Quaranteam: Piper's Prelude (Ch. 02)

The second time it stopped, more water crushed down onto me, cooler this time, and with no soap in it, letting me get the soap off my skin.

When the belt stopped again, this time high pressure warm air blasted down onto me, like standing beneath a giant hair dryer, and I did my best to wring out my hair so that I could get it as dry as possible, but the hot air only lasted long enough to get me mostly dry before the belt moved again.

At the next stop, a small hatch opened several inches below my shoulders. Another disembodied voice said to me, "Put your right arm through the hatch."

I crouched down a little and slid my right arm through the hatch, feeling a soft table for me to rest it on. There was a very bright light on the other side of the hatch, so I couldn't see anything, especially at the poor angle. A moment or so later, I realized that this was the injection part, as I felt a needle shoved into my vein, some liquid being shot up into me. I could hear three little puff sounds, and I think what happened was they put some kind of multiple injection system into my arm and then injected me with a combination of things, one after the other, but because I couldn't see, I really don't know for certain. Maybe it was just one shot. I'd ask Niko about that too.

I felt a cotton ball being placed against my skin and then a bandage being strapped to it, a large towel put in my hand, before the voice said, "Pull your arm back in."

Going against instructions just felt like it would slow everything down, so I pulled my arm back in, the big towel coming along with it. As soon as the towel was through, the hatch closed again.

"Wrap the towel around you and prepare to exit the chamber."

It was a very large white beach towel, so I wrapped it around my midsection like I was a housewife on an old 80s sitcom, and then the belt moved again before stopping and the door in front of me opened, a woman standing on the other side.

She was in her mid to late 20s, with dark brown hair and a pair of arresting hazel eyes that felt like they were going to look right down into my soul. She had her hair up in a bun, dressed in operating room scrubs with a lab coat on over them, and thick black rimmed glasses on her face. She was Jewish, I think, although maybe part Italian? There was a sort of weird beaded bracelet around one of her wrists and this collection of like four or five necklaces around her neck, one of which had a Star of David on it. She had a very confident aura about her, like she knew exactly what her place was in this new world and she wasn't going to take any stick from anyone over it. She held in one hand an iPad and in the other a stylus, looking up at me impatiently. She was a good looking woman, but very unprimped, as if she didn't take time to apply much makeup or style her hair. "Name?" she said.

"Uh, Brown," I said to her. "Piper Brown."

"Oh you're Piper Brown," she said to me, her demeanor softening a little bit. "Yeah, he's right, I do recognize you. That meme was inescapable a while back." She scribbled a few things onto the iPad, tapping at a few buttons with her stylus, the tablet beeping in recognition of her actions, or maybe just to let her know that the keypresses had been received. "Okay, there you are. Had to find you in the list. You're in Pod 37. That's where you'll find your things, and where you'll sit and watch the orientation videos while we keep you under observation until morning or midday tomorrow, when you'll be taken to meet the man you're being partnered with."

"When do I find out who that is?" I asked her.

"Typically you wouldn't until you actually get there, but I can tell you his name is Arthur Covington the 4^th because he's my partner as well." She started walking away from the belt, leading me down a corridor with opaque plastic on either side of us. I remember thinking how strange it was that I had to walk down this hallway barefoot, but I figured I had just stepped out of a shower.

"Wait, we're... we're going to share this man? The two of us?"

She laughed, as if I'd made some kind of a joke. "Not just the two of us, but a whole mess of women. It'll make more sense after you watch the orientation videos."

"Sorry," I said to her, "I didn't catch your name."

"Oh," she said, stopping to turn and smile at me, as if she genuinely hadn't realized she hadn't introduced herself. "Sorry about that. Nice to meet you, Piper. I'm Doctor Rachel DeMarco." She shook my hand and I remember thinking that she had very soft hands for the sort of punk rock demeanor she had about her. "Let's get you into your orientation, where you can start learning all the rules about your new existence."

She started leading me back down the corridor again, as I asked her the only question I could think of. "So how many women are partnered up with your Mister Covington?"

"You'll be number ten," she said. "I think he's expecting to stop receiving additional partners after he hits twenty or so."

"Twenty?" I asked in shock. I didn't know then what I know now, obviously. "That's insane!"

"You'll see all of this in one of the orientation videos, but the casualty rate for men is extremely high, so those few men that are still alive are being very highly protected," she sighed. "It stinks, but it is what it is. The only working solution to the DuoHalo virus we have right now is this. Life sucks; wear a hat."

"What do you mean by 'extremely high?'"

"Look, Piper, I get that you have a lot of questions, but right now you should probably just sit down and watch the orientation videos. They'll answer most of the questions you've got rattling around in that pretty little head of yours right now, and you'll have plenty of time to ask me more later," Rachel said to me, as we walked up to one of the many zippered pods that lined the hallway.

"But-"

"Here we are now. Pod 37," she said, pointing to the large number to the right of the open zipper flap. "There's an iPad in here with a series of videos preloaded on it. After you've watched all the videos, it'll unlock and give you basic internet access, as well as logged in Netflix and Amazon Prime Video accounts, so you can watch whatever you want to. No outside communication, though. That'll happen after you're delivered to your partner, not before. That's also when your phone will be returned to you. There's a cot in the room, a cooler with a few bottles of water and some sodas in it, and a couple of protein bars. Eat and drink as much or as little as you want, but do make sure you're drinking some water, because you may be dehydrated from the trip. The iPad also has a 'call for assistance' button on it that you should only use if you need to use the restroom, or if there is a serious emergency. You are only allotted a single bathroom break while you're in the pod, so don't use it unless you really need to go. You must watch all the videos before you can turn off the light in your pod to sleep, and if you try to fall asleep without watching them, there will be an alarm that starts going off every ten seconds until you start watching them. It's only about thirty minutes of videos, so let me stress to you again, you must watch them. I'll be by again in the morning and we can talk a little bit more then if you want. But for now, go, watch the videos, and they'll answer all your questions, okay?"

She didn't even wait for me to answer before pushing me into the pod, zipping it closed behind me before sliding a ziptie through the zipper points and a fastener on the other side, a cheap lock that would still no doubt do its job until the morning.

And then she walked off.

The pod was pretty much as she described it. There was a cot with a pillow and a blanket on it, and my suitcase was off to one side, another sticker on it next to the one they'd put with my identifying information on it. This one was massive and green and said 'DECONTAMINATED' in large intimidating capital letters. I could see there was a camera pointed down from above directly at the cot, the observation camera I expected.

The first thing I did was open up my suitcase and a strong whiff of citrus blasted into the air. Whatever decontaminating agent they used smelled like fresh oranges and limes. All my clothes were in there, so despite the fact that there was a camera pointed on me, I dropped the towel and got dressed in comfortable clothes, because I was clearly going to be in the pod for a day or so.

Once dressed, I noticed that on top of the pillow was an iPad mini with a pair of headphones plugged into it, presumably so I didn't bother anyone else around me. When I'd been getting dressed, I could vaguely hear people nearby, but the plastic was opaque enough that I couldn't tell how close or far away they were, nor could I be certain I would do anything but bother them by talking. Trying to see through the plastic just let me see shadows and shapes, no real details of any kind.

Rachel had been thorough in explaining how miserable I was going to be if I didn't watch the videos, so I sat down on the cot, folded my legs beneath me, shoved the earbuds into my ears and turned the iPad on, deciding just to get it over with.

There was a little app called "Orientation" on the screen, along with a bunch of other things that were grayed out, clearly restricted until I watched the damn videos. I know lots of people have had different experiences in how they were given briefings, but this is what happened to me, so I'll just tell you my story and assume yours is different.

The first video was entitled "DuoHalo and You" and it featured Doctor Charlotte Varma talking in her soft French accent about the DuoHalo virus, and how absolutely toxic it was to human physiology. She did her best to explain how high the casualty rates were going to be, and that it was far more lethal to men than it was to women. She also explained that they had developed a way to inoculate men against it, but that it was an indirect solution, and it was to make the vaccine sexually transmitted. Men, she explained, couldn't take the vaccine directly, because it was lethal to them, but when filtered through a woman's body, it could be passed on to the man through sexual contact. The more immunized women a man was having sexual contact with, the better buffered against the virus he would be. She warned the viewer that it was coming, but the last minute was still filled with stark images of dead and dying men in hospitals all across the country, just to drive home how real this problem was, and how lucky we were to be escaping it.

I took a little bit of time to let that settle in my brain, and walked around the cot some, wondering how many of the guys I'd grown up with, how many of the men I'd known over the years, how many of them were still alive? Dr. Varma didn't say specifically how high the fatalities were, but the grim look on her face and the fact that the images they'd shown featured, in one shot, a trailer truck stacked full of corpses in body bags, was enough to make me very nervous. I wanted to call my dad more badly in that moment than I ever had in my entire life.

In looking back at it, I think all this isolation behavior is partially there to make women more accepting and eager to bond with their assigned partners, to make us mentally more receptive to the person we're delivered to, having been devoid of almost any human contact for a couple of days, disoriented and constantly shuffled from one place to another but not allowed to talk to anyone.

The second video was entitled "The New You" and covered what was going to happen once we were imprinted to our partner. For at least the foreseeable future, we would be 'bonded' to the man in question, and we would need his semen about once every ten days, give or take three or four days on either side, varying from woman to woman. In getting that semen, we would also be giving a booster to our man's immunity. In fact, we were told that if we were ever worried that we or our partner had been exposed to DuoHalo, we should have sex as soon as possible, to reinforce the serum's effect in our partner, to ensure his safety.

The video then went on to explain that when we had our first sexual encounter with our partner, we would be 'primed' and then 'imprinted.' The first contact of any man's semen to us would begin the priming process, and would give us one of the most intense orgasms of our lives, the video said, and then when we received a sufficient amount of it (usually through the male orgasm), we would go into the 'imprinting' process, where we would fall into a coma like state, and our body would begin generating the antibodies we would constantly be feeding back to our male partners moving forward.

I think the video knew (and rightfully so) that nobody was going to believe this, so they brought a man and a woman on screen to demonstrate. I still don't know who that man and woman are, but I am certain that there hasn't been a couple that more people have seen fuck since the Pam & Tommy video leaked back in the 90s, because I think almost every woman in America who's gone through the imprinting process has watched this same video of that man and woman fucking.

You know this, I'm sure, but he looked like he was a white guy in his mid 40s, balding with a scruffy beard, and she was a hot young Asian woman in her in early 20s, fit and busty, with a streak of green in her black hair with blonde ends.

It starts a little clinical, with both of them disrobing. The first thing you see is the woman drop to her knees, and when her lips touch to the head of his cock, and she gets her first hit of his precum, the look of sheer ecstasy on her face cannot be faked. Nobody is that good of an actress. It is clear that she is being gifted with one of the hardest orgasms she's ever endured.

I think a lot of us women must get aggressive after that initial priming orgasm, because next she pushes him down onto the floor roughly and moves to climb on top of him, kissing him and grinding against him, moaning and squealing the whole time. She thrusts herself down onto his cock and begins fucking that man like he's just a toy for her pleasure.

They dialed down the sound for most of it, so that we could hear Dr. Varma talking, but I'm pretty sure that woman was swearing up a storm at her partner as she fucked him. Dr. Varma talked over the incredibly graphic footage, telling us that as soon as we were 'primed,' we should complete the imprinting process as quickly as possible, because prolonging the experience could lead to complications. We were also told not to wait too long after meeting our partner to start the process, because the serum would cause problems in our systems if we did not get imprinted to someone.

Little did I know I was going to be the poster girl for those problems.

After a couple of minutes of some of the most carnal fucking I'd ever seen put to film, the man clearly ejaculated inside of his partner and she slumped down on top of him like she'd passed out. They then showed how she was limp, completely unconscious, and the sound turned up so we could hear the woman saying "imprinting" over and over again for just a few seconds, but that was long enough to rattle me.

The third and final video was about the post imprinting life we would be living soon. Dr. Varma explained to us that this was going to be our reality for a while, and that while it wasn't an ideal solution, it was what they had that worked. She reiterated that we would need to get semen from our partner about every ten days or so, and that for every day we went past that, the more we risked going into a mindless state, where we would just attempt to rape our partner until we got it. If we were separated from our partner for longer than that, in our mindless state we might just go after the first available male we found.

That, the video said, would probably be the last mistake we ever made.

As part of the imprinting process, we were now bio-coded to that one partner, and the semen of any other partner would be toxic to us. Like all things, they knew we wouldn't believe this, so we were again shown the couple from the previous video, although obviously this was some time later, as she was conscious again. They took a bit of precum from her partner and smeared it on her arm, to no effect. Then, they had another man standing there, and took some of his precum and smeared it onto her arm just a little further down.

It took maybe a minute or so, but it became evident that the second man's precum was beginning to eat through the woman's skin, burning it like it was acidic. They then washed it off her arm, as the woman visibly relaxed. The damage was still there, but having cleaned it off her skin had caused the burning to stop. The voice asked us to imagine what it would've been like if that second man had ejaculated inside of her.

Infidelity wasn't just frowned upon - it was likely fatal.

They didn't have conclusive proof of that yet, but it was considered such risky behavior that they didn't want us to even entertain the idea. Scientists were working on ways to be able to unbind two people and to enable them to rebind them to others, but until that had been developed and tested, this was the reality we had to live with.

We were also told that if we got pregnant, and we were going to be heavily encouraged to get pregnant, that the child would be completely immune to DuoHalo, regardless of gender, and wouldn't need to go through an imprinting and pairing process, nor would their body be toxic to us at any point during the pregnancy. Sadly, that immunity wouldn't kick back upwards to us. We'd be having sexual encounters right up until giving birth, and then right back to it within a week afterwards, although the video also pointed out that ingesting semen orally would have the same impact as vaginally or anally, and that this would be something to keep in mind if one part of our body got too tender.

Dr. Varma had just a little parting advice to women, to look at the intense orgasms as the carrot to the stick of being stuck with this. We would continually know a sexual satisfaction that no woman in our generation had ever known before, and we would get those releases every ten days, so there would be a biological and chemical rush to compensate for what we'd lost.

She also said that they had done the best they possibly could with such short notice to get us paired up with, if not someone we were attracted to, at least someone we would get along with. What a fucking lie that turned out to be, at least in my case.

After that last video, the rest of the iPad unlocked, although I was quick to discover just how limited it really was. There was no web browser, no camera access, no FaceTime, no phone app, no ability to install new apps, nothing to allow me to communicate with the outside world. I could watch television or movies, but other than that, I was simply alone in my plastic jail cell, so I watched a little TV then crawled into bed in the cot and hoped that the next day wouldn't be so detached from the rest of humanity.

As I drifted off, I could hear a few girls crying themselves to sleep in the distance.

I didn't know that I would be doing the same the very next evening...

* * * * *

"Jesus Fucking Christ," Fiona said. "That's... that's way different than my experience. I mean, yeah, I saw those videos just like you did, although they've updated the one about infidelity. They show a pretty gruesome picture of that woman who died, Veronica."