The ABO Serum

(Part 6) Maybe Some Mates Aren't Affected

Dr. Alan Blitzer was among the first alphas identified and the senior unmated alpha on staff at GenLife. That meant he was the ranking alpha in quarantine and the one everyone looked to for information and leadership. He had a running text conversation with the general manager and could count on quick responses.

Through all the chaos and rapid adaptation, he never felt concerned for himself. This was what he'd been working toward after all. And he had a partner who would surely be his mate when GenLife released the alphas, and he could transition.

He went along with the matchmaking experiment because he figured they'd need control subjects. He didn't think any of the towels he smelled were particularly extraordinary.

The one he rated highest belonged to an unconscious beta. They asked for his pillow and blanket to put with the unconscious man to see if it could wake him up. Alan provided them. It would be cruel not to when they had no better proposals for treatment. But he didn't think it would work.

In the meantime, he did what other partnered or married alphas in quarantine did, Face Timed his sweetheart and had awkward and embarrassing phone sex. It wasn't ideal, but he didn't think it was anything to worry about.

Then, the beta woke up. Dr. Placer's research team credited this miracle to his pheromones, and she was advocating to expand the matchmaking sample group to include all betas. They couldn't smell pheromones on a conscious level, but maybe they were detecting them subconsciously. And obviously they were emitting them if Dr. Blitzer ranked one among the highest in his perception.

Alan tried to remember what the beta's towel smelled like but couldn't remember any scents standing out. He suspected it was just time for the beta to wake up and had nothing to do with him. It was equally plausible that they could find mates by smelling the general population. That's what happened with the investor. His mate found and pounced on him before exposing him.

With that case in mind, Alan wrote up his own proposal to start bringing the married and partnered alphas and omegas back together with their unaffected partners to see if they'd already found their mates. After all, the betas went home and affected their partners first, and most solidly monogamous couples were okay in the end.

He was reluctant to forward any new proposal because the alphas in quarantine were already working hard on suppressants, but he missed his boyfriend, and he missed his freedom, and mated pairs were allowed out.

He didn't expect his proposal to get Dr. Placer's support, but she showed the drastic physiological relief they recorded during the fourth phase of her experiment where pairs finally met in person. And argued that they should be moving forward with any proposals than can bring the affected relief.

Whatever his discomfort, what the omegas experienced made it pale in comparison. Her presentation of their recorded symptoms at the last meeting made him feel guilty for doing anything that wasn't moving the suppressant research forward.

Fortunately, the general manager assigned another team to expand Dr. Placer's matchmaking experiment to include trial meetings between couples where one party was not transitioning. He included one caveat; a relationship counselor should be present. "We can record their biological reactions to each other," Daryl advised, "but there's no objective way to record the types of strain this is putting on their relationships. I'd like an analysis of the types of problems this has caused between already established couples and the outcomes. We expected that this could wreck relationships. The Weisman case has made us optimistic. But we should still be prepared for the worst."

It made sense, and Alan didn't have to oversee it himself, so he accepted the change to his proposal, handed it off to the assigned team, and went back to work on the suppressants. With all the new couples forming they were finally getting more data.

For omegas, the presence of their alpha brought complete immediate relief. But Alan wondered if the presence of any alpha would bring a measure of relief. For the omegas who didn't select the towel of an alpha who selected their towel, were they still able to find noticeable relief from their most preferred towel? What was the physiological mechanism that caused that relief? Was it entirely olfactory or was something else happening?

After the initial towel sampling phase, he combed through Dr. Placer's data and put together relatively balanced scent, pheromone, and control groups. Then duplicated the numbered towels preferred by the scent and control groups and used computer aided chemical analysis to recreate the scents without the pheromones for the scent group.

All the participating omegas spent 24 hours before getting their towels hooked up to as comprehensive a set a biosensors as they could manage and still go about their lives. Then, they received their towels. The control group could tell they didn't have an effective towel, so they were just an unaffected group to measure against. The scent only group had a nominal success rate consistent with a placebo. The pheromone group didn't show the same level of physiological relief as the matched pairs, but their relief was still measurable, and they didn't have the symptom escalation when they had to give the towels back a week later.

A second experiment giving all pheromone towels, but random alpha, beta, and omega pheromone saturated towels revealed that, though to a lesser degree, the random alpha towels still provided some relief, but the beta and omega towels did not. This brought Alan back to Dr. Placer's original data set. Were some alpha pheromones preferred by more omegas than others?

That was an embarrassing analytical evaluation. His own pheromones were at the top of the list. Fully a third of the omegas rated his scent as their favorite, while he ended up preferring a beta. He did not want to share this little tidbit, but it had important connotations for developing a suppressant if certain alphas had more generally appealing pheromones than others.

He was figuring out how to present this latest information when a reminder popped up on his screen it was time for him to reunite with his sweetie. He smiled and put his computer to sleep before double checking his looks in the bathroom mirror and heading out.