Quaranteam - The Upstart's Knight Ch. 07

24th October 2020

Nia's Mercedes EV clawed through the miles along the M1 motorway, travelling south towards Nottingham, and their latest recruits. The road felt practically abandoned, a long, unused slash of tarmac across the grey British autumn with only the occasional HGV bothering to offer them company, drivers sealed up within their cabs. Somewhere, several minutes behind, Rhys and Nell were following them, but other than that there certainly weren't any other cars left to care about how many miles above the limit Nia was driving down the inside lane. Or traffic police left to stop her. Just Ethan, pressed back into the passenger seat next to her.

It had been months since Ethan had seen anything but the confines of Taymont Hall, and he was acutely aware of how the country he was stepping back out into was a very different place to the one he had previously known. Diminished, scarred and scared. He reasoned that he should, by rights, have been apprehensive but was surprised to find he wasn't, his mind more preoccupied with thoughts of others than with any concerns about his own safety in the abandoned stillness of DuoHalo England.

There was a slight but definite tension from Nia as she drove the eerily quiet journey, her unease at being away from Evie for even the planned couple of days being obvious. The first two members of Team Knight were already intensely close, and Ethan could tell that leaving the hurting Asian woman behind was even harder for Nia than it was for him. Evie had rebuffed attempts to be convinced to come with them, insisting she would be ok, and Ethan knew that with time she would be. He just wished he could help her get there faster.

The preview footage they had received had done a lot to focus minds on Project Upstart, offering them a real sense of tangible stakes, but the footage had also proved more challenging for some than others in the two days that had followed. Evie in particular had slipped into quiet determination, all furrowed brows and extended work hours, using professionalism to build up a wall to just how much the video had shaken her. And it was Nia that she'd confessed to, however, that it had spilled open half-raw wounds about the loss of her girlfriend and left her projecting the face of the woman she'd cared about onto the suffering they had been shown. Evie might have gotten over Sara's death, but the harsh discovery of what she might have gone through was a new cut that was going to take time to heal.

"It's 11am and I'm Ruby Foster with the NEBC headlines. Theresa May has suggested lockdowns could be here to stay until Christmas in an update this morning as -"

Ethan reached over and flicked off the news bulletin that stirred on the radio in place of the classical music Nia had been listening to. The familiar voice of their anchor Ruby, due to be added to Team Kaminski later that week, felt even more like platitudes than normal and he knew neither of them wanted to hear them.

"You know she's made of strong stuff and has Farah there to look out for her," Ethan settled on instead, opting for an attempt at soothing Nia's disquiet rather than allow the journey to continue with silence.

"And you know that's not the point," Nia offered evenly in return.

Ethan did. He had an almost visceral need to not just know that Evie was ok, but also that he was the one there to help her, and it had taken a huge amount to pull himself away. Nia didn't want it to be Farah there looking out for the youngest member of the Team, she wanted it to be herself.

He reached over, briefly slipping his hand over hers, causing her body language to soften.

"No-one ever promised love would be easy," he said, gently, and watched as a handful of emotions played across Nia's face before settling on a wistful smile.

"No...I suppose they didn't."

If she wasn't driving he'd have kissed her.

Nia had been a flurry of activity for the last few days. She was a born leader, driven and brilliant, and was pulling Project Upstart forward with a clarity of vision Ethan struggled to imagine someone else bringing. She was determined to make their own broadcast human and relatable, and had been pushing hard to try and get as many interviews and accounts from recipients of the vaccine as possible, leaving Ethan doing his best trying to coordinate footage both domestically and from abroad. It felt impossible not to be swept up by her calm intensity more often than not. And he loved her for it.

And yet it was the side of Nia he was getting to see now, in the car, that he loved more. He was touched at how readily she was willing to set aside the mask for him and show her human side. Nia cared as intensely as she did everything else, but that meant she was willing to fight hard enough that others might miss it.

Which meant that he was reluctant to risk spoiling things and discuss the topic he promised himself he would bring up when he got in the car. But Nia and Evie weren't the only people on his mind.

"Actually, there's something I've been wanting to talk to you about for a few days but never felt like we had the time."

The consideration with which he picked his words pricked at Nia's ears, and her reply was open yet cautious. "Well, I am a captive audience until we meet the McNamara sisters."

"Aoife Ryan."

"The engineer? What about her?"

Aoife had finally replied to his messages, but her replies felt strained, the easy comfort of simply interacting with her suddenly not so easy. Ethan knew that was more his fault than hers. What had already been an awkward ask to keep things from her before suddenly felt impossible following the preview footage from Scotland, and every word he shared with her without opening up felt like a larger lie than the last.

"We're..." he started, then paused immediately, realising he didn't really know how to describe what his relationship with Aoife was, and aware at how delicate this had the potential to be. "She's my best friend. And she's honestly the only thing at Taymont that's kept me sane the last few months. I know how important keeping things quiet is but lying to her by omission like this is killing me."

"Ethan..." Nia's reply wasn't an admonishment, answering with strained sympathy instead. Even so he pushed on, attempting to answer the reasonableness of her objections before she could raise them.

"I know...I know. We don't have a choice. But what if I don't want to just accept that. You're the one who's told me that you shouldn't be afraid to push back if something feels wrong."

"I wasn't expecting you to use that one against me quite so quickly." Nia gave the slightest of sighs, her smile wan and Ethan detected the hint of bemused humour from her that he was using her own philosophy against her. She had styled herself as the titular Upstart, unwilling to play by rules she disagreed with, but wasn't quite as used to others using the same logic against her. Some might have felt her to be unreasonable, but Ethan knew she was anything but. She spoke quietly, the care in her voice obvious as she appreciated the sincerity with which she spoke.

It was plain that she disliked how much this had clearly been hurting him, but even so it pushed hard against her better judgement.

"This isn't just a case of doing what we want Ethan," Nia continued. "There are consequences to everything we chose to do now that are very real."

"It's not just about me being selfish about what I want. It's..." Ethan had considered over and over how to make his case and took a moment to try and find the words he knew he wanted. "You say you want us to do this right. That we have a duty to make sure what Project Upstart delivers is better than what it would be if someone else was standing where we are. If I'm not bringing the best of myself, my values, what I think is right, to what we're doing, then why am I even here. I can't just pretend I'm doing the right thing for the big picture if I'm compromising all the little details that make that up."

Behind the wheel Nia's look was unreadable, her eyes carefully placed upon the road as they progressed.

"I don't know what the answer to this is yet Nia...but I need to know you're going to support me standing up for things when I think I do."

A pair of delivery vans, painted with the blue and red livery of one of the big supermarket chains, joined the road ahead of them, now a vital service to allow people to remain in their homes and some of the only people with a reason to be out here. Nia slowed and it gave her enough of a chance to glance across towards him.

"How long have you been rehearsing that in your head for," she asked, her expression affectionate as she looked to undercut any tension with the observation.

"At least a day. Probably more like two," he confessed. Nia had immediately seen how much he had agonised over how to say things, and the humour she took from that fact made him realise how unnecessary it had been. If he had thought that she might not have heard his concerns, she was rapidly disabusing him of that particular worry.

"That's not all you wanted to ask though is it?"

Nia's question caught Ethan off guard. It took him a quiet moment, as the car sped past another truck, to realise exactly what she had meant. He was struck by an appreciation that there was a larger question at the root of things, one which he hadn't quite managed to thrust towards despite the amount of time he'd spent thinking things over.

"Aoife did the Delphi questionnaire at the same time I did..."

"She did. You were a good match for her."

"So why isn't she..."

Ethan's feelings spun into motion as his question tailed off, like a machine clearing an obstacle from its gears. His brow tugged slightly into a frown. It was an odd discovery, noticing that he'd been avoiding asking what the serum would mean for Aoife. It was as if he knew the fact she hadn't already been paired up meant that it wasn't going to be with him, and he had been doing everything he could to avoid looking reality in the eye. And it was only in the sudden knowledge that he would never be able to have a relationship with her that he realised how much he might have wanted it. Confronting that stung more than he ever thought it could.

"Because she's a terrible match for me," Nia said, slowing the car slightly. There was guilt in her voice, noticing the confused emotions prickling across Ethan's face. A finger tapped anxiously at the car's wheel, and she exhaled. She spoke gently as she tried to explain plainly for him without retreating behind the mask of over-composed professionalism. "Delphi has to deal with thousands of data points for each candidate. Even with the best AI we have, applying that across every possible match becomes exponentially harder with each person you add to a team, to the point of impossibility. To simplify things, as I understand it, the algorithm tends to weight things around a single person and then builds out from there. In the majority of cases it's the man."

"But not with you?" For the first time in days Ethan found a growing spark of resentment for the situation they were in, even if he couldn't bring himself to direct it at Nia.

Nia nodded. "President Pelosi was the first one, as I understand it, to be prioritised by the algorithm ahead of her partner."

"I suppose there's a certain amount of sense to that."

"I didn't demand special treatment." She continued, softly protesting in the face of what she suspected he was feeling. "But when the UK government were deriving the Delphi platform from the US's Oracle, they were insistent that there were provisions in there to consider professional metrics too. They wanted it to make sure it could be used as a workforce solution for the public and private sectors too. There's no sense pairing a minister who needs to be in London with a pilot or someone working on an oil rig. I don't know if I was flagged manually or if it simply decided to prioritise me on its own."

"You sound like you're trying to justify something that you're not in control over," Ethan replied, caught between the sudden cut of things with Aoife, and the love he had for Nia. He could imagine the burden he would feel if their roles had been so easily reversed and he was a barrier to her, and he refused to hold that against her.

Nia's response was with the same, earnest firmness she brought to her work. "When your feelings are being made to compromise for me, yes, I do need to justify it Ethan. Even if the algorithm is never going to put us with someone you can't connect with, it's not going to be able to let you have everything you might want either. I have to be aware of that."

Everything he might want? No-one got that, even before the pandemic. He already had more than he should ever have been able to ask for. And yet it didn't make it easier to avoid picking at certain questions. He couldn't reason away emotions.

"So...It thinks you and Aoife wouldn't work?"

"If it was just you and her it may have been different, but her compatibility with me is below 50%, and her professional suitability for Upstart was even worse."

Aoife was brash, confrontational, and bad with whatever she considered to be undeserved authority. She was also deeply principled and outspoken about what she thought was right. It didn't take much to see how much of a clash she might be with Nia, or how she might struggle to toe the line Project Upstart might demand of her. But then it also felt unfair that traits that seemed to be valued in Nia, traits he loved, might be the same ones being held against Aoife.

"I can't change that we don't work together, even if I would try for you," Nia apologised. Her next words didn't seem to come particularly easy to her, but she said them anyway. "However, even if she's not on our Team I can see that this still means a lot to you. I trust your judgement, and know you understand the stakes. If you think you can find a way to tell her without it causing issues then I'll stand beside that."

Not for the first time, Nia's response surprised Ethan. He had been prepared to have to stand his ground and make his case, or perhaps even insist that he would have done it with or without her approval, but instead she cut that defiance off, smothering it with understanding.

Nia allowed herself another glance away from the road and read his expression. "What's the point of arguing when I know I'm not going to be able to say no to you on this? Regardless of who the algorithm thinks is in charge."

"You could have told me sooner."

"Part of me was hoping I wouldn't have to," she said, almost sadly, the barest glimpse of self-consciousness showing through. As if she'd been waiting to see if she could simply have his heart to herself. "And the larger part told me I needed to let you work through whatever you were feeling yourself. We're adults Ethan, I trusted that when you were ready to talk to me you would."

Nia's hand found his again, the most she could do while driving to reach over and give a loving squeeze.

"But I am sorry," she finished. "About all of this with her."

"No-one ever promised love would be easy," he repeated, the statement feeling even more humorously understated than before, drawing a small chuckle from Nia. But then if someone offered him the chance to go back to an easy life now, was there really any chance he would dream of taking it?

A bold blue motorway sign breezed past the window, white letters noting that they were less than 10 miles from Nottingham, and Jessica McNamara, the young woman that the algorithm had picked out to be the next member of Team Knight for Nia. And for him. He was going to find a way to make all of this work, no matter what the rules or reason said. For the women he was already paired with. For the ones he was still going to be paired with. And for the one he wasn't going to be.

******

Quiet followed them from the motorway into the centre of Nottingham, only sporadically broken up by other vehicles, just often enough to remind Ethan that the city wasn't completely abandoned. Nia had slowed from her previous breakneck speed, subconsciously urged to a cautious crawl by the haunted feel of the urban fabric. At one point a pair of urban foxes strolled across the street in front of their car, emboldened in the half-deserted cityscape, disappearing behind a bus that seemed to have been abandoned by the side of the road months ago.

There were people, infrequent, nervous, shuffling, bundled up against the autumn cold with heavy masks covering their faces as they made their way in and out of the handful of shops still open for essentials. On a couple of rare occasions they passed those foolish enough to be out without any protection at all, and Ethan was left wanting to wind down the window and berate them for what they didn't know. At one set of traffic lights they stopped, and Ethan's notice wandered to the shape of a homeless body, curled up in a doorway with its back to them. They were covered up in a heavy sleeping bag despite the early hour, rendering them oddly formless, and they failed to move during the long minutes in which the Mercedes lingered before the red light. It was only as they drove away that Ethan realised he would have no way of knowing if they were dead or simply sleeping.

The state of things didn't quite feel real as they passed. Too close to cliche. Ethan had been shut away in Taymont too long, and the stark difference of the world now made it easy to envisage as a dressed set rather than a place doing its best to keep pretending while people died in the millions.

Eventually they did reach the new-build apartment complex that was their destination. Delphi may not have paired Ethan with Aoife, but that didn't mean it wasn't generating other matches for Team Knight. The US data suggested a median of seven partners in order to achieve the levels of second-hand immunity needed from their vaccines, with a digital artist and graphic designer called Jess the next on their list, as the algorithm spread its search further across the country. Oddly, Jess's sister, a programmer named Alex, had been flagged for Team Barclay at the same time, and Rhys and Dr Armstrong were headed to her apartment on the other side of town, knowing that if there were any issues Nia or Nell would be available to support the other.

Like with Farah everything had been carefully coordinated in advance, introductions made through odd digital interactions that made online dating seem simple. Jess had wanted a chance to meet in her own home, and to be vaccinated there, letting her use the familiar to ease into things before heading to Taymont. And so Ethan found himself ringing the intercom, buzzed through to find her apartment five floors up, while Nia followed with a clinical looking briefcase of polished aluminium.

He paused briefly in the stairwell, unable to stop himself checking his phone, and felt Nia's frame slide alongside him, a hand around his waist.

"What did you say to her?" she asked, knowing he'd taken the time to message Aoife while she fetched things from the boot.

"Just that I had something important I needed to talk to her about pretty urgently," he replied, holding up the screen to show her. "Still unread. I'm not sure what I'm going to say when she does answer."

She leaned up to kiss him tenderly. "Then you are doing all you can for now."

"And I have someone else that needs my attention waiting for me, I know." Ethan closed his eyes, blowing his cheeks out as he took a moment to reset his thoughts, finding the determination again that he was going to be everything he needed to be to everyone who needed him. "Let's go cast the next die."

A dog barked from the other side of the door as they knocked, and Ethan's immediate attention was forced onto the enthusiastic jack russell that emerged, rather than the petite redhead that accompanied it. It jumped up, paws against his thigh, eagerly sniffing his hand with an energy that suggested Ethan was the first new person it had met in months, and he stooped down to scritch at mismatched white and brown ears.