Chapter 1: The Tease

24 April 2025

The soft hum of the mini-fridge served as a counterpoint to the clickety-clack of Dr. Jennifer Thorne’s frantic typing. She hunched over her keyboard as she input the last set of findings into her abstract, drawn from the last eleven… no, make that twelve… hours of her researching obsession.

Today’s work with the vials and slides and petri dishes began when the sun was trying to burn through the overcast over the River Thames. Now, outside the windows of the lab, the London skyline was blurring into a twilight of purples and greys. The tourists and theatre-goers had queued up outside the Cambridge Theatre at the end of the street, while other Londoners were finishing off their night at Seven Dials with cocktails and overpriced dinners. But inside, the world was reduced to the neon glow of her monitors and the streams of data scrolling across them.

Jenny’s speciality was biology, and particularly virology. For years, she had been studying how particular packets of proteins, enzymes, and other combinations of primordial soup came together to become tiny clusters of infectious survivors, and what those clusters did to the hosts they hitched rides upon. She would freely admit to being fascinated at how quickly and dramatically viruses could evolve, and shift, and travel throughout biospheres, regions, and species.

Several of her colleagues from the University of Glasgow had gone on to make breakthroughs in mRNA research, searching for the next COVID-19, and combatting bird flu and monkeypox and diseases that hadn’t even been reported outside of obscure medical journals. They were household names, or in the running for Nobel Prizes, or had been gobbled up by pharmaceutical conglomerates for seven-figure salaries and share options.

Jenny had eschewed all of that when she elected to do her post-doc research into a virus which had been mistakenly identified as a sexually transmitted disease. One of her male colleagues derisively called it a “nympho bug,” because some of the initial data indicated that the few women who had been infected by it exhibited heightened sexual arousal. But Jenny saw something far more peculiar, and felt driven to delve into it.

What she had found two years earlier was enough to make her pass up the prospect of a $500,000 package from Merck in the States, or a lecture chair at Imperial with an expense-paid flat in Chelsea. The virus was… elegant, effective, and amazing. But it was also a fucking challenge.

For one thing, it refused to be sequenced. Or more particularly, it was evading sequencing. Jenny felt as though the virus was hiding its secrets from her. She tried to tempt it with different mixtures of proteins and enzymes and goodness knows what else, but it didn’t want to be cracked.

The lack of results cost her one job, and then another. She eventually found herself begging the friend of a friend to get her a seat at what could charitably be called a co-op lab in a rundown multilevel building on Shelton Street, in the West End. Jenny had secured one more grant, which would hopefully fund her research for another 12 to 18 months. But she didn’t want to think about what might happen if she couldn’t figure out why this virus affected its hosts the way that it did.

The other problem was that she had never heard of, much less encountered, a virus which was only willing to infect women. Jenny knew that she was far too prone to humanising her research subject, but what the actual fuck? She would have sworn that when she tossed a sample of the viral DNA into a culture sample taken from a man, that the virus was blowing a raspberry and telling her to go bugger off. Yet when the exact same DNA was introduced to a culture sample taken from a woman, the virus acted like it had been checked into a suite at Claridge’s and was getting a spa treatment.

This was not normal.

Jenny was sure that she was on the verge of something, but she just couldn’t make the breakthrough she was seeking. So she resorted to something she swore she would never ever do.

She wrote a partial progress summary, and prepared to post it into an online forum for practitioners. And as she polished the last paragraph of the abstract, she took a moment to intentionally straighten up in her desk chair, feeling the effects that months of frustration and weeks of distress had worked upon her back. Mum would be hacked off by my posture, she thought to herself.

She knew her colleagues mostly looked down upon these fora. She looked down on them too. People who could actually do science published in journals. These were for people who couldn’t.

But she felt she was hitting a dead end, and she needed to collaborate. If she couldn’t get peer reviewed through the conventional channels, maybe this stab in the dark might get her something useful.

“Fuck me,” Jenny sighed as she pressed send. She posted the abstract summarising what she called the “Striptease Virus.” She couldn’t think of a better way of explaining its behaviour. The virus was showing its stuff, but when it came time for the big scientific reveal… it was demanding that she slip another fiver into its protein-wrapped g-string.

She included her name and her contact information on the acknowledgements, as she was required to do. She had never – NEVER – felt so low as she did after seeing the abstract post to the site. But maybe someone else could help her figure it out, because she knew as sure as anything that this was the research that was going to change her life.

The days and weeks that followed were horrible. The rude comments from the people she had never met before were awful enough. But the slights from the people who did know her cut particularly deep.

Those people had no idea how important this research was, and they couldn’t possibly appreciate how certain she was that this was THE ONE. So they could look down their noses, and treat her like she was beneath them now. They could sod off for all she cared.

Jenny collected herself. She knew that she did care. But rather than being overly chuffed by the criticism and the derision, she let it fuel her more. Someday, when she cracked this bloody code, she’d show them all.

***

It was almost two months to the day from when she had posted her abstract that she had her first breakthrough. One of the few commenters on the forum who offered something positive had suggested that perhaps the data she had charted regarding sexual arousal wasn’t just an effect. She – well, Jenny assumed it was a she from the insight – suggested that maybe the sexual arousal was causing the virus to respond too.

Jenny had to admit that she had never thought about it in those terms. Yes, a virus could be symbiotic. But who had ever heard of a virus which encouraged its host to do things, and then rewarded the host for the action? That suggested something like intelligence.

Either that, or that the virus wasn’t occurring naturally.

That idea made Jenny’s skin crawl.

A weaponised sexual target.

At that moment, Jenny considered binning the whole project. But she just couldn’t. It was too many years, and too much work, and she was that close. So she followed the thought to whatever natural conclusion it could produce. How could she use the idea of arousal as a stimulus, rather than a response?

She was a brilliant scientist and researcher, but Jenny lacked advanced programming skills. She couldn’t even conceptualise how one would program a simulation for arousal to tease the virus. Nor did she have the budget to hire someone who possibly could. So she had to consider something a little more… edgy? Risky? Insane?

It was that thought which led her to cue up one of the dirty videos she had found when surfing the naughty parts of the Internet – a female doctor who was hypnotised by a male patient. Jenny didn’t have a good reason why this scenario did something for her, but it did. She had never been hypnotised… never even gone to a hypnosis show. Why would I want to see people acting out on stage, or clucking like a chicken?

There was none of that in the video though. After putting her under, the patient made the doctor strip. While she was wearing nothing but her lab coat, her stethoscope, and a dumb smile, he fucked her in her office. She moaned that he was her Master, and she was his hypnoslave.

That wasn’t even the part that got Jenny going. No, the good part was that he told her that he wanted her to hypnotise her female patients for him. He gave her a special spiral with a flashing light. All she had to do was hold it in front of her patient’s face and push a button. The light would flash, and the spiral would spin, and the woman watching the ridiculous device would get all mushy in the head. “Yes, Doctor,” she would say. “Of course I will obey you.”

That scene made an intense connection in her mind with the research she was performing. Jenny let herself think about being the doctor, only rather than a stupid spiral, the virus was taking away her free will. And next, she would use it to take away the free will of other women, and show them where they truly belonged. That hit just the right buttons for her, and she was soaking herself within sixty seconds.

Jenny allowed herself to bask in the ecstasy of the deluded fantasy, and then turned full bore back to the science in her brain. With her fingers still coated in her arousal, she took the top off a nearby jar and pulled out a swab stick. She unceremoniously took a musky-scented sample from between her thighs. Then, after quickly getting her knickers back into place under her skirt, she made her way to the sample of the virus, and gave it a little bath with her juices.

“Holy fuck,” were the first words out of Jenny’s mouth as she watched the results. There were electric results. And that wasn’t even a metaphor. It was as if the virus was generating its own electric field all of a sudden.

The experiment was a fucking success. So what better way to explore than to perform additional experiments? Over the next three days, Jenny had half a dozen wank sessions, followed by taking samples to set up the virus under an array of observational and interpretive units. If anything, the more she tested, the stronger the results became. She swore that after one particularly nice session, the virus culture started to glow.

Jenny was ecstatic about the behaviours she had been able to coax from the virus, but for the life of her, she still couldn’t break it down and decode it. And without that, she felt like all she could do was look at it and watch it as it had its fun.