Quaranteam - The Upstart's Knight Ch. 08

Thanks as ever goes to the other QTverse writers and in particular CorruptingPower for the encouragement and input, as well as letting me play in his sandbox. Also thanks for the reviews and comments from readers here. This is the last new girl that will be getting introduced for a bit since there's more than enough for Ethan to get to grips with for now :)

Relevant Cast List:

Team Knight

- Ethan Knight: A junior producer at the North England Broadcast Corporation and member of Project Upstart

- Nia Clarke-Mills: VP of Marketing at Averna Pharma, responsible for the PR of the Gemivax rollout

- Evie Kimura: Civil servant from the Department for Culture Media and Sport, permanently attached to support the NEBC and Project Upstart

- Farah Hassan: Former England Women's cricketer turned media personality, headhunted to be the face of Gemivax for Project Upstart

- Jessica (Jess) McNamara: An online artist and designer hired to help produce graphics and animations

Team Barclay

- Rhys Barclay: A former editor of a tabloid paper brought on to Project Upstart despite his dubious personality

- Dr Eleanor (Nell) Armstrong: A public health doctor working as a consultant with the NEBC, now assisting Project Upstart with the Gemivax rollout

Unaffiliated

- Aoife Ryan: the long suffering and increasingly burnt out head broadcast/studio engineer for the NEBC

- Alex McNamara: a programmer and coder who is matched with Team Barclay via the Delphi algorithm

25th October 2020

Alex sat on the bathroom tiles crying, the voices on the other side of the door so small and remote that they'd stopped making sense. Her hands wouldn't stop shaking. Her heart raced so hard it hurt. And every breath burned like hell, forcing her to work at every shallow, snatching gasp.

She'd had panic attacks enough times before and thought she knew what anxiety was like, but the wave that had come over her within moments of receiving the vaccine made those seem tiny by magnitudes. This almost felt physical. Something she could reach out and touch. A beast in black and carmine with jaws large enough to fit around her chest, trying to savage her into the ground.

It would be a lie to say that she hadn't had her misgivings before the injection. The blonde doctor, Eleanor, at least seemed nice. But every doubt and off vibe she had about Rhys had become more cacophonous with every moment in which the serum worked its way through her body. The sheer fucking wrongness of everything had wormed it's way into her skull, until the only thing she could think to do was run. Knowing the bathroom at least offered a door she could lock, that was where Alex had made her break, listening to the impulse to grab the doctor's laptop as she'd gone. If what she was hoping to find on the device was reassurance, what she'd gotten was the opposite and it now lay in the corner, smashed against the wall. Trashed, like everything else in the room, as she'd struggled to find any sort of outlet for what she was feeling.

But there wasn't one. No matter how much she screamed and cried and broke and lashed out, her heart pounded faster, the run spun harder and the panic built further. With her red hair drenched with sweat, Alex curled up on the floor, and prayed whatever this nightmare was would just fucking kill her already.

******

"Aaah for fucks sake!"

Aoife swore as she was jolted from her half-thoughts and the autopilot she'd been working on by a small, brief flash and the faintest plume of electrical smoke. Black scorches marred the circuit board in front of her, and it didn't take a genius to immediately realise that she'd managed to short it past the point of saving. If she was less worn out she might have had to fight the urge to throw her soldering iron across the room, but as it was she simply set it down, before slumping her beanie clad head onto the workbench to give a despairing whine.

The digital clock on the wall read 00:57, but time felt a little arbitrary in her basement workshop, beneath fluorescent tube lights that did their straining best to keep the space from slipping into complete darkness. The repair job on the sound mixing desk was meant to be a quick one, something she could knock out easily rather than taking on one of the more daunting pieces of satellite equipment Nat had left her with. Something she could have done before midnight to justify a few snatched hours with her eyes closed on the camp bed in the corner of the room. But she was long past the point where her exhaustion was purely physical, and even the easy jobs were taking her twice as long. And that was without stupid lapses in concentration leading to stray gestures frying the device she was trying to fix.

It crossed her mind that maybe she didn't have much left to give.

"I can't keep fucking doing this."

Despite the statement Aoife made herself move, as if forcing herself to keep going was the only thing stopping the last few threads holding her together from finally coming apart. She was forced to pick her way past several obstructing coils of outdoor cable, ordered as a back-up following the vandalism of the uplink, and reached the sets of shelves her predecessor had mounted to meticulously arrange all the documentation and manuals they might need. She knew there was a handbook for the sound desks there, which, even if it didn't offer a solution, would at least give her the part number to order a replacement.

Aoife hated how much of a ghost of herself she felt right now, carrying around feelings that had been building for a while until they'd started to get past the point where she could keep ignoring them. Across the room the blue light of her own PC monitor remained illuminated at her desk with a couple of basic diagnostics of some faulty camera drives running. They weren't the drives that kept wrestling with her attention however.

It was almost 72 hours since she'd dumped the contents of the encrypted drive for 'Project Upstart'. Stealing something like this definitely wasn't like her. Not the her she saw herself as anyway. Nor was sitting on it, almost obsessively refusing to delete the data despite the fact she seemed no closer to working out a password. But if there was even a glimmer of an answer to how trapped she was starting to feel, Aoife couldn't let it go, no matter how sick it all made her feel.

At least she was talking to Ethan again. Even if noticing how stubbornly raw her feelings had ended up becoming was another sign of how poorly she was coping. He was the one good thing in her life right now, but her reaction to him missing a movie night wasn't something she liked. She didn't want to build him up into something he couldn't be or to put all her needs on him. But then she wasn't sure what else she was left with.

Finding herself standing in front of one set of shelves without having noticed the last few steps towards it, Aoife realised she'd spaced out entirely for a moment, and gave her own face a soft slap. "Come on you fucking numpty. Focus."

She spotted the faded volume she was looking for, eventually, on the top shelf, half buried beneath a stack of folders and documentation that had been stashed away months ago, waiting hopefully for a point where someone might actually find the time to file them properly. Little chance of that happening. The hard part was straining her short frame up to get it down, something she only half succeeded in, retrieving the manual with an accompanying avalanche of papers and another loud string of curses. Aoife took a moment where she fought down the urge to simply give up for the day, finally stooping down to start dejectedly collecting things back up, before a glimpse at one caused her to stop.

The single photocopied sheet was a mixture of printed arial font and annotations in the careful hand writing of Tom Warrick, the genial Welshman who had been the NEBC's head producer at Taymont Hall. Guiltily, Aoife realised it had been weeks since she'd thought about him. As far as she was aware Tom still was officially in charge, but she'd not heard from him since he'd become another of the dozens of their staff who'd been rushed to hospital. She liked him, but at some point managing the concern for every single person they were no longer getting news about had become another task. One she didn't have the bandwidth to grapple with. And so that had got buried, unflatteringly, along with other luxuries like sleep and washing her hair.

It wasn't the thought of Tom himself that caught Aoife off guard however but the contents of the paper itself. It dated back a couple of months, and the point at which the fourth of Aoife's immediate superiors had also taken ill and left her, overwhelmed but determined as the most senior engineer on staff. Her rapid promotion had come with several unneeded challenges though, one of which being the delay in getting the access and clearance she needed to even start doing some of the jobs being asked of her. Tom's solution had been to simply make her a copy of door codes and his own top level access credentials, tucked away and forgotten once Aoife's own permissions had finally come through a few weeks later.

And there, jotted down near the bottom, were several strings of characters under the heading 'site to site encryption keys.'

Too good to be true? Maybe. But everything else about the systems they'd been given to work with at Taymont and by Palisade Services had been equally haphazard and inadequate. Why would their cyber security cut any less corners? Aoife's pulse quickened and she snatched up the paper, retaining just enough presence of mind to avoid tripping over the cables as she rushed back to the glow of her computer.

The first key was a bust, deflating expectations as she checked and re-entered the code, carefully watching the capitalisation of each of the random seeming characters, but with no more luck. The second and third were the same, and she felt a twist in her guts, chiding herself for the foolish feeling that she might have made progress. Cynicism set in, and she was slower as she moved to the fourth key on the list, expecting the same result as she tapped the return key...

And watched as a progress bar lit up the pixels, with the names of newly decrypted files flickering past faster than she could read them.

"Get tae fuck..." she murmured to herself, disbelieving and unblinking.

The green haired woman hesitated for a moment as the computer finished the task, a simple generic pass key all it had taken to spring the contents of the drive open onto a new window. Whatever lines she had crossed in getting this far, there was definitely no turning back or bottling things up again the moment she started to look at what was inside. Right now however better judgement was no competition for burnout and bloody minded curiosity and her finger, almost unthinkingly, clicked the mouse onto the first file.

What Aoife found left her feeling very much awake, exhaustion replaced by a choking rush of adrenaline, cold and sickly, that left her cursor trembling as she spent the next few hours navigating from one report to the next. It didn't become clear to her why the bleak detail of DuoHalo was being passed around on a locked drive, kept from the public, but her mind struggled to really grasp onto that question for long enough to care. Reports from London and Scotland quickly began to blur together instead, dispatches from around the country causing the ground to drop out from underneath her and spiral away with death counts, statistics. She begged herself to look away from footage of ventilators and morgues, spent, bloodied PPE and crying relatives. And she knew that if this was the measured face journalists were putting to things the personal reality had to be so much worse.

She finally pulled herself away when her guts rebelled, and she grabbed the rubbish bin from beneath her desk to vomit into.

******

The clock had ticked over into the earliest hours of Sunday morning by the time Jess stirred from her imprinting. It was several hours since Nia had headed to Alex's place to help with whatever was going on, and while he was getting updates from his partner it still felt like his idea of exactly what was going on was distant and incomplete. Instead his mind had been left to poke at not just that, but at thoughts of what he was going to say to Aoife, and the nagging uncertainty of how he felt about things with Nia.

Ethan knew that there was a potential level of emotional dishonesty from himself here, that he had told the algorithm he had no attachments, only to reveal three partners in that he might have feelings for someone else. And Nia had surprised him with how supportive she seemed to be at him doing whatever he needed with Aoife to make things right. Yet the more he thought about it the more he couldn't tell if the non-disclosure of Nia's status in the algorithm bothered him, or if he simply was trying to find his footing on ground that suddenly felt uncertain. He knew he'd need to make whatever thoughts he had clear to Nia, once he had them straight, but right now Jess needed that to wait. And he kept reiterating in his head that he was going to find a way to make this work. For everyone.

As Jess had stirred, her dreamy contentment had been quickly replaced by worry as Ethan had let her know that there were issues with her sister. Ethan knew from his previous experiences with imprinting that the petite redhead was likely waking up with a head full of serum driven feelings and urges she was having to quickly get to grips with. Jess dealt with things admirably however, even if as they climbed into her tiny Kia to head across town the burden on her face showed through while she fidgeted in her seat. Wisely she let Ethan drive, and he did his best to explain what he knew as they rushed through empty streets.

Alex McNamara only lived a couple of miles away from her younger sister, in an old Victorian townhouse near the centre of Nottingham that had been converted into several 'affordable' flats. Ethan recognised Nia's car as one among several pulled up directly onto the kerb outside, while the front door had been propped open for them. The pair slipped inside, making their way up an ageing stairwell, paint peeling, and up to the 2nd floor, where Rhys could already be heard doing his best to restrain his displeasure through another open door.

It was cold as they entered the narrow hallway into Alex's place, a draft blowing in from somewhere that century old heating pipes were failing to cancel out. They were met by Dr Armstrong, the blonde woman sat on the dated carpet beside a locked door, into what Ethan had to assume was the bathroom, an open doctor's bag resting beside her. Armstrong smiled on seeing them, the expression worn with weary relief, and she pressed herself gently against the door, calling reassuringly to the other side.

"Alex? Your sister's here. We're going to fix this, you just need to hold on a little longer for me, ok?"

Ethan struggled to make out the strained, mumbled reply from the other side, as Jess hurried to join Armstrong.

Alex McNamara had, as far as Ethan could tell, been given the vaccine a little after her younger sister had already imprinted on him. According to what Nia had told him it was normal for the body to experience a spike in several stress hormones after receiving Gemivax, normally unnoticed amidst the other acute phase effects of the serum. However, she had also explained that rarely, these spikes could be pronounced enough to induce significant symptoms, from arrhythmias to severe anxiety and distress. Alex was evidently one of the 1 in 10,000 unlucky enough to have experienced the mother of all panic attacks, and had spent the hours since locked in her bathroom refusing to come out.

There were a couple of dull, agitated bangs on the other side of the door. This time Ethan was able to hear the tearful words that came after.

"Tell her this is all wrong..." Alex sounded strung out, exhausted by hysteria. "I need it to stop. I can't do this..."

Jess knelt beside the door, and Ethan watched how concern was etched roughly onto her body language as she spoke back, doing her best to placate the unseen sister on the other side. And as she did Armstrong took the opportunity to move, rising with a stretch of stiff limbs to speak with Ethan in hushed tones.

"I'm really worried about her. She's been in there for hours and won't even let me check her vitals. I don't like the idea of what being in that state for such a long period of time is going to be doing to her."

Ethan nodded, he could hear Nia and Rhys bickering from down the hallway and the warm glow of the living room, and wanted to at least be clued in on the discussion he was about to walk into the middle of. "What state is she in exactly? Nia told me a little but I'm not exactly familiar with this sort of thing."

"From what Averna are telling me? The vaccine's triggered a release of catecholamines and vasopressin that..." Armstrong paused, giving a small, tired sigh as she caught the look of Ethan's face and realised the terms meant nothing to him with his tv producer background. "They're hormones broadly associated with stress. Meaning we might as well have locked her in there with a wild animal for the last 7 hours given how her body is likely to be responding physiologically. And psychologically..."

Armstrong's statement was cut off by another short series of bangs from inside the bathroom, accompanied by a fraught cry of frustration.

"Why is no-one listening to me!"

Kneeling there in the dimly lit hallway, Jess looked helpless as her big sister gave fatigued shouts from behind the locked door. The young redhead glanced up at Ethan, grappling hard with the churn of her own emotions and serum induced sensations, and his emotions wrenched. He met her gaze, and something almost viscerally protective kicked in in the back of his head, the bond they now shared grabbing hold of him and demanding he make this ok for her.

"We're going to help her, I promise Jess." He was surprised at how calm and soothing his voice managed to be, despite feeling totally out of his depth. "Just keep talking to her."

The young artist bit her lip and nodded back. Her own voice wavered softly as she spoke. "How long has she been like this?"

Armstrong gave another sigh, deeper this time. "She's been in there since we vaccinated her. And given how long ago that was, that's about to become its own set of problems."

Ethan had seen first hand how intense the need of Farah had been after even a short delay between vaccination and priming. But he'd also been told that once that time began to stretch much further than 8-12 hours the level of distress it inflicted on the woman began to become unmanageable. Apparently the version of the serum the US produced took significantly longer for that particular issue to arise, but then according to Nia most things about Gemivax ran hotter and faster than its American counterpart. And presumably the fact that no-one had told him what would happen if any of that occurred in conjunction with an adverse reaction like Alex's meant they were in uncharted territory. Worryingly the look on Armstrong's face made it clear the doctor felt almost as out of her depth as he did.

"I work in public health," the blonde woman protested. "This is past what I was briefed to deal with. She calmed down a bit after I slipped a diazepam under the door, but I'm not happy giving her anything more until I can tell what her body is doing. The solution is to get her imprinted but, well, I assume Nia told you the issue we also have there?"

"Yeah, she did."

Even if Nia hadn't, the 30 unread messages Jess had received from her sister while she imprinted would have clued them in, even if they weren't destined to be read until the younger McNamara woke up. Text after text, increasingly frantic.