Greek System

After Graduation, Faye needed to go to college, to at least get the college degrees and doctorates that she needed to further her work.

For convenience, she chose the College of Idaho to be near the institute, and then she could get any advanced degrees after that. Also, she loved the Greek System over there – the sororities and such appealed to her girly-girl side. Carla and Michael, as well as her friends from Troy House, followed her to CI, except for Arianne who went back to France to study Design and Fashion, and Ashanti who had decided to continue her career as a model. Her old boyfriend, Craig, bowed out of their relationship – he couldn’t accept being just a part-time boyfriend. Just as well, because Craig probably couldn’t have taken the competition: in CI, Faye didn’t have any steady boyfriend or girlfriend, but she really did play the field. The closest Faye had to a boyfriend or girlfriend was Michael or Carla, or, maybe more accurately, Michael and Carla.

It was a wonderful and fulfilling life for Faye, working closely with Penny and Maia, finding more and more kids that had Kodikos scores of fifty or higher, expanding the number of Endowment schools, and developing more gene therapy cures.

But, other than that, Faye and her friends were enjoying their lives as college students, and Faye, for her part, was determined to make the most of this time. College life was great, although, Faye had to admit, being a “goddess” was even better.

Batch Fourteen

Faye found that the Endowment had, in the past, tried to raise people’s Kodikos scores by artificial means. Still, all of the programs they tried were failures, except for a small program initiated in a lab of theirs in Gothenburg, Sweden, and pilot-tested in a small town in the USA.

The cover was that it was a kind of vitamin supplement, and no one knew what it really was, but in all of their formulations, nothing was effective except for one case with their last batch – the fourteenth batch: a female test subject was affected. The epigenetic changes gave her a better metabolism and resistance to cardiovascular diseases, as well as resistance to most viral and bacterial infections. But during her trial program period, she became pregnant, and her children (they were twins) were also affected.

It was a set of fraternal twins – one a girl and one a boy. The girl was affected in a way similar to the mother, but as for the boy…

From all the reports they got, the boy underwent a spontaneous change just like Smith and Faye i.e. a gender change, but the difference was, his transition from boy to girl wasn’t triggered by the application of Ambrosia. His change was gradual and started from the day he was born and accelerated rapidly when he hit fifteen or sixteen. The thing was, his transition wasn’t complete.

He was showing most of the things that the Endowment’s higher-scoring graduates did, but overall, he was mostly similar to Faye. There were differences, though. For example, instead of being tall, the boy was barely above five feet. But the main issue was that his change to a girl was incomplete. That, and there was one other effect that never happened to any of their graduates: it was a kind of thing connected to his perspiration or something – they weren’t sure.

It seems that he affected other people, and made them extremely… friendly to the boy. However, the effect was not uniform – it was sometimes deadly. One of his friends (per the report Faye read, the name of that friend was Kyle), had some very bad psychological problems that may have been induced by the boy’s… pheromones. Kyle’s family moved so that he could be hear specialists who could help him.

The program was quickly suspended because it was an apparent failure, but when they discovered the mother and her children again (especially the boy), they were now looking at the program again, and trying to find out about the side effects unique to the boy. Faye ordered that the mother and children be tested to see if they had high Kodikos scores and to look into that boy that had the mental problems. It seemed that all three had relatively high Kodikos scores but was just a hair under fifty. Whether the scores were that way before or after the trial tests, no one knew.

Also, they discovered the family years after the program was ended. But before then…

To recoup some of their expenses, their lab in Sweden reformulated the batch fourteen formulation into an additive to a vitamin health supplement – they thought that it was harmless after all, and it had some great health benefits. It hasn’t gone mainstream yet, but before they could, they rediscovered the boy and his family.

For now, they stopped production of the health supplement, and were contemplating stopping the sale of the supplement. The company that they subcontracted to market and sell the health supplement didn’t stop selling it, however, as they waited for instructions. The Endowment’s research unit didn’t recall the remaining stock, so the retail company continued to sell the product. Per the expiration dates on their remaining stock, the health supplements would actually be safe to use for fifteen more years so the company had enough stock to last them a long time.

But in their worry that the health supplements may be recalled any minute now, they contacted their best customers, mostly small health supplement companies in the US, offering them discounts on bulk purchases. One of their best customers, a small nondescript clinic in New York City, actually placed an order for five thousand twelve-pill and thirty-pill bottles of the health supplement, both in the once-a-day and the once-a-month formulations. It was, by far, their largest single order. The order was placed by a “Sally Schmidt, RN,” and confirmed by her boss, Dr. Joeseph Muller, MD (based on the signature, it seems Dr. Muller liked to call himself “Dr. Joe”).

Other than that, however, the Endowment had no other programs that were even remotely successful. Faye ordered more research. In the meantime, she had asked Penny to establish more Endowment schools to allow them to find more of the students that they couldn’t help before.

Mr. Daimon, for his part, fast-tracked the repair and reconstruction of the damage at Delos and did his best to assist and console the families of the students who were hurt or had died. By then, Faye had learned that Mr. Daimon was the one who actually ran the school and not the principal. That way, he could remain under the radar. Faye also learned that all the Endowment schools had a “Daimon” who had different titles and positions and secretly oversaw the schools. For Delos, it was the vice principal. Whatever their original names, they were “Daimon” now. Faye should have realized something, given the name “Daimon.” For Troy, the daimon was actually Theo, Penny’s assistant.

There was a groundswell of goodwill and support from the communities for Delos and the other two schools that were attacked, and there was state legislation being contemplated now to address these mass shootings.

But other than that, the country and the rest of the world were none the wiser.

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