Quaranteam: Phil's Tale Ch. 04

The whole thing reeked so much of white privilege that Phil wanted to punch Haunton in the goddamn face, but the man was offering them resources to scale up vaccine production a large amount in a very short time, things they would have to otherwise declare a national emergency for, and considering how little respect the Orange Cheetoh in the White House had for science, that seemed like an impossibility.

It didn't hurt that they'd brought in a couple of people from the governor's office who were also pushing for this sort of "sanctuary test zone."

As unhappy as he was about it, Phil knew there was no way he could be handling this entire situation on his own, so Miguel Cunningham was put in charge of the project. Cunningham assured everyone that he was already in the process of developing a plan that would determine how the vaccine would be distributed and how men and women would be paired up. It was a thing Phil wished he could spend more time managing, but as it stood, he needed to make sure the vaccine didn't have any other crazy side effects, so the deal was made.

As work on New Eden progressed, Phil was occasionally given peeks into what was going on over there, as he and the other members of the team were invited to come and select their new homes in the estates.

New Eden was 125 mansions in a large private enclave up near Mount Diablo, and the properties had been built with intent to sell to wealthy individuals in the area, but the government had agreed to buy all of them and to extend the fencing around the enclave to include the little Boeing/Air Force labs that the vaccine project was currently run out of.

The location of the lab being almost already within the borders of New Eden seemed far too coincidental for Phil's liking, but he couldn't find any written proof that it had been planned that way, no matter how much it felt like it was.

Phil felt the whole enclave idea was absurd, as he walked through the house he'd just sort of randomly picked from the list, saying he didn't think anyone needed a home this size, but the General had made it clear that Phil's research had proven one thing conclusively -- multiple female partners strengthened the immunity a man would have to DuoHalo, so men were being encouraged to be polyamorous, and Phil's health was far too important to put at risk.

More importantly, the team's research had determined that a single sexual encounter with a vaccinated woman would remove DuoHalo from a man's body, but that the man's immunity to it only lasted a few days and then he would be vulnerable again.

The whole thing felt so goddamn perfect, he had to wonder if McCallister had designed both his application and the virus itself, or just gotten lucky and piggybacked into making it work the way he wanted it to as a form to get widespread distribution for his pet project.

New Eden seemed surreal, but it was happening with or without him, so he'd decided to simply enjoy the perks he was being gifted as part of his work saving humanity. A staff was going to be delivered to his home, but he insisted he wanted to keep it as small as possible, and if the option of just having one staff member only existed, he would prefer to take that.

He was told he would be getting a staff of two -- one cook and one housekeeper. He agreed not to put up too much of a fuss about it, even though it all seemed a little silly to him. He, Audrey and Linda grew closer, becoming more of a family. Phil even told his sister about it, even though he knew he wasn't supposed to, but if he couldn't tell her, who could he tell?

April turned into May, and Phil was no closer to stripping out any of McCallister's modifications than he was when he started. All of it was so deeply embedded into the work that taking any bit of it loose would make the entire thing collapse like a house of cards.

The nationwide quarantine was now in full effect, and everyone was being strongly urged not to leave their houses under any circumstances. The economy was basically shut down, and the rest of the world was starting to follow suit. The cover story of Corona being the bigger thread was still holding, but the cracks were starting to show, and the death toll was starting to rise, both domestically and abroad, although tellingly, Russia was reporting lower casualties.

Fucking McCallister.

Major Peters, the woman who'd been in charge of the base before Major General Fielder had arrived, had been paired up with James Haunton, a decision Phil still didn't understand, but the woman hadn't wanted to talk about it much with him. It was just one of many questions Phil couldn't get an answer about on how the government was going to deploy the vaccine he and Dr. Varma had developed. In fact, it was starting to feel like the mechanism was taking over, and an entire industry was building up in getting people matched up with others.

Cunningham's system was built and while Phil thought it all seemed insane, that people would be up in arms about it, the decision was made to begin getting people inoculated in the Bay, while also getting everyone else prepped for later inoculations. Nobody else seemed to want to put up much of a struggle, desperate to keep people alive more than happy.

That was the mantra they were constantly repeating around him, day in and day out.

Stay alive.

Linda and Audrey had started reporting strong sexual needs for him within seven days, and by the time day ten had rolled around, Linda had practically fucked him at gunpoint, not that he minded. He had just had been a little taken aback by her raw sexual intensity when she'd finally crossed over her breaking point.

(It was actually more than a little hot.)

All of it meant that he'd had more sex in the past few month than he'd had in the last couple of years, and that was one of the few good things to come from all of this mess.

Despite the fact that he should have been doing more study work on the vaccine and its long term effects, in early June he decided he needed to read up into how the pairing system was going to work, and he didn't care for what he found one bit.

People were going to be sorted into five levels. Level one made up slightly more than 75% of the population. They were the lowest priority. Level twos were mostly government and essential workers. Level three was law enforcement and military. Levels four and five were far less clearly defined, with level fours being people of "significant" importance, and level fives those of "utmost" importance. Everyone on the project was immediately being given level five status, and they were all being given five people they could assign level five status to.

Cunningham had also developed what he called "the Oracle," a combination questionnaire and algorithm that would make optimal pairs with the least amount of friction, but as Phil had seen more than a few times over his time in Silicon Valley, there were some baked in racial assumptions into "the Oracle" that Phil found himself at odds with.

Most annoyingly, he couldn't make changes to code in the Oracle, so he was being forced to find his own ways to work around it. They were already running everyone on base through the system, trying to find people they could pair them up with, but while he didn't have access to how the Oracle interpreted the data, he found the system was running them in batches, so he could spend some time looking at the raw data before it was processed.

The data was being weighted, and so when he'd entered what kinds of things he was and wasn't attracted to, all of that had been given top priority. Distance had been given low priority. There was also a number of "hidden" variables, including things like "desirability," something he was suspecting had been designed so that maybe high profile people who might be contested would be sorted out. He was tempted to see if he could request Layla McIntosh, the singer in his favorite band Twilight Dwellers, but decided against it, because he was pretty sure they would've just given her to him, and he couldn't feel good about that. He wanted to be paired with people who wanted to be paired with him.

There were a few things that he could influence, though. The areas for initial canvasing for pairing were mostly limited to the incredibly wealthy areas of the Bay -- the Sunset district of San Francisco, Palo Alto, Hillsborough, Pleasanton... Lots of rich folks, many of whom were going to get marked as fours, although it turned out New Eden was exclusively for level fives. Phil made sure to include several other areas to get a broader racial and economic selection. Even if they were just rated level ones, they would still get early access to the vaccination, and he could keep people alive who had actual useful life skills.

He also didn't think he had a whole lot of people he wanted to give level five status to, but when he sat down and looked at it, he kept coming up with a math problem. He wanted to give level five to his sister and her husband, as well as everyone in the poker group.

That was seven people for five slots.

A day later, a solution presented itself.

When Phil was meeting up with the canvassing team, he spotted a well-read paperback sitting with one of their bags, and the cover was one he knew intimately. "Hey I'm Dr. Phil Mar--"

"I know who you are Doctor Marcos," the man replied, eagerly shaking his hand. "I'm Doctor David Straussman, and I'm a big fan of your work. You know your serum truly is groundbreaking and it's going to save a lot of lives in the coming months."

"Thanks Dave, but please, just call me Phil. We're all colleagues here. I can't help but notice you're reading one of the Druid Gunslinger books. You a big fan of the series?"

"Huge! Huge fan of them! I started reading them about six years ago when I was pulling late nights in med school and needed something to take my mind off of my studies for a bit, and I always do a reread of the whole series when the next one's close to coming out, although I'm betting this whole plague thing is gonna slow down the release of it. It's the longest Conrad's ever gone between putting one out, and the wait is killing me."

After their conversation, Phil had made sure that Dave would encounter his buddy Andy on one of his first runs, and hopefully Dave would be generous enough to solve Phil's math problem to get all of the poker group inside of the sanctuary of New Eden.

On July 1^st, they began injecting hundreds of beautiful women with the serum, and Phil knew the world would never be the same.