My apologies for being away for so long. I will be trying to do regular updates for this Fanfiction.
The most pressing task, once I had secured enough capital to move freely, was to establish a legitimate-seeming base of operations for a pharmaceutical business. In the city's industrial outskirts—warehouses strung with rusting signage, forgotten strip malls, a landscape of gray utility and terminal ambition—I found a vacant commercial complex where the rent was cheap and the neighbors uninterested in one another's affairs. The property, a bland concrete rectangle with embedded offices and a loading dock, would serve as both headquarters and laboratory. I registered the business under a generic corporate holding, drawing up articles of incorporation that described us as a boutique research start-up focused on "novel psychoactives with therapeutic potential." It was the kind of euphemism that drew no attention and, with luck, might even attract some seed money from credulous venture capitalists.
The next step was recruitment. I placed a series of online job postings, couched in the language of pharmaceutical innovation, calling for organic chemists and process engineers with experience in pharmaceuticals or, ideally, clandestine synthesis. Of the two dozen or so applicants, most were desperate postdocs or disgraced former academics, casualties of the eternal grant wars or, in one memorable case, a failed sabbatical experiment involving DMT and an entire department's worth of lab rats. I offered obscene salaries, immediate signing bonuses, and the promise of unlimited research freedom, provided the product met my exacting standards for quality and quantity. I even installed a foosball table in the breakroom and splurged on gourmet coffee beans to build the illusion of a quirky, disruptive workplace.
My lead chemist, Dr. Anya Shostakovich, had been blackballed from the biotech sector for an incident involving methylated precursors mistakenly delivered to Princeton's admissions office. She hired her own team, a gaggle of sullen graduate-student types who worked in shifts and never asked questions outside the bounds of physical chemistry. We set up our first production lines for amphetamines—a classic, easy to synthesize and with massive demand among the city's white-collar strivers—then expanded to MDMA, LSD (sourced from clandestine lysergic acid cultures in the Balkans), anabolic steroids, and, for the pain clinics and hospice markets, high-grade Oxycodone and Morphine. Each batch ran through a battery of purity tests and was then moved, via encrypted logistics apps, to distributors who delivered by drone or motorcycle courier to dead drops throughout the metro area.
Security was paramount. The labs were shielded with faraday cages and the windows treated with two-way mirrors to deter surveillance. All comms were routed through a mesh of burner phones and VPNs. Every week, I rotated the workforce among three rented sites and sent anonymized payments to their bank accounts via a shell payroll provider in Liechtenstein. I even hired a local high school chess prodigy to monitor the dark web for chatter about our operation, paying him strictly in gold bullion and premium game tokens.
But the scale was still small time. To reach the next level, I needed access to precursor chemicals in bulk, and for that, there was no alternative but to deal directly with the Triads in China. The Chinese underworld had, for decades, perfected the art of exporting controlled substances under the cover of legitimate business—lavender oil, vanilla extract, even industrial paint thinners, all packed with the necessary molecular building blocks if you knew where to look. They also had the logistics infrastructure to move literal tons of merchandise from Guangzhou to every port on earth. I spent weeks researching the various factions and their internal politics, cross-referencing shipping manifests and social media posts, until I isolated a mid-level fixer who brokered deals from a karaoke bar outside Shenzhen.
The plan was simple on paper, wildly dangerous in reality. I would travel to China under the guise of a pharmaceutical trade delegate, arrange a private meeting with the fixer, and negotiate a long-term supply contract that would keep my labs flush with precursors for years. The weeks leading up to the trip were consumed with logistics—fake documents, biometric spoofers, a crash course in Mandarin business etiquette, and bribes to two separate customs officials. I scheduled meetings with cover companies, printed up glossy pamphlets advertising our "innovative pain management solutions," and practiced my best dead-eyed CEO handshake in front of a mirror.
On the morning of the flight, I packed a single carry-on bag, wiped my laptop's hard drive clean, and left a note for Dr. Shostakovich with a series of encrypted backup plans in case I didn't return. The city was still half-asleep as I caught a rideshare to the airport, the skyline a jagged line against the predawn haze, and I watched the streets slide by, thinking of the empire I was building, brick by illicit brick.
The next step, the only step that mattered, was to survive this meeting and come home alive.
It helped that I sit near the top of one of the largest criminal organisations on earth. My name carried weight—not the full story of it, just enough. The fixer's people checked my credentials twice, then a third time, and each time the answer came back the same: I was who I claimed to be, and my organisation had the reach to make life difficult for anyone who stood in its way. A courtesy meeting was arranged within days, not weeks, and the terms were straightforward: they would supply precursors by the container-load, routed through shell companies in Macau and registered as industrial solvents, and in return they would collect a steady stream of revenue from a market they had no local access to. For an outfit that size, moving a few tons of chemicals was a simple task, a single line in a ledger already crowded with worse. The hard part was over before I'd finished unpacking.