Corrupting Power
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Quaranteam: Phil's Tale - Ch. 14
🕑 Added 2023-08-05 09:46:22 +0000 UTC(Author's note: The attached PDF for this post is of Chapters 1 through 14, but includes several revisions to make the timeline flow together. I realized I did a lot of this work back with the edit pass of Book 1, but never released it publicly. Keep in mind, the dates at the top of each chapter are simply the date at the start of the chapter, and some chapters can include multiple days, weeks or even months. There's probably still some inconsistencies, but it should bring everything in line much better. Your patience and understanding in this matter is appreciated. Phil's Tale is currently without a commissioner, so we haven't had a chapter in a while, but I felt like it was a good time to write one anyway, so this one's on the house.)
Chapter 14
October 31st, 2020
It wouldn’t be Halloween without Andy throwing a costume party, and it was the perfect excuse for everyone to cut loose and relax a little bit. They didn’t have a lot of time to put costumes together because in typical Andy fashion, he’d been so distracted that he didn’t think about putting the party together until almost the last minute. But Phil and his family were more than ready for it and decided to even go along with a theme – Street Fighter.
Phil had done the Ryu costume a couple of times, but he’d always done it by himself, and the idea of having an entire team of fighters with him felt great. Audrey was dressed up as Chun Li, the outfit a little tight on her, but Phil could tell she liked it that way. Linda, on the other hand, was killing it as Cammy, her hair braided in two long tails, the red beret atop that, long red fingerless gloves on her forearms and the classic olive-green leotard exposing almost all her legs and ass cheeks. She’d even added green camo paint, just to make sure it was clear who she was. Phil had told her that if she wanted to go in Cammy’s updated costume, he wouldn’t have minded, but Linda’s only response had been, “If you’ve got it, flaunt it.” Tamika had found herself a bright magenta wig, and the rest of Poison’s costume hadn’t been that hard to acquire, being that it was really just a ripped white muscle t-shirt and the shortest jean shorts she could find. She had the whip, too, though, and seemed to be enjoying practicing with it. Yuko was going to introduce herself to the Rooks dressed up as Sakura, and she seemed to be looking forward to it.
Paloma wasn’t quite ready to meet everyone yet and decided that the party really needed someone watching the walls anyway, so she was going to get out just before they arrived at the party and would be patrolling the exterior of it, as well as sort of vetting any parents and children who might come by trick or treating. She wasn’t going to go and shake them down, but it was easy enough to do a quick cursory scan over them to make sure they weren’t providing cover for an attack or anything.
Being inside of Andy’s new house, most of Andy’s partners were still getting ready when Phil and his family arrived, so the decision was made for the three of them to go and sit down to play some poker, one of their favorite past times, and one they’d been super lax about, what with the quarantine in effect. But now that Phil, Eric and Andy could all move about New Eden freely, they needed to go about setting up a regular night of the week for poker again.
One of the things Phil had sent over for Andy’s place was a designated poker table with green felt, along with a long metal case full of actual clay chips. He’d thought about buying Andy a Shufflemaster, but it felt like maybe that would’ve been going a bit too far. Besides, they all enjoyed taking turns shuffling. Phil, in particular, shuffled for long periods of time in between hands, but it was because he was something of a fidgeter, so during the rest of the time, he was often rifling his chips together in and out of stacks. He’d had the fidgeting habit since he was a teenager, and no matter what he tried to do, he’d never been able to fully shake it.
They never liked to play for big money but having at least a few dollars in the game gave it some sense of meaning, so it didn’t feel like they were just dicking around for no reason at all. It was also a chance for them to just catch up with one another and have some face time. One of the things that they’d all realized years ago was that if they weren’t scheduling regular times to hang out, inevitably they’d just overstuff their schedules until they were constantly busy. Phil fully expected some of the ladies to start rotating into the poker game at some point, but he didn’t want to volunteer anybody until the host stepped forward and asked them to join the original trio. He knew Linda was eager to get a turn in the game but wasn’t going to be rude about it.
They were only a couple of hands in it when Andy got his first ring at the doorbell, and he was off to answer it himself, leaving just him and Eric at the table, which was good. It gave the two of them a chance to exchange information on the sly.
“You get access to the same report I got this morning, Phil?” Eric said.
“The one about where it’s from?” Phil responded. “Yeah, although even with all their corroborating data, it’s still so fucking hard to believe someone built the fucking thing intentionally.”
“You think that’s the most shocking thing from that report?”
Phil chuckled, offering a little shrug. “I’ve always thought the Kiwis were too nice to be trusted. They’re like Polynesian Canadians – that level of civility has to be hiding something. Anything on your end that isn’t in the report?”
“Well, they didn’t deliberately release the damn thing. Based on what intel we’ve been able to piece together, a sample of it was being transported from a lab in Wellington to a lab in Hong Kong through Sydney in mid-January. We don’t have video footage of it to confirm this was accidental, but all circumstantial evidence points towards the bag having fallen off a conveyor belt between flights and down on top of an air duct intake vent, where the ruptured cannister leaked and filled the air for almost two weeks before anyone noticed it. Odorless. Colorless. Completely undetected. And because of how the cannister ruptured, each time a drop of the virus came out of the container and fell into the vents, that single drop was viable for twenty-four hours, infecting tens of thousands of people. It turns out literally all the earliest cases of DuoHalo can be tracked back to exposure in Sydney airport, but after a couple of days, the damage was already too far along to be rolled back,” Eric sighed. “And it went two weeks before anyone found the bag.”
“So why the hell did the Aussies send people to try and kidnap me?”
“It wasn’t just you,” Eric chuckled. “We think they also tried making a pass at McCallister at some point, trying to snag him from the Russians. They went in quarantine hard very early on, and we figured they might have had some inside information, but we didn’t know it was that they were basically ground zero for where the damn thing was accidentally released.”
“Why not share that with us in the first place, y’know?”
“Intercepted communiques say they were worried we would think they’d made the virus, even though it’s interesting to note that New Zealand went into lockdown the actual day the bag spilled in Sydney Airport. We don’t think it was intentional, but we figure that once the bag didn’t get to where it was supposed to go, they panicked as well, and just locked everyone out. That’s why they have a zero percent DuoHalo infection rate in New Zealand.”
“Wait, they didn’t get it? At all?”
“They’ve still got fucking teenagers alive, Phil. ALL OF THEM. Like, half a million boys and girls between the ages of ten and nineteen, almost all of which would be dead anywhere else. And that’s why the Kiwis are freaking the fuck out. If they get one case on their island, it’s half a million kids dead within a matter of days. And our serum can’t do fuck all to fix that. So they’re trying to figure out what the hell do they do – stay completely isolated from the rest of the planet for a decade? Try and some way to modify our serum? They’re scared out of their fucking minds. Their current expectation is they’re just going to wade it out, and see if we can come up with some other answer for them in the next few years.”
“And Australia?” Phil asked.
“They got hit harder than almost anyone else in the world, barring the Russians and the Chinese, who, we’re guessing, just said ‘fuck it, let the people die,’ rather than come ask us for help. Although whatever McCallister brought over to them has staunched the hemorrhaging for the time being, not that they had all that many more men left to lose,” Eric sighed. “Talk about being totally up shit creek without a paddle. We still haven’t even been able to establish communications channels with the Chinese government, so we’re still only guessing about what’s happening over there. The Australians tried to quarantine hardcore at first, but you know that place, it’s more like a federation of various states than a single proper unified country. So, some people were very good about it, and loads of people said, yeah, fuck it. They’re chickens with their heads cut off.”
Andy walked back into the room and sat down at the table with a smile, picking up the deck of cards, starting to shuffle it. “That’s wild, man. Seeing kids trick or treating.”
“How old?”
“Seven or eight, maybe,” Andy responded, dealing out individual cards out to each of them, one then another. They usually started with classic Texas Hold’em before they would get into the weird variations they often did as the night went on. “There was something so remarkably… normal about all of it. Kids shouting ‘trick or treat,’ putting candies in bags… it was like for just a fraction of a second, I forget all about these viruses and all the deaths and could pretend the world was back to normal.”
“In your very expensive mansion that’s been given to you by the government,” Eric joked.
“Look, let me pretend for half a minute, okay?” Andy laughed.
“Check,” Phil said after glancing at his cards.
“You can’t check, Phil,” Eric chuckled. “Either you’re calling or you’re out.”
“Fine, I call then,” Phil said, adding some chips into the pot.
A few hands later, the girls wandered into the room to show off their costumes, all the members of Andy’s house finally gotten to the point where they were ready to be praised and gazed upon. Niko was dressed as one of the characters from Andy’s books, the mortician if Phil remembered correctly, and he saw the unmistakable smile wide on Andy’s face as she moved to slide down on his lap, slipping an arm around him. “You like?”
“No, I absolutely hate it,” he laughed, sticking his tongue out at her. “You look stunning. You all look stunning.”
“Lauren worried she was too tall to pull off the Black Canary, but I told her that in those fishnets, you wouldn't give a fuck.”
“You would absolutely be right.”
Niko gestured for him to tip up his hole cards so she could look at them, which he did briefly then tipped them back down. “Looks like you're doing well.” Phil wasn’t entirely sure if she was being honest or just poking fun at how little the chips had moved around.
“Ah, we're mostly playing for fun,” Eric said.
Niko winked over in his direction. “Sure. That's why your chip stack is so utterly small.” To be fair, Eric had lost big in the first three hands, but if it came down to it, he could always buy back in again. They weren’t stingy about that kind of thing.
“Absolutely,” Lily said, moving to stand behind Eric. “And it certainly isn't because my man has no poker face whatsoever.” Which Phil found hilarious – Eric was remarkable at keeping secrets, but literally did not have a poker face to save his life. He’d usually taken to trying not to look at people too much when either he had a very bad or a very good hand, but it hadn’t been helping him enough for him to be in either his or Andy’s league if they were taking it seriously, which they generally weren’t.
Audrey moved to stand behind him, sliding her hands on his shoulders. She was very demonstrative physically with her affection, something he’d found he really liked. He hadn’t thought of himself as a touchy-feely person before this whole thing had started, but physical contact had been the important discovery that had kept his mind focused during the troubled times. “Phil's usually pretty good at poker, though,” she said, kissing his cheek. “Although I heard Andy's always been better.”
Andy shrugged, playing it off with that polite humility that Phil had to admit he’d always been amazed by. “I'm not bad. I mean, I wouldn't drop ten K of my own money to enter the World Series of Poker, but I usually come out at least a little bit ahead at poker nights.” Andy wasn’t always the biggest winner, but if you looked at it statistically over the long haul, he was definitely the most profitable.
“Go easy on them then I guess, Andy. How high are the stakes?” Niko asked, clearly wiggling her ass in his lap, trying to distract him off his game. “Are we rich yet?”
Andy cocked his head to one side, mocking a frown upon his face. “Have you missed the mansion we now live in?” Phil had to smirk at that, glad that the windfall he’d helped engineer for his friend hadn’t gone to his head.
“Sure, but that's not money money,” she teased. “What're you playing for?”
Eric laughed. “Big, big money.” He looked left, looked right, then leaned forward while putting his hand over one side of his mouth and stage whispering to her. “Twenty dollars is the buy in.” He widened his eyes and nodded in her direction, like it was his life savings they were talking about.
Niko rolled her eyes, which made Phil chuckle. What had she expected, that they were playing for pink slips? “Forget what I said about going easy on them. Take them for everything they're worth.”
“Oh, and the loser has to buy dinner for the next game night,” Phil said. “Or, at least, they used to have to, but that was before we all got our own private staff.”
“I can't remember the last time Andy bought dinner,” Eric grumbled.
“I don't know that he ever has,” Phil sighed. “I think it's all the rest of us just passing the buck around.”
The doorbell rang, and Niko slid off his lap. “Who else are we expecting?” She’d clearly missed the bell the last time the bell rang with trick or treaters, but it was true they were still expecting at least a couple more attendees for certain.
Phil rolled his eyes upward in thought. “Ari and his family are coming. Jenna's hooked up with some guy named Dale, so they said they'd stop by. Mel told me he couldn't make it this time but would try and catch us for the next get together.” Nobody had heard from Lesser Phil, so they’d put him down as a no.
“I'll go see who it is.”
Phil and Eric could hear “Trick or treat!” shouted from the door, and multiple of Andy’s partners moved to bum rush the door, eager to look in at the tiny smiling faces in costumes, waving politely to the parents who stood out in the driveway.
For the next hour or so, it was either trick or treaters or additional people. Ari’s family had grown to a respectable number, and nobody was expecting Jenna to be hooked up with a himbo beefcake like Dale, although to be fair Dale worked for the FBI and certainly seemed a lot smarter than he gave off on his first impression. Lesser Phil even managed to put in an appearance, although he showed up entirely on his own, not bringing any of his partners with him, but Lesser Phil had always been the kind of person to do things differently, and LP said that his partners would be over to meet people eventually, but that they were still dealing with the trauma of having lost so many men in their lives, each of them coming from large families full of brothers all of whom had been taken during the early waves.
It was a great party, though, with loads of people laughing, and Andy, as always, having a wild collection of spooky Halloween music mixed with campy classics like ‘The Monster Mash.’ At one point when they were changing dealers, Linda gestured for Phil to leave the table for a moment. “A’ight, I’m out the next hand or two, guys. I’ll be right back.”
“Don’t whip him too hard, Linda!” Andy teased as Phil moved away from the table and over towards a corner of the room away from most of the people.
“What’s up?” he asked her, an odd smile on her face.
“What’s the policy on women hooking up with women outside of the family?” Linda asked him cautiously, her expression giving absolutely nothing away other than perhaps amusement, but Phil’s eyes widened anyway.
“Somebody else’s partner hit on you?” he said, but he found himself smiling along with her. “I mean, I can’t say I blame them, but… can I ask who it is?”
“Andy’s first, Aisling, the smoking hot redhead.”
“Well,” Phil chuckled, “if that description didn’t tip your hand on how you feel about the matter…”
“If you’d rather I don’t do anything, Phil, I won’t. I haven’t yet, but she’s coming on pretty strong, so I figured I’d better at least mention it to you.”
“… do you want to hook up with her?”
“I mean, it could be fun, and it’d be nice to lay down the pretense for at least a little bit with someone outside of the women I see all the damn time. But is it safe?”
“Look, as long as you don’t come into contact with any of Andy’s semen, and she doesn’t come into contact with any of my semen, there’s nothing even all that risky about it, so if it’s something you want to do, and, more importantly, all parties involved are cool with it, so that means Andy better know as well…”
“He does, at least Ash says he does.”
“Then I say have at her and have a good time, as long as you’re not catching feelings for her and it’s mostly just girls having fun.”
Linda licked her lips and grinned. “You know, I knew you were a damn fine man from the moment I first looked at your file, but even still, you continue to surprise me, Dr. Marcos. We’ll make sure we slip off into some part of the mansion that’s off the beaten path, so nobody just wanders into us while we’re getting frisky.”
“One other condition though,” Phil said.
“Oh yeah? Wassat?”
“I want at least a vague play-by-play of how it went.”
“You want me to take pictures?” Linda smirked.
“Nah, going that far feels like an invasion of privacy,” Phil admitted. “But I wouldn’t mind if I at least got the rundown if Ash has any tricks I can learn from.”
“Yeah, that sounds fair. Do you think I need to ask Andy’s permission as well?”
Phil shrugged. “I’d say that as long as Ash has talked to him about it, you’re probably good to go. Besides, how the fuck do you even begin that conversation? ‘Hello, Mr. Rook, I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind me fucking your partner for just a little bit? I don’t want to keep her; we just want to have a bit of strange, if that’s cool.’ Andy’s head probably exploded when Ash asked him about it.”
“You have got to stop underestimating your friend, Phil,” Linda chided. “Nearly everything that’s been thrown at this guy this year has only tripped him up a little bit, and he’s doing the best that he can to deal with the same world-threatening trauma we are, and there he is, still laughing and playing poker with his friends. He may present a cuddly marshmallow surface, but there is rock hard diamond at that man’s core. Niko’s even feeling bad about keeping her relationship with me secret from him, but she understands that orders are orders, and so she’ll follow them to the letter.”
“Maybe in a few months it’ll be okay to let that cat out of the bag, but right now, we’re looking at an escalation of partners, and I’m still trying to think of how to tell Andy he’s going to have to take on at least another handful of women to ensure he’s safe.”
“Give it time, and maybe it’ll work itself out,” Linda said, kissing his cheek. “Anyway, I’m off for my playdate, so stay where either Niko or Violet can see you, got it?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Good boy.” Linda pulled away from him and crossed the room to where Aisling was standing in a doorway. The diminutive redhead gave him a rather authoritative nod and smile, which he did his best to return, as Linda moved over to her, at which point Ash slid her arm around Linda’s waist, and the two women moved out of the room.
He hoped like hell he’d made the right decision there, but he felt like he wasn’t going to be led astray trusting Linda. Plus, if things continued to shake out like how he expected they were going to, this was an important case study, assuring each other that women could have inter-team pairings as long as they were careful to avoid cross-contamination.
Social structures were getting completely torn to the ground and built back up again, and with many women having to deal with sapphic thoughts they’d never really had in the forefront of their minds, it was entirely expected they might fool around with long term friends who weren’t necessarily in the same pod as them. They were even starting to work on ‘referral priority’ for the Oracle system, where a woman in a current Team could request a friend or colleague come join that Team, and the person in consideration would have priority access to getting their Oracle results crosschecked against the existing Team.
Phil headed back to the poker table and settled in for several more rounds. Around ten o’clock, there was a ring at the door once more, it having been almost twenty minutes since any children had come around, but Andy went to diligently answer the door, and Phil noticed that Niko headed off after him almost immediately, as Phil’s hackles immediately went up as a familiar voice hit the edge of his hearing…
…Covington.
God, Phil hated the prick. The more digging he’d done into the man, the more he suspected he might have been one of the people behind the back door into the Oracle system that they were still investigating. He hadn’t been able to figure out who it was on Cunningham’s team who’d been bought off, but clearly it had been someone, and that person had covered their tracks well.
They were far enough away that Phil couldn’t hear what they were specifically talking about, but there was something odd about the entire conversation, the way that that Andy was standing, looking almost confrontational, with Niko’s hand on his back, her body leaning into him as much as she possibly could.
Phil had made it a point of learning how to read people lately, and it was surprising how nervous Niko seemed. This was a young woman who’d been on hand when the first wave of men had died at New Eden’s base, who’d stared down death more than a handful of times, and yet, she seemed like she was terrified of how Andy was going to react.
After a couple of minutes of talking to Covington, they shut the door and then Niko pulled Andy off down the hall towards Andy’s study, tugging him in, closing the door behind them. Phil wished like hell he could be a fly on the wall for whatever conversation was happening there, but moments later, he was distracted by Aisling and Linda making their return to the living room, giant shit-eating grins on each woman’s face.
Phil stood up from the poker table, since it was clear Andy was going to be a few minutes, so they were taking a break in between hands, and moved over to join Linda. “Don’t you look like the cat that ate the canary?” Phil chuckled, whispering quietly to his partner.
“Phil, I have something vitally important to tell you,” Linda whispered, blushing a bright shade of red. “If we’re hiding military or scientific secrets from Ireland, I regret to inform you I’m probably responsible for whatever leak we had, because I’m pretty sure that woman ensorcelled my fucking mind. Whatever she asked, I would’ve told her.”
“That good?” Phil laughed.
“Jesus wept, Phil,” Linda said, her voice still low and quiet. “I don’t know how that man can still be walking around with that banshee in his life. She might not be human. It was fucking unreal. I’m very fucking glad she’s with Andy and not you, because you’d have been drained dry.”
“So… good then?”
“Fucking great, but not something I’m going to make a habit of doing,” she said. “I don’t think I could fucking handle it.”
“Never thought I’d see the day when the great Linda Hayes was shaken to her core,” Phil said, shaking his head, clearly enjoying himself a great deal.
“Fuck you, man,” Linda teased back. “I’ve seen some shit.”
A minute or so later, there was another ring at the door, and Aisling moved over to answer it, a couple of children standing outside yelling ‘Trick or Treat!’ Ash moved to give them candy, but then stepped back into the foyer for a second. “Hey Phil? Somebody’s here to see you.”
“Me?” Phil said. He hoofed it across the living room and over to the foyer to see Miguel Cunningham standing behind a couple of children, one dressed as Spider-Man and the other dressed as Wonder Woman. “Hey Miguel, how’d you know I’d be here?”
“I didn’t, but I spotted that monster Covington walking away from here just as we were about to get in the car and head home, so I thought I’d better come up here and see who lived here, only to see your car in the parking lot,” Miguel said to him. “I know who’s responsible for giving back door access to the Oracle. It’s that weasel, Ed Decker. I’m pretty sure he’s getting paid off by people like Covington to have their requests simply override whatever results the Oracle should be spitting out by giving out junk data. I think I see a way to figure out everyone who’s been incorrectly assigned this way without us having to do individual spot checks on every pairing we’ve done in the last month.”
“Finally,” Phil sighed. “A bit of good news. What’ve you got?”
“Listen, these people are so fucking lazy, they didn’t even bother to randomize or alter the custom outputs each time. It just spits out an 98.7% match each and every fucking time, with no variation or deviation in any way, shape or form. Now, we’re going to get some false positives if we just pull up all the matches that were 98.7% matches, but if we run the raw data a second time, the false information’s going to pop up, as long as it has a new query number.”
“I’m guessing you’ve already put together a spreadsheet of how many matches we need to rerun?”
“I have. It’s about five hundred.”
“Jesus, that many?”
“It looks like we’re only getting between five and fifteen a day now, so maybe they know we’re onto them or maybe they’re trying to tamp it down and not get caught. Maybe they’ve all got full houses now and no desire to add to them further, or maybe they’re just waiting for new clients to come in and fork over money and provide a list of names.”
“Anyone on the requested list I’d recognize?”
Miguel sighed, nodding. “That’s the biggest problem. They’re basically all names with some level of recognition. Actors, musicians, athletes, models… if you can think of someone who might’ve ever been on a Maxim Hot 100 list, I bet they’re probably on there. A number of them are even here or coming here right now.”
“Anyone I’d recognize?”
“A couple of pop princesses, one from the top of the current charts and one from the 90s. More than a few former Playboy Playmates. Some actresses, some I recognize, some I didn’t. That one woman from the big sci-fi series is already on her way here. Same for that woman who was in the ballerina films my wife loves. We’ve gotten lucky in that most of the truly big name celebrities are married or in well-publicized relationships, so they can’t be requested without raising a lot of red flags, but the longer this goes, the more we’re going to see that kind of excuse fade away, because those women’s partners are going to die, and then those women are going to be vulnerable, and if we haven’t fixed this fucking problem… that’s on us.” He looked down at his hands, realizing they were shaking a little, then looked back up at Phil. “Sorry, I sort of went on a tear there.”
“Yeah, well, I understand, Miguel,” Phil said, patting him on the shoulder. “Over the next couple of weeks, we need to fix this. Together.”
“I hope you’re right, Phil.”
“Me too.”
Comments
Corrupting Power
Oof. Glad to have you here, and I apologize for QT2:15. ;)
Nice reading though as a Kiwi (from New Zealand) not sure on us taking blame for the disease. Just not in our DNA to develop something lik. But really enjoy your writing thanks you
Admiral Ale
Nope, gotta go with the original. Stay safe.
