Quaranteam: Phil’s Tale
Chapter Nine
It had been a few strange days since his meeting with Eric, and much of it had been spent running tests on Audrey, trying to figure out what was happening with her. Without warning, it seemed like Audrey’s window had shortened. When Phil had come back from Eric’s house, it had been almost like she’d been going nine or days without his cum, instead of the four she’d actually gone without. That wasn’t good, and had Phil worried.
The tests had come back that there wasn’t anything wrong with her, only that she’d actually fought off a new variant of DuoHalo, and that information had sent all of the base into a tizzy. It was odd, because nobody else on the base had contracted it, as far as anyone could find.
The Quaranteam serum was doing its job. They’d developed a rapid results test that could determine DuoHalo was in someone’s bloodstream, or if someone had recent antibodies developed by the serum, and Audrey’s blood had new antibodies, but nobody else on the base had them, not even Phil or Linda themselves, and they spent most of their time with Audrey, day or night.
There had been a few hours when Audrey had run into town the previous day, and that was when they’d determined she’d caught it, so they’d checked in with the restaurant she’d stopped in at, and found that the owner and the staff had all gone through similar symptoms over the previous day, but nobody could be sure where they’d caught it from.
The track-and-trace system they’d built allowed them to check with everyone who’d come into the restaurant that day, and while the ones in the afternoon had gone through similar symptoms, the ones who had come in early in the day as well as those in the evening hadn’t. That meant there was a very narrow window of about two hours in the middle of the day where someone had brought the DuoHalo variant in.
It wasn’t possible to figure out who specifically brought it in, simply because many of the people who came in during the lunch rush paid in cash, and the owner’s security cameras hadn’t got great angles for when several people had come in simultaneously and picked up orders.
That was a problem, but the fact was that the serum was doing its job.
It wasn’t this particular variant Phil was worried about.
It was the next one.
And the next one.
And the next one.
They’d been theorizing and preparing for the possibility, but this was the first one that had broken through into the protective shield they’d tried to make by locking in people within New Eden. They were mostly keeping folks from leaving and returning regularly, but there were a small handful of people who could go in and out, simply because they were too important to not be allowed to. The idea was to not let many people in, in an effort to try and minimize the chance of exposure, even with their layers of protection.
From their initial research into the antibodies, the DuoHalo variant that had briefly infected Audrey, which they were called 4.b, wasn’t as strong or deadly as the original strain, but it did seem more persistent, and it also seemed to be mucking about with the Quaranteam serum’s protocols.
For the first few days after they’d fought off 4.b, the person’s sexual needs window was shrunken by around 35%, although it only seemed to have that impact on women. The men who’d come in contact with it hadn’t even blipped, nary a cough or a runny nose, at least those who’d momentarily had it within the walls of New Eden.
Once the first variant appeared, it was like opening Pandora’s Box. There wasn’t just one, there were dozens of variants popping up all over the nation, and even more across the world. Many of them weren’t that troubling, but a handful of them were starting to interact with the Quaranteam serum in odd and unusual ways, none of which made Phil feel any better.
The only bit of good news amid all the chaos was that the serum was doing what it was supposed to, keeping people infected by DuoHalo from having serious health problems, including death. The worst symptoms that people protected by Quaranteam serum were getting were: headaches, exhaustion, vertigo, nausea and intense voracious appetites, both gastronomical and sexual. That was a far cry from those who were unvaccinated, who were still dying at an 80-85% rate in men, and a 15-20% rate in women.
Word about the serum was starting to spread from survivors to the unvaccinated, and Phil had done everything he could to make sure their inoculations weren’t just focusing on wealthy, affluent areas, but also hitting industrial and inner city areas as well. There had been some pushback from untrusting people, but they were starting to spread the word about how high the fatality rates were.
As Phil had expected, it had helped that he’d suggested they send in non-white members of the Air Force and the CDC to demonstrate the serum and its effectiveness. It wasn’t going well, but at least it was making a little bit of progress. Lots of people, rightfully so, brought up the Tuskagee experiments. Phil empathized, he really did, but it was important to him that they did everything they could to get people protected and put together with serum carrying partners.
He’d suggested to the outreach teams that they work via contacting relatives and kinfolk, and that was at least making a little bit of progress. Once one person found their new life and their place in it, having them tell all their male relatives about it had been working well enough as a starting point. The progress wasn’t fast, but it was working, and that was a good beginning from which to make further headway. Sometimes they’d tell their friends as well, and that helped the trust circle expand even more. Anything that did that was progress in Phil’s book.
What it also meant, from a numbers point of view, was that the adoption rate in African-American, Asian and Hispanic communities wasn’t anywhere near as high as it was in white communities. There’d been some push back within the government that if these people didn’t want the serum, they shouldn’t be wasting their time trying to change their minds, but Phil was adamant that they keep pushing and just take the time hit, otherwise he and his team would strike and stop research work on combating further variants that might appear.
That seemed to scare the shit out of the higher ups enough that they kept their committal levels to what they were, and that meant everyone just kept on working.
(Phil also pointed out to the higher ups that the adoption rate for the serum in the southern states was also significantly lower, for similar reasons, and that nobody had suggested they just stop trying to convert the poor southern white folks, who’d also been putting up a similar level of fuss, into taking the serum, and that had certainly put the final nail in the argument’s coffin. Nobody liked being called racist, especially when they were being racist.)
Phil had also started looking into some of the other things that were happening nationwide, because as much as he would’ve loved to just get head down and focus on his little corner of the world, he needed to know what was happening outside of the relatively safe walls of New Eden.
The military, divisions of which had started the pandemic as highly resistant to taking the Quaranteam serum, had started clamoring for it after suffering heavy casualties. The US military was only about 15-20%, so in the early days of DuoHalo, it had decimated entire bases.
The Air Force had been the first to go full bore on the serum, especially since they’d aided in its development, so their losses were the most contained, looking at only about a 45% casualty rate. The Navy had been the next to get onto the Quaranteam serum train in a big bad way, and had suffered about a 50% casualty rate before they’d begun deploying the serum. The Army, which had the highest number of women in it, had suffered around a 60% casualty rate. And the Marines, who clocked in with only 7% women, had been the last and most resistant to adopting the serum, lost nearly 75% of their personnel, leaving them extremely short handed.
Every single living person in all the military branches, including the reserve, had been buffered with the serum now, and were doing their best to take care of critical infrastructure and maintenance across the country.
Law enforcement had been a much different story, and the federal and local levels couldn’t have been much more different.
The CIA had been first in line with their sleeves rolled up and their arms out, demanding to get dosed with the serum as quickly as they could. The CIA’s workforce was nearly half women, and they’d already gone about establishing a new system to help them manage the side effects with a minimal impact on their activities. Phil wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, because the CIA was still notoriously tight with their security, but the CIA’s director had said in a memo to the Joint Chiefs that they had suffered only an 18% casualty rate, and urged all the other branches of law enforcement to get on board before they lost all personnel when they were needed the most. From what Phil could read in-between the lines, he suspected that members of the CIA were mostly being matched up with other members of the CIA, keeping the loop tight.
Because the CIA had been all in with it, the NSA and the FBI had generally followed suit, although there were some divisions of the FBI that had suffered higher casualties than most, in parts of the country where vaccine paranoia was running the highest. Across the board, the two branches were looking at around 40-45% casualty rates, in line with what the Air Force had suffered.
Local law enforcement, on the other hand, was all over the goddamn place. Many officers were insisting they weren’t going to take the serum and would just “deal with getting sick,” even with the numbers about casualties that they had access to. And it varied a lot based on regional attitudes. For example, in the larger metropolitan areas, the police were looking at about 50-55% casualty rates, simply because they were prioritized so early for serum vaccinations, and because most of the officers there seemed to see the value in it. But smaller town police forces were being wiped out, especially in both the south and the more rural states, where irrational fears over “government microchipping” and “unproven science” were starting to cause protests and refusal to take the serum.
Phil hated to be cold about it, but he, like many other people in the organization, had come to the conclusion that they just didn’t have the time and resources to save people with unjustifiable concerns about the serum, so while they were doing their best to convince everyone, those who were actively pushing back the hardest were mostly being left to die.
It was a daunting decision to have to make, but the dead count was already so unfathomably high that everyone was just doing what they could to get through the day. Nearly the entire military had been retasked to do one of two things domestically—either they were aiding in the vaccination effort, by transporting either the serum or people taking the serum, or they were doing the more grisly job, in corpse detail.
The amount of dead bodies across the United States was now so high that they were reverting to contingency plans that the military had long held and hoped they would never have to use. Bodies were being identified, marked as deceased in the national registry, then either burned or added to a mass grave, both of which were becoming disturbingly common across the United States. They didn’t even have time to notify next-of-kin, simply because there were so many corpses to manage.
All of this was also being done as quietly as possible, trying to keep the general population from panicking before a nationwide announcement could be made, and that was still looking like it was a few months away, in late November or early December, when they’d gotten around 60%—70% of the surviving population inoculated with the Quaranteam serum. It would mostly be to get the hard holdouts to voluntarily take the serum, and to reach those in more backwoods portions of the country.
Part of the way they’d been doing media blackouts was to shut off both the internet and the cell phone networks of areas before they rolled in, limited people’s ability to communicate outward. They were also trying to do sorties at night, so they could determine where there were large volumes of bodies to take to processing.
Even with that, however, it was tough to keep a lid on it, and word was starting to get out. The government’s stance on the matter was unflinching—“we’re working on it, stay at home, only go out if you absolutely have to and mask up if you do.”
One of the working theories that the CIA had about why international reports about death tolls hadn’t been screaming from the rafters was that in many cases, the international media had suffered the most fatalities, and they simply didn’t have the work force to be able to get stories out, although the CIA director’s debrief also stated that some nations were putting “national security” stamps on reporting, and doing their best to keep things under wraps so as to not cause a panic, with the UK, Canada, Germany, France and Spain all taking this approach.
The CIA debrief also included a bunch of other fascinating, although not entirely confirmed, bits of information, such as that both Russia and China were suffering even higher casualty rates than the US, even though both countries were trying to project strength by claiming they were suffering only minimal losses to their population. Satellite photography had uncovered both countries were doing large scale mass graves as well, however, which completely went against their propaganda.
Phil spent a long while reading the debrief from the CIA, and the other kernel of information that he found utterly fascinating was that New Zealand hadn’t apparently suffered almost any casualties (or at least that was what they were claiming) and Australian men were definitely more resistant to DuoHalo naturally, something literally all the scientists were doing their best to try and understand. Australia was still contracting DuoHalo at around the same rate as everyone else, but instead of the typical 80-90% fatality rate in men, which had been basically a universal constant everywhere else, only had a 50-60% fatality rate in men. With a male population of around 12 million, this meant Australia was going to have millions more male survivors than had been expected.
Canada, by contrast, was getting hit harder than almost anyone else, with a near 95% fatality rate for men infected by DuoHalo, so efforts to get the Quaranteam serum to their allies to the north had been intense and prioritized.
The current version of the serum was in mass production by nearly every pharmaceutical production team the US could manage, and the government was getting some insane deals from foreign countries to get their initial batches of the serum, including things the likes of which Phil was incredulous of on one hand and more than a little disturbed on the other.
While Canada was getting a great deal of help from the US, one of the proposals Phil had seen kicked around was that Canada simply give the United Sates the provinces of British Columbia and Yukon, so that Alaska would be connected to the US via land. The idea seemed absurd on its face, at least to Phil, but the death tolls were getting high enough that Canada was freaking out, trying not to just be an empty country that the US inherited simply by virtue of coming in and cleaning out the dead bodies. If the deal went through, all of the inhabitants of those two provinces would immediately become American citizens (in addition to retaining their Canadian citizenship) and would be given a choice of relocating into what remained of Canada or staying in the two new American states. It wasn’t a done deal yet, but the negotiations were pretty far in, and from what Phil could read, it looked like a fifty-fifty shot of actually going through.
Other countries were struggling to make similar deals, offering huge trade imbalances or the sorts of resources that would’ve been ridiculous in any other world, but the serum was a lifeline to keep a dying population afloat for many of these countries. There were even nations willing to give up their own sovereignty to become part of the United States, if only to keep their population from being completely annihilated. The fact that there was a Powerpoint presentation floating around entitled “Do We Want To Own Indonesia?” floating around was mind-boggling, but it was happening, and was being actively considered.
The reports on Russia especially made Phil nervous, simply because he knew for a fact that Adam McCallister, the former project chief over what had eventually become the Quaranteam serum, had defected to them, taking all of his research with him, including a fully functional version of the serum, and the template with which to mass produce it. So why were they still dying in such massive numbers? Was it a distribution problem? A manufacturing problem? Were the Russian people refusing to adopt the serum? Was it an intentional dieback plan by the Russian government? Phil couldn’t seem to find anyone with a firm answer to the matter, which made him all the more nervous about it.
What the hell was happening with Adam McCallister?
Within two weeks of 4.b appearing, they had identified twelve major variants across the globe. The Quaranteam serum prevented any major health problems from all of them, but many of the variants impacted the serum’s baseline functionality, either reducing the time period in between partner couplings or intensifying the voracity of those encounters. All of the variants were more tenacious than the original, lingering in the air longer and surviving away from the host more successfully. The most dangerous strain was when they were calling the Smooth Variant, which the Quaranteam serum could still fight off, but would temporarily cause all of the victim’s hair to fall out. The hair loss wasn’t permanent, but it certainly had caused some panic in the first few victims.
Another detail in the report about the variants that Phil had found fascinating was that all of them were showing enhanced versions of what they were called the Daniels Effect, named after Charlie Daniels, their biofeedback engineer who’d first noticed it.
The Daniels Effect was that people who were introduced into a Team (as groups of individuals consisting of one male and several females were being called) ended up bonding with one another on a level they hadn’t anticipated. In doing so, they found that being around members of their team were naturally increasing levels of dopamine, oxytocin, seratonin and other neuropeptides. Just being around other members of the same Team increased comfort and mental well-being. It also seemed to be counteracting the inherent tension that isolated groups of people often encountered. Everyone had noticed it—being around your Team just made you feel more at ease. It also meant that members of a Team were more likely to be able to settle disagreements without escalation or aggravation. Teams, the new family unit, were just fighting less.
When afflicted by a variant, the Team tended to cling together even more vehemently, closing ranks and becoming more xenophobic, at least temporarily. A Team would close ranks, refusing to venture away from each other until they had all fully fought off the variant, letting them as a group choke it out.
Daniels wasn’t the only one with a discovery named after him. Martin Grant, who had been a weapons engineer brought onto the project late in the process, had discovered that the Quaranteam serum was also granting a higher than normal toxin resistance to those who’d taken it, and he’d discovered this in typical Martin fashion—he’d been having trouble getting drunk lately.
As it turned out, it was now somewhere between 30-40% more difficult to become inebriated, and the body, post serum, also seemed to share similar resistances to other toxins nearly across the board. This also meant that anesthetics had needed to be adjusted, as they simply weren’t having the desired effect. The same was true for pain medications, although some men had reported that they were experiencing less chronic pain problems post getting a Team, many having dropped opiods entirely.
Unlike women, who stood a 1-in-10 chance of experiencing some level of cellular regeneration, men weren’t gaining any sudden benefits when they were first pairing, but it seemed like constant couplings were slowly reducing and removing chronic problems in men. The more partners a man had, the faster it seemed to be working. It wasn’t solving all problems—far from it—but things like arthritis and fatigue were getting stripped away, if the data was to be believed.
(It didn’t do a damn thing for sense degradation, Phil noted, which meant he was stuck wearing glasses for the rest of his life.)
It did also reduce the male refractory period by a sizable amount, but that was partially by design, as Dr. Varma had worked to ensure that if sexual coupling was going to be part of the serum they couldn’t shake it wouldn’t be one that impacted the health and well-being of those they were treating with it.
Audrey’s cycle hadn’t reverted back, even two weeks after having fought off the variant, needing to couple with Phil every four or five days, much more regularly than the typical nine to eleven days that was average. Dr. Varma assured the two of them that her cycle would slowly expand back outwards, but that it was something that would happen over months, not days, and that they should be particularly attentive to her needs until it did.
And Phil’s house wasn’t getting any smaller. During the two weeks while he’d been working on studying the variants, Yuko Takahashi, the video game engineer he’d put in a request for, had shown up, and had gotten paired up with him in an encounter that couldn’t be described as anything other than rowdy. Yuko, it turned out, had been the kind of girl who liked sex on furniture. And on the floor. And against the wall. And she had shown up early in the morning, just after Phil had given Audrey a dose, which meant it took him quite some time to get her imprinted, with Yuko having several orgasms before Phil’s arrived.
Phil’s Team seemed to like Yuko a lot—she was whipsmart and very sarcastic, and happy enough to keep working even while rearranging her life to get comfortable within the House of Marcos. She wasn’t bisexual, much to Linda’s dismay, but was willing to tolerate other girls being around from time to time while having play time with Phil, as long as they focused on him and not her. She integrated well with the existing Team, confident enough to feel comfortable in her place but not so complacent that Linda or Audrey could walk right over her.
Unlike everyone else who entered their data into the Oracle system, where they just had to trust the results when they showed up, Phil could track someone from the moment they’d been matched to him, checking on what criteria had paired them up with him, and if he still wanted them to be paired. It also let Linda perform security background checks on all candidates they were lining up for him. With Yuko, he was at a total of eight partners, including staff, a number that had Linda livid, and so she was doing everything she possibly could to get more viable partners for Phil to show up as quickly as she could. She wanted him to be at twelve before the end of September, which meant he had to pick up the pace. She’d even gone over his head about it, telling Major General Fielder that she needed to put a priority delivery onto Phil’s file, for his own safety. And, naturally, Fielder had agreed with her, as his health as one of the top minds behind the Quaranteam serum was of the utmost importance, and so Linda had even suggested he go about requesting a few people.
Phil was also scheduled to get at least one person through the international personnel exchange program that the people around the office were jokingly referring to as Operation Honey Trap, where countries would give up scientists and spies in exchange for access to the Quaranteam serum in bulk and quick. Promises had been made that they would still be working within the existing Oracle system, so that they would get along with not only the person, but the person’s entire Team.
He’d been told that a woman named Paloma Gallegos would be arriving for him soon, and she was an officer from the National Intelligence Centre from Spain, which was the sort of Spain’s equivalent of the CIA. She was going to be paired up with Phil, and going to become a US citizen. Phil wasn’t entirely certain how to feel about it, but he’d been told that the spy exchange was being done in an effort to bring countries closer together. He wasn’t sure how the entire process would work, how someone dedicated to the service of one country could shift that to another, but the higher ups assured him it was for the best, and that she had agreed to shift her loyalty to her new country.
Linda had done her homework on the woman, and decided that she would actually be a good match for Phil, and that she seemed like the kind of woman Phil might’ve picked up on his own, even if she was, and these were Linda’s words, joking or not, “slightly out of your league.”
“I just don’t know how you feel comfortable having a foreign intelligence agent being brought into our house, Linda,” Phil said to her, as he was getting in the car for her to drive them home after a long day at work, him in the back seat (not his choice), her and Audrey in the front.
“People are willing to give up a lot for safety, and as part of the program, the rest of Paloma’s family gets preferential treatment when it comes to the Quaranteam serum,” Linda said. “It’s all about getting access to it as soon as possible, and Paloma had four brothers, all of whom were definitely at risk. She’d been adamant they not leave their homes, but one of them did and he died in the first wave of casualties, so she’s making damn sure it doesn’t happen to the rest of them. She’s coming over on the next diplomatic exchange flight from Europe, and she’ll be here in a couple of days.”
“What the hell do I have in common with a spy, Linda?” Phil sighed, leaning his head back against the back seat of the car, taking off his glasses to rub his eyes.
“Well, she speaks Japanese for one thing,” Linda told her. “And she’s been to Japan a number of times for that Comiket festival I know you’ve gone to. She’s one of you, an ohtanto or whatever.”
“Otaku,” Phil corrected with a chuckle. “And I guess if she’s been to Comiket, she can’t be that bad. Violet said there’s someone waiting at the house, too? Charlie?”
“No, Rochelle,” Audrey corrected. “The Black Lives Matter lawyer from Atlanta. She arrived this afternoon, but you were so deep in work, nobody wanted to pull you away from it. You seemed particularly troubled about that variant you were looking at, the Smooth Variant. What’s got you so worked up about it, baby?” She reached back behind her and stroked his leg with one of her hands. “The freaky hairloss thing?”
“Well, that part’s just disturbing,” Phil said. “No, the thing that’s got me the most worried is that there are signs of non-natural mutation in it, almost like someone’s trying to improve the virus, to make sure it’s strong enough to survive long enough to wipe out anyone who isn’t protected by the serum. Who the fuck is crazy—”
“Look out!” Audrey shouted, pointing ahead of them, as an airborne drone dropped a grenade down onto the road in front of them, Linda swerving the car just in time to get around it, the back right corner of the vehicle lifting off the road for a moment from the shockwave of the blast.
As the car veered off the road and into the woods, Linda was already calling asking for backup, telling Phil to keep his head down. The vehicle had bulletproof glass, but explosions were an entirely different kettle of fish, and Linda said she was trying to keep the vehicle in the trees so the drone couldn’t get a bead on them through the tree cover.
All Phil could think was that it must be Thursday, and how he never could get the hang of Thursdays.