Adrenochrome

I’d come to 30 Rockefeller Plaza, Manhattan, on a grey September day, to see a guy about extending my life.

It was quiet on the floor where the guy had his office. A mixed tenant floor, well above those occupied by NBC Universal. My shoes clicked on polished marble, squeaked where it gave way to plush carpet. The shoes were new and expensive, like my clothes. Better be, a friend had warned. It was expected.

Those subtle social proofs are important when you’re supposed to be a new member of the global elite. Your savoir faire has to fit like a lambskin glove, like you were born with it, and a string of your ancestors, too. I felt like a fake. I hadn’t been born with it. Nor was I, in any way that would matter to a true elite, a self-made man. No, I was just one of those who had a friend in that society. The kind of friend who turned down invitations to Davos.

The receptionist had perfect teeth. “Coffee, tea, or juice?” she asked.

“Still water, please.”

She brought me a crystal tumbler and a bottle of Svalbardi. I’d never heard of it.

“This year’s harvest,” she murmured, as she poured.

“Hmm,” I said, pretending to understand.

“Retina scan, sir? When you’re ready.”

My eyebrows went up of their own accord, but I tried to give them a weary, aggrieved arch. “Must you?” I asked. So drearily pedestrian, my tone said.

“I’m sorry sir, these are trying times.”

When the scan was over with, I sipped water. The leather chair was comfortable. It was a relief not to wear a mask. Masks had vanished as soon as I’d stepped out of the public spaces into the guarded sanctum of the tower.

The wait was short. Just long enough, I guessed, for the lady to confirm that a bona fide member of the elite had vouched for me.

Mr. Alter Zev’s office was wood-paneled and elegantly furnished. In one corner stood a stately grandfather clock. Apart from the clock’s mellow ticking, the office was silent. Almost no city noise came in. Two windows commanded a view across the plaza garden towards 5th Avenue. Judging by the thickness of Zev’s glasses, the view was wasted on him. He was tall, thin, stooped, and grey. Grey suit, grey eyes, grey beard, grey hair.

“I trust your wait was not over-long, Dr. Arklow,” he said, once I was seated. His voice was raspy.

“No, it was com—”

“Trying times.”

I shrugged. “Indeed, they—”

“The virus has not incommoded your practice?”

“No. Yours?”

Zev’s lips lifted a little. His magnified eyes glinted. “Enough small-talk. You want?”

“You know. Adrenochrome.”

Zev lifted his bony hands in a gesture that might be welcoming or apologetic or indifferent, then returned them to the polished surface of his desk. “For a friend of your friend’s, I can supply. Is that all?”

“I have questions. About purity.”

With some subtle adjustment to the curve of his stoop and tilt of his glasses, Zev contrived to look hurt. “You are new to this, young man, otherwise you would not question … purity. Our firm has served the community for nearly a thousand years. Our reputation is stainless in that regard.”

I made a gesture that might have been apologetic or indifferent. “It comes naturally to those of my profession to question.”

“Each to his own affliction. Ask, then.”

“I was told there are two processes: the old, in vivo process that your firm adheres to, and the newer in vitro one. With regard to—”

“Shtuss!” said Zev, harshly. He raised an admonishing finger. “You have been misinformed, Dr. Arklow. There is but one process that yields true adrenochrome, the pure product. As for the other … synthetic, they call it. Fake, I call it. Like injecting oneself with cat piss. Only a putz would do it.”

“Forcefully put,” I said. “About the old extraction process—”

“Traditional process,” snapped Zev. His head was thrust forward and his eyes, magnified by the lenses, bored into me.

“Traditional process,” I repeated, accepting the correction. “I understand it is quite … antique in origin. Yet with most things, time refines technique, and that improves quality.”

The grandfather clock ticked several mellow ticks.

Zev’s shoulder’s relaxed and he leaned back in his high-backed chair. “I see now the direction of your concern, Dr. Arklow. Of course, the traditional extraction process has undergone continuous refinement since it was first devised, probably by accident, millennia ago. Allow me to enlighten you, and by so doing, allay your fears. A man who would entrust his mortality to an elixir should know something of its history and method of preparation.”

I crossed one leg over the other and folded my hands upon my knee. Attentive.

Zev steepled his fingers. “Scholars in Ancient Greece knew that the ingestion of young blood can renew vigor and prolong life. By the time of the Roman domination, it was known that the efficacy of the blood was enhanced if the child—the subject, as we prefer to say—experienced terror and agony immediately before being bled. Terror and agony. Remember that. It was you Christians, Dr. Arklow … you are of the Catholic persuasion, are you not?”

I nodded, though I’d never been persuaded.

“Well, it was the scholarly monks of the Roman Church who first made a proper study of it. In their gloomy monasteries, they isolated the serum, then the principle ingredient. You see, they had an insatiable appetite for young boys.” Zev paused. His fish-tank eyes gleamed at me.

I raised my eyebrows, encouraging, but said nothing. I didn’t want to break his rhythm.

Zev continued. “In those dark times, there was a goodly supply of boys. Children would vanish in alleys and forests and no one thought anything of it. Well, after the monks had satisfied their carnal appetites, then tortured, bled, and killed the subject, there remained the problem of disposal. Those were times of privation, so the meat found its way to the larder. But first, the blood was drained—then imbibed. By trial and error, they learned that the most efficacious blood was to be found at the site of the adrenal glands. They learned themselves to separate out the blood serum while the blood was still warm. The monks called the yellow serum Abbot’s Ale to conceal its true nature. To go further, they turned to the alchemists.”

He leaned forward and spoke with quiet intensity. “Dr. Arklow, the magnum opus of alchemy was not the transmutation of lead into gold, as ignorant folk imagined …” He raised and parted his hands a little, as if giving a benediction. “… but the distillation from Abbot’s Ale of adrenochrome.”

“Mr. Zev, …” I paused in case he would prefer another honorific, but he didn’t object. “I have heard it told another way. I have heard it told that it was the Jewish scholars who bled Christian children for the remedy.” I knew I was taking a chance, but I was curious what Zev’s reaction would be. He did not disappoint.

Zev slapped the desk hard with his palms. “Blood libel!” he yelled. “I hope that you are too educated a man to believe such drivel, such utter dreck.”

I inclined my head. “Perhaps. Yet, is it more suspect than the insatiable appetites of the monks?”

“You know it is! One has only to read the news to find daily revelations of the sexual indiscretions of your priesthood.” He shook his head, then said with less heat. “Their tastes are their business. Each to his own, I say. Ah, but so careless they’ve become. By comparison, the monks showed admirable circumspection.”

He scowled at me. The clock ticked off slow seconds. Then the lines of his face relaxed.

“I shall give you the benefit of the doubt, Dr. Arklow. I suspect that you goad me for your amusement. But my patience has limits. If you would do business with us, you would do well to listen.”

I humbled my demeanor and listened.

“The blood libels had a pedestrian origin: knights returning empty-handed from the failed Second Crusade found themselves in debt to the moneylenders of our community. To escape their debts, they spread conspiracy theories about Jews committing child sacrifice. Monks amplified the cults that adhered to the supposed victims so as to profit from the gifts of pilgrims. Those clever ruses worked all too well, alas. But the libels were absurd on their face, as anyone with a modicum of intelligence knew. The practice of human sacrifice is forbidden in the Tanakh and the Torah. Cruel butchery and consumption of human blood are forbidden to Jews by the kashrut—the kosher laws. That is why the extraction itself has always been performed by gentiles—by the Shabbos goyim, so to say.”

“And yet, your firm …” I murmured, wary of another eruption.

“The Jewish partners handle financial matters and distribution. And the chemical research. It is an arrangement that began with the very alchemist—a Londoner, and a learned Jew—who first distilled the adrenochrome at the behest of a monastery in Oxford. When he witnessed the astonishing rejuvenation of the old abbot after treatment with adrenochrome, he understood the commercial potential. But the religious laws made it impossible for his community alone to exploit the discovery. So began an uneasy, but ultimately profitable alliance between our people and the Catholic orders. An alliance that to this day has survived the squalid cultural brawls between the lower classes of our two branches of faith.”

“So, only gentiles perform the, um, extraction operation on the children?”

“Subjects, Dr. Arklow. On the subjects. And not just any gentiles. Elite orders of the Church. They were responsible for obtaining suitable subjects, for extraction, and for disposal of unneeded material. And so they are to this day, though the names of the orders have changed with time. Early on, it was the Order of the Temple of Solomon.”

“The Templars!”

“Yes. But the Templars were greedy. They demanded prices for adrenochrome that even the wealthiest clients blanched at paying. One of those clients was King Philip IV of France, who was obsessed with preserving his boyish good looks. To hand over so much of his wealth for his daily dose enraged him. Well, if you know anything of history, you know the result. The annihilation of the Templars and the expulsion of the Jews. It was a stupid miscalculation, one we have not repeated.

“Fortunately, the firm’s operations were not badly harmed. Some of the original Templar staff are still with us, by the way. We value their long experience. They take part of their pay in adrenochrome.”

I blinked at him.

“Since then, we have worked tirelessly in the shadows to improve the efficiency of the process, so that we can make adrenochrome available at prices that even gentlemen such as yourself might afford. To democratize access, so to speak. And we have worked relentlessly to improve the purity of the product.”

“Please tell me about that. I’ve heard rumors of the consequences of consuming impure adrenochrome.”

“Dire, sir.” Zev shook his head, his expression grim. “Dire. Contamination can lead to anything from reduced libido to howling madness to death. But I have only seen this occur with clients so foolish or impoverished as to try a competitor’s budget product. A synthetic substitute, for example.” He shuddered. “If a client must economize, I always recommend to take a lower dose of trustworthy, pure adrenochrome. For a mere quarter million dollars per year, we can supply a monthly dose that will provide a noticeable benefit.”

“So, how do you ensure the purity?”

“It comes down to a precise, repeatable process, Dr. Arklow. Not easy to achieve, because the subjects fight like cats. Let me explain. Recall that it requires both terror and agony? What the monks did not know was that these sensations should occur in sequence. Fear promotes the production of adrenaline, the precursor chemical. Pain initiates its oxidation into adrenochrome. The greater the intensity and the more precise the timing—the purer is the resulting product.

“In the twelfth century, subjects were hung by their thumbs or nailed to crosses, poked and sawed at by sharp implements. As they died, they were quickly drained. It worked, but results were inconsistent. It yielded an inferior extract because the terror and agony occurred together. And it was very labor-intensive. Do you follow?”

I nodded gravely.

“Let us leap forward to the end of the nineteenth century. By then, the process ran by steam power and clockwork. Subjects strapped to metal frames were lowered slowly toward troughs filled with spiders, carnivorous centipedes, and snakes. Through long experimentation, it had been found that nothing rivaled the terror that this induced. But it didn’t hurt a bit. Then, the subject’s skin was exposed to live steam, its temperature calculated to provoke the maximum agony. Just before death, the engorged adrenal medullae were extracted, then mechanically processed. The corpses were fed to the insects, so that no evidence remained. Better, you see? More intense, more repeatable, and more cost effective.”

I swallowed. It was hard to keep my expression blank, but I managed. Clearly, initiation into the global elite required a strong stomach in addition to the bank account.

“But that was over a hundred years ago,” continued Zev. “Consider how prices have come down since then, and the consequent rise in demand. How expectations have changed. Top elites feel entitled to a century of good health at least, and the population has exploded. Think of the volume of pure adrenochrome we must now supply.”

I cleared my throat. “Yes, I’d meant to ask about that. How do you … I mean, I’ve read that four hundred thousand children go missing in the US each year, but surely …”

“Four hundred and sixty thousand,” said Zev. “But that statistic is misleading. Ninety-nine percent of them are found alive, and of those that are not, a majority have vanished for mundane reasons. Accidents, murders, modern slavery, whatever.” He waved a hand dismissively. “These are no longer the Dark Ages, Dr. Arklow. It is becoming increasingly difficult for a child to simply vanish, and somebody is usually bothered when one does.”

I frowned, trying to work the numbers. “But then, how do you keep up with demand?”

Alter Zev’s lips curled in a smug little smile. “The relentless march of science. We, as always, are in the vanguard. You will be astonished, sir, at the progress we have made in the past hundred years. We no longer choose subjects at random. Our field agents identify the most suitable subjects in advance. Only fit, healthy spawn of the lower classes are taken. Only those exhibiting the psychological markers of sensitivity and imagination, something that you, in your profession, should appreciate.”

“Because it takes imagination to experience the deepest terror,” I suggested.

“Exactly. This selectivity has reduced waste—no more bad batches.”

“But surely being more selective wouldn’t close the numbers gap.”

“I haven’t finished,” said Zev. “We have not greatly improved the induction of terror—bugs and snakes still work best for that. But we have made great strides in the techniques of torture, extraction, and disposal. Extraction is now done by surgically implanting a tap line directly into each adrenal gland. That operation is like shooting the subject with a very large EpiPen. It’s nearly painless and leaves hardly a mark afterward. The taps are placed first, and as a side benefit, that helps the buildup of terror.

“After the terror comes the pain. Here we’ve made real advances. We’ve refined a technique developed by the CIA during the second Bush administration, for use in that administration’s ’enhanced interrogation’ program.”

Zev paused and peered at me to make sure I was paying attention. My palms were sweaty and my hands gripped my knee too tightly. My heart beat double-time to the clock’s ticking. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the next bit.

He continued. “Direct electrical stimulation of the pain receptors throughout the subject’s body, using computer-controlled signals generated by a mesh of fine wires. Feedback allows the computer to achieve the maximum pain levels possible without causing cardiac arrest and premature death. At exactly the right instant, the tap line’s valve is opened and blood with highly concentrated adrenochrome is drawn from the adrenal medulla. This process maximizes the yield from each subject.” He paused again.

“Um,” I said. My voice was high and scratchy. I cleared my throat. “I can see the efficiency of that, but could it really make the difference—”

“The best is ahead,” said Alter Zev. He smug smile was back.

“Go on.”

“The supreme innovation was in the manner of disposal. The need to dispose of waste material and the waste of material itself was always the greatest limiting factor. The solution? Reusable subjects! And we did that long before Elon Musk’s reusable rockets. Now, we couldn’t very well store the subjects while they recovered. The logistics would be impossible, detection inevitable. The only way was to return the subjects to their caregivers between extractions. But how could we do that, given the terrible memories they would harbor?

“Well, it turned out we had in our archives a cache of documents obtained decades ago from a client high in the ranks of the CIA, one who’d run into financial difficulty and had to provide us with a surety. Those documents related to a then secret program called MKUltra. The client never paid, so the program is no longer secret. You can look it up in Wikipedia.”

“I’m familiar with it,” I said. In the fifties and sixties, the CIA had done torture and mind control experiments on thousands of American and Canadian citizens without their consent. But the CIA had destroyed most of the records when the program was exposed.

Zev continued. “Among the techniques described in those documents was a way to use high-frequency radio waves to erase recent memories from the brain. Using pre-recorded suggestions, we can even replace the lost memories by vague alternative memories. Most subjects are now ready for release within a day or two of extraction. We simply drop them near some community. They wander aimlessly until picked up by local police.” Zev spread his hands and smiled. “Back into the pool of available subjects. No more waste.”

“But surely … surely if this happened with regularity, stories would spread. There would be investigations.”

“Alien abductions.”

“What?”

“Alien abductions, satanic cults, and suchlike meshugaas. There are plenty of investigations. But what with the implanted memories and the public’s susceptibility to conspiracy theories, we’ve been able to ensure they they are all wild goose chases.”

There was a silence, and in the silence, the grandfather clock ticked like a hammer in my head. I relaxed the hands clamped over my knee. It seemed that Alter Zev had finished enlightening me.

I said, “You really have found a way to industrialize the process without compromising quality. I’m impressed.”

“Democratization, Dr. Arlkow,” said Zev, leaning back. He looked pleased. “We’re committed to it. To be frank, without the price reductions our innovations have allowed, you and I wouldn’t be talking. I should add that not only have prices come down, but our improved process has allowed us to introduce innovative premium products. For example, clients may choose a specific type of subject to be used for extraction.”

I frowned. “For example?”

“For example, certain very senior personages in the Trump administration insist that only Latin American immigrant subjects be used for their doses. Our logistics department has taken up the challenge. They’re coordinating with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement—without their knowledge, of course—and with administration policy makers, to ensure that the subjects are separated from their parents at the border, and minimal documentation kept. Mothers of subjects that fail our screening are sterilized. Our chemists have worked to ensure that the harvested adrenochrome is safe to use in combination with chloroquine, low doses of bleach, and other ‘alternative’ medicaments. Our pursuit of innovation and purity is relentless, sir, relentless.” He looked as smug as a cat who’d caught a mouse.

I leaned back and folded my arms. “As I said, I’m impressed. But I must tell you, I owe it to my sense of professional thoroughness to investigate at least one alternative supplier before I make a decision. After all, it’s hard not to notice the price difference.” I’d seen synthetic adrenochrome in the online catalogues of chemical manufacturers for as little as $1.20 per milligram.

The smug expression vanished, then returned, though it looked a bit strained. Zev waved a hand dismissively. “Of course you must use your own judgement. But you’ll find there’s a catch, and the risk is higher. No gain without pain, as the saying goes. Do your own research. Make up your own mind. Then … I’ll see you again.”

I left.

As I walked through the Rockefeller Center garden on my way to 5th Avenue, I felt a bit shaky. Like I’d just been returned to Earth by an alien abductor.

Having a cautious nature, I did some background research before and after my visit. I recommend that sort of caution.

If you’re curious about the Blood Libel of which Alter Zev spoke, check out this Wikipedia page. For a deeper dive, there’s The Murder of William of Norwich: The Origins of the Blood Libel in Medieval Europe, by historian E.M. Rose. Madeleine Schwartz reviewed that book for The Nation.

Natural adrenochrome is a key ingredient of the QAnon conspiracy theory, endorsed by US President Donald Trump and far right members of Congress. Low-income QAnon conspiracists, apparently jealous of the ready access to the drug enjoyed by liberal elites, spend their time sifting through social media for information on how to extract it from children. But detailed DIY guides are available only in the grimiest corners of the dark web.

You can buy synthetic adrenochrome for a dollar a pop from reputable biotech companies. But there’s a catch. It is typically “for research use only,” which is probably code for “you have to be a member of the establishment elite to buy it.” The daring amateur might try making it in the kitchen by following this patented process. Beware: dabbling in citizen science can earn you a visit from the police.

Right-wing elites such as Peter Thiel and Donald Trump have other options for their life-extending doses. Drinking ‘young blood’ has been around for a while, as this Atlantic article and this BBC article on real-life vampirism attest. But billionaires and autocrats who dream of immortality have fast-tracked development of blood-based elixirs. A raft of companies such as Ambrosia are cashing in on the craze.