Page 3 of Hired for Research
She went straight to the thermostat as soon as she got in the house, turning it up to something that wouldn’t leave her needing to keep her coat on. One of the many drawbacks to the house was its age and the lack of all the new, fancy technology that most places sported now. She kept telling herself she’d get it updated… one day.
By the time she’d made herself a sandwich and heated a bowl of soup, the house was finally warm enough for her to pull off her coat before sitting at the one clear spot on the dining table shoved into the corner of the tiny kitchen. Her laptop, various notebooks, a half-dead plant, and scattered mail took up the rest of the tabletop. Her mother had always complained that Evelyn still lived like a messy, broke college student despite having graduated years ago, and she couldn’t help smiling as she opened the laptop.
“It’s because I’m still broke and in college, though I’m on the other side of the desk now,” she said to the empty kitchen before her lips curved down again. “Or I was. Now I’m just stuck in the lab.”
Evelyn had been teased plenty of times about her habit of talking to herself, but sometimes it helped her think. Not to mention there were times when she could go an entire week without speaking if she didn’t talk to herself. She’d been an only child, and with her parents gone and her research leaving her alone most of the time, she couldn’t say she held many conversations in the average week.
Sighing once her stomach was sated enough to stop its rumbling, she reached over and opened her laptop, pulling up the research files. She wouldn’t normally have access to them outside the lab, but with the time constraints, the Director had agreed to set up access from her laptop as well so she could continue working from home.
Evelyn had spent every moment going through the testing, formulas, and results available, yet something in the back of her mind kept nagging at her, telling her none of it mattered. That Beth had missed something. That she hadn’t been looking in the right place.
She read as she finished her meal, finding nothing new. It had been the same throughout the last four months of reports she’d read through. Some half-baked attempts at tweaking the amount of hormone blocker, and a lot of useless filler.
Shoving her bowl aside, she skipped ahead to the reports from the next month, skimming through them before moving on to the next month. It was a repeat of the same, over and over until she got to the last report before Beth left.
I’ve come to think it’s not testosterone at all. While higher on average than a male beta, it’s not a drastic enough difference to explain the size and behavioral difference between the two dynamics. Simulations of reducing an alpha’s testosterone levels to that of a beta show no signs of significantly changing their physiology or behavior.
There has to be something else, or something working in conjunction with the testosterone. Perhaps the hormone needs to be blocked from childhood, prior to their dynamic presenting, but how could we manage that without performing genetic testing on every child? What new mandates would be placed on the poor children found to carry the alpha gene?
Perhaps we do not understand what makes an alpha an alpha after all.
Evelyn leaned back in her chair, arms dropping to her sides. She’d grown more and more sure of Beth’s ineptitude during the process of working through the reports, but what she’d just read made her reconsider her harsh judgment of the other researcher. It was hard to work on a solution to a problem when you didn’t have a full grasp of the issue. If they couldn’t say definitively what caused an alpha’s differences, how were they supposed to change them?
Dynamic research had been done prior to the mandates being put in place, but most of it had been abandoned when the need for it was removed. It had been believed that a person’s dynamic was controlled by a specific gene that caused the pituitary gland to release certain levels of the normal hormones everyone had, but what if that wasn’t correct? What if they’d missed something?
Standing so fast she knocked over her chair, Evelyn looked around her little kitchen, mind whirling with possibilities.
“I need an alpha.”
She picked up her phone, about to call the Director, but she hesitated with her finger over the button. He wasn’t likely to be in his office, and she doubted he would appreciate her calling his personal number in the early hours of the morning without a pressing need. While the urge to get to work immediately made her fingers itch to get started, she also wasn’t sure what to ask for.
“I’ve never even met an alpha,” she muttered.
Evelyn started to sit back down before she remembered the chair had toppled over. Righting it, she dropped onto the seat, staring blankly at the wall.
“Where does one find an alpha?”
It wasn’t like she could post flyers at the university asking for volunteers like they did with most projects, there were no alphas there. The only alphas in the city were mated and useless for her purposes, or locked in Alpha-Camps that omegas were barred from entering.
“Except…”
She turned back to her computer, fingers flying across the keyboard. Most alphas entered an Alpha-Camp once they left the special school for adolescents of their dynamic, but some of them were chosen as studs instead of the usual work-gangs they were assigned to. There were a few other options for alphas who were well behaved and properly trained, but no one would stop her from going to an omega tending facility.
Evelyn had never had the funds to be able to hire an alpha for her cycles, so she’d never looked into the facilities before, but her search brought up a few options within the city. She scanned the list, not sure what she was looking for, before shrugging and going back to the first one that had popped up.
The Haven was a top-class facility, the kind that catered to omegas who made more in a month than she did in a year with her meager salary, but the cost didn’t matter. She wasn’t looking to book a stay for her heat, she just wanted access to the alphas.
After saving their information, she closed her laptop, a thrum of excitement buzzing through her. She hadn’t worked out how she’d be able to run the tests she wanted to do on the alphas, but the thought of finally getting to do something besides stare at a screen all day had her ready to rush out and get started.
She tossed and turned in bed for the little that remained of the night, sitting up to write new ideas on the notepad she kept on the nightstand as they popped into her head. She needed blood samples, preferably before and after tending an omega. Pheromone samples. Brain scans if she could get them.
Her eyes were burning when morning light poured through her curtains, but she knew she had no chance of sleeping no matter how long she laid in bed. The anticipation of getting to work outweighed the exhaustion, so she climbed from the pile of bedding she’d buried herself in to keep warm and moved to her dresser as she put on her glasses.
A glance out the window as she reached for clean clothing had her groaning in frustration. The world outside was pure white, a solid layer of snow hiding plants, road, and vehicles with equal disdain for her plans.
“Fucking snow. I hate winter,” she grumbled as she grabbed a fuzzy pair of pants instead of the slacks she’d been reaching for.
While the road she lived on was level, her driveway sloped down from it to her overcrowded garage. Even if she shoveled off the snow, the likelihood of her little car making it up the hill to the road was slim, and with the drifts she could see, the chance of getting stuck somewhere was too real to risk.
