Chapter Text
March 22, 2028
It was two in the afternoon on the east coast when the alarms went off. Eleven AM on the west coast. For the first time in American history they had to send out an emergency signal, not for one specific location, but for the entire US territory.
"This is a National Emergency. Please stay indoors. Remain calm. Isolate yourselves. A biochemical weapon has been released in your area."
The message scrolled across every single phone in the nation along with a blaring alarm sound.
Televisions across the country were switched on, channels changed to news networks only to find the same vague message screaming out from every single channel.
Laptops searched for articles that might explain the panic-inciting broadcasts. The news stations were all equally clueless as to the source of the crisis. Who had released the weapon? What effects might it have? What did the line "isolate yourselves" insinuate?
The first news that broke was on the scope of the crisis; the national emergency broadcast hadn't clarified that the "area" in question was the entire country. The release of such news lead to increased panic. All across the nation citizens were struck by the realization that there would be no hope of safety in the next state over. No specialized government task force would be coming to their rescue.
Then reports flooded in and the broadcasters urged the public even more strongly to take the message seriously. Fights were breaking out in the streets, men were pummeling each other, people were looting stores, women were being assaulted. The entire population appeared to simultaneously lose their minds.
The images on screen were censored but they mostly involved brutal fights in public, looting, mass traffic accidents, and crowd crush incidents.
There were many videos being sent in of sexual assaults occurring in broad daylight, but the news stations weren't airing that content. They had enough material to cover already and the sexual assaults were distracting from the bigger story.
The BBC was flooded with incoming citizen reports that included private footage, often taken on phone cameras. They were the first to verify their sources and start airing the footage internationally. People were turning on each other. The broadcasters pleaded for the people who weren't taking it seriously to do as the broadcast requested. Stay Indoors, Remain Calm, Isolate.
As the world fell to madness and no one had answers the message was repeated. The day was immortalized as the SIRCI Event, the moment that changed US History for good.
In the coming weeks and months it became clearer what had happened. Samples of the compound were isolated from the environment and analyzed by labs large and small. The White House did a press briefing that devolved into a violent brawl. It resulted in the banning of social gatherings. The country needed to go into a temporary shutdown like it had in 2020. Luckily, the infrastructure was there to better support it this time.
Before they were cutoff, the White House had managed to reveal that the compound only impacted men. It affected the neurochemical production centers in the brain. Men who were afflicted would show no outward changes, they could blend in just like everyone else, but that could change in an instant.
See, men did not experience a fertility cycle in the same way that women did. They were fertile all of the time. Women, however, had an ovulation window each month. Women evolved to emit a pheromone during this period called Estratetraenol (EST). It signaled to men that a woman was breedable, but it was subtle, and ordinarily men wouldn't be able to tell if a woman was emitting it.
In their studies they found that the neurological changes impacting these men focused heavily on the centers of the brain that were hardwired for processing, interpreting, and responding to these pheromones. One tiny whiff and it activated their instinctual natures and suppressed their logic centers. They were driven solely by the animal need to claim, mate, and defend. All other men who posed an immediate threat to their mating rights were seen as targets, even if those other men were their friends or family.
When the mating frenzy took hold there was nothing that could mollify them other than successfully breeding the fertile womb that they had scented. They could not be brought out of their madness without mating. The longer the men stayed in these frenzied states the more violent they became. It was observed that they would do catastrophic internal damage to themselves, through over-exertion alone, when they were detained and kept away from an ovulating woman who they were attempting to breed.
Once entering a frenzy, the more delayed they were in fulfilling their purpose the more violent they were with both challengers and the subjects of their sexual intent. The oversaturation of cortisol and testosterone drove them to barbarity, and they typically needed to mate multiple times to reemerge from their frenzied state.
When these territorial feuds occurred between men who had set their sights on the same woman, they often resulted in either unconsciousness or death. They had no feasible off-switch. Even being knocked unconscious sometimes resulted in them waking up in the same frenzied state.
When they were able to engage their instincts and naturally ease their frenzies, the men's faculties would return to them. There was no evidence to suggest that they would form any sort of lasting monogamous bond after these incidences. The most common result was for the men to abandon the women in question. Oftentimes leaving them vulnerable to subsequent assault i if they didn't seek shelter immediately after.
The scientific community named the affliction MAdNAEST-28. It was an amalgamation of the abbreviations for the neuro-centers in the brain that were most affected and the pheromone that acted as a switch to activate them. It was colloquially referred to as the Madness, but the trouble was that it took scientists too long to understand and define it. The media had needed a placeholder name; after having settled on SIRCI it had gained too much recognition with the general public. SIRCI-28 just rolled off the tongue more readily than MAdNAEST-28, and while 'The Madness' gained some popularity and would at least garner recognition, the world more readily adopted SIRCI.
Emergency laws were passed to defend the affected men and absolve them of culpability for the crimes that they may have committed while in the affected state. The SIRCI-afflicted group was given disability status. It was then made clear to the American population that they must not incite these violent episodes.
There were too many of them; as much as 35% of the male population was affected. If they tried to isolate the men then the system would collapse. Losing that much of their workforce would cripple the nation. It became the responsibility of women to isolate themselves when they were in an ovulation phase or to take pheromone suppressants.
If they were unwise enough to expose themselves to the public at that time and they incited an episode in someone, then the woman was deemed culpable. They must submit themselves to that man in order for them to relieve themselves before they became enraged and violent. If they ran away from a man whom they had triggered and left them in that state, then they could be held criminally responsible for the man's actions, tack on hate crime charges for discrimination against a disabled person, and be charged with reckless public endangerment.
Before the SIRCI Event, America had already been grappling over abortion laws and the pro-life community was winning. Abortion legislation had, in all but five states, reduced abortion access to life-saving cases only or simply outlawed it altogether. Vermont, Massachusetts, California, New York, and Minnesota were the final holdouts. Abortion legislation issues reached a fever-pitch in the post-SIRCI America. The needle on abortion rights was being pulled from both sides, but unbeknownst to the population, the needle was an illusion.
The true culprit behind the biochemical weapon's release was the American government itself. They had concocted a lot of evidence so that they could point their finger at a foreign party, but at the end of the day, their population growth was declining. Good, virile, young men were dying in their wars, and they needed to maintain, if not increase, their population if they wanted to retain their military superiority.
The hands of government were not about to let their investments in this venture be scraped out and tossed in medical waste bins. Abortion remained inaccessible for the majority of the population, but the wealthy, the powerful, the connected, they would always have access. They had no intention of letting those planned parenthood lobbyists and pro-choice voters get in their way. Pregnancy was a feature of their plan, not a design flaw.
Shortly after the first medical journals published studies on the madness, the market flooded with pheromone suppressants and EST-mimicking compounds. Gynecologists were booked and busy with the flood of women who needed birth control. Even more harrowing, obstetricians found themselves overloaded with patients who had encountered these afflicted men and now had fetuses that they were obligated to carry to term.
Laws banning the EST-mimicking compounds were passed. The advocates claimed that it was being used to incite episodes even when there were no women to breed. It was deemed a hate crime to use the compounds and almost always came with additional charges of public endangerment. Women were accused left and right of having used them and charged with rape. These were the only rape cases that had resulted in incarceration throughout the whole ordeal.
Many men who were affected were desperate for a cure. A study was done that claimed that permanently severing the nerves responsible for detecting scent in the nasal passages would limit, if not completely eliminate the episodes from taking place. The cost was deemed too steep for most men. Food would never taste the same, they'd never again experience the scents that brought them joy.
There were 160 million men in the country, 56 million of them had the madness, and only 7% of them were willing to give up their sense of smell in exchange for not being overtaken by unanticipated episodes of brutal rape frenzies that were likely to result in unwanted pregnancies and abandoned children. Only four million men decided that their sense of smell was a reasonable sacrifice. Fifty-two million decided to see how it played out, wait for a better solution, mitigate their risks as best as they could, or simply give in to the government-defended right to rape women.
Men, both in and outside of America, who hadn't been afflicted grew envious of those who had. There were forums popping up all over the internet, American men who were immune to the madness but wanted someone to engineer a variant that they could take, men who wanted to be rutted with animal intensity but needed to get their hands on bootleg EST, foreigners who wanted a sample of the original biochemical to try and afflict themselves, channels dedicated to videos of real-life public episodes.
Other countries fetishized the American epidemic and made parodies of those videos. The trends in the porn industry skewed drastically towards the subject and many afflicted men found their new niche within the porn industry allowing themselves to be presented with various sexual opportunities and diverse circumstances while they were in rutting episodes.
To make matters infinitely worse, the men who experienced these episodes frequently were observed to have developed larger genitals. Their girth and length in an engorged state were increasing incrementally with no limits in sight. The findings of the report were met with wild responses from around the globe. Men who had once found the whole situation abhorrent had grown accustomed to seeing the media sensationalizing it, porn heavily adopting it, discussions about it in everyday settings. The news that men's dicks could actually permanently increase in size was the final nail in the coffin for many of them that put their abhorrence to rest.
Labs that once looked for a cure shifted to new studies aimed at understanding the brain chemistry that resulted in the unlocked ability to permanently increase genital size. They wanted to reverse engineer it and develop products that would help the men who weren't afflicted achieve the same results. Other studies were being conducted on the long-term issues that might arise from the affliction and what pre-emptive measures needed to be taken to protect men's health.
Public research funding was overwhelmingly funneled into these studies. Other countries were paying exorbitant amounts for research subjects who would come to their labs so that they could get in on the groundbreaking new field of study. The clock was ticking, everyone wanted to be the first to publish, the first to patent a drug for a new idea, the first to discover new facets of the affliction to unlock additional branches of research.
All the while, the world reported on the findings, they talked about sex-enhancing stimulants, penile-enlargement drugs, safer and more accessible viagra alternatives, even a potential solution for male-pattern baldness. Men around the world were vocal about their anticipation for these new drugs. Wives nursed fantasies of their husbands with better cocks, greater stamina, and insatiable sexual appetites.
The women who were being forcefully impregnated and used by these afflicted men were forgotten, just a new fact of life, something no one had any power to fix so they should just get used to it.
With open arms, the world embraced the madness and so the madness flourished.