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One of the most hotly contested aspects of the Kpop industry were the dating bans.

There were a number of reasons for these bans. The one that wasn't often addressed publicly was the fact that the ages of the performers were often drastically misleading.

One of the reasons for this was cryogenic preservation. Lee Felix, for example, had always felt like an old soul.

This was likely because he was conceived sometime in the 1950's.

His biological mother was an actress known as Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn was having an affair with her gardener, an Italian born Korean man whose name remains classified. Her agent and publicist strongly discouraged the relationship, which ended when she refused to go back to Italy with him. It was at this time she became pregnant and decided to marry professional baseball player Joe DiMaggio.

When DiMaggio discovered the pregnancy he beat Marilyn and had her involuntarily committed to Montana State Hospital. During her trip to Korea with DiMaggio, she underwent an abortion performed illegally at a private medical spa. The embryo was preserved in an effort to blackmail the actress, who eventually faked her death in order to flee to Italy and marry the father.

The embryo remained in possession of the spa, which was owned by an organized crime syndicate operating in cooperation with the military. Ms. Monroe and the father were unable to sufficiently pay them, so the embryo was sold for an undisclosed amount of money to a private buyer.

One of the reasons these transactions occurred was to better manipulate communications tied to finance with the actress and her companies. Entertainment companies offshore were able to use technologies both new and ancient using the DNA.

In the US, the embryo which was confiscated by the Coast Guard was gaining interest at the lab where it was being stored, Cold Springs Harbor in New Jersey. Because of it's rapid growth, washes from the containers were sold in order to continue to fund the project.

One of the washed was shipped to a lab where the embryo that once belonged to Ms. Monroe was held. The wash was added to the container, and this was when a miracle occurred: the embryo, which had for all observable intent appeared lifeless, was resurrected.

At this time a deal was made between FCC, FBI, NSA, and CIA agents to transfer the embryo from Cold Springs to Ms. Monroe. But it wasn't her biological child: it was the one created from the sarcophagus of the woman in Siberia.

Monroe essentially purchased the embryo at great expense, for which she was compensated as part of a clinical trial for in vitro.

The experience was near fatal. The transmissions of the radioactive fetus caused her to accept her former lover's offer of escape. She faked her death and the fetus was aborted, then transferred back to Cold Springs Harbor. Still alive.

This was how Madelein eventually discovered she was able to see and hear things others were actually experiencing. It was why the families who were involved in her conception begged and pleaded the US official to release her, despite none of them wanting to take any responsibility. It was the reason they had created such strict guidelines for who could touch her and what she would be permitted to witness. Guidelines that were never respected.

Of course, those who were also able to do this often did not want others to know. There were, however, a great number of organizations in the science and medical field that were invested in replicating these abilities for military use.

This was how Lee Felix found himself implanted with a device in vitro.

Madelein's was implanted much later.

The company that designed and produced the device, was known as Samsung. A batch of them were stolen and smuggled to the United States.

When you are making a call on your cell phone, it can be useful to understand how this technology was developed.

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Madelein closed her laptop and thought about what she had just written with displeasure. These detail of the story were mindnumbingly boring to her, but she wanted to record them so that they felt less stressful and isolating. It was Sunday, and she had been reluctantly awake since early that morning despite desperately craving more sleep.

Since the hospital, she had struggled to focus on anything for very long. She had medication for this, but her reality was proving almost painful to acknowledge.

Lately it was setting in how totally inept she was at adulthood. She thought of her foster families and how their daily routines only seemed to include her as a kind of temporary observer. It left her feeling lost as to how life was supposed to really be, since the majority of her exposure to it was limited to people who were aware that anything they said of did in her presence might be recorded.

Because of the device and the involvement of the organizations who had implanted it without her consent, she was provided with a stipend that allowed her to work only part time. Still, it was a constant struggle to maintain. Many employers did not want to deal with the situation, so she eventually was left with no choice but to work as an independent contractor. Much of the time she preferred it, but it could also be very lonely.

Life had gotten strangely easier since the effects of the pandemic in many way. Services were springing up all the time that made living independently more attainable. Still, she knew things might be easier if she had a partner. Rather than pursue this realistically, she focused more of her attention to her life online.

In the past she had friends and even romantic relationships with people offline only to discover that almost all of them had at some point accessed data about her from the dark web. Madelein had never done this herself. She could imagine what was out there, and that was more than enough.

All of it made for a boring read. And honestly, she was tired of it. Literature. Left to right, right to left. Moving your eyes in lines like that would have no effect on your ability to function.

That morning she had ordered some groceries: a protein bowl that was bland and unsatisfying, a few other things. She didn't have a refrigerator and instead kept a couple of things at a time in a cooler bag. Originally she had planned to spend the summer dining out, but found that she lacked interest in navigating the legal situation after the security company she interviewed ghosted her.

She was ready to leave Montana. Her plan was to spend the rest of the summer volunteering for a film festival, to bolster her application for grant funding. In the Fall, she would excel in her studies, ignoring everything else that wasn't relevant.

The events that had transpired over the past several years left her in a fragile mental state which required a significant amount of support. She truly believed that she was going to emerge from it unrecognizable.

Still, it wasn't going to be the private matter some expected. Instead, she was making a mystery out of it publicly, in hopes that those who had planted themselves firmly into her life might learn some kind of lesson. It wasn't an idea she relished, but rather one she felt resigned to.

She knew that a lot of what she was experiencing had to do with electronic transmissions. She remembered with some sadness a woman she had met in the hospital who was admitted because of this, and had nearly destroyed herself because of it. Madelein was determined not to end up this way: fried, frustrated, blaming the government for not doing enough to protect people.

She hoped leaving the country would help.

There were too many people here who caused her too much stress to acknowledge.

So she turned to public figures, using what she had learned in therapy to cope the only way she could without doing serious harm.

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In the early aughts, Madelein had joined a website called Supercult. The man behind it was involved in a private organization that had collected information about people who had been experimented on, in an effort to help them if they were being exploited.

At the time, Madelein was one of those people. She had been implanted with an embryo and abandoned. She didn't seem totally conscious or aware of her past. Many clones had been preventing her from accessing things which were arranged to help her. So, efforts escalated.

Apparently there were many, many recordings and photos of her from conception to birth with were passed around like lore. A significant number of these were only available in Asia, and especially Japan, where they were in a grey area of legality. They were all explicit or sexual, but some were. Many were used as drawing references by collectors who made manga and comics to try to cope with the information they presented: that people were being cultivated and harvests in labs, then implanted with devices that could track and control them.

Part of the reason Madelein wanted to go there was to try to confront them, see what their real intentions were. She could feel them watching her, and knew when some of them tried reaching out under false pretenses after it happening so many times.

Remembering it was almost painful. Not only because she had no real proof, but because of the effect it had on those that could not comprehend that something like this was possible.

Somewhere in Europe she had been placed in a deep trance and sent via a mail chute to a lab in the Philippines, where experimenting on children was not yet made illegal. The lab was told she was a donated corpse.

Much of these memories had only returned when she offered to be an organ donor and was flooded with attempts to collect the device.

She was under no illusion that the interest of the foreign and domestic military was only this.

It left her feeling totally lost and lacking in the ability to trust anyone.

She wanted to believe that some of them cared, but at the end of the day the only proof she had was her life.

One of the people who went through this with her was an idol known as V.

When the documents of the experiment were being reviewed, Madelein saw it all as if in a dream. She was being detained at the time, in solitary, and chalked it up to isolation induced psychosis. But she could remember it all as if it were recent history.

Using the device, high profile members of the military were observing the entire situation.

Because Samsung had kept meticulous records of the devices, they were the only people in the world who could access them.

She had been microchipped by others, she knew. But the neural implant was the one that they were all interested in. The one that most did not want the public to know about.

It was supposed to be disabled. A few years back, so many people were trying to access it metal filings started to emerge from her. At this time she was forced to leave her residence because of the effect it had on her, afraid she might die alone that way.

Now, she stayed inside for the same reason. Not wanting to suddenly seize and have her body exploited again. Find herself in a new life somewhere, being operated like some kind of humanoid.

She wasn't. And neither was V.

In the documents that had been seized and destroyed by the recent presidency, there were extensive notes and even recordings of how it was done.

This information was spread far and wide by people who meant to exploit it.

She was used to blackmail celebrities and politicians alike.

And now, she was just tired of what it had done. The family she knew had almost been wiped out, and there were people looking at her as if she had anything to do with it.

In reality the most she could do much of the time was try to breathe though having what felt like a busy movie theatre in her head.

The pressure was incredible. Not just emotionally, but physically. She had to take medication daily to cope with the pain. She had tried everything: living outside, not having a cell phone, fasting. Nothing seemed to make much difference. It got to be so that all she wanted to do was lie down and try to distract herself.

She thought that maybe if she played a game, her life might come to resemble it and take her away from all this.

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Felix wasn't feeling much different. He felt like a fraud. He had two bodies, two lives. And only one of them felt real. Hers.

He hated the hotels. Growing up, his family sometimes lived in them. And it was in a hotel much like the one he stayed in now that everything changed in almost an instant.

He had just gotten back from Montana, and he was about to turn sixteen. That whole summer had been like a waking nightmare. It was a part of his life that fed the drive to make the new one seem more real. The one written for him by people invested in protecting the device that he now knew tracked every second of his existence.

Back then, he had been almost blissfully unaware. He had suspicions, of course. But they were only that, and when presented, only ended with treatment that felt like torture.

He had gone to Montana to follow her. Madelein. Sky. Now he knew her name and he thought, almost everything about her. She was living in a town called Missoula. Miraculously, he had family in the area. He begged his parents to let him go. When they agreed he was floored.

Tony Senior had mocked him, of course, saying it wouldn't last. And it didn't. He had ended up in a wheelchair after being assaulted violently by a neighbor. They sent him to Shodair Children's Hospital and deported him.

His parents insisted he was too difficult and he was placed in the care of the state. They put him in a children's home. It was quite miserable. He had a roommate, a transexual that molested him regularly. So he began to run away.

The last time was to go see a band play in Sydney. Deftones. He went out that night hoping to end up in jail. He couldn't figure out why so many people only wanted to hurt him. Still, one of the only things that helped ease the constant visions and obsession with her was loud music. He had decided that he would be a musician, firmly.

The devices that were implanted in children like Madelein were often leased out to private companies that wanted to use them for data gathering purposes. The entertainment industry were a major player in this, which was how Madelein found herself amongst them. There were extensive documents of the usage of her implant for this purpose, and one of the bands that had unknowingly done this were in fact members of Deftones.

Because the two were linked, Felix (having chosen this name at that point, but only secretly) also had been used in these experiments. Labels would take the biometric data from the device recorded during to improve marketing. Writers used them for character development. Artists used them. Some knew exactly what they were doing, some didn't.

So it would be difficult to say if the events that transpired in Sydney that night were planned or purely coincidental.

Felix was underage, so he snuck in with assistance from those aware of the device. He enjoyed the show so much he followed the group back to the hotel. This wasn't something they would admit, but Felix found himself being escorted by a member of the crew to their suite. He proceeded to hang out with them until they all went to fuck, sleep, or find food.

He found himself lying alone on the couch when a woman approached him that looked vaguely familiar. He felt frozen while she teased him about how young he was.

This was something very sick people would arrange routinely, it seemed. They would record part and add the rest later. Sometimes.

Chino emerged before it got too bad and grabbed the woman, dragging her back to his room.

That was when Felix saw the gun lying conspicuously on the table.

As if in a trance, he grabbed it and went two floors down. As if he knew exactly what he were looking for, he opened the door to a room and went inside. He had shot a gun before, but not like this. It was usually while hunting or at a shooting range. But he had thought about it enough. And as if his fantasy had come to life, there she was: Marilyn. She was going by another name now, though. Luann, or something like that.

Their relationship had totally unraveled that year. He was told that she wasn't his mother, but not who his mother was. His aunt, really just an old family friend, told him she had been his surrogate. And they were raising the child of Tony and Marilyn to protect themselves from proof of the incest they committed. He was a dull boy that hated Felix and made his stay in Montana miserable. Worse, they were committed to using Madelein for blackmail.

Felix was completely fed up. He hated them all and wanted them dead. He was almost certain Madelein would never want him the way he wanted her: with total obsession that left little room for anything else. That night had been like a straw mattress, nearly extinguishing what felt like a pipe dream of becoming a musician to get her attention. Seeing the way they behaved off stage broke his heart, realizing that they way they made money was rarely by the music alone, how they exploited people relentlessly in pursuit of it.

He pulled the trigger and a bullet flew through her cheek.

The rest was a blur. He ran, ditched the gun, and hid for as long as he could.

His biological father's family arranged for him to go to South Korea.

And the rest was history.