Quaranteam: Phil's Tale Ch. 01

"Major Peters wants to see all the chiefs in the conference room in five minutes."

"All of us? At once? What the hell for?"

"Dunno, but she seemed spooked, so get your ass over there and I'll see you in there."

Major Monica Peters was head of operations for the Air Force at the research station, and had mostly struck Phil as a sensible, take-no-shit officer who was much more concerned with results than people's feelings getting hurt. She hadn't struck him as the kind of woman who spooked easily, so the fact that McCallister had described her as such put him on edge.

Three minutes later, Phil sat down in the conference room and saw all the heads of state were there or just arriving: McCallister, the project chief; Wes Bridges, the division chief for the bio half; Matt Cunningham, the division chief for the electrics half; Hunter Wilson, section chief for the electronics interface; Martin Grant, section chief for weapons engineering; Nate Campbell, section chief for aeronautics engineering; and Charles Daniels, the section chief for biofeedback engineering.

Standing at the front of the conference table was Major Peters, talking in quiet animated conversation with a man at least six inches taller than she was, and with a lot more impressive things on his uniform.

As soon as everyone got seated, Major Peters moved to pull the doors shut, locking them, before returning to the front of the table. "Good morning, gentlemen. I feel like we've made a lot of progress on the project over the last several months, but as of today, we're going to be putting Project Impulse on hold for the foreseeable future." Everyone was looking around, mostly looking at McCallister, but he looked just as confused as the rest of them.

"I don't understand," McCallister started, before the Major raised her hand to silence everyone.

"I know, Dr. McCallister, but Major General Fielder here is going to be assuming operational command of this facility for the time being, and redirecting our efforts into something new, something incredibly urgent. Now if you'll give him a few minutes of your time, he'll walk you through what we're going to be working on moving forward."

"Thank you, Major," Fielder said, picking up a clicker from the table, pushing the button on it as a screen came to life behind him, displaying a map of Asia. He was a lean man in his early fifties, silver hair and a thick bushy mustache, golden rimmed glasses on over his eyes. He seemed equal parts calming and intimidating, like his very presence implied a level of seriousness that no one had previously expected. "Late last fall, we intercepted communiques about a couple of biological contagions that we suspected might become problems, despite best efforts to keep them contained. The first is this Coronavirus, out of China, which we think will be a problem, but we're anticipating having it handled relatively quickly. The bigger concern is the second pathogen, which we're currently calling the DuoHalo virus. We don't have any confirmed point of origin for the DuoHalo virus, but the working theory is that it was extracted from the ice in northern Russia by a research team taking core samples from deep in the tundra, which makes it perhaps millions of years old."

He pushed a button and advanced the slide, this time showing a dead man, blood leaking from his eyes, nostrils, ears and mouth. The image was extremely grisly and Phil suddenly found himself glad he hadn't made the time for breakfast.

"The DuoHalo virus is, as of yet, undetectable during its incubation period, but has a very high level of contagion, and we're fairly certain is spread in an airborne manner. During the incubation period, every carrier is spreading and redistributing the pathogen at an incredibly dangerous rate," the Major General said. "We believe that the Coronavirus will offer us a good smokescreen cover for this, as it's likely we're going to be seeing people quarantining within a month or so, and we have yet to have any cases of the DuoHalo virus here in the U.S. as of yet. The quarantine for Corona will help us keep this more deadly virus, the DuoHalo virus, quiet and off the radar while we're trying to figure out how we can manage and solve it."

"We're not really familiar with the ins and outs of infectious diseases, Major General," McCallister said, in the first thing that Phil had agreed with him on in a while. "This isn't really our area of expertise, so why are you coopting us for this project?"

"We're coopting several teams for this project, Dr. McCallister," the Major General said, "so you aren't the only one. We weighed the pros and cons of having the various teams collaborate, but as of right now, nobody has a good handle on this pathogen, so we want everyone coming at it with no preconceived notions, no expectations in advance that color their thoughts on how to fight it. So yes, we understand that this isn't what this group was formed for, but for right now, it's all this team needs to be working on. We're also going to bring a couple of specialists in to help with some aspects of it, and they should be arriving in a few weeks. Doctor Dev Varma and his wife Doctor Charlotte Varma. He's an expert in weaponized pathogens, and she's an infectious disease researcher specializing in helping people survive exposure to them. They will be assuming the project lead positions from Doctor McCallister, who will be retasked with helping develop some kind of treatment that will enable us to endure and survive this as a country."

"That's pretty strong language there, General," Phil said. "How high is the mortality rate on this DuoHalo virus anyway?"

"We aren't entirely sure, but if the Russian chatter we intercepted is to be believed, somewhere between 50-75%."

That put the entire room into silence. Phil was already doing back of the envelope math in his head, but with a mortality rate like that, it was the kind of death toll that would put the Spanish Flu epidemic to shame without breaking a sweat. Over three billion dead people in a year or two was basically a crisis the like of which the world had never seen.

"That... that can't be right," Bridges said. "That would be the deadliest virus this planet's ever seen, if it's true. How contained is it?"

"We're not sure," the Major General said, "but even if we could convince the Commander-in-Chief to force everyone to quarantine at home immediately, to shut down the borders to any and all entrances or exits, we still anticipate we're going to start seeing cases of it here within a few months time, and once we do, our window to get this thing under control shortens exponentially."

"The guy stared into a fucking eclipse," Daniels muttered beneath his breath, quiet enough that most of the room couldn't hear him, but Phil was sitting right next to the man. "He doesn't give a shit about what the science says. Fucking Cheeto, he's gonna get us all fucking killed."

"Now all of this information is highly classified, so you cannot go discussing this with anyone off base, and even the amount of information you distribute to your teams should be kept as need-to-know as possible," the Major General continued. "The mechanical engineering members of the project will be working to build detection and testing systems, and Doctor Dev Varma will be that project's chief when he arrives. Doctor Charlotte Varma will be directing the rest of you, who are tasked with developing either a vaccine or a suppression system that can keep the virus in check and under control. The work that Doctor Marcos's team has been doing shows a lot of promise in piggybacking that into some kind of treatment to help us keep this plague from wiping out our country as we know it, so until she shows up, I'd like you to take point for the team, Dr. Marcos."

"Yes sir," Phil sighed, knowing that as nice as it would be to not really answer to anyone for a while, they were also targeting him to be their scapegoat in case anything went horribly wrong. It was a very double-edged sword they were handing him. "How do you want us to spin it to our teams?"

"Give them as much information as they need, but try not to get into the lethality of it unless it turns out to be necessary," the Major General said. "We'll be meeting with each of you over the next couple of days as we work to re-calibrate this team towards its new purpose. You should have a meeting invite on each of your calendars, and we'll meet again in a few days to put together a battle plan. Until then, dismissed."

The Major General still wasn't used to working with civilians, Phil thought to himself, but that was fine. Judging by the sound of things, they were all up shit creek without paddles anyway, so the best thing to do was simply to get to work.

Phil headed out of the office, bypassing the rest of the team leads, who were all chatting among themselves. He suspected there was going to be a certain level of bitchiness about the upending of the project, the complete change in leadership and at least a few pot shots about they thought Phil was likely just to fuck it all up anyway. Let'em sit and stew, Phil thought.

By the time he got back to his office, there was, in fact, a meeting request in his calendar, for tomorrow afternoon, meaning they were meeting with everyone else before him, which meant he was either the most important opinion or the least. Considering he was being put in charge of the team until the two Doctors Varma arrived, he hoped it was the latter.

Also in his email was the data dump the Major General had promised them, and Phil immediately started reading all of it on his iPad, taking notes in a separate window while he did, making sure to keep track of every crucial bit of information they had about this DuoHalo virus. There was a bunch of information about the Corona virus as well, which also seemed bad, but nothing like the DuoHalo virus, which seemed absolutely insidious.

The DuoHalo virus was such an insipidly effective threat, Phil's first suspicion was that it had been engineered, crafted and designed by human hands, but in looking at the data, there were too many wild and loose threads, too many unusual and unpredictable variables for it to likely have been built by people, and instead was likely just some random freak mutation from some existing virus that hadn't previously been dangerous to humans at all. The idea that maybe it had been sitting frozen in the ice several hundred feet beneath the surface for tens of thousands of years seemed as plausible as any.

One hour turned into two which turned into four, and before he knew it, there was a knocking at his door. He looked up to see Doctor Bill McKenna standing in his doorway, a quizzical look on his face. Bill was generally a good guy, with a beer gut that could hold a couple of kegs, and a bird's nest of silver hair with a giant bald spot in the center of it. "So what's this about us getting retasked?" Bill asked him.

"Yeah, I guess rumor mill travels fast," Phil said to him. "Project's been put on indefinite hold, and we're being retasked onto a new thing. We'll have a meeting about it about it on Monday, after the reshuffling happens. They're probably gonna have the exec team in over the weekend, drafting up a new battle plan."

"Well, I think I need you to take a break from that and come see a bit of video from one of our human test cases earlier today," Bill said, that odd look on his face having only gotten odder.

"We weren't supposed to be doing human test cases yet, Bill," Phil sighed. "Who the hell authorized that?"

"Dr. Bridges started us on initial low dosage testing this morning, so I assumed you'd heard about it," Bill said, "and even if you hadn't, he's your boss, so I figured we'd better go along with what he said to do until you said otherwise."

"Well, as of," Phil said, glancing at his Apple Watch, "four hours ago, I'm his boss, so we're definitely going to put a stop to human testing, at least in the short term. We'll be doing a lot more human testing in the very near future, though, what with the retasking."

"Okay, sure, but you'd still better come and see this," Bill said, his voice getting a little more insistent. "Before anyone else does."

"Bill, whatever it is, I'm sure--"

"PHIL," Bill hissed. "For once in your goddamn life, trust me on this and come take a fucking look at it, will you?"

That definitely caught Phil's attention. Bill was the kind of man who never swore. In fact, Phil had known the researcher for four years, and just using the word 'goddamn' was enough to get his attention, but then he'd taken it a step further and added an f-bomb for good measure.

"Okay!" Phil said, closing the case on his iPad, letting the magnetic pencil cling to the side, as he tucked it under his arm. "If it's that important, let's go take a look at the damn thing."

The two men walked down the hallway, then down a couple of flights of stairs, heading into an area they used as a sort of staging grounds, but off to the side, there were a handful of rooms where they could do clinical trials and keep people under observation while the biological and chemical elements were in their system.

"What sort of amperage were you testing the serum at?" Phil said, trying to get a handle on what exactly Bridges had been testing for.

"None at all," Bill said, "just doing some basic grafting of our baseline serum onto a couple of common steroid and opioids, seeing how the serum worked when paired with another drug designed to do something else. Bridges wanted to see if the serum had any other uses outside of the bioelectrical feedback system we designed it for."

"Well, of course it fucking does, Bill," Phil groaned. "That's the whole purpose of our serum, to be a piggyback deployment measure that we can use to introduce elements rapidly into the human system. Shit, you could've just told him that when he asked. Before we got folded into the drone control program, the idea was that we were going to use the serum to direct nanobots to identify and repair wounds in the field, which is why we knew we could use it to send bioelectrical signals out. That's why they brought us in here in the first place, because the nanobots team couldn't figure out how to get basic fucking diagnostics working for the nanobots to act on. You know all that."

"I told him all that, but he said since we'd made so many adjustments to the serum in the last five months, trying to get it to work in tandem with Dr. Cunningham's system, he wanted to be sure nobody had screwed anything up along the line."

"Well, if the serum's sending out minor bioelectric signals through the body, it shouldn't cause any adverse effects, unless it's reacting to something in one of the elements it's been grafted onto."

"That's what I'm telling you, Phil!" Bill whispered, angrily. "We got one hell of an adverse effect out of one of the grafts! One hell of an adverse effect!"

"What was it grafted onto?" Phil said, knowing immediately what it was going to be, based purely on how his day had been going so far.

"Just a simple flu shot!" Bill said, leading Phil into an observation room, with the subject, a woman in her late twenties, asleep beneath a blanket. They had a steady flow of volunteers, people eager to put their bodies on the line to make some quick cash, as long as the experiments weren't too dangerous. "She's fine now. Mostly. We think. We hope, anyway, but you should've seen her just after the shot was administered."

The two men sat down in front of the television, as Phil rubbed his eyes. "Well, let's see it," he said. "Show me the tape and let's see how fucked up today's really been."

Bill picked up the remote and turned the television on, before tapping on the keyboard, logging in using his own authenticator before loading up a video file from five hours prior. "Here she is when the shot's administered." The file started playing and the woman was injected in the arm with a cocktail of flu vaccine and the serum that the scientists had affectionately nicknamed 'Zap Juice,' based on its derivation from the physiology of electric eels. The name on the video file said the woman's name was Caselli, K. Kate, Phil guessed. She looked like a Kate.

"Everything looks fine and normal, Bill," Phil said, watching the woman get the injection, no adverse effects of any kind, before she sat down on the cot with her book, some Sue Grafton novel, starting to read.

"Sure, now here's an hour later," Bill said, tapping to advance the time code.

The image suddenly shifted dramatically, as the woman had crawled beneath the sheet on the cot, and there was a frantic rustling going on beneath it.

"Is... is she?"

"She absolutely is definitely masturbating, yes," Bill said. "And when one of the researchers went in to talk to her, this happened."

Bill skipped ahead a few minutes, and one of the junior members of the team -- Doug? Mike? Shit, Phil couldn't remember his name -- went over towards her, and the woman leaped up from the cot and started kissing the man intensely, before he pushed her back and fled from the room, closing her inside, even as she hammered at the door with her fists, yelling and demanding that he get back in there and fuck her properly. The meek little woman who had gotten the shot had been replaced by this furiously worked up warrior.

"Holy balls," Phil said. "After that?"

"After that..." Bill said, skipping forward again. The woman moved back to lay on the bed, stripped off all her clothes, and masturbated right in front of the camera, rubbing her pussy slowly, thrusting her hips upwards, almost like she was trying to invite a man into the room, and eventually, after what felt like a very long time, even with the video playing at 4x speed, she finally seemed impatient, sped up until she hit some kind of orgasm and then passed out atop of the blanket. The orgasm looked particularly intense, and Phil noted that Bill had turned the volume down sizable, as the woman had let out a rather primal moan, somewhere between release and frustration.

"Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat the fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck...." Phil said.

"About twenty minutes later, Damon felt confident enough to go back in there, and pulled the blanket over her. Said she was completely out like a light, would not wake up. At all. He checked her basic vitals and everything seemed generally within acceptable ranges -- breathing, heart rate, eye motion..."

"Eye motion? She's in REM sleep?"

"Yep," Bill said, stopping the video. "And she still hasn't woken up yet. She passed out almost two hours ago. After he'd checked her vitals, he tried to wake her up and said she was out out. Didn't seem comatose, but not being able to be woken up was pretty weird."

"No, what's pretty weird, Bill," Phil said, leaning forward to take the mouse from his colleague's hand, scrolling the time back, showing the woman's face right before she grabbed poor Damon and kissed him, pausing at that exact moment. "That right there is pretty fucking weird. Look at that expression. That's not a woman who's in her right mind. That's not a woman who's thinking clearly. That is a woman in some kind of delirium state, almost like an altered consciousness state. And you've documented all of this, including the fact that this request came from Bridges?"

"Yeah yeah, it's all in the notes, Phil," Bill said. "I know how adamant you are about us documenting everything so we've got it all written up. This isn't our fucking fault and nobody can say that it is."

"And nobody else had a reaction like this?"

"Well, we only did five tests, but yeah, I think if any of the others had turned someone into a hormonal sex maniac, don't you think I would've mentioned it?"