Quaranteam: Phil's Tale Ch. 11

Chapter 11

October 22 ^nd, 2020

While there were a lot of things Phil had adapted well to post Quaranteam, there were a handful of things that were still taking serious adjustment to. The biggest? Sharing a bed with as many people as he now did. Audrey and Linda had refused to sleep anywhere he wasn't, and every partner who'd been added to his family seemed to consider the matter. While the staff had been more than happy to remain in their own beds, and Tamika only swung by weekly for her fix, Paloma and his other new addition, Rochelle, also wanted to share his bed, so Phil had two women on either side of him at all the time, which meant he couldn't get up in the middle of the night if he wanted to.

After having been mostly single for most of the last decade, it had been easy to just get comfortable having the bed to himself. Hell, before the crisis had started, Phil hadn't bothered upgrading beyond the twin bed he'd had growing up. Once Linda and Aubrey had imprinted on him, though, that had immediately changed. Phil hadn't even known mattresses could be delivered as quickly as Linda had had a new bed - box springs, frame, and mattress - show up the day after her arrival, a move that had been a little pointless, because less than a month later they'd been moved into New Eden, where the house was already stocked in advance.

The bed in the house in New Eden easily fit everyone, although perhaps that was the incorrect way to think about it. There was room for everyone in the bed, should they want to sprawl out and have some space to themselves.

They didn't.

Or, rather, the ladies didn't.

And Phil was learning to deal with the fact that he was always going to be sleeping under a blanket of arms and legs, whether he was happy about it or not. Audrey always plastered herself on one side, and the other side seemed to get taken up by a rotating assortment of Linda, Yuko and Paloma. Rochelle liked being near him, but didn't need to be touching him, which was good, because the rotating position could be hotly contested some nights.

Originally, he'd made them settle it by having a Guilty Gear Xrd REV 2 tournament, but now all the girls had figured that out, and were spending half an hour a day practicing their fighting game skills in general, which, as sexy as it was, made solving problems even trickier. For now, he'd decided he was going to stay out of it, and let them solve the matter for themselves.

That did, however, mean he sometimes ended up in situations like the one he was currently in, where he wanted to get up, take a shower and get back to work, and instead he was... buried beneath a blanket of arms and legs. It was about half an hour earlier than he'd normally get up, but Phil was eager to get back to the lab, as there was some research that was starting to seem particularly promising. But Paloma was slowly rubbing her calf against his crotch through his boxers. He turned his head to look over at Paloma, who had a sly smile on her face, even though she had her eyes closed.

"You can pretend you're still asleep," Phil whispered to her, "or you can get up with me and we can go into the bathroom, and spend a little bit of time together before we need to wake the others and go to work."

Paloma didn't pretend to be asleep much longer.

Just after he'd given Paloma a nice big load, Linda moved in to join them, and before he knew it, he couldn't get out of the shower until he'd given a dose to Paloma, Linda, Yuko and Audrey. He was a little surprised the house staff weren't lined up as well when they finally got around to drying off. Phil wanted to make a joke about it, but all the girls were getting along so well, he felt like saying something was going to break the spell.

The group of them headed in to the base, leaving Violet back at home to sleep, although the plan was that starting soon, Paloma would take over some of Violet's shifts, so that she could have a chance to sleep in the same bed as Phil from time to time. Phil had been a little surprised that Linda had trusted Paloma that far, but as it turned out, even as different as the two were, they were alike in many more ways, and got with each other incredibly well. Linda had even made the Spanish woman an honorary member of Linda's Girls.

During the past week, Phil had been doing more than his fair share of digging into the Australians who'd attacked him, when he wasn't up to his nipples in DuoHalo research, anyway, which wasn't all that often. Z Special Unit were sort of the Australian equivalent of the Navy SEALs from the USA, or the SAS from England. They were a special forces unit designed for more complicated and subtle work, and their presence in New Eden certainly hadn't been by accident.

Although he wasn't actively being encouraged to keep tabs on such things, now that international negotiations were starting up on other nations obtaining the Quaranteam serum, he wanted to see exactly what the rest of the world was looking like, and after an initial shock to the system, Australia had done relatively well for itself, keeping most of its men in isolation, and apparently getting their hands on some black market doses of the Quaranteam serum, something that made Phil even more nervous about how the month was shaping up.

Had the Australians tried to get Phil in order to not to have to pay for the serum? Was that the extent of their plan, and if so, why hadn't it seemed like they were trying to take him alive? The most recent attack had felt more like an assassination attempt than a kidnapping operation. Did they have their own version of the serum? And if so, why weren't they using it or, more importantly, also offering it for sale?

The Aussies had been one of the leading countries engaged in negotiations with the US for priority access to the serum, and were already willing to pony up quite a bit in exchange for a high ranking spot on the waiting list. Was it a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand was up to? Could their government really be that in the dark as to what their military was up to?

Butler and Isaacs, the two members of Z Special Unit they'd been able to identify, hadn't been apprehended, nor had they been spotted leaving the country, so no one was sure if they were laying low, waiting to strike again or they'd fled and just not been spotted. And official inquires to the Australian government were met with confused, if not concerned, replies, stating that both men were considered presumed dead, having supposedly died in a botched operation some 18 months ago. 'Whatever they're up to,' the Australian PM claimed, 'we've got nothing to do with it. Seems like they went rogue. You'll be doing us a favor by killing them.'

So that hadn't been at all helpful.

And, as Fielder had told Phil, it all sounded like a very convenient plausible denial, the kind any real special ops team would have in place in advance of a particularly dangerous assignment.

It wasn't the only thing troubling Phil, no matter how much they were telling him to keep his head down and his eyes on improving the serum.

The Russians hadn't responded to hails for weeks now, and that was also quite troubling, because Phil fucking knew they had McCallister and as far as any of the satellite images were showing, they were still doing mass graves and burning incredibly large numbers of bodies. They had McCallister, and he had to have given them a working version of the Quaranteam serum by now, so why the fuck weren't the Russians using the goddamn thing? And if they were, why wasn't it working for them? And if it was, why were so many fucking people still dying in Russia?

Doses of Quaranteam were starting to be delivered to a handful of close allies of the US, with the UK getting a test run of 50,000 doses, France and Germany 10k doses each, and a thousand doses to any country asking for "proof of concept." That was how they were in the process of selling it to the other countries - letting them see how it worked for themselves, and protecting some of the upper echelon within the existing power structures, the ones that were left anyway.

Phil couldn't decide if he was more amused or disgusted imagining the Royal Family of Great Britain getting paired up. He did feel a little guilty about it, knowing that there was a chance the rejuvenating side effects might youthen Queen Lizzie back a decade or two, if she got lucky. He also knew that they were likely bristling against the break from tradition harder than anybody else.

(He also wondered if they would have been as eager to take the serum if they'd known who'd developed it - based on how the Royals had treated Meghan Markle, he suspected the fact that he wasn't white might have affected the blue bloods willingness to trust the science.)

But the problems weren't just abroad, because the base itself was continuing to feel less and less like the place he'd been working at for the last few years and more like something else entirely. The building that Phil hadn't been allowed to go into continued to grow, and he still had no idea what the hell they were doing over there, because he wasn't allowed to go into it, other than it was "Air Force special operations."

Once a week, Linda would yell at the General about how she didn't like being kept in the dark about things happening at the base where she was a high ranking member of the security forces, only to be repeatedly told to worry about her protectorates and not the security of the base itself.

That building also had a ridiculous amount of data coming and going through it, because it seemed like every other week, they were laying even more fiber to the building. Phil couldn't even begin to imagine what was being done over there that would require such massive constant data transfer. Well, he could but he didn't like any of what his imagination had come up with.

He and Dr. Varma had been doing more research on a number of the new variants, including             

the incredibly troublesome Smooth Variant. Because what they'd feared they now had proof of. There were particular chemical markers in the virus that were 100% human made.

Someone had intentionally improved DuoHalo and had let it loose onto the world. And the way that they'd improved it made both him and Charlotte a lot more nervous, because it revealed intent. The virus had been improved in that it was transmissible longer, and the hair falling out was actually a marker that a person was no longer contagious, although weirdly enough, the hair itself still carried the virus with it for another day or so, and could easily jump into the lungs of someone cleaning up the hair. It was an engineered attempt to make the virus as transmissible as possible.

No one knew where Patient Zero for the Smooth Variant had come from, but they had clearly done a round the world trip and hit several major international airports. Even worse, it seemed like whoever Patient Zero was, they'd gone about trying to make sure they were spreading the new strain as much as possible. It was almost like they'd chosen the maximum number of airports they could hit while criss-crossing the globe without ever stopping.

He'd gotten reports that Andy and his Team had arrived at their house about a month ago, but had been ordered to remain in the manor for the first month before exploring New Eden itself, which was actually for the best, even though Phil didn't want to be the one to lecture Andy on how to live his life. The months of September and October were the busiest that New Eden had ever seen, between all the rush work infrastructure that was needed to scale up and insulate the colony even more than original.

Security had been intended to be a sort of optional side benefit, but after McCallister had been exfiltrated and people had taken a couple of shots at Phil himself, the security for New Eden had skyrocketed, and on the day Andy and his Team had moved in, they were in the process of putting fences up around every single border of New Eden. Guards were being added to the perimeter, and extra forces were being brought in so that there was a border patrol around New Eden twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Having a border guard would've taken some getting used to, but immediately after the Aussie agents had taken their shot at him, it had been decided that New Eden was on one-way lockdown. People came in, but they didn't go out, with the exception of the people who were running out for supplies, and those people were going through screenings that made the TSA look mall cops one week from retirement. Without a virtually unquestionable reason to leave, people needed to remain within the borders of New Eden at all time for the foreseeable future. That managed to do something truly astonishing...

...it pissed off literally everyone.

The order had been handed down by someone above Major General Fielder, and Fielder had been following the order to the letter, but his displeasure about the order had been spilling out onto pretty much everyone on the base. He'd been stomping around and snapping at the drop of a hat. Linda had told him that she thought it was because he felt like he was no longer in complete control of the base, and that outside forces were starting to take too much of an interest in the day to day workings of everything. That meant Fielder was micromanaging far more than he should've been. And he was only one of hundreds of people who were no longer functioning at the top of their game.

All the scientists had also gotten pissed, because it had gone from "you'll have a few months to move all your stuff into your new homes" to "everything that's not here right now will get brought to you eventually, get used to the idea" in a single shift. Bill had been the least grumpy about it and he'd still been a complete pain in the ass.

The military forces on and around the base only compounded the anger, as the people on the base felt like their performance was being questioned by the new increase in border security, and the new border forces had an attitude that felt something like 'well, if you'd done your job properly you wouldn't have needed our asses here,' and were happy to express that at a moment's notice.

In additional to all the internal pressure, the external pressure kept building at a ridiculous rate, but it seemed like all the internal debates about how hard to push the Quaranteam serum to the American public had been settled. It was clear now that they weren't going to get another path through at any point soon, so they needed to lean hard on protecting the American people, no matter how odd or unusual the serum was, or how unconventional the new way of life was going to end up being.

DuoHalo had cut through the veins of the American people with no mercy and no cessation, and it wasn't stopping. The biggest part of the problem, especially with the newer strains, was the lack of early symptoms. People could catch DuoHalo and be contagious for up to two weeks before they might be presenting. That meant there was little chance to track where it had been picked up or how many people that person had been in contact with. The damn thing was a sleeper agent, laying in wait and building an army, right up until the moment that it killed you.

With the early strains, the danger had presented early, but it was almost like whoever had been tampering with the virus had wanted to ensure that it reached every single person on the planet eventually, something that it looked like was definitely going to happen within the next year or so.

For now, however, with death tolls so ridiculously high, the transmission rate was starting to decline. Not because the virus was any less contagious than it had been before - if anything, the new strains seemed to lie in wait even longer before presenting symptoms, which meant it was infecting a greater amount of people - but because there were so fewer people around to catch it.

That had put the Executive Branch into shock. The longer they waited, the more likely it was there wouldn't be any men left to save, so the military had gone into full active deployment across the country, functioning as additional labor for the Corps of Engineers, as well as all the construction crews that were trying to get as many new safe harbors up and running as they could.

They had also drafted up a plan that was called Operation: Sudden Shock. In an effort to keep the casualty rates contained and secret from the public at large, at the beginning of December, a letter would be sent to every surviving person in America with a list of family members they had whom had died due to DuoHalo. The strict shelter-in-place orders had worked wonders at keeping most people in the dark with how many people had actually died - they were just under the assumption that their loved ones were in urgent care, and that the doctors simply didn't have time to keep individuals abreast, because there were so many cases, when in fact, their loved ones had died weeks or even months ago, and simply no one had the time to tell them, or, more accurately, they'd been ordered not to inform next-of-kin of the passing, so as to prevent widespread panic.

As a nation, though, they were getting closer to that every day. The dam of silence would only hold so long, and very soon, it was going to break, if they didn't act soon.

Plans were being made for a Presidential Address to happen before the end of the year, and Operation: Sudden Shock would happen soon after it did. The hope was that because there would be so many people to grieve all at once, the sudden shock of it all would overload the synapses, and people would simply let the shock of much of the mental anguish wash over them, similar to pain gating theory, where once a level of pain was too high, other pains all simply disappeared into the background, even when they were still present.

It would be a collective trauma, shared by everyone in the world, but one they could manage and work their way through, over time.

That was the theory, anyway, and psychologists and psychiatrists were working overtime to try and find the best way to manage it all. This was the best they had currently come up with, and Phil couldn't say he was at all pleased by it, even if it wasn't his direct problem to solve.

Even crazier than all that, however, was the fact that the conspiracy nuts were starting to get uncomfortably close to the truth with their rantings and ravings. There had been an increase in people calling talk shows to complain about 'secret government colonies' being built all over the country, but as much as Phil wanted to dismiss them, they were right on the money, going so far as to have actual locations and maps drawn up. Of course, they weren't right about everything. Despite how great it sounded in concept, the Quaranteam serum couldn't be aerosolized, so they couldn't fly it over and use 'chemtrails' in the air to distribute it, no matter how time and cost effective it sounded.

(Of course, Phil had also been incredibly depressed to find that no, the Air Force didn't in fact have access to secret alien technology that would help them in this moment of crisis. His dreams of flying across the country in a silver flying saucer with the USAF logo on the side of it had died hard that particular day.)

They were also starting to seriously ramp up the number of partners that existing men had, and within the span of a couple of months, many of the men already in the program were likely going to get a little overwhelmed. Phil had looked at the docket of what was coming down the pipeline, and Andy had been stable at six partners since not long after his arrival in New Eden - his three actual partners, and the three members of the staff - but there were going to be a lot more showing up soon.