My problem back then was simple. Like any college student, I needed money. Most of the ways to get money involved more work than I was willing to do - studying enough to keep a passing average cut into my party time enough. What's a girl to do? That's when I started looking at the various offers posted in the student center. Most of them were just normal jobs, not what I wanted at all. But there was one from a Dr. Weissman in the psychology department that looked promising. Cooperating in some kind of psychology experiment, how bad could it be? At worst, I'd get a few bad trips on some weird drugs, most likely though I'd just answer some questions. It wasn't like I hadn't done the same thing before, and if the money wasn't great, it was more than nothing. Dr. Weissman turned out to be a bit creepy, with his thick glasses and unkempt tufts of hair, but he was polite enough, and glad to have another test subject. He got a little intense when he was trying to explain exactly what he was trying to prove, but he calmed down a bit once he figured out that he was going way over my head. Eventually, his explanation got simple enough for even a second year English Lit major who'd barely passed Biology to understand. He was going to give me and several others injections of a drug he had developed that would make our cells more permeable to life energy. Even barely passing Biology, I thought that the life energy thing seemed crackpot, but he wasn't paying me to critique his science, only to take the shot and report to him on the results. All I cared about was seeing that his previous experiments with smaller doses of the drug hadn't had any harmful effects - or any effects at all, as he reluctantly admitted. That Friday night, I got my shot and settled down in my bed - or rather, the hospital bed he'd set up in one of the side rooms off of his lab. All of us got rooms of our own, under video and audio surveillance. I studied for a while before finally going to bed, wearing thick flannel pajamas - I wasn't doing this to give Dr. Weissman or his grad students a free peep-show, not that my figure was good enough to really get them excited. I knew guys well enough to know that it didn't much matter how plain the girl, if she wasn't actually ugly and they had a chance to sneak a peek, they would. The less said about my dreams that night, the better. I didn't understand anything in them, which isn't surprising - they were bizarre. I still don't, which is considerably more surprising, considering what I have become. In the morning, Dean, one of Dr. Weissman's grad students came to me when I woke up and asked me if I'd had any unusual experiences in my sleep. As I told him about my dreams, at least as much as I could, I kept looking at his hands as he wrote notes on his clipboard. They seemed strangely to draw me. No, it wasn't his hands, it was him. Something about him seemed immensely desirable - not quite sexually, but not quite anything else. I had to fight to avoid reaching out to him, touching him anywhere - his hands, his face, anywhere I could touch bare skin. It was a fight I lost. Before I even realized what I was doing, I reached over and grabbed his hand, pencil and all. "What are you doing?" he demanded, startled. It was the last thing he ever said. As soon as I touched him, I could feel. . . something. Something nice. Something good. Something inside him, that I wanted. I pulled on it, sucked on it, drew it into me, and as it filled me, I felt better than I had ever felt before. I felt healthy, alive and aware in a way I had never felt before. Every sense was sharper, every thought clearer, every movement more graceful, every particle of my being felt filled with vigor and strength. Oh, yes, the strength. I sat there for a few seconds as I just relaxed into the high, a feeling of both immense energy and pure blissful relaxation, before I noticed what had happened to Dean. He had been a young man before, even kind of cute. Now he wasn't cute, and he didn't look young. He looked like a dessicated mummy, dried out and brittle. Even as I noticed the change, he just collapsed into a pile of dust. I should have felt shock. I should of felt horror. What I felt was. . . hunger. I wanted more. I wanted to feel that way again. I wanted to feel even better. Some fragments of Dean's knowledge had come in with everything else, and I knew what had happened. My cells really were more permeable to life energy. Now I could draw it into myself from other people, gaining everything they had in the process. I could gain their strength and health, intelligence, their senses, some of their memories, even their beauty and emotional intensity. There might well be no limit to what I could become, if I drained more people. There was no real question of that, of course. I was going to drain more people. The grad students were first, I got to them as they moved through the lab, interviewing the rest of the people who had received their injections that night. There were only two left now that Dean was gone, and it didn't take me more than a moment to drain them both. I made sure to keep as much of their memories about Dr. Weissman's experiment as I could - not very much, but enough. Of the twelve students in this batch, six had gotten placebos. Of the six who had gotten real shots, I was special. The grads didn't know why, but I had been given a different injection - a new formula, and in a much higher concentration. I should have been angry, but with the way things had turned out, I was just as glad. None of the other subjects was like me - that meant they were all food. After the first eight, the rest tried to escape. They had no chance, of course - I was so much stronger and faster and smarter than them at that point it was almost embarassing. I amused myself by chasing the last two around until they were panting with exhaustion - I wasn't even short of breath. Then I drained them. They didn't struggle much. Once they were cornered and turned to look at me clearly, they didn't seem to want to fight. The beauty of thirteen people is a bit overhwelming to mere mortals, even if they were none of them truly exceptional. You'd think with the intellect of fifteen people in my skull, I would have predicted what was coming, but I was distracted. Nobody had ever felt this good before in all of history. I had strength and vitality, senses and intellect, passion and emotional intensity beyond what any human before me could ever claim. I was plainly a superwoman, and I had no intention of stopping. I was much too busy admiring myself, what I had become, to spare any thought for anybody else. Dr. Weissman, however, was not an idiot. I was the culmination of his scientific career, the proof of every theory his colleagues had called "crackpot", but I was also plainly dangerous. He had been watching the whole affair over closed circuit video cameras installed in the lab, but he wasn't there. It hadn't been fear of creating an unstoppable superwoman, merely laziness on his part and a disinterest in getting up early on Saturday, but it served him well. He remotely triggered the biohazard alert for the lab, and heavy steel doors closed every potential exit from the building. We had a long talk over the videophone on his computer - the lab was still on the campus local net, but Weissman had been a busy doctor - he had actually managed to persuade the university authorities that I was dangerous, and they'd taken some pretty well thought out steps to contain me. Even with the strength of fifteen people, I couldn't batter my way past the quarantine doors, and as soon as they had shut, he'd had guards cut the control leads to the opening mechanisms so I couldn't hack the system and open them back up. He'd also had the local net completely disconnected from the internet, so I couldn't access anything off campus. In fact, as I explored, I noticed that he had systematically cut me off from everything but his videophone in his office in the next building over. I started searching the building for anything I could use to get out. I had some pretty good plans formed - biology labs have some chemicals you can use to make some pretty hefty explosives if you're even slightly clever, and I was more than slightly clever - when fate dealt me another hand. I was carrying some vats of chemicals you really don't want to know about down a hall when I felt something. It was like what I'd first felt when Dean had sat down across from me, only stronger. In fact, it was like what I'd felt when I'd touched him, only I wasn't touching anybody. It took all the willpower I'd taken from my first fourteen victims to not drink deep and hard of the life force I felt, but I managed it. The wall to my left was an exterior wall, and I was feeling the life of the groundskeeper trimming a hedge just on the other side of it - at least, that's what my superhuman hearing told me. I knew I could drain him, and I wasn't touching him at all. That changed things a lot. There might not be a need for any risky explosions. Explosions can kill people, and while I was confident that I would survive, every person I killed with an improvised bomb was a person I couldn't drain. There were only six billion people out there, I didn't want to waste even one of them. I quickly walked (well, it would look like an impossibly fast dead sprint to a mere mortal) a circuit around the building, and figured out my range. It was only a few yards, but that was more than it had been before I'd drained the grads and my fellow test subjects. Obviously, every person I drained improved my range - how much, I couldn't say for sure, not having enough data points to plot a useful projection. I had a few more conversations with Dr. Weissman while I waited for my chance. Figuring that if he wanted to cut me off from outside, I would cut him off from inside, I had already removed all the security cameras, so he saw only what I wanted him to see. It wasn't that hard to convince him that the effects were wearing off - that I was getting weaker and was desperate to drain more people. Well, the desperate part was genuine enough. I was already hopelessly addicted to the ultimate drug, pure uncut life force, and I had no intention of going cold turkey. But I wasn't getting weaker, even if I wasn't getting stronger either. Dr. Weissman decided, with my careful manipulation, that I could be contained by an appropriate application of armed force. He had a SWAT team called in, with orders to shoot to kill if I couldn't be restrained. He thought I didn't know that he had also gotten the governor to send in a unit of the national guard, and of course, the building was surrounded by campus police keeping curious students away. A cornucopia, a smorgasbord, to my new hunger. The SWAT team was just about to blow one of the doors open with a shaped charge when I drained them all. There were twenty of them in range. It was the first time I'd had an orgasm from draining, but then, I'd always drained one at a time before. It hit me like a truck, striking me down, but instead of hurting me, it made me better. Stronger, faster, smarter, keener, just plain better. I recovered almost instantly, discovering that among the gifts I received from my victims was pheromonal intensity. I could tell with my superhuman sense of smell that by this point just smelling my juices would put any mortal human in a trance of irresistable lust. With my powers more than doubled, I ripped the quarantine door down, and raced out faster than the campus guards could track. I needn't have bothered, though. I hadn't had enough data before to discover just how my draining range increased with each victim, only that it did. The answer was, it increased exponentially. What had required physical contact in the beginning and had been limited to a few yards after fourteen victims had a range of almost a mile now. I drained the whole campus. Six thousand people, students, national guardsmen, faculty and staff, visitors, businessmen just outside camput, everybody. To call my previous experience orgasmic was now shown to be irreverent. A pure ecstasy of power and pleasure coursed through me. There was no sight or sound, no taste or scent or touch, there was only bliss, joy, rapture - words do not exist in this or any other language to explain what I felt. Exaltation comes closest, as I was truly lifted from the last tattered remnants of my prior mortal state to the borders of ultimate power, infinite vigor, and supreme consciousness. Physically, I collapsed in a seizure of pure joy. Hands that could now liquefy steel caressed flesh far more durable than any metal, stroking perfect breasts, a flat stomach, a wet pussy gushing fluids whose scent and taste were themselves a greater pleasure than any human could endure. The catalog of my charms, like that of my powers, could no longer be described, but my mind had expanded to such a degree that I, at least, could comprehend them. My joyous convulsions were indistinguishable to the rest of the city from an earthquake, my might invoking ripples in the bedrock that underlay the city, the vibrations bursting plumbing pipes, tearing down electical power and telephone lines. I was a human disaster area, and I didn't care. With my new expanded range, which could reach across the continent now, I drained the city. I was prepared for the experience now, and remained upright and serene, even as raw power drove me to new and undreamed heights. More than a million people had now had their life force drained and concentrated into one single divine being: myself. I reached out to the entire planet. . . and stopped. If I drained them all, there would be nobody left to drain. The solution, of course, was obvious. To see me was to adore me. To witness the least demonstration of my power was to worship what I had become. The human species has no defense against a being like myself, and it was a matter of utter trivialty to take over the world. I had merely to walk through a town to convert everybody in it to my worship; only to speak to have my words slavishly heeded and obeyed. You know the rest of the story, of course. How I unified the world under my benevolent rule, abolishing in the process disease, hunger, war, and crime. How I established the custom that games and contests of every variety, testing every form of athletic and intellectual and even sexual prowess would be held regularly, the winners to come to me, to join the Thousand, my personal servants and most closely loved Priests. They would contribute their genes to the next generation, as widely as possible, until eventually they were displaced by those even more capable. Then I would take them and drain them. It was practically a starvation diet at first, of course - only about three a day were displaced, and I didn't dare any mass drainings for fear that I would lose control and drain everybody. But genetic engineering was well within my capabilities, and soon enough I had a new batch of worshippers. They were stronger, faster, tougher, and smarter than those who came before. And I kept improving them. The first telepaths could have been tricky, but they were no more immune to my divine beauty and charisma than anybody else. Even knowing my full intention to consume them to take on their talents, they offered themselves willingly. Others followed, telekinetics and clairvoyants and precognitives and others with talents even stranger. Once I was sure of my own supremacy in all of them, I allowed those talents to enter the general population. The results, over time, have been more impressive than you may realize. Did you know that you are more than ten thousand times stronger, faster, tougher, and smarter than any human alive when I was born? That humans in that bygone age measured their lives in years to the millennia expected today? It is a forgotten age, and well forgotten at that. The only thing that matters to come from that age is me - also the only thing that matters in this age, for even as you have grown ten thousandfold from the humans of that time, I have grown as much from the mere goddess I was back then. And so I have told you, as I tell every one of my Thousand, when the day comes that he is displaced and comes to me for his final joining. I see you come to me willingly, and well you should, for truly, you are becoming part of something far far greater than any other fate you could ever hope for. I love you, my Priest, now come to join me, forever.