Quaranteam: McCallister's Madness Ch. 02

Part Two - "Think bigger"

Adam couldn't help but smile a little as Elle frowned at him, her eyes wanting to rip a hole straight through him, he could tell. The last thing the woman wanted was to hear that he'd done this intentionally, maliciously, and yet, he had just confirmed to her that he had not only done it deliberately, but that he'd worked towards the goal for quite some time.

"So you are not denying that that you intentionally made women attached to men, that you made their survival dependent upon a man's?"

Adam laughed, shaking his head. "Deny it? I am proud of it. My dear, you must realize that whatever horrible things you may think of me, I am not responsible for the DuoHalo virus. That horrific plague was not one of my creation, and all I did was simply piggyback my own wants onto the solution designed to keep mankind alive. If you want to lay blame for that part of the tale, you should look more at the Russians."

Elle stepped in closer, as if the detail intrigued her very much. "The Russians created DuoHalo? Tell me more." Her voice had a British tinge to it, but he felt like she wasn't English, merely educated in Oxford or some other British college.

"I don't know that for certain," Adam said, feeling the effects of the truth serum still pulsing through his veins. "They never admitted to creating the virus, but I feel certain that if it wasn't them, it was definitely someone. The virus is complicated, crafted with far too much adaptability and flexibility for it to have been naturally occurring, by my estimate, although I am no virologist. It might be beyond my scope of knowledge in the field, but I am relatively confident in my read. I did ask my Russian handlers about it a number of times, and while they insisted they weren't involved in its creation, it was extremely difficult to discern if they were speaking for themselves singularly or on the behalf of their country and government. They didn't have sodium pentothol running through their veins, now did they?"

"Therein lay your mistake, Doctor McCallister," Elle said to him, leaning against the table a little. She had unzipped the top of her jumpsuit some, to put her non-negligible amount of cleavage on display for him, the tops of her breasts exposed invitingly. "You seem eager to ask questions, but never the right ones."

Adam looked around the room, his eyes having slowly adjusted enough to get a better sense of his surroundings, although without his glasses, he was still lacking for finer details. There were five people in the small room with him, Elle, three other women and one man, although it seemed very clear that Elle was in charge of the whole situation. The entrance/exit to the room was somewhere behind him, and he couldn't turn well enough to get a good look at it. The floor was metal of some kind, and the table was affixed to it, not just fastened, but actually welded to it, something that he found especially odd, at least at first.

The air was filtered coming in, but the airflow was heavy and constant, keeping the inside of the container relatively cool. There wasn't a scent to it, but if there was, he was certain it would've been tinted with salt and brine.

At first, he had written off his vertigo as a side effect of either disorientation or whatever chemicals they'd used to keep him docile and obedient, but now he had decided that wasn't it at all. It wasn't that he had vertigo - it was that he wasn't standing on solid ground.

They were on a boat.

Based on the amount of time he'd been unconscious and the fact that he was fairly certain he hadn't been transported anywhere by plane, that left four options - he was on either the Barents Sea, the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea or the Caspian Sea.

If it was the Barents Sea, which was basically part of the Arctic Ocean, he could be headed anywhere, so he decided to dismiss it as a useless option. That wouldn't help him narrow things down at all. He did, however, feel as though the surrounding air wasn't cold enough to be in the Arctic, although he was forced to admit he could be in a heated container.

If it was the Caspian Sea, the only real contender was that they were heading to Iran, with Tehran being on the south side of it. He didn't have any idea what Iran's current status was or how they had managed the DuoHalo crisis, but as he considered how patriarchal the society there was, he thought it unlikely that Elle was part of their efforts. Also, she seemed too white. It was, perhaps, a racist assumption to make, but he decided he was operating with whatever facts he had at hand.

If it was the Black Sea, then he expected their final destination would be Istanbul, although he supposed that heading up towards Bucharest was also an option. Both Turkey and Romania had taken DuoHalo serious eventually, although both countries were several steps behind where they should've been, because 'eventually' hadn't been soon enough. Again, however, Elle looked too light of skin to be Turkish, although he did have to allow for the possibility that Istanbul was simply an extraction point to take him even further.

Odds were, he decided, that he was likely on the Baltic Sea. If they had taken him from Moscow to St. Petersburg, then put him on a ship of some kind, it would give them the most options of where they could head. Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were all definitely viable options, and Elle seemed like she could easily be from any of those countries.

"Allow me to try the right questions then," McCallister said. Playing coy had done him no favors, so perhaps it was time to be more direct. "Are we on a boat on the Baltic Sea?"

Elle smiled, bringing her hands together in a tiny, polite clap. "That we are, Doctor. But that should come as no real surprise, so I am afraid it feels like significantly less information that you might have obtained if you had asked a more poignant question. Now, tell me about how you came to join the Quaranteam Program."

"Don't call it that," he snarled. "If anything, you can describe it as Project Impulse. That was what it was called when I was brought on to manage it, anyway."

"Then tell me how you came to become part of Project Impulse."

* * * * *

After Eve and I graduated with our doctorates in 1995, we were presented with a great many opportunities, bolstered by the fact that we were Stanford graduates. Instead of rushing in to work, however, we took on residencies at Stanford's Children's Hospital, each of us working on different things. Eve spent her time researching how neural pathways were formed during the developmental years, studying to see if there was a way to help manage and correct for aberrant occurrences. I, on the other hand, was studying to see how neurochemistry could be adapted and adjusted. We were working on adjacent projects, but not the same project.

It was a quiet time in our lives, I suppose, the six years we spent there, from 1995 to 2001, with both of us mostly head down in our work, spending ten to twelve hour days five or six days a week in the research labs, which meant Eve and I were generally too tired to do more than exchange pleasantries and fall asleep next to one another before getting up the next morning and doing it all over again. We were apart together, and that seemed to be enough to sustain us both.

We did talk, ever so briefly, about whether or not we wanted to have kids, but the thought was that we were too busy to entertain the option. I did learn many years later, however, that at some point during our tenure at Stanford Children's Hospital, she had had a fertility study commissioned, and that she had turned out to be somewhat infertile. The odds of her successfully carrying a child to term were somewhere between 5-10%, which may have contributed to the chasm of distance between the two of us, and why we both became so lost in our work. She didn't tell me about her condition, and I wouldn't discover it until far later. I also am unaware if she ever had me tested, to see if my sperm were viable.

Then, on a cool September morning in 2001, the world changed. Eve's mother called, waking us up, telling us to turn on the television, just in time to see the second plane hit the South Tower of the World Trade Center. It wasn't until later in the day that we found out one of Eve's sisters, the youngest, Charity, who had been only 22 at the time, had been on American Airlines Flight 11, which had crashed into the North Tower in the very first strike of the attack.

Eve was shattered, understandably, and we decided to take some time off from our research projects, although it turned out during what was supposed to be a hiatus, we decided to leave the hospital permanently. We felt like we had no choice.

For several months, Eve was nearly in a fugue state, the loss of her little sister weighing heavily upon her soul. To be fair, I also mourned Charity greatly, as she had been perhaps the most welcoming member of the Merriweather clan to me. She... Charity had an indomitable spirit, a contagious sense of enthusiasm and optimism about the world. She had accused me of staring at my own shoes too much, and was constantly forcing me to dance, something I always told her I hated but secretly brought me great joy. In moments where life was throwing challenges at me, I would always think "How would Charity look at this?" and from that worldview, I could endure and persevere. Now that light had been unfairly snuffed out.

Perhaps my only strain of optimism about this world and those who inhabit it died with her in that plane crash.

When we finally crawled out from our depression, both Eve and I decided to pursue different paths, although both of our paths made sense. Eve started working for a company called Ultratics, who were studying bone diseases.

I, on the other hand, went down a different, rather more radical path.

I began to investigate where I could apply my skills in regards to the American military-industrial complex. I decided I needed to be surrounded by people for whom ethics were, at best, guidelines. I needed to not be constrained, to be allowed to work down whatever dark corridors I needed to follow.

As it turned out, bioengineering was a field that all the various branches were starting to see potential in, and I interviewed with all of them. After a few months, I decided that the projects the Air Force were working on aligned themselves the best with both my skillset and my interests.

I won't lie - at first I thought they might have been working on biological weapons, and if that had been the case, I would've been able to incorporate what I'd been working on in my spare moments into that work.

Because I had made progress on forcing women to need a man more than a fish needed a bicycle, although as of 2001, it was still mostly in its infancy.

In 1999, as I'd been working on something entirely unrelated, I stumbled across a way to essentially link two sets of DNA. It didn't do anything in particular yet, other than connect two individuals on a genetic level. One person's DNA could recognize and authorize another's, sort of like a lock and key. There weren't any consequences for using the wrong key, nor any benefits for providing the right one, but it was the very beginning of my eventual endgoal.

One person's DNA could look at another person's and, on a fundamental level, go "Yes, that's correct." Once I figured out how to make that have repercussions, I would be in business. I knew, however, that it was no small leap I needed to take, to find a way to make that work.

With this in mind, I joined what was known as Project: Cattle Foot in the summer of 2002. At the time, we were tasked with developing injections that would make fighter pilots more resistant to G-forces, able to endure more and more pressure before blacking out.

It was a far cry from what I expected to be working on, but it did several important things - it granted me access to much more powerful tools and with much less oversight. As the project was being developed by a private company partnered with the Air Force, we were given access to all sorts of information and resources we wouldn't otherwise have been able to get.

One of the very first things I noticed was that there were loads of other individual projects I needed to be reading up on. The amount of work I was actually doing as part of Cattle Foot was astonishingly light and didn't occupy large portions of my mental resources, so I was able to spend time digging into all of the other various projects that not only the Air Force, but the military at large was supporting development into.

If asked, the American government would naturally say that chemical and biological weapons weren't things they were doing research into, but you have me under sodium pentathol, so I can assure you, they were and are researching these things, and in spades.

At this point, I was starting to consider how I might piggyback my ideas onto one of these other projects, but I still faced two larger problems, the first being that I did not really have anything that did what I wanted it to yet, and the other being that weapons development, by its very nature, is designed to have even greater impact on its targets than what I had been intending.

What good would my project be if it was attached to something that killed its target? None at all. I needed to find some way to get it to be used on large groups of women, and, as much as you may dislike hearing this my dear, women still only make up a marginal amount of fighting forces.

It was not, as one of my military colleagues might have said, a target rich environment.

This put me in a holding pattern for quite some time.

In 2005, my next discovery along the path was something to allow the recognition between the lock and key to have a genuine impact. I discovered a way to cause two sets of DNA to recognize each other, and if exposed to another set of DNA other than the key to its lock, a rejection process would happen, causing minor necrotization of the DNA.

This might sound minor, but it was the fundamental building block upon which my research was laid foundation on.

By 2009, I had come a long way. I had been able to extend this to be one-way, using the sex chromosomes to attach as both lock and key, where the key could work on multiple locks, but the locks would all point to the same key. An XY chromosome (male) would function as the "key" to unlock a paired XX chromosome (female) in a challenge/response pattern.

I had even gone so far as to make it work exclusively with sexual fluids, essentially bonding one woman to one man in concept, although I definitely hadn't done any human testing. All of this was purely theoretical, but the research seemed to indicate that all of this should and would work, if I could find a way to introduce it to two people, both a man and a woman. The lock/key pairing only seemed to last a month or so, but it was a start.

In 2013, the Air Force decided to scrap Cattle Foot, and I found myself panicking. I did not want to be removed from all these useful tools and assets I had, so I needed to think fast. My security clearance was going to be revoked and all of my research impounded, something I desperately could not afford to let happen. There was a strong possibility I could smuggle out what I'd been doing on the side without getting caught, but I didn't want to risk that unless absolutely necessary.

That was when I realized that manned aircraft wasn't the likely future for air combat, and started working with a variety of other teams, some working on preparing for space, others working on drone research. By not specializing on any one project, I sort of became a freelancer, drifting in between teams, helping out on a variety of projects without really leading anything.

Over the next several years, I worked on whatever they wanted to throw me at while I kept on trying to hammer my research into something better, more resilient. I kept looking for gaseous weapons being developed, but couldn't find anything that was both viable and a good match for melding my existing research with.

The key problem I'd found was that my work wasn't easily aerosolized, meaning that trying to put it into a gas weapon meant the lock and key system wasn't going to work. I couldn't expose a woman to enough of a concentration of it in an airborne form to make it do what I wanted, and after years of trying to figure it out, I simply realized that it wasn't likely something I was going to be able to make work, despite my staggering intellect.

I needed a different path to realize my goal, and that angered me.

In some ways, those years were the biggest setback I'd ever encountered. I had the core of something that would do what I wanted it to, but with no way to get it out into the world undiscovered, what I had was essentially nothing, even if it was mostly everything.

In 2015, Eve moved to work for a start up called Ceravanatos, working on anti-carcinogens, trying to engineer a bio-organism that wouldn't just cure cancer, it would restore cells to their original status. It was ambitious and heady work, although their CEO was prone to great over exaggeration, promising things far beyond his ability to deliver.

The promises, however, were more than enough to keep the money flooding in, which kept both Eve and I afloat, although I was making decent money from the various projects the Air Force had me on, even if they were never great or large successes. We had a decent sized house in Pleasanton that we spent almost no time in.

Eve and I were still basically two separate people co-inhabiting one life, fighting all the time when we were together, but still so invested in our work that neither of us wanted to make the step to officially separate from each other. I think, had one or the other of us not been engulfed in our work for a period of time longer than a few weeks, we might have decided to divorce. That we never had that much time might have been one of the things that brought us to where we all now find ourselves, because as loathe as I am to admit it, I benefited greatly from Eve's work at Ceravanatos, although I think even to this day she remains unaware of that.

I suppose I should confess that I stole some of the research from Ceravanatos for my own devices, because if they were going to miss steps that were right in front of them, why would it be my obligation to help them instead of simply taking what they had built and were wasting, incorporating it into my own work for greater purpose.

By 2018, I had taken the nugget of the idea Ceravanatos was working with and had, unreliably, spliced it onto my own project. Sometimes when being introduced to the lock and key system, when the key was imprinted on the lock, the lock would go through a massive burst of cellular regeneration, repairing damage that had been done to it, and in fact, restoring problems within the host organism that had seemed insurmountable.

My thought, at the time, was that if I could find a way to graft my lock/key process onto the Ceravanatos restorative program, I could gift it to my wife, and people would be so caught up in the joy of using the anti-carcinogen properties that they would completely accept the secondary cost of being sexually imprinted onto only one man, especially since there seemed to be a decent enough chance of the male also getting some of the restorative process.

The problem, as it always was, was consistency. I couldn't get the damn thing to have predictable and manageable responses. Sometimes it would bind exceptionally well; other times it would short circuit and cause mishaps to both the lock host and the key host.