The Miracle Milk
Days 3 – 5
Day 3...I was doing my rounds as usual, but when the time came to visit Lady Sophia and Peter, the air became really hot somehow. Sure, the sun was piercing between the clouds, but not so much I should have grown uncomfortable in my sweater. But grow uncomfortable I did, to the point I had no choice but to resort to my summer clothing, a full-sleeve, loose t-shirt. This thankfully did the trick, and I went to my last and most generous customer.
She seemed surprised when she looked at me. The shirt, right? Fair enough. Anyway...I gave her the milk bottle she asked me. She only had one question this time around.
“Juliet, can you confirm none of the children you nursed developed any side effects?”
“Oh, I c-c-can g-guarantee it. Only the families most stricken by the economic crisis hired me at first. Like the M-MacGiverns. They used to live off the I-Internet, poor g-guys. But more and more families hired me as it became c-c-clear the only results of my breast m-m-milk was strong, healthy babies. I always feared side ef-ffects, but none whatsoever came in more than a year. I hate my breasts, but I can’t deny this milk is a boon. I want it gone, but...That would be s-self-fish, wouldn’t it?”
“...Technically yes” Answered Lady Sofia with a strangely apologetic tone, “But no matter the benefits, you deserve a cure. The Syndrome can always evolve and become lethal, if nothing else.”
“You’re right, th-thanks. If that’s the case, I want the cure. B-b-badly. I can’t st-t-tand these things anym-mo-m-more. Every day I fear the g-g-guys always squatting on my ap-p-partment b-building’s porch are gonna stop asking me to ‘milk our cocks with those udders, butterface’ when they’re just not c-calling me a f-f-freak. One d-day they’ll at-t-t-tack me, I kn-n-now it. Please...”
“Of course. I will do my best. Now, if you please?”
“Yes, of c-course. Come here lil’ P-Peter!”
Hope’s really something. I always relax when I nurse, but this time around, I went and had an orgasm. I came to expect this freaky thing from the milking machines, but a baby? Not much else happened this day.
Sophia Garland’s research notes
Case: Juliet Ferry, day 3
I cannot decide whether today’s results were great or terrible news.
How should I start...By the good news, probably. Peter’s second blood sample showed resistance to extraplanar particles on par with dangerous, experimental treatments. Disregard “good” news, this is outstanding. I checked with the early customers she mentioned...Their daughter is growing well and is perfectly healthy. Although I must keep doubting, the evidence is rather eloquent...We have a potential Syndrome vaccine on our hands. And Juliet wants to get rid of it.
She has any right to, but...
I don’t know. I don’t know what to write here. That my little test was successful and that she did take a less revealing outfit? This makes things a thousand times worse. I might, and by might I mean in all probability could, take advantage of her nursing trance and order her to change her mind. To become the vaccine humanity needs. She probably wouldn’t even realize it but...I won’t kid myself. This would be nothing short of evil to do that to her. I can’t keep the pretense of being a cold, results-driven researcher here. This is serious; I have the life and free will of a person in my hands.
I will send the bottle she provided to Cambridge, via the emergency trade route. I must have a second opinion.
Juliette kicked back and looked at the ceiling, pouting. How did any of this explain why Mistress was so great? She had found a bit of sense in the milk and cure business, in that she couldn’t fathom her milk to be anything but the best. Beyond that, however...She could read the words, but only the most simple and straightforward fraction of them could pierce through the warm honey that had taken over most of her mind. Juliette read some sentences over and over, trying to fire up some understanding, only to find herself thinking back on how she loved the weight of her chest and how she would get another milking in a couple of hours.
Not that she couldn’t ever think about anything more complicated than base sensations, longings, and swooning over Mistress. The fog shepherding her thoughts did ebb to uncover higher brain functions sometimes. After all, Juliette was a maid. When she saw the manor was too messy to match the picture burned into her memories, a second gauge embedded in her vision went up. This one never went as high as the milk one, and always settled at about one-third, whereupon Juliette’s vacant stare shifted into focus.
The honey pacifying and isolating her mind receded just enough so Juliette could think freely. Could, as in had the potential to, and nothing more. Attempting to do any hard thinking would only have her struggle her way outside of quicksand. The thinky gauge, as she called it, would have had to be much higher for that, and Juliette had been successfully molded to believe it would be a fate worse than death. In addition, Mistress had thoughtfully conditioned her maid so her highest functioning state of mind could not stray off the path.
Indeed, before Juliette could take advantage of her relative smarts to understand what she could not a minute ago, a deep sense of duty welled from within her. Mistress’ home was unacceptably messy and dusty. Her mind’s eye flashed with what the mansion should be. She sprang into action, grabbed a duster from a cupboard, and smiled broadly.
“It’s cleaning time agaaaain!” She squealed as her well-programmed hormones made her, once again, irrepressibly enthusiastic. “Maid Juliette, on duty!”
She would resume Mistress’ task, but only after completing the job she had no choice but to love.
Sophia Garland’s research notes
Case: Juliet Ferry, day 4—Before Juliet’s visit
The M.I.T. got the sample in the early morning. They all but confirmed my findings. Juliet’s breast milk contains neutralized extraplanar particles, effectively acting as a vaccine. Our world is dying because humans transform when met with the Shinjuku Particles, usually to painfully lethal results. Juliet only got transformed in just the right way. She is the bridge between the unknown parallel plane and our reality, And she suffers because of it. I don’t want to brainwash her, but do I have the right to deny humanity its cure? This is too much...This decision is a queen’s task, I’m just a researcher.
I suppose I will shimmy around the question with Juliet and get an idea of what she would think about this dilemma. In the meantime...She talked of potential attackers yesterday...How credible is this threat? Whatever I do, I cannot allow some punks to harm her. She should be doing her rounds right now. I’ll talk to them right away.
One hour later, I have resolved the issue. The punks were on her apartment building’s porch as she said. They were quite the aggravating little bastards, but in a crumbling world, people are easy to sway. I promised the quatuor one hundred dollars for each week Juliet stays safe. I do not fear them getting ideas and attempting to rob me. My security systems are quite notorious around here.
Man. What a horrible day. I went back to Lady Sophie -appropriately dressed this time- hoping she’d cure me, or at least tried to. First I gave her the milk bottles as I promised, then...
“I’d like to talk to you about something important, Juliet.”
Inexpressive as she was, she was clearly being solemn about this. I followed her to her study, when she dropped this bomb.
“First up, yes, I’m fairly sure at this point I can perform breast reduction surgery and suppress your lactation to at least human levels. However...I must urge you to consider not to go through it.”
“Wh-what? Wh-wh-why?”
“To be blunt, your milk is more than just nutritious and healthy. It immunizes against Syndromes.”
This was sort of like telling someone from before 2003 they could heal both cancer and AIDS. No, actually, scratch that. It was like telling him they could cure hatred and war. Or even Death itself. Syndromes weren’t just strange, incurable diseases. They were doom and destruction itself. I was born into a world where mankind was too terrified to fall sick to waste time on war, politics, or even big business. The ultimate goal, the only viable goal, was to not fall victim to them. If it wasn’t common knowledge Syndromes weren’t contagious, I would have been slaughtered by my own family without hesitation. Being told I was the vaccine...I started trembling like a leaf, and my consciousness seemingly sought to slip away. My answer came with a white, hollowed voice.
“What are you...saying?”
“I have lied to you, I’m afraid. Peter is not mine, but rather a subject sent by the M.I.T’s Syndrome research task force. His genetic profile was deemed critically sensitive to Syndromes. Yet three days of feeding, and his blood samples resist particle samples from the heart of Tokyo.”
“The ep-p-picenter?”
“Yes. I do apologize for the deception, but you know what this means. You are the vaccine.”
My head fell down, struck down by the world’s weight.
“B-b-but h-how is this p-possible...?”
“Your milk has stabilized extraplanar particles. It functions like a vaccine in reverse. You change human physiology just enough for it to be perfectly acclimated to the unstable particles. Even if this effect manifests itself only in infants, this is huge. Beyond huge.”
“...But what about the c-c-cure all rich people are b-buying?”
“It is no cure, Juliet, trust me. All the fools are doing is taking money from the desperate and preserving their minds in incorporeal form. Then they create mindless clones of their bodies to scrub the world clean while the ‘cured’ rot away in cells beyond experimentation and control. They will never hold. By the time the Shinjuku Particles infect all that remains of mankind, and they will, it would take a millennium at least to cleanse them all. Even if they do succeed in scrubbing the planet clean, the world will be nothing like ours. If by some miracle the stored minds return to their clones bodies, they will find themselves in an alien world. Tokyo already has snow in the summer, and it’s only going to get worse as time goes on. No, if mankind is to survive, we must adapt. This is why the M.I.T. and me have broken off from the world’s cloning research. And you are our breakthrough.”
I should, by all accounts, have been overjoyed. From the day I was born, I knew I was part of the last generation. There was no way to cure the Syndromes, and whenever there was hope, it mostly just meant praying for our good fortune. Now there still was no cure—Lady Sophia had said in no uncertain terms this was only about immunization. But a vaccine was barely a step down from a cure. It was peace of mind. It was the incarnation of what hope truly used to mean. And I, the sick, shy girl, was that hope? I...I couldn’t handle it. I should have been happy, ready and willing to help. Instead...
I broke down.
“I’ll d-d-do everything I can so you can rep-p-p-plicate my milk, ma’am.”
“This will certainly be a venue of research but...”
“D-DON’T!” I erupted, my teeth chattering. “Don’t a-a-a-ask me to keep th-th-them. Please.”
What was I saying?
“You said you could c-c-cure me!”
“Well, yes, but that was before I confirmed how...”
“Yeah, yeah, now I’m no longer a f-f-f-freak, I’m THE freak. The most important pair of tits in the w-w-world. The secret is in my DNA, right? I don’t have to lactate to have those shitty p-p-particles, right?”
“In all probability, but Juliet, calm d...”
“NO! I want to help mank-k-kind as me, okay? M-me, not a f-f-freaking c-c-C-COW! You have to make them normal before the news sp-p-preads, please...”
I couldn’t control my mouth. It acted directly under command of the countless pictures of industrial breast pumps and milk-enhancing chemicals flashing in my mind’s eye. Those horrors didn’t come out of nowhere; rather, it was my worst nightmare, one that made me wake up more than one night, my bed drenched in cold sweat. I always rationalized it. People didn’t need baby food so much they’d turn me into two giant, unthinking milk bags. But now that I was able to immunize people against the apocalypse? There wasn’t any part of my brain who wasn’t utterly convinced this was my inevitable future.
I’m...A bit hazy on what happened next to be honest. I’m pretty certain I got Lady Sophia to promise she’d try and cure me tomorrow if I was still certain about putting my safety before the greater good. Well, she didn’t put it in those words, but that’s pretty much what it amounts to, right? From today onwards, I’m a guinea pig whether I want it or not, and I do want to, I’m not that selfish...I just want to keep some damn dignity being one.
Sophia Garland’s research notes
Case: Juliet Ferry, day 4—Before Juliet’s visit
Stupid. Stupid, stupid stupid.
Why in the world did I think telling her the truth was the right idea? Even if she grew too restless about being cured, I had time. I could have least delayed it until I had a good mapping of her corrupted physiology, or until she trusted me. If push had come to shove, I could have implanted suggestions during her trance state. But the thought of doing that terrified me so much that I went all-in into honesty. And look where we are now. Her eyes were more eloquent than her gimped speech could ever express. She was deathly afraid that, to save humanity, she would have to sacrifice her own. She isn’t wrong, the risk of me or my colleagues being blinded by ruthless efficiency exists. But by telling her the truth, I only backed her psyche into a corner.
Time to pull an all-nighter studying her milk samples. Let’s hope I have something to calm her tomorrow.
Juliette read the day 4 segment while slowly coming down from her semi-intelligent state. She had cleaned Mistress’ house for six hours straight, relentlessly assuring the whole manor matched the exhaustive data burned in her brain. She only paused to be comfortably milked by her maid uniform, but cleaning did not tire or even wind her down in the slightest. Every time she put a book into place, dusted a shelf to restore their normal color, or erased a blemish on the floor, she was rewarded with unbridled happiness and pride. Thus, for every moment of her chores, she had a bright and bubbly smile on her face, just like one you could find on a little girl decorating the Christmas tree or opening her presents.
Of all the triggers Mistress had installed to keep her firmly locked in her French maid identity, this extreme dopamine rush was the most solid and consistent. Even day 1 after her transformation, Juliet could not help feeling rapturous accomplishment at doing her new “job”. To this day, Juliette still remembered that memory of learning a new -if not a first- passion in life in the span of a few hours. She hoped she would get to revive it as she followed the tale of her past.
She still had enough higher cognizance to understand what she was reading, but the euphoria kept her from emphasizing with the fears of her past self, and soon the gooey honey in her mind would bring the thinky gauge all the way down, and she would be too dim to understand it. Juliette enjoyed both those states very much. One was her job and passion, the other was her leisure.
After a while, she finally could no longer make heads or tails of the strange book. The little maid, feeling lovey-dovey, decided to check if Mistress was alright.
“Mistress! Mistress!” Exclaimed the little maid without a hint of stammer. This word was now the most natural one to say. “I made you t-t-tea!”
“Oh, is that right? Thank you my dear. You look happy, did you learn something?”
Juliette dutifully lay the engraved silver tray on the table along with the tea. It was a Lady Gray blend, Mistress’ favorite. Tea, not requiring much more than trade routes to export and being durable, was one of the rare luxuries -of sorts- that remained widespread, very much unlike meat. Sophia Garland stirred the cup, then waited for her loving servant to answer.
“Well, huh, my milk is really good, like more than being yummy. I was afraid, but I don’t get it. Oh, and, huh, was 9 supposed to come after 4? It comes after in the diary. I don’t remember if it’s right, is it right?”
Sophia laughed softly, though with a definite hint of sadness.
“No, cutie. There’s no day 5 in the journal because you never went back home. You came and...Couldn’t help but beg for normalcy. You had tried to calm yourself all night, but you were having a panic attack. It’s a very serious condition, where you are so unhappy you can’t help but think you’re dying. Its dangers are tenfold when your physiology is affected by a Syndrome. I could only accept to operate on you, if only to put you to sleep.”
“Thank you! Thank you! You were sooo nice to me even back th-then!”
“I had no choice. I did not perform surgery right away, too. I was beginning to think you were right, you needed a normal body and we would just need your warped DNA, as much of a delay as it would have been. I performed further tests to make sure I could suppress lactation long enough to reduce your breasts, but then...I made an awful discovery.”
Sophia Garland’s research notes
Case: Juliet Ferry, day 5—Test results after Juliet’s sedation.
I hesitate to write anything about the test results. I can barely imagine an appropriate way to describe how dire they are.
Lying to Juliet and sedating her seemed like it would be the low point of the day, and I had resolved not to touch her unconscious body at first. Testing the milk bottle she had brought with her, no doubt as a gesture of goodwill, had only one objective—testing my Syndrome suppressants. Results were encouraging, but when I looked at the controls, I realized the stabilized Shinjuku particles were, well, not so stabilized anymore. Doubt creeping into my mind, I fetched a pump and extracted a sample from Juliet herself. The particles in it were fully unstable.
I immediately thought of the worst case scenario, which is to say, that her physiology had degraded and that she would soon be entirely converted by the particles and die. But that didn’t make sense, all Syndromes, even the WCS, are torturously slow to kill. I quickly realized the correlation at play. Juliet stressed out all night, spoiling the milk she brought me, and then descended into a panic attack, fully corrupting her bounty. This would seem positive, at first, but the implications are nothing but.
One, the vaccination effect of Juliet’s milk are dependent on her state of mind. Trying to synthesize it would likely lose most if not all of the immunizing effect, much like the baby formulas the old world used to make.
Two, Juliet needs to be happy, or at least at peace. She proved that will be a tall order, furthermore with the burden she now knows is on her shoulders. She wants to be rid of her Syndrome and live a normal life. Mankind cannot afford it.
It pains me to say it, but circumstances no longer allow me to care about what she thinks.
“A-a-and then? And then?”
“Suffice to say a great deal of time passed before I made my decision, but I knew I had to take care of your trance. I knew that I had to indoctrinate you, to make you happy to be lactating. Happy to have such huge breasts. Happy to be a source of vaccine. But not only that. It had become too dangerous to let you go outside. Even discounting the possibility of an accident or aggression, going outside could chip away at the happiness I would force upon you.”
Dr. Garland forlornly caressed her thrall’s soft curly hair.
“I had to go all the way and enslave you fully. Turn you into an irrepressibly happy and obedient cow who would never willingly leave the confines of my secure home. Turn Juliet Ferry into you.”
“Yay for Mistress!” Genuinely celebrated the mind-broken maid. “I’m the happiest obedient cow!”
“Yes...And I imagine you want to know exactly how I created you, aren’t I right?”
Grinning from ear to ear and shivering in conditioned excitement, Juliette nodded frantically.
“...Very well. I contacted a psychology expert at Cambridge, kept you in induced sleep for two days, then brought you back to consciousness when I was ready to brainwash you.”