It never is.

I slept almost a full day after finally having the planets align and my chemical puzzle finally fell into place. I slept like the dead. I really truly did. I couldn't believe my luck! I had finally accomplished the task that had taken almost 10 years to accomplish. I had created a vicious little **** that would turn people into my needy servants. All the time I had been bullied in high school. All of the stunningly beautiful women that refused to even give me a nanosecond of their time. Even my own family told me that I wasn't good enough because I was not into sports, and did not like to fight. I was the first Ph.D. in the family, and it was good to be king! I could have chosen to take the simple route and get myself some gold digger, but I had wanted more. I always wanted more! I deserved more! I deserved the world!

When I finally woke the following day, which was almost seven in the evening, I groggily put to work brewing coffee and going through my daily routine. I worked out for almost an hour, took a quick glance at the world news while sipping on my coffee, and then I finished it off by taking a cool shower. I then turned off the lights and headed into the basement to get to work.

Instead of working on Epic, I simply went through the process of creating more. I wanted to have enough for 25 people to start with, with enough of a supply of the second and third doses that I would be able to keep all 25 people supplied for 5 years. Thankfully, I had all of the ingredients and took fairly minimal time to get my machines to spit out the amount that I needed. It helped that most of my lab was automated with the latest and greatest technology so that I could avoid either doing all of the work or having to have an assistant.

Once everything was moving I went to my office, a small 50 by 50 glass enclosure at the far end of the lab (Yes, I made an office just like you would see at a normal business. It even doubled as a clean room in case chemicals got out into the main lab. I had a ridiculous amount of safeguards in place, but somewhere to hide when the lab was venting was a critical need). I sat down and logged into my computer (A high-end laptop of course. Portability would be key if I was ever caught).

I opened my note app and started to type notes. I was desperately trying to start coming up with test criteria, and qualifications for people to test my substance on. I was excessively wealthy so the easiest route was to hire an employee, but there were some substantial drawbacks to that. I could kidnap a homeless person, or a prostitute, but again substantial drawbacks. I lived as a recluse essentially, only going out for groceries once a week or so, and even then I tended to just have people deliver them to me.

It only took a few minutes for you to start focusing more on the drawbacks than the benefits of the potential options. A homeless person or prostitute would likely have additional health factors that would all but invalidate testing. Hiring an employee was likely the best route, you could even potentially get an intern which would minimize the cost expenditure. It would be for the best, but I needed to screen them extremely closely prior to using them as a subject. I would need a good amount of health, and mental health data. Which was my next big issue.

I would not want to try and illegally obtain the information, and these were things that were quite literally in the red light zone for employers to ask for. I also needed to make sure that the person would be a good fit socially. I needed someone who was hyper work oriented to the point where their own family rarely heard from them, if at all. There were just so many factors that I would need to consider.

I took my new problems and began to put together a fairly substantial social media scraping algorithm that I would want to use for screening purposes. I went a step further and added a data entry interface to ensure that I could scan, or type in notes and data. I built out forms for a ton of different things, and then finally put it all together, linked a server and database, and it was ready to go. I aimed my scraper at resume posting communities and social media that focused on your profession. I then built out a profile on a number of different job boards and began the recruiting postings there. It cost me a bit, but I knew it would yield a high number of applicants. You see I had decided that I would provide a paid internship at about 20% higher than industry standards for an entry-level employee. I went back to my scraping application and prepped another feature to sort the job boards using my account to filter the applications into 1 through 5-star ratings so that I had somewhere to start.

With all of my tasks complete I checked the clock and realized that it was almost 10 in the morning so I turned off my monitor, shut down my lights, and headed to the kitchen to eat dinner, and shortly after that fall into bed, only to get back to the grind the following day.

I am sure all of the technobabble is boring you, but trust and believe that we will be getting into the meat of the story shortly. There is so much that I want to tell you.

But that is for another time.