Pheromone City

By Dr D. Bruno Starrs

In the increasingly woke and egalitarian country of Australia, The General (AKA 'Turtleneck'), aided by the exotic dancer Velveteen (AKA 'Dr Vanessa Vivaldi') and their enlisted heavy, Chestybond (AKA 'Who Knows?'), is remaking the effete, black males of Sydney into Schwarzenegger-like cyborg soldiers for their secret, revolutionary, right wing 'Wimp 2 Warrior' organization. The W2W freaks home in on Indigenous Australian academic Lewis Jerussy, the author of a popular new nurture-over-nature non-fiction book, and proceed to brutally rip apart his friends and neighbors - as the monsters rampage after the pheromonal scent emanating from a leopard-print G-string surreptitiously planted on Lewis by the stripper Velveteen.

Despite not being alpha males themselves, Lewis and his mates turn out to be more formidable than expected, destroying two of the bio-hacked musclemen. Chasing the latest cyborg to target him after his fiancée is murdered, Lewis stumbles into The General’s subterranean W2W lair and is duly captured and transformed into a killer meathead himself!

But Velveteen finds herself sexually attracted to Lewis and, rebelling, she devises a treasonous, new plan. The stripper slash scientist - whose well-researched proposal to bioengineer a regiment of female cyborgs was savagely belittled by The General - will rework estrogen-related pheromones into an effective counter to the testosterone and methamphetamine-charged aggression of the W2W soldiers. Re-ignited on an olfactory battlefield, the age-old war between the genders is about to be resolved - in favor of female 'Homo sapiens'!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dr D. Bruno Starrs
• Release date: Aug 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005132590

Dr D. Bruno Starrs

Dr D. Bruno Starrs was born in Adelaide, South Australia, in a hospital. It was a year he cannot remember very well. He is a mongrel of a human: his ancestry is a mix of Irish, Maltese and Indigenous Australian.Bruno's qualifications include two Masters degrees and a PhD from highly reputable Australian universities. Despite such a thorough education his verbal diarrhea has yet to be cured.

Book preview

PHEROMONE CITY.

By D. Bruno Starrs.

Copyright 2022.

ISBN: 9781005132590

CHAPTER ONE.

SMASH! SMASH! POW! In a packed Las Vegas sports stadium, a sweat-drenched ‘World Games Unlimited’ fighter pounds his hapless opponent in the jaw with fists like reinforced concrete. Fragments of shattered, bloody teeth go flying and the challenger’s body hits the mat with a lifeless thud.

Despite his own body effectively shunting blood away from the genitals and towards his working muscles in an evolutionally functional ‘Fight or Flight’ response, the winning combatant’s cock involuntarily stiffens for a moment as the realization hits home: He’s the reigning champ and he’s definitely gonna get laid tonight!

‘Cock’ is another word for ‘rooster’, of course, and the dominant pugilist flexes his chemically enhanced brawn, strutting around the ring like a spurred rooster circling its defeated feathered foe. Behind him a banner reads: WORLD GAMES UNLIMITED: NO DRUG TESTS – EVER!

Crowing hubris from such alpha males is obligatory, be they human or avian warriors, and the WGU combatant shamelessly milks the cheering audience for more applause, ecstatic with his triumph, pumped with his success. Beneath glistening, blood-spattered, brown skin, veins bulge and striated muscles dance as he strikes victory pose after victory pose. Acknowledging the impressive physique on display, the Las Vegas crowd goes wild with admiration - if not repressed homo-erotic adulation.

USA! USA! USA! bellows a check-shirted, red-necked fan and the patriotic rabble soon takes it up as a chanted chorus to this near-monstrous symphony of 21st Century ultra-violence.

Way over on the other side of the planet, the fight has another equally keen audience. Watching the match on wall-mounted TV screens in a Bondi Beach bar, the predominantly male patrons in this upmarket Australian drinking hole cheer no less enthusiastically than their US counterparts. Americans or Aussies, they’re all idolizing athletes doped to levels never seen before, in the professional sporting world’s most controversial legal experiment to date: the World Games Unlimited equivalent of an anything goes, non-drug-tested Olympic Games.

From Synchronized Swimming to Mixed Martial Arts, the WGU competitors are all juiced-up to the eyeballs with anabolic steroids and other Performance Enhancing Drugs, their focus intensified by designer Nootropics and their energy levels artificially improved with laboratory-tweaked versions of what addicts on the street used to call ‘Crystal meth’.

Originally, media hysteria and what some call rampant political correctness had forced the Olympic Games organizers to initiate a new, non-tested class for a handful of female to male transgender competitors but with exogenous testosterone use by athletes thereby effectively legalised, this category quickly evolved into a PEDs paradise when the World Games Unlimited entrepreneurs entered the industry. The ticket-buying public now loves ogling all the juiced-up bodies setting juiced-up world records and bar-owners happily pay for the WGU streaming rights, if it means the punters are happy.

Stockbroker and lawyer types mostly, the business-suited Aussie fans in the Bondi pub are indeed happy and they fist-pump the air joyfully, sloshing boutique beer from raised glasses as the World Games Unlimited logo and stinger wraps up the live broadcast. Someone starts up the patriotic Down Under chant: Aussie, Aussie, Aussie! Oi, oi, oi! but then the stream cuts to a video clip of an effeminate-looking, heavily coiffed, pastel-pink and baby blue-suited South Korean boy band. The Bondi crowd boos raucously.

Meanwhile, outside and oblivious to all the alpha male posturing in the bar, a thin, pimply, young, black man of Nigerian ancestry stands on the rain-wet footpath and exhales a lungful of medicinal marijuana smoke then flicks the roach into the gutter, ignoring the ‘NO LITTERING’ sign and making a mockery of his timelessly fashionable Greenpeace black t-shirt . The stoner kid shivers as he listens to his university biology lecturer drone on through his battered ‘Beats by Dr Dre’ headphones.

Hormones, the tenured professor declaims, "Rule humanity the same way they rule the animal kingdom. Oestrogen makes women clucky. Testosterone makes men punchy. As docile honeybees can become a swarm of unstoppable killers in an instant, the primal instincts of Homo sapiens may be restored – feasibly – via judicious use of certain bio-specific chemical compounds. Feasibly, that is."

Trevor Abdullah, the thin, pimply, young, black man on the Bondi footpath, is unimpressed by his lecturer’s biologically determinist stance. In his head, he cockily confronts the learned pedagogist: ‘Your science is a bit reductionistical, don’t you reckon, prof? Homo sapiens may retain some vulnerability to evolutionarily significant hardwired instincts but surely we’re better than the dumb animals?’

Lacklustre students such as Trevor rarely voice such relatively cerebral - but dangerously contradictory - opinions out loud to their teachers, however. They’re best kept quietly alone inside his head while he at least tries for the appearance of humility and passes enough exams to eventually make it through to a graduation ceremony. And a wage slave job sufficiently remunerated enough for his potentially crippling uni debt to be eventually annulled.

Many young Sydneysider men feel the same desperation as Trevor. And the marketing experts know this. On laptop and phone screens all over Sydney, a recently created, professionally designed, royal blue-themed window pops up, urging all the city’s persecuted, sexually side-lined and (unjustifiably) angry beta males lurking on forums dedicated to such patriarchy-promoting Involuntary Celibates - also disparagingly known as ‘Incels’ - to take meaningful action and change things for the better!

The advertisement implores the online male audience to: Click on the link below to see if you qualify for an obligation-free trial of ‘The Wimp 2 Warrior Treatment’. Become a brother in the revolution and reboot your sad, unhappy life, NOW!

BEEP! The junk ad appears unsummoned once more on Trevor’s phone. He is quite familiar with the spam and, irritated by its persistent harassment, Trevor angrily ignores it.

Pondering his always uncertain future, Trevor turns and stares pensively for a moment across the unlit, golden-sand beach and further on to the Pacific Ocean’s far, black horizon. The famous Bondi surf breaks gently, producing a peaceful, non-stop thrum of white noise beneath the unruly partying and traffic sounds of Bondi’s busiest street.

Dripping salt water, two paunchy, balding, wet-suited boogie boarders jog past Trevor and into the comforting warmth of their parked cars. ‘Pathetic old fart nobodies’, Trevor silently surmises to himself as he pauses the science podcast. ‘Pathetic old fart professor, for that matter’, he adds.

Humility doesn’t come easy for young Trevor. That’s probably why he doesn’t have a tutoring job or any other university-based income source to supplement his meagre scholarship. Hence his dependence on the side hustle of Scooter Juicing.

The night air has a briny, sea-scented tang to it, and Trevor always finds working the coastal suburbs of Sydney invigorating thanks to its biting perfume. Still alone on the wet, misty footpath, he scratches his bleached blond, corn-rowed hair as he studies his phone. A risk-taker as usual, his helmet dangles uselessly from his belt while - completely unnoticed by Trevor - mysterious pink fumes waft away from a scrap of leopard-print fabric snagged on the rear axle of his scooter!

His phone beeps again then auto-plays a video message from Trevor’s friend, another Nigerian Australian surfie stoner kid: Happy 21st! So wrecked I missed your party, dude. You had a stripper, right? Epic! I bet the slut went off!

She went off alright, replies Trevor, deadpan. Disgusting off. So I bailed and I’m-ah right back to juicin’ them scooters. Got me a God-level capitalist work ethic, hey bro?

Trevor hangs up and inspects a ‘Guava’ scooter dumped next to the bar. According to the Guava App on his phone, it’s damaged and its battery is low, so he expertly flips the lightweight electric vehicle onto his back.

Hey cheese-squeeze, I’m using it!

Trevor looks up with apprehension at a trio of well-dressed but rowdy drunks emerging from the bar onto the dark, rain-slick Campbell Avenue - the main street of Bondi Beach.

Swaggering in spotless RM Williams horse-riding boots, beige moleskins and navy-blue blazers, the men aspire to looking like wealthy but rugged white Aussie graziers, although none of the three are at all rural in upbringing.

You’re gonna ride it? For real?

CHIRP CHIRP! The Drunk White Man unlocks his parked red sportscar with a remote control and replies, mocking Trevor’s vernacular: Yeah mate, ‘for real’.

The Drunk White Man’s friend towers threateningly over Trevor, who shrinks down instinctively.

Got a problem with that, wimp?

N … No! Only it’s almost dead.

Aw, sad face emoji. Your girlfriend just texted me, begging me to come on over and fuck her, like the black bitch on heat she is. But I guess those fag eco wheels aren’t going to impress her after all … And all I got’s this crappy old Ferrari!

As the drunks slap each other on the back, hooting and guffawing at their mate’s dumb joke, Trevor seizes the opportunity and takes off with the uncharged scooter. He still hasn’t noticed the leopard-print material entangled on his own scooter’s rear wheel axle.

Nor is Trevor cognizant yet of the snagged fabric’s faint, reddish-pink vapour trail drifting up into the dark night sky. Floating on the cold air like a ribbon of aromatic influence, unspooling on the Southerly breeze as if from some secret necromancer’s crucible, sending out invisible feelers for the only pair of nasal receptors in Sydney that matter to it - this scent has itself some serious work to do.

Indeed, the fragrance is so persistent it seems almost sentient - and the powerful aroma goes exploring the city, relentlessly searching for a chemical match.

***

A few minutes later and Trevor finds himself cruising the nearby beachside suburb of Coogee, dodging rain puddles and begrudgingly admiring the scenery. The main drag of this affluent suburb, Marine Parade, is prettily lined with Council-tended Norfolk pines, coconut palm trees, children’s playgrounds, shaded picnic spots with coin-operated gas barbeques and looping cycle paths.

But it’s not actually an environment conducive to Trevor ‘finding himself’. Instead, the upmarket precinct irks him with its ostentatious wealth so prominently on display.

Typical of moneyed Coogee are its many sprawling, gated mansions and multistorey art deco blocks of flats with names like ‘Monterey’, ‘Shangri-la’ and ‘La Dolce Vita’. All such buildings craning towards the sea in the direction of Fiji or New Zealand, emulating the giant, stone sentries of Easter Island. All such buildings peacocking their Antipodean prosperity with perfectly landscaped lawns and topiary. All such buildings serving as reminders to Trevor of the inequities of modern Australian society.

In fact, not content with simply reminding Trevor of the inequality, Coogee enjoys rubbing it in. ‘This lavish lifestyle is not for you, commoner! Not now, peasant, not ever!’, it seemingly wants to