QT: Aisling's Antics (Ch. 02)

Part Two - "This guy"

December 11 ^th , 2020

Fiona realized as soon as she stood up that she desperately needed the five-minute break to let her muscles work out their kinks, to get her body moving again and get her blood pumping. Her left leg had practically fallen asleep having to hold the same pose for the better part of an hour, but everything fell back into place once she started stretching, taking time to lean and bend, putting her yoga and Pilates training to good use.

"Okay, I'm adding a third thing to my list," Aisling said with a grin. "You're going to have to teach me how to get to be that flexible."

Fiona smirked, holding her body in a jack knife pose, her shoulders and arms resting against the ground as her legs lifted to point straight up into the air, then even bent back a little further until they were over her face. "I didn't just wake up and have these skills overnight. You're looking at the result of several years' worth of training and work and-"

"And I've got all the bloody time in the world, Fi, but I certainly can't get me legs to do that right now, and I'd rather like them to."

Fiona nodded with a wry smile. "You'll just need to start showing up a little earlier for the advanced stretching that me, Moira and Sheridan are doing before the big group work out."

"Or we can have another session sometime later in the evening, because I'm not a morning girl unless I have to be."

"Okay, okay, you like keeping Andy Hours, so I can respect that," Fiona laughed. "I swear he's always preferred being up when the stars are out and not the sun. You always been like this?"

"Well, it lets me talk to my family in their morning late in the evening here," Aisling said as she moved over to her little fridge in her studio, pulling out a bottle of water, offering it to Fiona, who nodded, then tossing it to her, before grabbing one for herself. "My older brother likes to make sure I'm doing well, and I like making sure he's doing okay and not going crazy. He only just got partnered up last month, and before then, he was basically living like Bubble Boy, nobody in or out or even allowed near his place. Andy had to send him a digital file version of the most recent Druid Gunslinger book because he was worried about contracting DuoHalo from the mailman. He wanted to mail him a signed copy right away, but Dermot didn't feel like it would've been safe."

"Now that he's partnered up, has Andy sent him a signed hardback?"

"A complete signed set of all eight Druid Gunslinger books in hardback went out in the mail a couple of weeks ago," Ash said with a grin. "Dermot told me I can skip Christmas this year if I want and call it good. He can't wait to meet Andy next month at the wedding. None of the family can."

"They're all over the whole 'our daughter is one of seven brides for one man' thing?"

"Well, Dermot's got four women stationed with him, and mom and dad added two more women into their lives to keep Dad safe, so I think they know how hypocritical it would be for them to judge me doing the same," Ash said with a smirk. "Besides, once Dad found out one of my fellow brides was Emily Stevens, he forgot about everything else for a bit."

"They're big fans of the films?"

"Dad raised us reading those books to us at bedtime as we were growing up, so they've got a special place in his heart. The movies came along a little bit later, but he thought Em was a spot on Dahlia Hairtrigger," she said, rolling her eyes a little. "Ma's made him promise to not geek out too much when they finally meet. He's been too shy to talk to her over Zoom so far, her and Sarah, although it was hilarious to see Aiofe and Niamh utterly lose their shit when they first talked to Sarah. The Ballerina Badass movies are some of their favorites, and they spent like an hour talking to Sarah about her training for all the dancing she had to do."

"So your family thinks you're a starfucker is what you're telling me."

Aisling burst into giggles. "They're envious, you could say that. But I had a long chat with mom, and she told me she'd always known I'd liked both boys and girls, so it wasn't a big shocker when I talked to them about it all, back when it was just the four of us, me, Andy, Lauren and Niko. I didn't want to try and explain it to any of them before I needed to, and back then, we really didn't know much of anything."

"Should we get back to the story, then?"

"You feel ready to do another hour holding the same pose while I'm yapping at you?"

Fiona grinned, giving a little nod. "Remember, though, you promised not to hold back on any details."

Aisling paused for a moment, frowning a little bit. "There's one detail I'll tell you, but I'd like to leave out of book, if that's okay."

"Why would I leave it out?"

"It's a little bit private and it involves Andy."

"Well, now I've got to know," Fiona said before taking a long swig from her bottle of water. She set the plastic down on a table just off to the side, then took off the robe again and moved to get back into the position. "Why don't you tell me, and let me decide for myself? We don't really need to be in the habit of keeping secrets from each other in this family."

"Even if it's for their own good?"

"Tell me and I can help decide that for you."

"That's fair enough. Anyway, where was I?" Aisling asked, as she lifted the protective cover off her painting to allow her to work on it again.

"Just getting to June."

"Right, right..."

* * * * *

On June 10^th, Google held an all-hands virtual town hall meeting that we were told was mandatory, and I remember thinking at the time that it would them deciding to furlough all temp-to-hire workers, or maybe even just letting all of us go. There had been some nervousness about whether or not contract workers were going to be allowed to keep going as they were since we'd all been working from home since March, and our team's Slack channel had definitely slowed down some, with some people reporting in sick or even going to the hospital. Obviously, knowing what I know now, I'm pretty sure we were witnessing several of the early fatalities of DuoHalo indirectly when people would say they were going to the hospital and then never coming back, but at the time, we just assumed they couldn't check in from quarantine.

The meeting, as it turned out, was not about layoffs, firings or furloughs. It was about this experimental vaccine that we were being offered a chance to take part in. The CEO of Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company, Sundar Pichai was holding the meeting via Zoom, and he looked, well, he looked tired and exhausted.

"Hey Googlers. Today's meeting is to offer anyone who wants a chance to volunteer for this new slightly experimental vaccine which will, according to the Air Force, protect you from both Covid and DuoHalo. But it has some side effects that we don't fully understand. Now, I understand if this means you don't want to participate, but this is the only solution we are likely to have for the foreseeable future. It's going to, well, for lack of a better turn, it's going to pair you with a person, maybe a handful of people. But the government is adamant that they want people to be happy with who they're paired with. So if you decide you're willing to volunteer for the program, you can just click on the link that'll go out with the minutes of this meeting, and then take the questionnaire to get matched up with someone who will essentially start making up your Quaranteam. Ha ha. Little joke there. Now I can tell you that I've personally signed up for the program, and the first round of vaccinations are scheduled to begin in one week's time. Until then, it's vitally important that everyone take the quarantine deadly seriously, and not venture out unless you absolutely have to. Even then, you should be wearing masks if at all possible and staying as far away from everyone else as you can. Stay safe. Stay at home."

I would love to tell you I was thoughtful and considered my actions for a long time, but I'd just be lying to you needlessly. I clicked on the link as soon as the notes appeared in my email box. You were lucky in that you had someone to be quarantined with, but being trapped, all alone in my shitty little studio apartment, I was slowly going out of my mind. I'd mapped the entirety of my floorplan in paces and could now completely move around the space with my eyes closed, even with all my art tools strewn everywhere. Every colored pencil, every sketchbook, I knew the location of every single thing in my apartment down to the millimeter.

I was also spending way more time on Discord's voice chat that I'd like, just to hear some other voices. Sometimes it was the family's Discord; other times it was one for a handful of people from work. I'd watched so much Netflix, I was starting to go down the rabbit hole into the stuff nobody ever wants to watch, that you have to go digging for. The algorithm was one step away from telling me, "Look, girl, I ain't got nothing for you no more."

The questionnaire, even back then, was nothing to sneeze at. It was, if memory serves, about a thousand questions. Most of them you answered with a slider that ranged in five increments from "very much enjoy" to "very much do NOT enjoy." We could set the age range of what we were looking for in a partner anywhere across the board, and I'd always sort of found men my age to be too immature, especially if I was going to be paired up with them for a long period of time, so I actually set my ideal range between thirty and forty. I wanted someone smart, someone funny, someone who liked dirty talk and someone who'd be willing to entertain me wanting to fool around with both genders.

I'd fooled around a bit with girls in college, but never gotten serious with any of them. I'd shared a bed with two or three wonderful women, but at the end of the day, I just wasn't ready for that at that point in my life yet. It was tricky figuring out what it was about them that kept me from wanting a relationship, but I think it was mostly just college experimentation, and as much as I liked being with girls, I still wanted a fella to call my own.

We spent a lot of the intervening time between when we took the quiz and when we got contacted chatting about what kinds of things people answered, although more than a couple of times, people got prudish and told us to keep such chatter off Slack, so we just took it to Discord voice off the company servers. It's pretty remarkable how fast gossip travels around a company when people are stuck at home without much else to do.

It was around that point that we also got word that some of the people who had 'disappeared' from our Slack channel had died in the hospital. It wasn't official news, but the amount of detail that was in the rumors made it all completely convincing. And with that, we all agreed we were going to abide by whatever recommendations were given towards keeping ourselves out of the line of fire of the viruses.

Oh hey! Now that I think about it, I saved a bunch of screenshots of that quiz to my Dropbox, so I can dig those up for you if you want. We couldn't cut and paste them, so I couldn't get the whole thing, but I took a lot of screen caps just because we needed something to talk about, and I think I wanted to document some of what we were going through, so I knew I wasn't going crazy.

About a week later, I got an email telling me that I was in what was being called the "high likelihood candidates" pool. That meant I should pack up a single suitcase with anything I thought I would need if I was being moved to live with someone else. Anything that didn't fit into a suitcase could be picked up later, once the pandemic had subsided. The email detailed that I wouldn't need to worry about paying rent once I'd relocated - any address that was tied to a relocated person would be immune to eviction until after the crisis had passed. There was no day associated with my possible relocation, but they were expecting I would hear about the transfer within a few days. They had my cell phone number and would call to give me a few hours' notice if and when I was selected.

As crazy as it all was, I started packing.

There wasn't all that much that I really needed to have with me at any given moment, but I realized that if what the reports were saying was true, I was likely going to be sharing a bed and being intimate with whoever I was going to be assigned to, and I have to tell you, Fi, at that point, I think I would've happily fucked a dudebro with a man bun, I was so worked up. The batteries in my vibrator had died weeks ago, and I'd already used every spare in the house to try and get a little bit more of a buzz going. I'd even resorted to sitting on top of my washing machine to get a little fix here and there.

It's remarkable how little I really needed to bring with me - most of my life was inside my laptop that I'd been hauling with me everywhere since college, or the iPad that I used as a digital sketchbook most of the time. I had a handful of physical sketchbooks that went into the suitcase, a bunch of cute outfits, a couple of things that I thought were fun larks and pretty much every good piece of lingerie I owned.

On June 17^th, I got the call. Someone would be coming by in the evening to pick me up and relay me over to the inoculation center. The truck showed up and the man at the door was wearing a complete hazmat suit, his air entirely self-contained. I was one of two dozen gorgeous women being loaded onto the truck, and I remember how odd I thought it was that none of us were being separated or given our own individual air. There was an airman in the back who was also wearing a hazmat suit in addition to her very fashionable M4. "Why aren't we isolated?" I asked her, having to yell a bit over the rush of wind from the open back of the troop transport truck.

"Once you get the vaccine in you, it should knock out pretty much anything in your systems, so the idea is to get it into you, and get you paired up with your partners as quickly as you can, for your safety and theirs," she yelled back.

"How come you aren't paired with anyone yet?"

She shrugged a bit, almost dejectedly. "Number's not up yet."

I didn't recognize it at the time, but the inoculation center was a staging area over at the Pleasanton Fairgrounds, where they'd set up several giant tents. It's only about fifteen minutes away from here, and I guess they didn't feel safe bringing loads of people onto the base at New Eden at that point in the process. Within a matter of months, they'd have a much more permanent structure set up at the New Eden base for injections. They called the place Base Aphrodite because I guess somebody thought it was funny.

I'd also heard that they were going to convert some of the high-rise towers into staging areas, but I guess for the first wave or whatever, they wanted to have all of us nearby enough that they could keep tabs and make sure nothing crazy happened with any of us.

They put each of us into our own little vacuum sealed tent with recycled air and started coming for us one at a time to give us our shots. Back when we were doing it, it was two shots, one given in each arm, but based on what everyone's said since then, that must've just been for the first wave or so, because I think every other girl in the house other than me and Lauren, said it was just one single shot.

The woman who gave me the shot was a nice, charming woman, although there were several men walking around the area, talking about us as we waited our turn. I remember asking the woman when she dosed me if it was safe for those men to be walking around, and she told me they'd already been vaccinated, and were completely safe from whatever we'd bring in. We were all dosed before 7 pm, and they wanted us to sleep on it, to make sure that it took properly and didn't have any extreme reactions. There was only one of those that I saw, and I still don't know what really happened to her, but one girl down about five chambers woke up thrashing in the middle of the night and was escorted out by people in hazmat suits. In the morning, they told us she'd just had a 'reaction' to the serum, and that she needed to be brought to her partner immediately. You should ask Phil about that, I bet he'd know what happened.

Anyway, it was a little like camping, just in an oxygen tent with a hundred or so other women, but in the morning, we were brought food and given a checkup each before we were taken out of our tents and loaded back up onto a military truck and driven down south to Milpitas, where the Air Force had commandeered this Hilton hotel, just off 680 and Calaveras Blvd. We were assigned rooms and told to wait in our hotel rooms before someone would come and talk to us about our options. Room service would be left outside of our doors, and we weren't to leave the hotel room for any reason other than to talk to someone from the Air Force when they came to see us.

The whole "hurry up and wait" drove me a bit mad, not gonna lie, because I had an entire day and a half in that hotel room before anyone called me to come and talk to them. It was a big hotel room, though, with a little living room area, so at least I had space to walk around, and the Wi-Fi was solid, so I could call my family and let them know what was going on. The evening of the 19^th, the phone in my room rang and I was told to come down to a conference room to discuss my options.

When I got down to the room, there were three people sitting behind a desk, none of whom I've seen since. One was an African American woman in her mid-forties who looked as all business as possible. One was a blonde woman in her thirties in official Air Force dress attire whose nameplate read Harris. And the guy sitting between them looked like he was in his mid-fifties, with a receding hair line, oval shaped glasses and a thick bushy white mustache on his top lip that made him look more like a college professor than anyone I'd ever seen in my entire life. He was even wearing a cardigan sweater over a white-collar shirt.

"Miss Aisling Blake, am I correct?" he said, standing up and bowing, as if to discourage me from trying to shake his hand. "I'm Dr. Bill McKenna, one of the people working on this project. This is Major Harris and Dr. Winters, who're here to ensure you get an option that you're happy with. How are you feeling? Be honest. I'm a doctor."

"Honestly, Doc? I'm horny as all hell," I admitted to him. "Like, hard to think horny."

He nodded at me without so much as seeming even a little surprised. "That's going to happen. One of the side effects of the serum is an increased libido, but it also has the benefit of increasing the intensity of orgasms, so, y'know, balance, I suppose." He had a tendency to draw out each word, making them all sound massively considered, like he was selecting them with precision. "So we've brought you here because we have twenty men who would fit your preferences based on your quiz and theirs. Now, we didn't want to overwhelm you with too much data, so we've tried to distill them down to a handful of things you marked as 'most important' that matched up with theirs. Why don't you take a look through them and see if you find anyone you like?"

There were four sheets of paper, each with five pictures and a handful of things about each of the men on it. Andy's picture was on the third sheet, and he had such an easy way about him in the picture that it made me stop and look a little. He wasn't what I would've described as my type immediately, but in reading the details, it seemed like we meshed on all the important things - he had sexual tendencies that ran parallel to my own, with dirty talk at the top of things that were biggest turn ons, but he also seemed like the kind of man I'd want to spend a lot of time with, with interests in music, film, art and literature. I could see other men that I thought were more physically attractive than Andy or were people that I knew who they were - can you believe Elon Musk thought he and I would be a good fit? - but I kept coming back to the answers Andy had given and felt like he would be the best choice. There weren't any names on the page, so at that point, I didn't even know his name.