Corrupting Power
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Quaranteam: Phil's Tale - Chapter 13
🕑 Added 2023-04-06 09:26:43 +0000 UTCChapter 13
October 28th, 2020
The whole damn thing was starting to come apart at the seams, and Phil wasn’t entirely certain what the hell any of them could really do about it. The news was going to break soon about the deaths that the nation was facing, and the cover stories they were using to try and hold it under were beginning to chip away. The cover up really wasn’t one of his priorities, but he knew that the better it held up, the easier it would be to get people through the process.
Hospitals had even been given emergency doses of the serum, for what were called ‘Hail Mary’ cases. In a last ditch effort to try and save men who’d been infected with DuoHalo, women were being directed to try and keep whatever men they could alive, so if there was an unimprinted woman near a man who’d come into the ER with DuoHalo, if she thought she could even vaguely be a match for him, emergency authorization for dosing the woman with the Quaranteam serum and her getting imprinted on the man immediately had been authorized. The so-called ‘Hail Mary’ program had resulted in at least fifty men who would’ve been fatal cases of DuoHalo making a complete recovery, although they had lost a few as well, and had been forced to reimprint those women using the necrotized sperm method, something nobody liked doing, but was the only possible option at that point.
The Air Force was doing what it could now to start really moving people from place to place, and it was being done in so many different methods that Phil had trouble keeping track of them. There were Air Force cargo planes transporting people back and forth, but they had also just temporarily commandeered a number of commercial airlines as well. The main difference was that the commercial flights were full purely of women, and the Air Force cargo planes had men on them, but each in their own quarantined plastic bubble. It was a lot of people to have to relocate, but it was life and death and the Air Force was doing their best to manage the situation.
The lab at New Eden had expanded even further, so they could do more and more injections every day, and the observation time post-injection was dropping every day. The idea was that they’d gotten comfortable enough with the process that if something went wrong in the period of time between injection and imprinting, they’d know it almost immediately, so observation time had fallen from 12 hours down to just an hour or so now, unless candidates had extremely uncommon conditions, like exposure to dengue fever, malaria, shingles, scurvy or other medical complications.
In preparation for Andy’s party in a few days, the girls were all starting to put together costumes, including making one for him, just because his free time seemed to have disappear somewhere along the way.
“Hey babe,” Linda told him. “I think we need to take a field trip. You up for getting off the base for a day?”
Phil looked up from his workstation with a thankful expression on his face. Anything to get him out of New Eden would be a welcome respite. Before he’d had the advantage of going to see Andy, but with Andy and his family safely tucked away inside the walls of New Eden, the idea of going anywhere had become almost impossible. The ordered lockdown had been quite strict, so if there was something that called for him to go off site, even if just for a few hours, he was going to take it without hesitation. “Absolutely. You sure we’re going to be safe?”
“It won’t just be us,” Linda said. “You’ll be one of four doctors we’re going to take to visit a handful of locations. We want to get a number of perspectives on how the high rises are going to function before we start moving people into them en masse. They’re already doing it for a couple of them, but you know what a mess San Francisco is, so we’re going to do a tour of four different sites, evaluate each of them not just individually but collectively as well.”
“Let’s get to it, then.”
“Ah ah,” Linda said. “One sec.” She reached behind her and grabbed a bullet proof vest, sliding it on over Phil’s shoulders, strapping it in place before grabbing a light jacket, pulling it over it, so that the vest was completely concealed. “I’m done taking risks, and if we’re going to be outside of what I feel like is a safe zone, we’re taking all available precautions.”
“All precautions?”
“It’ll be you, me, Paloma and Violet, so you’re safe as houses. Basically, all the dignitaries on this little excursion will have no less than two personal security escorts.”
“But I’m getting three?”
“Because you’re my special boy,” Linda teased with a laugh. “And because my safety’s dependent on yours. I’m not in favor of you going off base, but I think in this particular case it’s important that we do so. And when I tell you that I need you to come and take a look at something, just do it, okay?”
Phil’s expression devolved into a little scowl. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“It might not even be able to happen, but if it can, I think I’m going to buy you a little bit of time for a one-on-one conversation offsite where we know nobody’s listening. We’ll see if that works or not. It’s going to be done on the fly.” She flicked her fingers in his direction. “Set yourself as Out of Office for the day, and let’s get going.”
They headed upstairs and over to the motor pool, where they were taking Humvees to drive off the New Eden estate, bulletproofed within an inch of their life. Phil couldn’t see who was in the other Humvees, but the minute they passed the gate marking the edge of New Eden, he felt himself give a deep sigh of relief. He hadn’t realized how weird it had been staying within the borders of New Eden, and in some ways, he could empathize now with the people who were starting to go stir crazy from the confinement of being told to stay at home and not go out for anything. He had a whole town he could move around, and yet the concept of “go no further than this” was enough to put everyone ill at ease.
The Humvees headed down 680 before taking the interchange to switch to 580 heading west. The freeway was basically still abandoned, although Phil could see the occasional car out and about, never quite sure if it was someone who was safe to be going out or someone taking their life in their own hands. The drive down 580 into Oakland was especially peaceful, the giant mountains on either side of them mostly barren of trees, providing a stark contrast to the quiet hills of New Eden, which had been overwhelmed with foliage, so as to provide everyone with a high level of privacy.
“It is so peaceful out here,” Paloma said, her voice still heavily tinged with that European Spanish accent. “I do not imagine it was this way before the pandemic set in.”
“You were never out to the Bay before you relocated here?” Phil asked her. He and Paloma were slowly learning to trust one another, peeling away layers of the woman’s spy instincts a bit at a time. It wasn’t that she wasn’t warm or friendly, merely that she avoided giving any personal information by way of reflex. The less she said about herself, the less lies she had to remember. But Phil had pointed out time and again that they were part of a family unit now, and Paloma was doing her best to let her mental defenses down a little bit when it came to him.
“No,” she said. “I’d never left Europe before this. Much of my work was internal security within the borders of Spain, although I did, from time to time, have to venture out into other parts of Europe. I had often wondered what the draw of America was, but agreed to be part of the cultural exchange, and now I find myself considering how truly remarkable much of the land is here. I do hope that I will find the people as palatable when I’m able to meet more of them.”
She had her hand on Phil’s thigh, as she often did when she was sitting next to him. Phil wasn’t entirely sure if it had been something in her particular genetic makeup or if something environmental had given her a stronger than anticipated reaction to the Quaranteam serum, but Paloma had gone from nearly ice cold before her imprinting to liking to have as much physical contact with Phil as she could get, even if it was just sitting near him with one of her feet pressed against his leg. She almost seemed like she needed the constant reassurance that he was nearby, and was always eager for physical affection, ready to escalate things at a moment’s notice if Phil gave any inclination of being in the mood. Her fingers on his thigh were always just a few inches away from his cock, as if she was just waiting for him to give her the signal. He’d gone out of his way to make sure he wasn’t giving her false go signals, but also to keep her satisfied. In addition to needing to be near him, she also had a much shorter refractory period in terms of needing regular doses. The average timeframe for most women on how long they could go between doses was about ten days, but if Paloma had gone more than five days, she would get itchy and agitated. It was something that had Phil studying her bloodwork during his increasingly rare spare time. He wondered if it was a reaction to something in her specific genetic makeup or reacting to some environmental factor that had altered her body somewhere along her life.
“We aren’t going to have time for you to scratch your itch on the way there, Paloma, but if it’s really bothering you, by the time we’re heading back to the base, it should be dark enough that I don’t think anyone’ll be looking into our windows, if you really can’t wait,” Linda said. He’d expected Linda to be a bit more paranoid with Paloma, but the two women had spent extensive time talking when he was otherwise occupied, and they’d seemed to find some common ground, an understanding between women of similar professions who were now united behind one cause, that of keeping his ass safe.
“I appreciate that, Linda,” Paloma said. “I may well take you up on that. I tend to find the more men I am around, the faster my need for Phil’s release grows.”
Phil frowned a little, taking out his iPhone and opening the Note he kept on Paloma’s various oddities, adding in yet another line item into his list of strangeness she experienced regularly. “Going to sound like a weird question, Paloma, but have you noticed that your sense of smell has gotten stronger?”
“Yes,” she said, as if the realization was just dawning on her. “And I can distinguish between many men by scent. You, your friend Andy, Dr. McKenna especially, but I think I can recognize perhaps as many as a dozen different men by scent alone. Is… is that problematic?”
“No, not per se,” Phil said, “but it is unusual, so let me make a note of it. We’ve had reports of some women gaining enhanced sense of smell post imprinting, but it’s generally been restricted to being able to identify their partner at short ranges. Being able to recognize other men? I think that’s a new one.”
“But there’s nothing… wrong… with me?”
“Hey,” Phil said, taking her hand and squeezing it. “Stop getting in your head about it, okay? Everyone’s reacting to this stuff very differently, and there’s no right or wrong way for it to be. Whatever changes it’s making to you, we’ll get through them together.”
Paloma smiled, looking down at her hand being held by him, then looking back up at him nervously. “Thank you, Phil. I do not remember being this easily emotional before the treatment.”
He gave her a sly little wink. “Well, that’s one thing I think you have in common with a lot of the women who’ve taken Quaranteam – more raw and intense emotions.”
“We’re all right there with you, Paloma,” Violet said. The busty airman typically liked to remain a little removed from conversations, but the last few weeks, she’d started coming out of her shell and interacting with all of the rest of the women in Phil’s Team more, as if it had finally sunk in that they were all going to be part of her life for the foreseeable future. “Just don’t push yourself when you don’t have to.”
The Humvees exited the highway close to the Bay, just on the outskirts of Oakland. There had been a number of mini high-rise complexes along the waterfront, but the entire aesthetic had certainly changed. Phil knew that many of the buildings had been filled with bodies months ago, but the National Guard had been mobilized to do sweep and purges for corpses. Many of the buildings had been completely emptied out.
“We’re going to stop here and take a look at one of these buildings, Phil,” Linda told him. “The bosses want you to see if the way they’re structuring these places will work, or if there’s something they aren’t thinking about.”
The four Humvees split, two and two, one pair in front of different buildings. The other person wasn’t someone Phil recognized, as the two groups moved into the lobby, where they were met by a member of the building refinement team, an armed soldier from the National Guard operating as his bodyguard. “Hey there. I’m Joe Raynor, renovation site manager. This is Corporal Hensen, my, uh, partner and protector,” Joe said to them. He was the sort of guy who looked like he was in way over his head, struggling to keep himself sane by just focusing on the project and not looking much at the world around him. Hensen, by contrast, looked like she was making it her job to keep eyes on everything else, and as such, her and Linda met eyes immediately, nodding in respect of each other. “Let’s take an elevator up a couple of floors, and I can show you how the building is put together.”
The other group with Phil’s was made up of two people in suits, a man and a woman, and two women in camo, holding weapons. Clearly the couple were the VIPs, but Phil didn’t recognize either of them and didn’t want to tip his hand that he didn’t know who they were or why they were there.
Once in the elevator, Joe waved a keycard in front of the elevator at which point the box seemed to unlock. He pushed 4, seeming to pick a floor at random, although Phil had been through enough of these surprise inspections to know that it was carefully planned and would be the floor they had in the best shape in the building.
When the elevator hit 4, the doors opened and the three groups of people stepped out into a small lobby. The area around the elevator was mostly circular, and there were a few bare couches against the walls, indicating it could be used as some sort of waiting area.
“So these buildings were big enough that even if a man’s Team got to be rather big, giving them a whole floor to themselves would excessive,” Joe told them, leading them over towards one of the four doors. “Each of these four doors opens to its own quadrant of the building, which we’ve done our best to convert into a stand-alone area for each Team. That means 14 converted and retrofitted apartments transformed into one large unit with about 20 bedrooms for men and women and a dozen or so rooms that can start as nurseries and be converted into rooms for kids as Teams start the hard work of repopulating the country.”
He opened the door and lead them all through it. Phil could see signs of the old structure still there – it was impossible to remove the central hallway that ran down the length of the building, although in many cases, the front doors or even the front walls of many of the apartments had been removed, leaving it open and exposed to the long main hallway. “I imagine you had a lot of excess wasted space, once you considered all this space for one family,” Phil said as they moved down the long hallway.
“Yeah,” Joe said. “Some of it was easy to reclaim and do other things with, but some of it was an utter bitch to figure out how to deal with, like the kitchen space in all the units. We ended up converting one entire apartment into a master kitchen for the whole unit, and left a couple of the further units with functioning kitchens, but for most of them, we just expanded the main room so that the living room, dining room and kitchen just became one big open space for each Team to use as they see fit. We left most of the excess power lines in there, but had to cap off loads of water lines and the like. And we’ve got a shitload of relatively brand new fridges and stoves that we don’t really need. I think someone said they’re going to be reclaimed, but at this point, I imagine we’ve got way too much stuff for way too few people across the board.”
Phil nodded. “Wouldn’t surprise me one bit.”
They stepped down towards the far end of the hallway, and Joe lead them into one of the exposed converted units. As soon as they set foot in it, Phil could see what the man meant about converting the space. The kitchen had been extended to take over what used to be someone’s entire condo, tile having replaced carpet, a large prep station out in the living room, a number of fridges lining the wall, as well as a couple of large-scale freezers. “This was one of the one-bedroom units, and the bedroom itself has been converted into a pantry, so the Team can be stocked up on supplies just in case this whole DuoHalo thing goes further south on us.”
“We’re hoping it won’t,” Phil said.
“Hope in one hand, shit in the other,” the man in the suit said to Phil snidely. “See which fills up first.”
“I’m sorry, you are?”
The woman reached her hand forward, pushing the man back just a little bit. “Sorry Doctor Marcos,” she said. “We should’ve introduced ourselves. I’m Senator Caroline Giancola from the great state of Kansas, and this is my husband Colin. We’re here getting a tour of what everything’s going to look like once we move past all the death and destruction. Obviously, we don’t have as many metropolitan areas in Kansas as you folks have out here in California, which makes it even more important that we get them right and don’t screw the pooch during our consolidations.”
“Hell,” Phil said, “I think the Bay Area alone has about the twice the population as your whole state does, Senator. But I suspected that considering how much farm land you have out there that your casualty rates would be significantly lower.”
“Somewhat lower, but certainly not massively lower,” the Senator sighed. “The distribution of people and lack of urban centers meant it was easier for many people to respect quarantine, but I think some of that was traded off by other people who thought it was nothing but a hoax and that they could ignore it with impunity. Kansas had about 1.4 million men in it last year; now, we think that number’s closer to two or three hundred thousand. We’re doing what we can, but the transmission rate on this damn virus is off the charts, and almost a quarter of the population of our state is under 18, so you can imagine how the loss of so many children has eaten into our resilience.”
Phil frowned, nodding in understanding. “I wasn’t trying to make light of your problems, Senator, simply point out that they’re an entirely different set of problems than ours. I wouldn’t think hubs like we’re putting together out here would be necessary for your state.”
“I want to see how you’re doing it all so we can decide how we want to approach restructuring cities like Wichita and Kansas City,” she sighed. “We can’t afford to just abandon our urban centers, but we’re going to have so much unoccupied real estate, it’s going to be disturbing.”
He sighed. “Yeah, I’m trying not to think too much about that myself, just because the last thing I want to do is imagine how empty San Francisco’s going to be after all of this. It used to be a giant commuter city, but now, it’s going to be a lot more like a ghost town. The last thing I want is for it to basically be given up on, which is why we’re doing things the way we are. The concept is to make new village centers clustered around several of these buildings, giving everyone new neighborhoods, even if it is for rather large and unwieldy family units.”
“I suspect Kansas is just going to need to expand a lot of farmhouses to include a lot more rooms,” the Senator chuckled. “But it might also be a boom in terms of construction for new homes as we struggle to keep up with it.”
“I heard there was some talk about deploying the Corps of Engineers to try and build almost templated large-scale houses across the country, but you’d know far more about that than I would, Senator. I’m mostly focused on the medicine and trying to keep people alive.”
“How’s that going, by the way?” she asked as their guide took them from the converted unit that had been transformed into a large kitchen/dining room into the end corner unit, which had basically been stripped and converted into one massively large massive bedroom with a large number of walk in closets sort of lining the main room. It also had a gloriously large view looking out over Alameda and onto the Bay itself, with windows that Phil suspected were reflective on the outside, so people couldn’t spy inward.
“The faster we can get everyone spun up on taking Quaranteam, the better I’ll feel,” he said. “I think all of the states have come around now, so it’s just a question of getting it out and in front of people. I understand the need for trying to keep the casualties quiet, but at some point, you’re going to have to come clean about how bad the losses are.”
“I’m well aware, Doctor Marcos, and many of us have been pressuring the new President to be transparent about such things, but she’s overwhelmed by so much to have to pick up so suddenly, and the losses, well, they’re enough to send pretty much anyone into fits of despair.”
“I get that, but inaction’s going to lead us to more problems.”
“The current plan is go public with everything by the end of next month, at which point we should have a pretty good sense of what needs doing and what’s just going to be impossible for us to get caught up on.”
“Giving up on anything seems like a dangerous proposition.”
“I hope that you’re right,” she said. “We should be moving on to the next location, though. We have three more sites to see today.”
They all headed back to the elevator and then into their Humvee, and drove across the Bay Bridge into San Francisco itself. The next building they were taken to was the prestigious 181 Fremont tower, and the place was under all sorts of work still, but the plan was that each floor would be its own self contained unit, and that each floor would have access cards to let people in and out, although the top floor penthouse would be incorporated into the floor below it for a particularly large Team to be moved into. The site’s foreman described how they were in talks to organize some kind of lottery in terms of placement, as each floor represented about 7,000 square feet, so the top floor itself would definitely be a prestigious placement.
From there, the Humvees headed southwest to Pacifica, a sleepy little coastal town southwest of San Francisco proper, right along the coast. As it turned out, a number of mini towers had been built with almost lightning speed, each somewhere between five and ten stories tall, a cluster of them near Skyline College, and they were already having people moved in. This, Phil was told, was going to be a sort of special place where those with particular clearances would be allowed to live and work, a combination of tech developers and those in the military and intelligence services. They were calling it Valhalla Shores. In addition to the towers, they’d also started building quick McMansions in place where a lot of charming houses had once stood. They were also in the process of gating off the whole community, much like they’d done with New Eden. It would all be its own private gated community.
It was on the tour of one of the Valhalla Shores towers that Linda pulled Phil away from the group for a few minutes, leading him up onto the roof, where he saw a familiar face he’d never really been able to have much time talking with – Miguel Cunningham.
The man was a slightly portly Hispanic man in his early 50s, with a scruffy five o’clock shadow that was far too thick to just be whiskers but not long enough to be considered a beard. He was wearing a bright Hawaiian shirt, red and white floral patterns, and he was nervously pacing, his partner and handler, a Latina Air Force Captain with a name bar that read Diaz. “Thank Christ you’re here, Phil,” Miguel said to him as Linda closed the door behind them, the four of them standing isolated on the roof in a nice little nook, out of sight of anyone and anything. “Your partner said you’re the one who found the back door into my code?”
“Well, indirectly,” he admitted. “You didn’t know about it?”
“Know about it?” Miguel spat, anger fuming from every pore he had. “It’s not supposed to be fucking possible. The system’s supposed to have a dozen safeguards to prevent this kind of thing! I mean, if people want to pair up and not use the system, shit man, have at it, but giving false reports? Ignoring actual pairing data? I thought I built the system better than that.”
“I think it was done by someone intentionally so they can just get paired with anyone they want to,” Phil said. “How many people would have access to be able to get down to the root level of access you’d need to work on your code in that way?”
“Five, ten tops. Most of whom are people I thought I could trust,” Miguel said, still pacing. “If they’re fucking with this, though, who’s to say they aren’t fucking with everything? Your formula, the pairings, fucking everything man!”
“Miguel, calm down,” Phil said, grabbing the man’s shoulder to get him to hold still. “We need to look into it, I agree, but we’ve got to do it together and we’ve got to do it quietly. I need to know who we can trust and who we can’t, because I’m pretty sure the Major General has to be in the loop, and that means we’re going to need to find a way to go above him to make sure this gets fixed.”
Miguel nodded frantically. “Right. Right. Right. Learn everything we can before anyone knows we’re onto them. Measure twice; cut once. How do we keep swapping messages without anyone knowing? I feel like our phones and offices are probably tapped.”
“We keep it lo-fi and old school,” Phil told him. “Handwritten notes in an altoids tin wrapped in plastic stashed in the reservoir of the toilet in the 1950s diner in New Eden. I know it sounds weird but…”
“But we don’t know who we can trust,” Miguel agreed. “Good. Yes.” He looked down and then looked up, smiling a little bit. “I’m glad you’re on the side of the angels, Phil.”
“You and me, amigo, we’re in this together…”
Comments
LightningCasino
I love the story too. With Cunningham he is one of the 10 that have access to the code. Hope for the best but plan for the worst kinda scenario.
Smcrae5639
Once you finish Phil’s tale I would love to see you weave all the parts into a single publication. At this point you would only need to insert Phil’s tale to book one that has been published already.
Kaywye
I have to say, that this is how you dona shared universe right. Where both stories add to each other without needing to read one to enjoy the other. They are both great stand alone stories, and when read in tandem, there's a reverb...for lack of a better term. Like listening to a wonderful guitar solo, then listening to a piano solo and realizing when they get paired together that it becomes a concert of extraordinary depth. Really awesome.
Corrupting Power
Valhalla Shores is... a special case. It was mentioned in QT1:38, and that may give you a little more insight into why it's circumventing what's expected, and a bit more info on what they're doing over there.
Metadi
The question of why they are building anything in the middle of a pandemic that isn’t directed related to keeping people a live is nagging at me. I’ve always taken the construction of New Eden as a security thing. I can understand the renovation plan but building new? Why? I’m enjoying the story and look forward to every installment.
Rick Shaw
The thick plottens
Corrupting Power
I'm currently writing about 4-5 hours a day for Patreon stuff, and 4-5 days for 'day job' stuff, although that fluctuates a *lot* simply because I'm a contract, on-demand writer for the day job.
Ronan
I'm loving the development and enrichment of the story. I like that Cunningham is not part of Covington's suborning of the system.
Cynthia Parker
so glad you have gotten back to this I really love Phil
Cynthia Parker
LOVE!!!
Todd Garrison
Really enjoyed this, nicely done.
J.D.
This story is so much fun because you aren’t writing like most stories get written. You have this huge main story and when something crucial to the story comes along, you manage to put together a completely smaller story that seamlessly flows along side to give answers or at least a viewpoint of some characters (some of them being main players) working through the situation to get the answers to then be brought back into the main story. I love the way it flows and just continues to add to the narrative of this incredible tale. Thanks for all the time and effort you put into this amazing piece of work. On a side question, how many hours are in your day because with the amount you appear to create, write, edit, rewrite, edit again, etc I wouldn’t think it could be done in a timely manor so…..so have like a Time Machine or something cool like that? You can tell me, I won’t tell anyone.🤞
