Corrupting Power
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Quaranteam: Book 2 - Ch. 39
🕑 Added 2025-04-21 06:37:01 +0000 UTCChapter Thirty-Nine
July 30th, 2021
It had taken a couple of weeks to get the paperwork taken care of, and to ensure all the proper requests had been filed before Andy got word that Ophelia Jackson and Belladona (or BD as Andy was already starting to think of her as) DuBois would be awaiting his arrival at the base in New Eden on Friday, the 30th, at 2 p.m.
Because no one had been able to find a way to remove the side effects of what was now being formally called the Quaranteam Reassignment Serum (QRS for short although some people still colloquially referred to it as ‘The Swerve’), basically all those reassignments were always being done with a protective observer on site.
That wasn’t the surprising part. The surprising part was that Andy had been told his entire Team would need to be at home and marked as ‘busy’ for July 31st and that more information would be provided upon his arrival at the base. The note made a point that Phil would be there personally, and that there were a number of additional things they would be talking about so to expect to basically lose the weekend.
Andy spent much of the days before ensuring everyone would be around, as per the memo they’d been sent about adding Ophelia and BD. Emily was done with filming for “Looky Loos” (except for pickups, which would be sometime in August), “Neon Stonehenge” had just finished its pickups a few weeks ago, and Maya had finished primary filming for “Fatal Alliances” last week, so she was thrilled to have a mandated ‘weekend off’ where she wouldn’t be allowed to work. Sarah and Lauren had been the only two that had been forced to do some rescheduling, but both accepted it was part of what they’d signed up for. Fiona had just submitted her first draft of her new book on the DuoHalo crisis, “Goodbye XY: The First Year Post Male Decimation,” and her publisher was already ecstatic. Hannah and Asha still had over a month before classes started back up, so whatever it was that needed them to all be ‘occupied’ for a few days, it had come at an ideal time. A month or so later, and it might have been utter chaos.
He'd also taken the time to have dinner with both Ophelia and BD in the intervening weeks, and he was astonished that the two had endured Viktor for as long as they had. Both women were remarkably quick-witted and educated, and as friendly as they were with one another, they were also quite different, with Feels being the softer spoken and more calculating of the duo, while BD had a personality that threatened to overshadow her beauty. She often spoke before thinking and apologized afterwards, she was boisterous and funny and seemed like she was used to being the center of attention. He’d brought Fi, Piper, Sarah and Emily with him to the dinner, so the two women could get as much exposure to the heart of the Team as they could beforehand, and Sarah and BD almost immediately became good friends, the two having the kind of personality that drew attention to them, and similar infectious laughs, plus matching senses of humor. When BD joked if there was something she should wear to her reassignment, Sarah had joked that the brunette should bring the longest leather boots she owned, and BD had grinned like a Cheshire Cat at that. Before the appetizer had arrived, he was certain both women would fit in fine within Team Rook.
The members of his Team had shown up to the base in two cars – one with him, Lexi and Sarah in it, the other with Niko, Piper and Emily in it. They knew they’d need to load up Ophelia and BD into cars to bring them back to the manor, so they’d made sure to leave as much room as possible. He’d understood why they’d been insistent they bring two cars, naturally – there was always the chance that he himself went into another regeneration, and that’s why they wouldn’t inject BD with QRS until they were sure he’d be awake and conscious to take care of it immediately. That, and of course, how quick the response was to QRS.
Minor improvements had been made to QRS over the past few months, but it seemed like the immediacy of the substance (and the susceptibility it induced between introduction and new imprinting) was something they were never going to be able to make headway on. Andy had suspected that when it was introduced, there were going to be an overwhelming number of people requesting reassignment, but those numbers had continued to remain surprisingly low, something Andy personally attributed to the fact that reassignment was a one-time offer, and Oracle had done its job miraculously well, coupled with the Daniels Effect that meant practically everyone on the planet had some degree of Stockholm Syndrome going on in their lives.
Most hospitals had been bracing for heavy demand that just never showed up. In fact, the current estimate was that there had been less than 50k usages of QRS since its introduction, something that was both good and bad. It meant that everyone was stabilized and was at least content enough to not need to take a one-way ticket to a different option.
Andy was starting to think he was maybe getting too comfortable being on the base, because they had even given him his own office, despite the fact that he was only there generally once or twice a week as part of his oversight duties. People always recognized him on sight, he and Lexi each had their own access badge, and Phil had been joking around they were going to give him a designated parking space next.
He wasn’t entirely surprised that Phil had insisted on meeting him first. Phil had reached the twenty-five-partner tier in June and still hadn’t filed a report on it yet, mostly because it was such a small sample group, but partially because it felt like Phil was working on a few dozen things at once.
“You look nervous, babe,” Sarah said to him as they walked into the building. “It’s just another day in the life of Team Rook. You got this.” She leaned down and kissed his cheek.
“They don’t typically tell you to take time off for partner reassignement, Sares,” Emily said to her. “There seems to be something quite unusual about this one.”
“It’s the dreaded twenty-five Tier everyone talks about in hushed tones,” Fiona scoffed in amusement. “You’d think he was joining the five-timers club for hosting SNL or something, the way they’re making a big deal about it.”
“It is a big deal,” Phil said, walking up to their group with Linda, Violet, Charlotte and Jordan in tow. Andy immediately noted that two of Phil’s three ‘working’ partners were with him. Jordan Price was originally part of the UK research team, but she and Phil had bonded almost immediately in videocalls, so much so that she was one of the first people to take the QRS after Eve McCallister had brought it to the US. She left the UK in December of 2020 to move to the US and join Phil in mainline QT research. She was a brilliant and dedicated AI input/output researcher from Liverpool, and one of the very few people on the planet who could hold a long-term conversation about the serum without needing two minutes to catch up out of every five. She was quirky and overly blunt, but the Rooks had all thought she’d made a great addition to Phil’s Team. “You have any idea how small this club is?”
“What, fifty? A hundred?” Andy asked his old friend.
“You’ll be number 37 that we have on record,” Charlotte said to them.
“Thirty-seven?!” Sarah said incredulously. “In a row?!” Most of them laughed although Em seemed more than a little confused before Sarah explained it was a movie reference, and she’d show her the film to her later.
“That’s not a whole lot,” Andy agreed.
“It isn’t, and most of them we haven’t been able to get good studies of, so, surprise, I’ve sort of volunteered you to be our test subject for this,” Phil said.
“Lad, relax,” Jordan said. She was a diminutive woman with long blonde hair and very pale skin, but absolutely refused to dress like a scientist, looking more like a cross between a kindergarten teacher and a 90s raver girl, bright colors and semi-revealing clothing choices. She even had a Banksy tattoo on her forearm, which had always been sort of a no-no for Phil before. They’d clicked hard enough to overcome even that. “You’ve got the easy job – get yer end away, have a kip, wake up. Simple. We’re the ones doin the ‘ard part.”
“I get the very distinct impression that there’s shit you’re not telling me, Phil,” Andy grumbled. “You want to give me at least the highlights?”
“I was planning on telling you with the rest of your Team once we’re back at your house tonight,” Phil said, a smirk on his lips. “But I suppose you probably deserve to know at least the suspected highlights, so you’ll understand why there’s going to feel like a small crowd watching you acquire your twenty-fifth partner.”
“Wait, watching? I didn’t sign up for that, Phil.”
“Actually you did. It’s it the paperwork you signed earlier – you must’ve just assumed it was the normal standard partner acquisition paperwork. But yeah, you’re gonna want us there anyway, trust me, for a variety of reasons.”
“Phil, start talking.”
“You’re all gonna regenerate,” Jordan said. “Like, the whole Team. Least you all should if you don’t mess up the pattern.”
“How’s that possible?” Andy asked feeling a couple of his partners get a little bit closer to him, putting hands on him so they felt reassured by being in contact with him. “Wait, the signal?”
“That is our theorem,” Charlotte said with a soft sigh. “They’re also going to share in your orgasm when you imprint your twenty-fifth. It’s part of the… increased connectivity your Team already has and is going to further be getting.”
“We’ve talked about the effects of Team scaling before, Andy,” Phil said. “Well, after what happened to us when we hit twenty-five last month, we want to make sure we’re getting as much of this into instruments and studies before you go through it. But yeah, when you pop, and start the imprinting process for partner 25, that orgasm is going to reverberate in every one of your partners.”
“Prob’ly,” Jordan added.
“We have a few theories about broadcast distance that we want to test with some of your partners, so we’re going to use you to help us test,” Phil said. “Distance may be a factor, and if a partner is out of range, it may immediately trigger once they’re in range.”
“How far is ‘range’ in this case?” Andy asked.
“We reccon it's around half a k,” Jordan said. “But it’s not like anyone’s bin able to give it a proper strenuous test and tha’. So that's what this is all for.”
Andy looked over at Fiona who grinned, rolling her eyes at him. “That’s like, a little more than a quarter of a mile,” she explained to him, obviously much more used to doing conversations in her head than he was.
“That’s not very far,” Andy said. “Is that by design?”
Phil scoffed as both Jordan and Charlotte smiled mysteriously. “Design. You say things like that like we had any real planning at work behind any of this, Andy. None of this is anywhere even close to our design specs. None of us planned for any of this. This is all the systems evolving on their own, by their own design and with their own purpose. All this shit just happens, Andy, and we’re just holding onto the railing for dear life. At least an hour of my day each and every day is spent thinking about what to expect the nanobots are going to do next.”
“Fan-fucking-tastic,” Andy laughed, shaking his head. “What else?”
“So, the regenerations probably won’t last more than a day, and they’re generally going to be minor. That’s part of the reason we want to do interviews and measurements and sort of full physicals before you go through this, so we can determine what, if anything, is getting changed.”
“You have some suspicions.”
“More than suspicions. We have some starting points. Eyes and ears are going to end up going through some level of repairs. Everybody who’s hit 25 has come out of it with 20/18 vision and remarkable hearing. I know your tinnitus is already gone, but, for example, Moira still has that condition, and I’ve got good money that says it’ll be gone when she wakes up. Any moles, warts, skin tags or starting patches of skin cancer will slough off. And, I can’t believe I have to say this… your jawbone is going to be a bit thicker for reasons we’re not quite sure of.”
“This is an odd collection of things, Phil.”
“I’m not even fully done yet,” Phil said with a chuckle. “We’re just starting to get to the weirder ones. You and the rest of your family are going to be more resistant to sunburns, heal faster and… yeah, this is another of the weirder ones – your hair is going to grow faster. Same for all the members of your family. Shaving’s going to have to be done a little bit more often.”
“Much more often, or just a little more often?”
“Noticeably so, but not unbearably so. Most of us have measured our hair growth rate at about 50% faster than it was before,” Charlotte said. “Thankfully, we also seem to immediately recover from razor nicks and cuts, so most of us have gotten quicker at self-grooming.”
“Anything else?” Emily asked.
“Anyone in the family partially or fully color-blind?” Jordan said.
“Not unless they’ve been keeping it secret from me,” Andy said.
“Well, if they have, that’ll get fixed,” Phil said. “Anybody who’s still got screws, plates or other bone repairs that involved added components will get those returned to a natural state.”
“Advanced regen,” Andy said. “Got it. What else?”
“Those of warrior skill stripes are going to get… more significant upgrades,” Linda said. “That’s going to be get applied to the Team Core as well, but in less volume.”
“What kind of upgrades?”
“Faster, stronger, more precise,” Violet said. “We’re kind of our own version of super soldiers now.”
“I could probably kick Captain America’s ass at this point,” Linda said with a beaming grin. “I tried the shield thing for a while, but I think the trajectory and deflection stuff is a bridge too far. But I’ve been able to do some incredibly cool stuff with pool balls. And escrima sticks. And quarters. And bottle caps. And coins. And—”
“They get the picture, babe,” Phil said. “As impressive as your laundry list of things you can throw and bounce off walls is.”
“Just warriors?” Piper asked. “It’s not going to affect everybody in the whole Team with that level, is it? I don’t want this thing changing my body to the point where I’m not going to be allowed to compete in the Olympics, and I’m betting Lauren doesn’t want it disqualifying her from playing for the 49ers either.”
“Protectors and principal only,” Phil said. “Nothing’s going to keep you from being in the Olympics, unless you’ve been moonlighting as one of his bodyguards.”
“I’ve been taking shooting lessons from Mel and Niko, but no, I’m no bodyguard,” Piper said. “I just don’t want to get DQ’d for body modifications that gave me an unfair advantage.”
“You’ll be fine, love,” Jordan said. “It’s not like you’ll be any more improved than anyone else who’s bin through a regen. Not unless the bug starts thinkin’ you’re part of security or anythin’.”
“I’m his wife,” Piper said proudly. “Well, one of them.”
“I’m his wife too,” Niko said with a grin, “but I’m looking forward to being Hawkeye.”
“Yeah, well, if you don’t qualify as a warrior woman, Neeks, I don’t know who would.”
“Me too, though?” Andy asked.
“Hey, not to the same extent,” Phil said, with a laugh. “It’s only made me even faster at hiding for cover. That and I don’t really drop shit any more. I’m certainly not doing anything that puts the Team at risk just because I want to be a hero.”
“We keep having to remind Andy that heroism could get his whole team killed,” Niko said to them, shaking her head.
“I haven’t done anything stupidly heroic in months,” Andy said with a frown. “I’ve learned my lesson. I promised you all that.”
“When the manor was raided?”
“That was months ago, and the cameras showed very clearly everyone was subdued,” Andy said in his defense. “And, I’ve also agreed not to do anything like that again, as you’ll all recall.”
“You shouldn’t have done it in the first place, boss,” Lexi grumbled.
“I’m only human, Lexi.”
“Yeah, fer now,” Jordan said with a giggle. “Mate, there’s a reason I want to study it, chances are this upgrade’ll change more than we know. And there’s gonna be a whole load of data goin’ back and forth when it does so I wanna be there to signal capture it. See if we can use tha’ to blag my way into deciphering whatever language they’re communicating with.”
“You’ll also be the first Team doing this with members of another 25+ Team locally, so we’re going to be studying if and how that affects things as well,” Phil said. “I suspect that it might.”
“What else?”
“That’s not enough? A full 25-person simultaneous regeneration, and you’re asking me ‘where’s the beef?’ Seriously?”
“Phil, how long have we known each other?”
“About twenty years now?”
“I let you hold out on telling me shit a whole lot, don’t I? Well, in this case, I want to know what other shit I need to be on the lookout for.”
Phil took a long look at Andy and then sighed. “Honestly, Andy? I wish I could tell you more, I really do. But we don’t know any more. That’s part of the reason we’re trying to study all this, so we can learn a bit more about what’s going on.”
“If I can suss out however the little fuckers are talking to each other,” Jordan said to Andy, “yer lookin at one of the biggest breakthroughs in figurin’ all this shite out since the whole thing started. I mean, we might even be able to take back control. Start to program ‘em to do the sort of boss shit we want rather than just lettin’em run wild in our blood streams. Or at least give ‘em some proper priorities, like. Ya know, keep ‘em focused and tha’.”
“You’re still convinced there’s some language they’ve developed?” Andy asked her.
“Mate, now more than ever. It’s just dead hard to tell what they’re saying. Like, it’s not just encrypted but they’re usin’ some language no human’s ever spoken." Jordan grumbled. “But given enough raw data, I dunno, I should be able to at least ‘av a decent go."
“More like good amount of catching up,” Phil sighed. “We’re so far behind on this one thing. It should’ve been something we’d been focusing on for a while. It wasn’t until Jordan pointed out to us after she got here in December that the bots had some kind of communications protocol. She’s been our lead researcher on the project since.”
“Oh, so this is the top-secret work you’ve been doing here Jordan,” Andy said with a slight chuckle. Andy had liked Jordan ever since she’d arrived a few days before the Christmas party, despite the fact that Jordan couldn’t tell him what she was doing at New Eden, which both amused Phil and annoyed Andy, considering he was supposed to have access to just about everything involving the Quaranteam project. Phil’s comment was that once Jordan had something actionable, Andy would be the first to know. And while Andy had seen Jordan at loads of their social events, and most of times he’d been on the base to visit, each time she’d just politely teased him in that charming Liverpool accent of hers, telling him that he’d get to know when she was ready.
“How many people are going to be in our house for this, Phillip?” Emily asked him.
“Well, we’re bringing over maybe twenty to thirty people, but Linda will be running point on your security, and Violet will be specifically watching over the kids,” Phil said. “Everyone who’s coming has been cleared by me and is someone I trust. There’s only one person on the list you might even have some hesitations about, and if so, tell me, and I’ll make sure she’s not there.”
Andy chuckled, rolling his eyes in for a bit. “It’s fine. Other people are far more paranoid about Rachel than I am. If she’s safe in your eyes, Phil, she’s safe in mine.”
Dr. Rachel DeMarco had been one of the key players in the NDR movement, or New Daughters of the Revolution, if not, in fact, their leader. Most notoriously, she’d been the one to cut off Covington’s hand on camera to display how serious they were in their convictions. Even though the man had regrown the appendage, the point had been made, and members of the government had been quick to label Rachel as a terrorist and a criminal.
Andy, of course, felt differently. He knew Rachel had been forced to serve women up to Covington on a platter, and having heard stories from both Piper and Melody about their time in House Covington, he actually admired Rachel for showing as much restraint as she had. Andy felt like if it had been him in her shoes, he might have gone for the head and demanded immediate Dead Man’s Switch reimprintings.
“I appreciate that, amigo, but it’s not your permission I’m waiting on,” Phil said before turning to look over at Piper.
Rachel had been directly responsible for Piper being delivered to Covington, and if anyone had a right to be holding a grudge against Rachel, it was Piper, although it could have easily been argued that Sarah and Emily equally had rights to be angry with the woman, as they too had been originally delivered to houses they were not good fits for because of Rachel’s tampering with the Oracle outputs. Rachel had been in therapy since she’d escaped from Covington when the government acquiesced to the NDR’s demands. Rachel had stressed that she’d felt like while she was under Covington’s control, that her life would be ended if she didn’t do what he’d told her to. Covington’s treatment of Piper had only reenforced those fears. Andy hoped that Piper had come to terms with why Rachel had done what she’d done, but he had to admit, the option that she hadn’t was still a legitimate one. It would be Piper’s call whether or not to allow Rachel in their house unattended or not.
The tall athlete sighed and then nodded, the decision plain on her face before she even spoke. Andy’s fearlessness had been rubbing off on the rest of household, and more and more, the cynics in his family were willing to try on optimism, even if just for a little while. “I’ve given Melody a second chance and that’s worked out pretty well for us, so I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t extend Rachel the same courtesy,” she said. “But if shit goes sideways because of her, Phil, there will be hell to pay, mark my words.”
“She’s reformed, Piper,” Phil said. “I promise you. She’s not going to do any harm, and she’ll be of a lot of help. Andy trusts me, and I trust her. So, I’m just asking you to trust Andy.”
“I hope you’re both right. With all of us unconscious around the house, we couldn’t be more with our pants down if we tried,” the volleyball player said. “I’m surprised you felt comfortable with this, Linda, when you went through it.”
“I had some of my Girls over to watch over us, and Bill was around to provide a little bit of oversight,” Linda said. “At that point, we thought the whole ‘entire Team going into regen’ thing was apocryphal, just because it seemed so damn unlikely. But I wasn’t going to take the chance, so we had everyone back at the house, and Bill plus a few security people around to make sure just in case things did happen.”
“Which they did,” Violet said.
“Didn’ even put up a single recorder or signal capture device did we, since Soft Lad ‘ere told me there’s was nothin to worry about,” Jordan said, poking Phil in amusement. “’It’s all big talk,’” he said. ‘People are makin’ shit up,’ he said. Bollocks, I said, but I let him call the shots. Fool me once an’ all tha’. Not a second time. Now we know there’s nothin going to catch us on the sly we can actually have people around you. Least til you’re all up, and tha’.”
“Obviously, you need to imprint Ophelia first, but after you do that, we’re all going back to your manor and getting set up before you add BD,” Phil said.
“So why aren’t we doing all that now anyway?” Andy asked with a little exasperation.
“Because you could roll a regeneration off Ophelia and wouldn’t that be Rook luck to a tee, with all of us sitting around waiting for your ass to get up only to do it again?” Phil laughed, rolling his eyes. “Because we’re prepared for it, it won’t happen, but if we weren’t, you know 100% it would.”
“That does sound about right,” Andy grumbled. “How long was the regeneration you were down for when you hit the limit?”
“About twenty-four hours,” Phil said. “Not everybody woke up at the same time. I think the person who slept the longest was Taylor’s friend Natalie, who slept close to thirty. Most of the security slept about that long as well. But hell, Audrey was up in under twenty.”
“It’s not going to affect any of the pregnancies, is it?” Fiona asked. “Because if it is, I’m willing to draw a line in the sand that says we wait.”
“It didn’t affect Audrey,” Linda said. “At least not negatively. Going through a regeneration, at least this kind, doesn’t seem to affect a pregnancy. Unlike how we refuse to let people get imprinted or change imprintings if they’re pregnant with a child from someone other than the person they’re about to get imprinted on. We think the fetus might have gotten a little bit of a tuneup, but nothing amiss.”
“We can wait if you don’t feel comfortable, Fi,” Andy said.
“No no,” Fiona replied, a slight scowl on herface. “I can already tell how miserable Ophelia and BD are in their current situation, and who knows when or even if this family is going to have a point where nobody’s pregnant in the next several years. No, as long as this has been thought about, then I’m fine with it. I just wanted to be sure before we got there.”
“Anything else? Any other questions you want to get answered before we get down to business?” Phil asked.
“You had any more communication from the nanobots yet, Linda? Or you Phil?”
Both of them shook their heads. “We’re starting to think that may have just been a fluke, a one-time thing. Nothing we can prove either way, but the radio silence, is, I think, pretty telling.”
“What’s that expression of yours, Rook?” Linda asked him. “‘We’ll burn that bridge when we cross it?’ It’s like that.”
“God, I hope not,” Andy said. “Alright, let’s go and get Ophelia reassigned, and assuming I’m still conscious afterwards, we can move the army of eggheads over to my house for the weekend.”
Phil started humming Loverboy’s “Working For The Weekend” until Andy glared at him.
Then he belted out the chorus with Linda, as Sarah rubbed Andy’s shoulders comfortingly.
Comments
Dennis McNulty
Fat fingers: how the 25th orgasm actually affects the whole team.
Dennis McNulty
Love the cliffhanger set up for chapter 40 and reading just how the 25th orgas
