sustained, icy pressure. It was the thrill of the sequence, the elegance of a neural map being deciphered. She loved the work. She loved cracking the code. Finding the answer. She loved the way human beings could be reduced to a series of chemical levers and electrical gates.

But as she sat in the silence of the garage, she realised she had never applied any clinical rigour to her own soul.

She thought of her acquaintances … she couldn’t really call them friends. There was Marcus, a venture capitalist who she once convinced to pay her expenses as an investment, because for a short time he could dream of the value her hypothetical future patents could hold. There was Adrianna, a fellow researcher in… whatever discipline she was in, who shared her struggles with the roadblocks of ethics committees, before she gave up and accepted a low-pressure teaching post in Germany. The others who came to mind were really just people she crossed paths with at gallery openings she didn’t really want to attend, or high-end bistros with food she didn’t really like. They were accessories to a successful life. They provided the necessary social faff to keep her from appearing like a ghost. But when they spoke of their lives, their children, or their anxieties, Jenny listened with the detached interest of a biologist observing a complex but ultimately predictable pheromone trail.

She had had lovers, too. Men who were physically striking, intellectually competent, and conveniently transient. In the heat of the act, she had often found herself analysing the physiological response — the dilation of pupils, the spike in cortisol, the rhythmic contraction of muscle. She noticed when her nipples would harden or she would get damp between her thighs, which led her to think about what chemical reaction in her nervous system was triggering it. She was insightful enough to provide them with what they needed, and sometimes they did the same for her. She performed the role of a considerate partner with the same technical proficiency she brought to a laboratory titration. But she had never felt the why.

Jenny had never felt that terrifying, ego-dissolving pull that people called love. Her relationships had been posh and empty. To her, love was a physiological reaction, or more likely a malfunction — a localised breakdown of the self-preservation instinct.

The closest she had come to a friend was Rebecca, the woman she turned into an enslaved test subject with hardly any hesitation.

“You’ve built a beautiful cage for us, Jenny. But I think, deep down, you’re jealous that you’re still outside of it.”

The words stung because they were true.

Jenny stepped out of the car and made her way to the converted warehouse where she lived. There was something appropriate about Greenwich Creekside, in the way that the old and the new were merged into something unique. Jenny was forging her own hybrid existence, using the ancient arts of medicine and chemistry to meld with the bleeding edge science of the virus.

Inside the building, Jenny waited for the lift. As she looked at her warped reflection on the reflective doors, she saw a knackered, albeit beautiful, woman in her late twenties, dressed in a tailored button-through blouse and charcoal trousers, her dark brown hair still pulled back into a knot so tight it looked painful. Aside from the glow in her eyes, she could hear Rebecca describing her as a pretty, high-quality nobody.

And beneath her poise, she was feeling a hollow ache. Her mind flickered to the lab coat back at the facility — the one with "Jenny" embroidered above the pocket. That was the version of her the virus had claimed; this "Dr. Thorne" in the mirror was just a shell.

In her loft, the windows carved into the masonry walls looked out over a city that felt like a circuit board. She poured herself a glass of neat Scotch and didn't turn on the lights.

"Was I supposed to become an obedient ****?" she asked the empty room. Her voice sounded small against the glass.

Instead of talking out loud to herself, she continued with her inner monologue. I could have kept limping along with my research, so why did I violate logic and infect myself?

Jenny already knew the answer. The pat answer was that failure wasn’t an option. She had to make this work. Her single-minded drive insisted on it, and she would work herself into exhaustion to ensure it. She could have explained that to anyone who would ask. But she wouldn’t buy it. It was too simple.

The real reason was far more personal. It was about power. On the one hand, she loved being in control. She always had. So anything that she could do to move her project along, she would do it. It’s not a short cut if it gets you to the right place at the right time, she used to tell herself.

But she had that other part of her too. The one that got off on fantasies of total surrender. Of course she wouldn’t have injected cancer or influenza samples into her bloodstream. That would have been mad. But a **** virus, which she had theorised would give her more arousal in a day than she had experienced in her adult life?

Fuck. Of course you would.

The Master — the singular biological authority her virus demanded, the man whose face she had never seen but whose presence felt like an atmospheric pressure — demanded total submission. He wouldn’t allow me to have the fruits if I wasn’t prepared to make the sacrifice.

Jenny paced the length of her living room. She had placed herself on this path, and now she had laid it out for others. But if she never found him, would she lose herself? Would this all have been for nothing but the science?

That dark thought led her to conceptualising the void. Now that she was corrupted, and was corrupting others, and breaking them down, what did she need to do next? Was it right to lead herself and them towards an unknown? What would happen to them if she never found the true answer?

For her entire life, Jenny had been the one making the decisions. And now, with this project, she was the architect. But so far, she was simply designing other people's voids. And it was, as Rebecca put it, exhausting. The constant weight of the I. The relentless need to be the observer, the judge, the one who knows.

What would it feel like to stop?

She closed her eyes and tried to imagine it. No more schedules. No more grant proposals. No more fake friends to perform for. No more meaningless lovers to satisfy with technical precision. She could just be.

Is that what the Master wanted? Not just a gallery of dolls, but an interconnected and purposeful hive to influence the world itself? Was she being called to a higher purpose — not as the scientist, but as the ultimate test subject?

The future was an unknown, a black box into which she would push them all. Or would she? For years, she had believed she was the one who was responsible. But looking out at the city, she felt the subtle shift in the floor beneath her. What if she was never the hand on the leash? Maybe she was just the lead bitch in the kennel, and her Master was finally calling her name.

She thought of Sarah, the girl they were about to take. Sarah was vibrant, messy, and full of the chaos of life. Jenny felt a pang of something that might have been pity, but it was quickly eclipsed by a dark, hungry envy. Sarah would be the next to enter the new process. She would get to experience the cleansing that Jenny had crafted.

"A higher calling," Jenny whispered.

It wouldn't be the mindless obedience of a drone. It would be the ecstatic surrender of a saint. The absolute yes which the virus was designed to instill.

Jenny walked to her bedroom, her movements slower now, more deliberate. She didn't undress. She sat on the edge of her perfectly made bed and stared at the wall. She began to time her breaths, slowing them down and focusing on the mechanical rise and fall of her chest.

One. Two. Three.

Rebecca was right. The architect was tired. Tired of being pulled between being the leader and the ****. Jenny wanted to enter the cage and lock the door. She had spent her life studying the vessel; perhaps it was time to become the wine.

***

Jenny Thorne sat in the dark for another three hours, motionless, waiting for her will to collapse. But it didn't happen.

Perhaps she was too well-constructed, too reinforced by years of ego and intellect. But a crack had definitely formed. She could see inside to the soul in which she had never believed. And she was burning to be empty.

Jenny swore she would facilitate Sarah’s acquisition with a new kind of fervour. Not because it was her job. Not even because she was a scientist. She would give her all because every step she took towards Sarah’s erasure was a step closer to her own.

Rather than sleeping, Jenny spent the rest of the night meditating on her deeper commitment to her task. And as the sun began to bleed over the horizon, painting the city in shades of bruised purple and grey, Jenny stood up. She didn’t feel tired at all. Rather, she felt focused, energised and irredeemably changed.

She had work to do. She had another girl to break. And then, if she was very, very lucky, she would eventually be allowed to break herself.