Countdown to Babyhood

Lysander Neurotech had offices and research centres across the world, from New York to Seoul and from Berlin to Cape Town. But it had all started in Sweden, the birthplace of the company’s founder, Peter Lysander. It was where Mr Lysander kept a private estate overlooking the Baltic, akin to what Rob imagined a real-life Bond villain would own.

Driven by chauffeur from Stockholm, Rob was on his way to meet the man himself: the Mr Lysander. The gates were solid and black, flanked by a concrete perimeter wall standing at just under 20ft tall. In Swedish that Rob could not understand, the driver spoke into an intercom that flashed green before the gates parted to reveal the heart of the compound. A beautiful Italianate villa met his eyes immediately, with extensions in all directions not a blockier, more modern style. It was a strange cocktail of architectural styles that betrayed an abundance of wealth and dearth of taste. Rob wasn’t the sort to judge on such matters, though. His job was to present his findings and keep the British section of Lysander’s business in the big man’s good books.

From his view in the back of the car, Rob spied his welcoming party standing at the bottom of the steps to Lysander’s grand home. There was a butler, dressed traditionally in wing collar and black tie, with his hands clasped behind his back. Beside him, a maid with a skirt slightly too short so as to reveal a sagging nappy underneath stood fidgeting with her fingers. In front of them both was a middle-aged woman in a royal blue power suit, her honey blonde hair up in a high bun and her eyes a steely blue. She had a sharpness to her, eyeing up Rob like a prison warden watching a convict in the yard. When Rob had the door opened for him, he caught the older woman subtly turning and firmly tapping the maid’s jittery hands.

“Mr Morris, it is a pleasure.” When she spoke, there was no hint of pleasure. Her English was impeccable despite the thick Swedish accent. “If you come with me, I can show you to my husband’s office. The staff can grab your bags, please come.”

Rob was led on up the stairs, only stealing a quick glance to see his small suitcase being awkwardly handled by the waddling, padded maid. The butler was quick to rip it from her hands so as to stop her from dropping it. Rob perceived a slight whimper just after.

While the outside was 19th century, the interior of the villa was predominantly a modern affair with clean marble flooring and simple furnishings in neutral tones. The Bond villain lair comparison became evermore apt the deeper Rob explored. Through hallway after hallway, he was led, until the stern Mrs Lysander stopped at a pair of high oaken doors. They were out of place in a long hallway of plain grey and glass features, which perhaps made it obvious whose room they concealed.

“My husband is through there. Knock twice, be patient, and only enter when invited. My husband is a very busy man, Mr Morris, so I advise you not to interrupt him and to be precise when you speak. Understood?” Rob nodded like a timid schoolboy. But, just as he expected her to walk away, she passed him a note quickly into his open hand. “Don’t tell anyone. Follow me to my room when you’re done.”

Mrs Lysander excused herself and walked back down the hall they came from. Towards another set of doors, she walked until she suddenly disappeared around a corner. Once she was out of earshot, he knocked twice and waited. Ten seconds passed.

“Come in!” a disembodied voice boomed. Rob readily obliged.

Mr Lysander was sat hunched over his grand antique desk with his back to the floor-to-ceiling window that covered one whole wall of the room. The other three walls were covered in exquisitely detailed murals depicting elderly people bathing in a pool and then appearing out the other side as children.

“Come, come, please. Sit down, Robert,” Lysander beckoned.

When Rob finally sat down, he got a good look at the man who made all of this work possible. Peter Lysander was middle-aged yet kept himself well, with hardly an ounce of fat on him. He rubbed his shaved head with his left hand, which bore no wedding ring, and then stroked his delicately groomed yet impressive grey beard. Before him was a scattered pile of papers, some of which Rob recognised. His report had made it here and the chief himself was reading it. He couldn’t wait to tell Christian and the other guys back home.

“I’ve read your report, Robert, and I am very impressed. You say the regressed behaviours continue once the girl was pulled back out under control conditions, yes? This is a remarkable leap forward.” When he spoke, Lysander had genuine excitement in his voice. Clearly, this was more than business - this was pleasure. “How did your little one react?”

‘Little one’ had an affection to it that surprised Rob. She was his ‘little one’, even if the report said she was merely a test subject. Still, Mrs Lysander’s words rang in his ears, reminding him to remain professional. Her other words were pushed to the background for now.

“She… she managed a near-complete return of vocal control and only a very partial return of limb control. Emotionally, she remained essentially infantile and showed a certain level of hostility-…”

“Ah, yes, a terrible problem. She gets six months to relax and think about nothing and she blames you, I suppose. You can give her another six months regressed and see what she says then. Typical moaning, isn’t it?” Lysander wasn’t quite the rigorous martinet he had been led to believe. “But, well, we do it because we love them, don’t we?”

Did Rob love Chloe? He had to be convincing enough that she would be with him for four years, but that was an act. That was merely part of his job. If he was asked to list her lovable qualities back then, top of the list would have been her gullibility. But wasn’t she so much more lovable now? So sweet were her gurgles and babbles that he did think of her differently now. She had always been helpless with him but now at least their dynamic was an honest one.

“Speaking of which,” Lysander said as if surprised, causing Rob to jolt out of his contemplation. “You don’t mind if my wife joins us, do you? She can get a bit cranky about now.”

“Err, no, of course not,” Rob replied bemusedly. Lysander’s wording was strange but it didn’t take long for the truth behind it to be revealed. The boss clapped his hands together and pressed a buzzer on his desk, causing part of the wall to their right to retreat and reveal a well-lit passageway to the room next door.

Rob caught the whiff of baby powder before he saw her. Holding unsteadily to the butler’s hand was Mrs Lysander, though not as she had left him just ten minutes before. Trading in the power suit for a footed sleeper and the high bun for messy, disjointed pigtails. Between her lips was an adult-sized baby bottle of milk that she held shakily with her left hand. Halfway to the desk, she slipped from the butler’s grip and managed to stomp towards her husband with the gait of a newborn foal. He turned to her and, with a beaming smile, beckoned her to “come to daddy”.

She launched straight for him and he caught her, handling her carefully so he could sit her down in his lap. Mrs Lysander, whom Mr Lysander was now playfully calling ‘Baby Kat’, bounced up and down in her husband’s lap while squeezing her lips tightly around the teat of her bottle. She giggled into her shoulder and rested her head there for comfort. The forty-something woman was the very image of an adult baby girl: joyful, brainless, and utterly besotted with the man she thought of as her ‘daddy’. Rob knew that look well and even spied something of Baby Chlo in Kat Lysander.

“Your wife… your little one… she wasn’t very little a few minutes ago.” Mrs Lysander slurped quieter now and the bouncing had subsided to a gentle rocking.

“Katarina goes in and out, sometimes it’s a few minutes or sometimes it’s a few days. I was surprised she was in such a good state to meet you, honestly.”

Rob knew of other projects, but every division of the company was kept well away from the others. The left hand never knew what the right hand was doing. As it turned out, the right hand had created a form of regression that functioned like narcolepsy.

“How did she end up… like this?” Rob gestured to the woman now half-asleep on Lysander’s shoulder. The boss took the bottle from his wife’s mouth and, with her infantile urges, popped her thumb into her mouth as a replacement.

“Katarina and I were business partners before marriage, you see, and I was drunk on love. She was drunk on money and power and all these things. I could see it more and more in women all over the world, but I could especially see it in her.” He paused a moment and pressed the buzzer again, only for the butler and maid to come in with an adult-sized pram for Mrs Lysander’s transportation back to her nursery. “Sorry, where was I? Oh yes, Kat. Yes, when she had me in her claws, she wanted to walk away with half of everything. She thought I had ethical problems… can you believe that?”

They both shared a laugh at the outrageous idea.

“As you can imagine, I wasn’t going to allow all my work to be destroyed for her sake. But I also couldn’t let her go. She was the first - the chemists I trusted gave me a pill for compliance. They said it would be permanent but it wore off within hours, so then I asked them for another and gave it to her and then she became as she is now,” Lysander explained. “She gave you a piece of paper, didn’t she? Let me see if it’s like the others.”

Rob complied and handed Mrs Lysander’s note to his boss, who considered it for a second and then chucked it into the waste bin under his desk.

“She thinks she’s still plotting against me,” he chuckled softly, “and she thinks I don’t know what’s going on. After she wakes up from her little time, she forgets it all and goes right back to scheming. She thinks the nursery is just for the maid - the same maid she plays with when she regresses. It’s all so silly of her, but we do what we do because we love them, don’t we? Even if they are silly, we love them for it.”

Peter Lysander rose from his chair and invited Rob to join him at the glass wall behind his desk. The view down the hill and out to the sea was a breathtaking one, as the sun dimmed in the distance and cast a reddish pink light over the Baltic. Rob stood beside his boss and looked out at the colour dancing on the gentle waves. All was calm and right with the world.

“I’m not a gender extremist, Robert. I’m a gender realist and I suspect you are too, so let me get your advice. The board recommended we send the Alexa Sweet countdown recordings to these silly incel groups to play in public. What does that get me?” Rob had been waiting for this meeting for weeks and now he had his chance to make his case.

“We have 60,000 little ones from a stadium full of people. Playing a speaker on a crowded bus will net you something like five a go, maximum, and posting it online will work once before the video is taken down. You can play whack-a-mole for the next fifteen years and maybe get another 60,000 if you’re lucky. But, Mr Lysander, we-…”

“Call me Peter. Carry on,” Lysander interjected curtly.

“Peter, we have other options. We started Project Popstar with a small team and a shoestring budget, but one brainwashed popstar and a couple of hit albums later and we have successfully put the world on high alert. Nobody suspects Lysander is restoring civilisation behind the scenes and that gives us total cover… for Project Politician.” Rob ended with a flourish, but Peter didn’t react.

“I like you, Rob, I really do. If I could rig an American presidential election on my own, I would have done years ago,” he said as he turned to Rob with a disappointed look on his face. For a moment, Rob thought he had lost him, but he knew what was at stake: not just the respect of his colleagues but the very survival of gendered civilisation itself. He was a true believer in the mission as much as he was a realist, just like Peter, and he was determined to make their dream a reality.

“With half the money it would take to rig a U.S. presidential election, I could get us a female British Prime Minister. She wouldn’t even need that much time: get a senior female MP retrained on our programme, let the current Prime Minister run his course, and then help position our girl as the next in line. Start the subliminals early, get loyal people in key positions, give it a few months, and then just whack a new countdown on the emergency broadcast system.” Peter placed an affirming hand on Rob’s shoulder.

“And what does that get me?”

“It took us seven years to get 60,000 girls. If I had the same resources plus a fraction more for the expenses fund, I could get you upwards of 20million girls in seven months.” Peter pulled Rob in close and gave him a tight hug from the side.

“Robert, my friend, you are an example of true masculine genius.”