The Ends Justify the Means

My problem back then was simple. Like any college student, I needed money.
Most of the ways to get money involved more work than I was willing to do -
studying enough to keep a passing average cut into my party time enough. What's
a girl to do?

That's when I started looking at the various offers posted in the student
center. Most of them were just normal jobs, not what I wanted at all. But
there was one from a Dr. Weissman in the psychology department that looked
promising. Cooperating in some kind of psychology experiment, how bad could it
be? At worst, I'd get a few bad trips on some weird drugs, most likely though
I'd just answer some questions. It wasn't like I hadn't done the same thing
before, and if the money wasn't great, it was more than nothing.

Dr. Weissman turned out to be a bit creepy, with his thick glasses and unkempt
tufts of hair, but he was polite enough, and glad to have another test subject.
He got a little intense when he was trying to explain exactly what he was trying
to prove, but he calmed down a bit once he figured out that he was going way
over my head. Eventually, his explanation got simple enough for even a second
year English Lit major who'd barely passed Biology to understand. He was going
to give me and several others injections of a drug he had developed that would
make our cells more permeable to life energy. Even barely passing Biology, I
thought that the life energy thing seemed crackpot, but he wasn't paying me to
critique his science, only to take the shot and report to him on the results.
All I cared about was seeing that his previous experiments with smaller doses of
the drug hadn't had any harmful effects - or any effects at all, as he
reluctantly admitted.

That Friday night, I got my shot and settled down in my bed - or rather, the
hospital bed he'd set up in one of the side rooms off of his lab. All of us got
rooms of our own, under video and audio surveillance. I studied for a while
before finally going to bed, wearing thick flannel pajamas - I wasn't doing this
to give Dr. Weissman or his grad students a free peep-show, not that my figure
was good enough to really get them excited. I knew guys well enough to know
that it didn't much matter how plain the girl, if she wasn't actually ugly and
they had a chance to sneak a peek, they would.

The less said about my dreams that night, the better. I didn't understand
anything in them, which isn't surprising - they were bizarre. I still don't,
which is considerably more surprising, considering what I have become.

In the morning, Dean, one of Dr. Weissman's grad students came to me when I woke
up and asked me if I'd had any unusual experiences in my sleep. As I told him
about my dreams, at least as much as I could, I kept looking at his hands as he
wrote notes on his clipboard. They seemed strangely to draw me. No, it wasn't
his hands, it was him. Something about him seemed immensely desirable - not
quite sexually, but not quite anything else. I had to fight to avoid reaching
out to him, touching him anywhere - his hands, his face, anywhere I could touch
bare skin.

It was a fight I lost. Before I even realized what I was doing, I reached over
and grabbed his hand, pencil and all.

"What are you doing?" he demanded, startled. It was the last thing he ever
said.

As soon as I touched him, I could feel. . . something. Something nice.
Something good. Something inside him, that I wanted. I pulled on it, sucked on
it, drew it into me, and as it filled me, I felt better than I had ever felt
before. I felt healthy, alive and aware in a way I had never felt before.
Every sense was sharper, every thought clearer, every movement more graceful,
every particle of my being felt filled with vigor and strength. Oh, yes, the
strength.

I sat there for a few seconds as I just relaxed into the high, a feeling of both
immense energy and pure blissful relaxation, before I noticed what had happened
to Dean. He had been a young man before, even kind of cute. Now he wasn't
cute, and he didn't look young. He looked like a dessicated mummy, dried out
and brittle. Even as I noticed the change, he just collapsed into a pile of
dust.

I should have felt shock. I should of felt horror.

What I felt was. . . hunger. I wanted more. I wanted to feel that way again.
I wanted to feel even better. Some fragments of Dean's knowledge had come in
with everything else, and I knew what had happened. My cells really were more
permeable to life energy. Now I could draw it into myself from other people,
gaining everything they had in the process. I could gain their strength and
health, intelligence, their senses, some of their memories, even their beauty
and emotional intensity. There might well be no limit to what I could become,
if I drained more people.

There was no real question of that, of course. I was going to drain more
people.

The grad students were first, I got to them as they moved through the lab,
interviewing the rest of the people who had received their injections that
night. There were only two left now that Dean was gone, and it didn't take me
more than a moment to drain them both. I made sure to keep as much of their
memories about Dr. Weissman's experiment as I could - not very much, but enough.
Of the twelve students in this batch, six had gotten placebos. Of the six who
had gotten real shots, I was special. The grads didn't know why, but I had been
given a different injection - a new formula, and in a much higher concentration.
I should have been angry, but with the way things had turned out, I was just as
glad. None of the other subjects was like me - that meant they were all food.

After the first eight, the rest tried to escape. They had no chance, of course
- I was so much stronger and faster and smarter than them at that point it was
almost embarassing. I amused myself by chasing the last two around until they
were panting with exhaustion - I wasn't even short of breath. Then I drained
them. They didn't struggle much. Once they were cornered and turned to look at
me clearly, they didn't seem to want to fight. The beauty of thirteen people is
a bit overhwelming to mere mortals, even if they were none of them truly
exceptional.

You'd think with the intellect of fifteen people in my skull, I would have
predicted what was coming, but I was distracted. Nobody had ever felt this good
before in all of history. I had strength and vitality, senses and intellect,
passion and emotional intensity beyond what any human before me could ever
claim. I was plainly a superwoman, and I had no intention of stopping. I was
much too busy admiring myself, what I had become, to spare any thought for
anybody else.

Dr. Weissman, however, was not an idiot. I was the culmination of his
scientific career, the proof of every theory his colleagues had called
"crackpot", but I was also plainly dangerous. He had been watching the whole
affair over closed circuit video cameras installed in the lab, but he wasn't
there. It hadn't been fear of creating an unstoppable superwoman, merely
laziness on his part and a disinterest in getting up early on Saturday, but it
served him well. He remotely triggered the biohazard alert for the lab, and
heavy steel doors closed every potential exit from the building.

We had a long talk over the videophone on his computer - the lab was still on
the campus local net, but Weissman had been a busy doctor - he had actually
managed to persuade the university authorities that I was dangerous, and they'd
taken some pretty well thought out steps to contain me. Even with the strength
of fifteen people, I couldn't batter my way past the quarantine doors, and as
soon as they had shut, he'd had guards cut the control leads to the opening
mechanisms so I couldn't hack the system and open them back up. He'd also had
the local net completely disconnected from the internet, so I couldn't access
anything off campus. In fact, as I explored, I noticed that he had
systematically cut me off from everything but his videophone in his office in
the next building over.

I started searching the building for anything I could use to get out. I had
some pretty good plans formed - biology labs have some chemicals you can use to
make some pretty hefty explosives if you're even slightly clever, and I was more
than slightly clever - when fate dealt me another hand.

I was carrying some vats of chemicals you really don't want to know about down a
hall when I felt something. It was like what I'd first felt when Dean had sat
down across from me, only stronger. In fact, it was like what I'd felt when I'd
touched him, only I wasn't touching anybody.

It took all the willpower I'd taken from my first fourteen victims to not drink
deep and hard of the life force I felt, but I managed it. The wall to my left
was an exterior wall, and I was feeling the life of the groundskeeper trimming a
hedge just on the other side of it - at least, that's what my superhuman hearing
told me. I knew I could drain him, and I wasn't touching him at all.

That changed things a lot. There might not be a need for any risky explosions.
Explosions can kill people, and while I was confident that I would survive,
every person I killed with an improvised bomb was a person I couldn't drain.
There were only six billion people out there, I didn't want to waste even one of
them.

I quickly walked (well, it would look like an impossibly fast dead sprint to a
mere mortal) a circuit around the building, and figured out my range. It was
only a few yards, but that was more than it had been before I'd drained the
grads and my fellow test subjects. Obviously, every person I drained improved
my range - how much, I couldn't say for sure, not having enough data points to
plot a useful projection.

I had a few more conversations with Dr. Weissman while I waited for my chance.
Figuring that if he wanted to cut me off from outside, I would cut him off from
inside, I had already removed all the security cameras, so he saw only what I
wanted him to see. It wasn't that hard to convince him that the effects were
wearing off - that I was getting weaker and was desperate to drain more people.

Well, the desperate part was genuine enough. I was already hopelessly addicted
to the ultimate drug, pure uncut life force, and I had no intention of going
cold turkey. But I wasn't getting weaker, even if I wasn't getting stronger
either. Dr. Weissman decided, with my careful manipulation, that I could be
contained by an appropriate application of armed force. He had a SWAT team
called in, with orders to shoot to kill if I couldn't be restrained. He thought
I didn't know that he had also gotten the governor to send in a unit of the
national guard, and of course, the building was surrounded by campus police
keeping curious students away.

A cornucopia, a smorgasbord, to my new hunger.

The SWAT team was just about to blow one of the doors open with a shaped charge
when I drained them all. There were twenty of them in range. It was the first
time I'd had an orgasm from draining, but then, I'd always drained one at a time
before. It hit me like a truck, striking me down, but instead of hurting me, it
made me better. Stronger, faster, smarter, keener, just plain better. I
recovered almost instantly, discovering that among the gifts I received from my
victims was pheromonal intensity. I could tell with my superhuman sense of
smell that by this point just smelling my juices would put any mortal human in a
trance of irresistable lust.

With my powers more than doubled, I ripped the quarantine door down, and raced
out faster than the campus guards could track. I needn't have bothered, though.
I hadn't had enough data before to discover just how my draining range increased
with each victim, only that it did. The answer was, it increased exponentially.
What had required physical contact in the beginning and had been limited to a
few yards after fourteen victims had a range of almost a mile now.

I drained the whole campus. Six thousand people, students, national guardsmen,
faculty and staff, visitors, businessmen just outside camput, everybody.

To call my previous experience orgasmic was now shown to be irreverent. A pure
ecstasy of power and pleasure coursed through me. There was no sight or sound,
no taste or scent or touch, there was only bliss, joy, rapture - words do not
exist in this or any other language to explain what I felt. Exaltation comes
closest, as I was truly lifted from the last tattered remnants of my prior
mortal state to the borders of ultimate power, infinite vigor, and supreme
consciousness.

Physically, I collapsed in a seizure of pure joy. Hands that could now liquefy
steel caressed flesh far more durable than any metal, stroking perfect breasts,
a flat stomach, a wet pussy gushing fluids whose scent and taste were themselves
a greater pleasure than any human could endure. The catalog of my charms, like
that of my powers, could no longer be described, but my mind had expanded to
such a degree that I, at least, could comprehend them. My joyous convulsions
were indistinguishable to the rest of the city from an earthquake, my might
invoking ripples in the bedrock that underlay the city, the vibrations bursting
plumbing pipes, tearing down electical power and telephone lines. I was a human
disaster area, and I didn't care.

With my new expanded range, which could reach across the continent now, I
drained the city. I was prepared for the experience now, and remained upright
and serene, even as raw power drove me to new and undreamed heights. More than
a million people had now had their life force drained and concentrated into one
single divine being: myself.

I reached out to the entire planet. . . and stopped.

If I drained them all, there would be nobody left to drain.

The solution, of course, was obvious.

To see me was to adore me. To witness the least demonstration of my power was
to worship what I had become. The human species has no defense against a being
like myself, and it was a matter of utter trivialty to take over the world. I
had merely to walk through a town to convert everybody in it to my worship; only
to speak to have my words slavishly heeded and obeyed.

You know the rest of the story, of course. How I unified the world under my
benevolent rule, abolishing in the process disease, hunger, war, and crime. How
I established the custom that games and contests of every variety, testing every
form of athletic and intellectual and even sexual prowess would be held
regularly, the winners to come to me, to join the Thousand, my personal servants
and most closely loved Priests. They would contribute their genes to the next
generation, as widely as possible, until eventually they were displaced by those
even more capable. Then I would take them and drain them.

It was practically a starvation diet at first, of course - only about three a
day were displaced, and I didn't dare any mass drainings for fear that I would
lose control and drain everybody. But genetic engineering was well within my
capabilities, and soon enough I had a new batch of worshippers. They were
stronger, faster, tougher, and smarter than those who came before. And I kept
improving them.

The first telepaths could have been tricky, but they were no more immune to my
divine beauty and charisma than anybody else. Even knowing my full intention to
consume them to take on their talents, they offered themselves willingly.
Others followed, telekinetics and clairvoyants and precognitives and others with
talents even stranger. Once I was sure of my own supremacy in all of them, I
allowed those talents to enter the general population. The results, over time,
have been more impressive than you may realize.

Did you know that you are more than ten thousand times stronger, faster,
tougher, and smarter than any human alive when I was born? That humans in that
bygone age measured their lives in years to the millennia expected today? It is
a forgotten age, and well forgotten at that. The only thing that matters to
come from that age is me - also the only thing that matters in this age, for
even as you have grown ten thousandfold from the humans of that time, I have
grown as much from the mere goddess I was back then.

And so I have told you, as I tell every one of my Thousand, when the day comes
that he is displaced and comes to me for his final joining. I see you come to
me willingly, and well you should, for truly, you are becoming part of something
far far greater than any other fate you could ever hope for. I love you, my
Priest, now come to join me, forever.

fats wrote: in my bank of stories there is something along these lines, i have no idea who wrote it so i'll post it here rather than the library.

fats