Research & Development

Chapter 1
Welcome to the Jungle

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Chapter Description: Contains males and females with monkey brains.

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It hadn’t been easy for Dan, climbing the corporate ladder so quickly. It had required a lot of work and a lot of sacrifice to be sure. But it had been what he’d wanted since he was barely out of primary school. He’d put aside social life at college and university to excel in academics. Then armed with a first class honours degree in international business he’d set off to take the corporate world by storm. He’d had to start like everyone else, in a shared cubical in accounts, but he unlike the rest of the worker bees, he hadn’t stayed there for long.

Six years after joining Merrell Group Dan had fought his way from that little cubical to a corner office on the fifteenth floor of the home office. At twenty-eight years old he was the youngest new executive in the whole company and he knew the board held high hopes for his future. Years of sixty and seventy hour work weeks, wining and dining clients and bosses and volunteering for every distasteful assignment offered up had finally paid off. Now Dan could stand in his own office, looking out at the spectacular view of the city’s skyline and know that he had arrived.

“It’s quite the view, isn’t it?” a deep voice intoned from behind him.

Dan turned to see Len Black standing in the doorway. The grey-haired fifty year old CFO had taken a personal interest in Dan’s rise. It was to this man that Dan owed so much. He gave his benefactor a wide grin and nodded. “It is a good view, but I’m here for more than that,” he said.

Black nodded seriously. “You’ve earned this Daniel. Why don’t you just try to enjoy it for once, instead of thinking about what comes next.”

Dan tried to look serious and accepting of his mentor’s advice, when in fact he had no intention of slowing up for a moment. In his mind the only goal worthy of him was CEO of the whole company. The older man seemed to see through his deception though. He shook his head and fished around in his pocket for a moment before drawing out what appeared to be a key card.

“I almost forgot Dan, this is for you,” Black declared, holding out the card.

Dan took it in his hand, eyeing the simple white card bearing the company logo and the black print words Special Clearance.

“What’s this?” he asked, confused.

“Now that you are an executive you have access to certain parts of the company others don’t even know exist. You can see our research and development labs,” Black explained.

Dan tried to look pleased by this news, though in fact he had no interest in the scientific side of the company. Perhaps Black was hoping he’d draw new inspiration from the R&D labs. If so he was on the wrong track, for the only thing Dan was really interested in was taking the very job Len Black held at the moment.

“I’ll keep that in mind, could be enlightening,” Dan offered with false enthusiasm.

“No Dan, don’t just keep it in mind, go down and see for yourself. I’m telling you, I want you to have a look at the labs, down the sub-basement. The stuff they’re doing down there, it’s... well it’s eye-opening. Just have a look, for me,” Black insisted.

Dan nodded awkwardly, wondering why Len was putting so much pressure on him about this. Could the old bastard be on to him? Did he know his plans? No, that was impossible. There was only one person who had any idea what he was really capable of, and she wouldn’t tell anyone. Dan decided that maybe there really was something interesting going on down in the sub-basement, something actually worth checking out.

**

The elevator descended rapidly into the depths beneath the building with Dan as its only passenger. He’d swiped his new key card through the black card reader and pressed the SB button for the secretive sub-basement. Now it was only a matter of seconds before he learned what the big deal was. Had they developed some sort of robot? Or perhaps they had secretly created a cure for cancer or a car that ran on water. With each passing second Dan was more eager to know what was down there.

With a loud ding the elevator arrived on the SB level and the doors spread apart. Dan stepped out into a sterile looking white corridor. Uncovered fluorescent lights gave off a harsh artificial glow. Pipes were visible running along the ceiling as well. As Dan walked slowly down the corridor, his wing tips’ steps echoing eerily on the linoleum floor, he couldn’t help but think he’d fallen for a silly joke. This didn’t look like any top secret lab to him. It looked like, well, a sub-basement. He imagined the only thing he’d find behind these walls was storage rooms and boilers.

In fact there were large metal doors every so often along the corridor, but each one Dan tried was locked and there was no place to swipe a key card. So he continued along until the corridor made a sharp ninety-degree turn to the right. Before him stretched another length of identical sub-basement corridor. Dan almost gave up right there, ready to write this whole thing off as a joke. But as he stood there shaking his head, one of the metallic doors halfway along the corridor swung open.

Dan froze as a tall man in a suit appeared from the doorway and headed down the corridor towards him. Dan immediately recognised it was Henry, the executive in charge of imports. The other executive walked briskly down the corridor towards Dan, smiling at the new executive. “Have fun,” he chuckled cryptically as he passed.

Deciding it wasn’t a joke after all, Dan made a bee-line for the door he’d seen Henry emerge from. It looked no different than any of the others. Dan wondered how he was meant to know this was the special one, how he was supposed to get in. He’d stood there pondering those things for no more than a couple seconds though, when the door popped open a crack, apparently by itself. Dan took a surprised step backwards, expecting someone, or something to emerge but nothing did. So he took a deep breath, and stepped forward, swinging the door open wide and stepping into the unknown.

As Dan shut the heavy metal door behind him he found himself in a whole other world from what he’d left. This was no dingy sub-basement storage room, that was for sure. He was now standing in what appeared to be a well-appointed waiting area, complete with comfortable looking seats along the walls, potted plants and a woman sitting at a large oak desk before him beckoning him forward. Behind her was a massively wide and tall corridor that seemed to stretch into the distance.

“Come along dear,” the woman urged him, waving him forward. She looked to be in her fifties, frumpy and unhappy as one would expect of a person stuck working in a sub-basement with no natural light day after day.

“I... I’m the new executive in charge of...” Dan began.

“Domestic sales, yes we know,” she finished for him. “We’ve been expecting you. Welcome to R&D dear.”

“You’ve certainly gone to great lengths to hide this place,” Dan commented.

“Yes, well given what we do down here, we don’t need too many prying eyes,” she told him.

“That top secret eh?”

“Oh honey, you have no idea,” she chuckled.

“So, can I just take a look around?” he asked hopefully.

“On your own? Oh goodness no. Doctor Fisher will be out in just a second to give you the tour.”

Dan nodded, glancing over at the chairs along the wall. This whole place had a secret spy feel to it and he really didn’t want to wait another moment. He imagined Dr Fisher as something like Q out of the James Bond movies. In a second he’d be showing him poison guns that looked like lapel pins and such. Dan could hardly wait.

But when the scientist appeared from a side door it turned out Fisher was not at all what Dan had expected. Instead of a grey-haired man Dr Fisher was a young woman perhaps a few years older that Dan. She had long brown hair and pretty girlish face. She did wear a white lab coat but she didn’t really look like the mad scientist type. She strode right past the reception desk and extended her hand to Dan.

“You must be the Daniel, I’m Laura Fisher,” she greeted.

She was a confident woman, well-educated and intelligent obviously. She spoke with a received pronunciation accent, often better known as BBC English. Dan silently wondered if it was natural or if she’d adopted it to mask a distasteful regional accent. He liked to consider himself a ladies’ man, and successful career women were certainly the toughest type of girl to conquer, but this one seemed out of even his league.

“Nice to meet you Laura,” Dan replied, shaking her hand and noting the firm grip.

“I’m sure you’re wondering what we have down here Daniel, and you need not be kept in suspense any longer. I am going to take you on a full tour of the place right now,” she explained.

Dan tried to contain his excitement, forcing himself to simply smile and nod. She nodded back, then led him past the reception desk and into the wide corridor. “Just follow me and stay close,” she directed.

As they walked along they reached a section where the whole left wall of the corridor became a series of windows. What was inside them seemed to defy logic. Here in frigid England, several floors underground in the basement of a multi-national company, was a lush jungle. It appeared to rise much higher than the windows showed, limiting their view to the floor of the mini rainforest. It was like a miniature version of the bio-dome.

“It takes a lot of energy for the climate control to keep it hot and humid enough for the vegetation in there. It also takes a lot of water to simulate the regular rain it needs. But we really do owe it to them,” Fisher explained.

“Them?” Dan responded.

Fisher didn’t say anything, just pointed to a section of the jungle to his right. Instantly his mouth dropped wide open. There hanging from a tree branch about six feet off the ground was a man in his mid-twenties swing back and forth from one arm, completely naked. Dan watched, transfixed, as the muscular nude man dropped from the branch to the dirt jungle floor and immediately went into a squatting position, resting back on his haunches with his fists resting on the ground before him. His eyes were wild and animalistic, completely lacking in human intelligence or reason.

“What happened to him?” Dan asked, able to see just from the man’s feral eyes that he was not acting but actually seemed to be thinking like a chimp or an ape of some sort.

But Dr Fisher only smiled and pointed to the left. “The same thing that happened to them,” she said.

Dan couldn’t believe he’d missed them before. They were camouflaged pretty well but still, with what they were doing, how had he not seen that? It was a man and a woman, each probably around thirty and both just as naked as the squatting young man. Their bare skin was smeared with dirt and grime, their hair uncombed, wild and filthy. The woman was on her hands and knees while the larger man thrust his stiff cock into her again and again. She stared blankly ahead with nothing but mindless ecstasy in her eyes, her face slack. The man’s face was equally slack, jaw loose as he made wild animal love to the woman.

As they went at it another dirty naked man of around twenty-five tottered out of the dense bush. He settled into a squat, watching them wordlessly, picking at his butt with one hand, then reaching up and scratching at his wild dirt-matted hair with the same fingers. His other hand began to stroke his quickly inflating penis and he was soon gustily masturbating himself as he watched them, drool trickling unheeded down his chin, his lips slack.

At once the older man screwing the woman exploded into her and the younger fellow watching them came all over his bare stomach. Both men arched their backs and stared vacantly up at the canopy above them as they experienced the bliss of release. Then all three human monkeys dropped to their butts in the dirt and began to make strange guttural noises at each other. The other young man joined them, running up hunched over with his hands just touching the ground and proceeding to hop up and down in place chattering with excitement.

Dr Fisher observed this and pulled out a walkie-talkie. “This is Fisher, the chimps in pen three are getting hungry, better put out their food now,” she said into it.

“Chimps?” Dan finally managed to say, tearing his eyes away from the scene before him for a moment.

“Yes Daniel, chimps. That’s what they are now, regardless of what they look like to you and I. I mean really, look at them. Are those people? Do you see intelligent, thinking humans like you and I?”

Dan looked back at the chimps, watching one spread his still gooey cum all over his stomach then rub in into his already dirt matted hair. No, they certainly didn’t look like thinking beings to him. But how on earth had this happened to them?

“No, you’re right of course. But... but how is this possible?”

“It started five years ago,” Fisher began. “We took on a contract from MI6. They wanted our pharmaceutical division to come up with more effective drugs for interrogations. It was promised that they would never be used on British citizens, only on known terrorists captured in Afghan or Iraq. You have to remember at that time things in Iraq were at their bleakest, civil war was breaking out, they were desperate.”

Dan nodded, trying to look understanding, but really just wanting to know what they’d created to make the scene before him possible.

“We went through a number of trials with various drugs, eventually focussing on one from Colombia. It was mainly used for very evil purposes by the cartels there. It was a crude compound which essentially removed free will. The cartels used it to make people torture themselves without even realising they were doing it. We thought it might be possible to alter the drug, make it more of a truth serum.

“In the end it turned out to be largely unsuccessful for that purpose. But we learned it had other, more lucrative uses. We called the end result a hypnospray, because to the layman it appears to have hypnotic effects. But that isn’t really true. You see in hypnosis a subject is never really out of control. They will not do anything they don’t want to do and the effects always wear off eventually. A true trance is difficult to maintain for an extended period of time without the aid of drugs.”

“So, they aren’t just hypnotised then?” Dan clarified.

“No, the drug we created is kept in the form of a spray, like a perfume. When the correct amount is inhaled the result is the subject’s mind is opened to suggestions like a sponge. This is similar to deep hypnosis but not identical. Only some people are good hypnotic subjects, the spray works on everyone exposed with equal effectiveness. Also the spray disables, or bypasses, all the mind’s safeguards. Suggestions rewire the brain. They become the absolute truth for the subject. If they are told they cannot read, their mind blocks off the section of the brain responsible for reading ability.”

Dan was awed by this information. He couldn’t believe that his company had developed such a powerful weapon. In fact he couldn’t understand how the Afghan war was continuing when they possessed such a thing.

“So why hasn’t the army just dropped clouds of this stuff in the tribal areas of Pakistan and told everyone they want to be peaceful?” Dan asked.

“Because the military has no idea we developed this drug. Neither does MI6 for that matter,” she replied coolly.

“What? But why the hell not? We’d make a fortune!”

“No, we wouldn’t. The military would make the existence of this drug classified and would keep us from selling it to anyone else.”

“So what? Military contracts are worth billions,” Dan reminded her.

“Only for weapons that we can actually use,” Fisher sighed. “This stuff is more dangerous than the nuclear bomb. Imagine if our enemies got it? It couldn’t be actually used, it would just be another deterrent like nukes. And nobody wants another arms race. If we turned it over the military would seize it, classify it and destroy all but a sample.”

Dan nodded, understanding the predicament now. “Okay, I think I get it now, but none of that explains this,” he insisted, gesturing to the jungle.

“Well when we were developing the drug we needed human test subjects of course. We got them from local universities. They volunteered for drug trials for extra money and course credits. Most were in medical or psych courses. Of course they had no idea what they were really signing up for.”

“I thought informed consent was the only legal way to do those trials,” Dan pointed out.

“Not when MI6 is paying the bill,” she corrected. “In any case we quickly learned there were some dangers with the drug. In the correct dosage the changes made are temporary, lasting only from a few hours to a week at most. The drug eventually leaves their system and the brain reverts to normal.

“However, repeated exposure to high dosages or a single overdose makes the changes to the brain permanent and creates resistance to any further use of the drug. Whatever suggestions were made are permanent and irreversible.”

“So you mean, those people were test subjects who got too big a dose?” Dan asked, horrified.

“Yes, for the most part. The two young men, the one picking his butt and the one hopping up and down and swinging from that branch, they were test subjects. We were experimenting with reverse evolution, but we hadn’t realised the dangers of repeated high doses. A week passed and they simply didn’t come out of their chimp mindsets. New doses with suggestions that they were humans didn’t have any effect. We took them for brain scans and found significant structural changes to their brains. Blood flow had decreased to certain areas, others like the speech centre, were total dead spots, already atrophied from disuse. They literally had the minds of chimps.”

Dan looked back at the nearest man, flapping his bottom lip up and down and baring his teeth at the other man. The poor guy would never recover and he’d been at university. He’d been an intelligent promising young man once and now he was a filthy naked animal and nothing more.

“Do they remember?”

“Sorry?”

“Do they remember that they used to be smart, used to be human?” Dan asked.

The scientist shrugged. “It’s impossible to know for sure without trying it yourself. We think they may have brief flashes of awareness and memory early on, but as the human parts of the brain atrophy they lose any self-awareness they might have had. But that’s only a theory.”

“What about the other two? You didn’t say they were test subjects,” Dan pointed out.

“No, they weren’t,” she agreed. “The woman there, she made a big mistake.”

“A mistake?” Dan asked, intrigued.

“She used to be Mr Black’s assistant, and a bit more than that if you get my drift.”

“Ah,” Dan nodded.

“Yes, and she thought maybe he wasn’t paying enough attention to her. She thought she could control him by threatening to go to his wife. As you can see that didn’t quite work out for her the way she planned.”

Dan watched the dark haired woman crouch behind the larger man, picking things out of his shaggy hair, bugs, maybe dirt, and putting them in her mouth, one after another. Dan shook his head with disgust. “Is it permanent for her too?”

“Oh yes, one very large dose given to her by Mr Black himself. Within minutes she couldn’t have told you her own name, let alone spilled the beans to his wife. He still comes down to have some fun with her on a pretty regular basis though. He says the wild animal sex is better than anything they had before and now there’s no danger of the wife finding out.”

A part of Dan found that reprehensible, but another part of him felt seriously aroused. He couldn’t believe how calmly she was discussing the permanent mind wipe of a grown woman. She was much colder than he had originally thought. He wondered how she justified her actions to herself. Being aroused by the idea and actually doing it were two very different things.

“What about the man?” he asked, trying to get his mind off the sadly reduced woman.

“Oh, you don’t recognise him? That’s Jim Morris, the CFO of Brandt Corp,” she said.

Dan looked back and gasped. She was right, he’d met that guy at a conference just a couple months ago. He just looked so different now, unclothed and filthy. His face even looked different, all the tense worry lines gone, his muscles so relaxed.

“Who did he piss off then?” Dan asked, wondering how no one had noticed his disappearance.

“No one. He’s paying to be there,” she replied.

“What?! So he knows what’s going on and he’s happy to wallow in dirt like that?”

“Oh goodness no, he has the mind of a simple little primate the same as the rest of them. The difference is that in about a day or two he’ll wake up and remember who he really is. Then he can go right back to work, having had a nice holiday from everything.”

“He pays to swing around naked and eat bugs out of people’s hair?”

“It’s a very relaxing and freeing experience apparently. And yes he pays very well to have that experience. And he certainly isn’t alone. Many executives from other companies pay big bucks to come here and use our product. Some of them want to use it on others, some want it used on themselves. Of course for executives from our own company the services are free. Just consider them another executive perk, like use of the corporate jet.”

Dan’s head was spinning from these revelations. “So there’s really a big market for execs who want to behave like or play with human monkeys?”

Now Dr Fisher let out a chuckle. “Oh no, no, not just monkeys. You’ve only seen one room Daniel. Please, come with me and we’ll continue the tour.”

 

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