Corrupting Power
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Quaranteam: Phil's Tale - Chapter 15
🕑 Added 2023-09-19 08:43:54 +0000 UTCChapter 15
November 2nd, 2020
The Monday following the party, Phil had gotten into the office extremely early, wanting to be around before the majority of people had rolled in. He wasn’t a morning person by any stretch of the imagination, but sometimes he needed to be able to work when the staff was at the minimum. He would’ve loved the office to have been entirely empty, but unfortunately those days were long since passed.
The office always had some people around now, any time of the day or night.
The work they were doing was too important for the office to ever be completely closed.
So Phil, Linda and Audrey had shown up just early enough to greet the skeletal night shift as they were putting in their final hours for the day, an hour or so before the dawn broke and the morning shift would come rolling in.
It still wasn’t all that quiet, but at least Phil could move around the place without tripping over people running around like the sky was falling. It let him look around the office and study the systems without people constantly asking what he was doing and if it was really so important that he shouldn’t be working on something else.
The data Miguel had told him about was spot on – nearly five hundred women whose paths had been altered and redirected to someone other than the person they should’ve been. And Miguel was right – the names on the list had been mostly people he’d either recognized on the spot, or whose names immediately hopped to life the second he Googled them. Lots of celebrities at the high level – actresses, athletes, musicians – but just as many mid-tier names or specialists within a field.
For every Emily Stevens or Piper Brown, there was someone like Alicia Winterson, who on first glance looked like nothing more than a simple ob-gyn, but under further study, it turned out she was one of the leading researchers in the field of troubled fetus development. It was like that for a lot of the names on the list – people who seemed like they could be innocuous but had hidden depths just below the surface.
Phil knew he couldn’t just pull these women from who they’d been assigned to without causing a giant chaos, not without proof. He was going to have to let them all go to their currently assigned partners, but should a way to reassign women come up, he was going to need to go to all the women on the list and offer them a chance to change pairings, to get situated with partners who would be better for them in the long run.
He reran their pairings, and in most cases, the women who had turned up with 98.7% compatibility scores actually resulted in pairings around the 40-50% rate, something so rough that the system shouldn’t even consider offering them the option to consider the pairings. The women were going to be very unhappy, and frankly, the men would probably also be unhappy, unless they were forcing the women to change, something that was supposed to be very much against the policy.
(Unless, of course, they were all underestimating The Daniels Effect, and it really could overcome even large gaps and force social smoothing among nearly any group. Even Daniels himself didn’t think it was that strong, but that hadn’t been tested.)
It wasn’t true for all of the forced pairings, however. In some cases, the pairings were in the 70-80% range, certainly not optimal, but not so far that the people involved would have significant resistance to the pairing. And then it dawned on him – that was part of the reason the false pairing results had been set so high, so that the women in question would trust the science over their own judgement. Shit, he probably would’ve made the same mistake himself, if he’d stopped to genuinely consider some of his partners as they were delivered. Tamika had clocked in at a 68%, but she’d insisted that the proximity made up for all of it, and that she’d happily pair up with Phil, so who was he to say no?
(Linda had reminded him since then more than a few times that he should say no if any of the pairings made him feel at all uncomfortable. So far he’d felt like saying no to anyone who’d been brought to him would be bad form, but after having heard about Andy’s mess with Lauren’s ex-girlfriend Taylor showing up, he had to wonder if any of his exes were going to try and look him up. That idea sent shivers down his spine. The last thing he needed was Crazy Katie reestablishing her weird almost borderline psychotic fixation on him again.)
His next step was to graph the data of all the misreported people in the Oracle system. They weren’t anywhere near as centralized as he expected them to be, but they certainly were concentrated – some in New York City, some in DC, a handful in Chicago, a handful in Texas, a bunch in Seattle, lots more in LA and the densest conglomeration right there in the Silicon Valley.
Initially he wanted to write it off as nerds all having their own personal ‘Weird Science’ moment, but then he started graphing the details of the men these women were partnered with and it seemed like all the requesting men were generally in their fifties and sixties. In some cases however they were requesting these particular women on behalf of their early twenty-something sons who just didn’t have the impetus or clout to do so themselves. Why take the risk of importing Russian models as trophy wives when you could just point at someone on television and say ‘I’ll have her.’
Almost none of the women in the False Positives had been sent to anyone in the military, interestingly enough, and Phil wondered if that maybe there were too many hurdles preventing that kind of thing. The two exceptions, a former Playboy centerfold now in her early 40s and an adult film star, both went to one place, General Fielder.
That didn’t surprise him one bit.
To get the sort of casual bypasses needed to circumvent the program would take someone with high level access, and Fielder was the ideal candidate. In addition to whatever cash he’d been taking on the side for rubber stamping all the False Positives, he got a few impossible pairings of his own. He wasn’t the only one. Major Peters had been paired up with Mayor Haunton the same way. And, perhaps more troubling, he couldn’t find any records at all that Major Peters had ever been screened against Mayor Haunton, even though the two of them were paired together. That by itself gave him a bunch of concerns.
With a bit more digging, he found out lots of the pairings on the base had actually happened before the Oracle system was up and running, and that in many cases, they’d been retroactively run through the system, just to avoid further conflicts as New Eden staff teams continued to ramp up. But both General Fielder’s earliest partners and Mayor Haunton’s had never been run through Oracle. Not before they’d been paired, not after, not never. That, in and of itself, was pretty weird.
The number of False Positive pairings had gone through a dip in recent weeks, although there were already a much higher than normal number of them in processing right now, something Phil wasn’t too pleased with. It was hard to predict what had caused the spike – the window for requesting people was obviously going to be narrowing, although there was going to be a massive spike starting in just a few weeks when the President had her speech, as everyone who hadn’t been put into a team yet would be given the Oracle exam, as well as a chance to submit requests with the expectation that they might well be turned down.
They were hoping to have a list of all women who’d been paired in the country by the time that rollout happened, so most requests for women already paired would never make it up the ladder. ‘Sorry Larry Brookshire of Debuque, IA; you, like everyone else, cannot have Angelina Jolie as a partner.’ They might need to limit the number of time that anyone had to file requests, though. Or cap the number of requests that could be sent to any one woman on any given day. Phil was sure there was a team already working on the scaling up, so he just needed to take a look at how their work was coming.
He almost felt like he should try and request a couple of remaining unpaired celebrities to see if they would still fall through the system, or if they were mostly paired up. A lot of Hollywood had been taken care of in the Serum Surge of October that had been targeted at the greater Los Angeles area, specifically to try and solve this problem. In fact, most of the early adopters who’d petitioned to get paired up with celebrities had actually resulted in those people moving, instead of the celebrity. Actresses needed to be near Hollywood to make movies and television, so sending them off to Pascagoula, MS wouldn’t be good for anyone involved. As such, they’d tried to fold Hollywood inward as much as they could, or to get them to stay relatively local. They’d done the same thing with Washington, D.C. and New York City, just in an effort to keep them from overwhelming the system with relocation requests. Better to encourage people to think local than to allow them to dream global.
Phil also realized he’d have a much better chance if he requested an international celebrity, but he also knew that because of his position, they were likely going to pressure his requests more than they would some random Schmoe. And he wasn’t keen to try requesting, say, some highly prominent Bollywood actress or British television presenter, even as tempting as it might be to file a request to bring Maura Higgins to his house. (While he generally resisted reality television as best as he could, he somehow found himself drawn to a very specific brand of trash television, and he couldn’t look away from the British version of Love Island, no matter how much he tried. And Maura’s Irish accent would certainly send Aisling’s into overdrive when the two met up, although maybe that was what kept Phil from taking the request too seriously, the possibility that the two could develop a secret language that would allow the two houses to talk without he or Andy understanding what was being said.)
One thing that definitely had surprised him about the Great Hollywood Compression was that many of the beautiful actresses hadn’t ended up with other actors. They also hadn’t (mostly) ended up with studio heads or powerful executive producers, but instead, a whole hell of a lot of them had ended up either with directors or writers. Actors didn’t even come in third in the places where gorgeous actresses had been paired. That had fallen to directors of photography, surprisingly enough.
Phil had to get up and walk away from the data for a bit, so he headed down to talk to Bill McKenna. Bill had turned into Phil’s closest male confident inside of the Quaranteam project, and Bill rolled in early in the morning most days, and so Phil wasn’t surprised to find him hip deep in research. “Bill, do I even want to know what’s got you awake so damn early this morning?”
Bill looked up from his computer screen, furrowed his brow then it dawned on him. “It’s morning, isn’t it?”
“It is. Were you here all night?”
“I was,” Bill sighed. “I started looking into a couple of the new variants, and I’m getting nervous again.”
“Bill, you get nervous at the drop of a hat,” Phil sighed. “But, unfortunately, you’re generally right when you’re getting nervous, so I’m never going to dismiss you out of pocket. What’s got you worried enough to keep you up all night?”
Bill took the stylus in his hand and tapped the large screen of his iPad. “This, this is the structure of the first variant, okay?”
“Sure.”
“And this is the structure of the second.”
“Looks almost identical to the first.”
“Right?” He tapped the stylus down near the bottom of the screen and pulled up a diagram that looked wildly different. “Well, this is variant twenty-four.”
“Whoa. That… that’s going through a whole mess of changes I wouldn’t have expected,” Phil sighed. “Is it presenting differently?”
“Oh yeah, very much differently. You’ve seen how most of the variants just seem to be accelerated versions of the existing core strain – difficulty breathing, depreciated muscle strength, the usual.”
“Sure.”
“Well, this one has all of that, but it also seems to be amping up the need to reactivate the Quaranteam serum again and is amplifying that need in its host in quite amplified and elevated fashion, at a sort of strength we’ve really not seen much.”
“How strong are we talking?”
Bill tilted his head and whistled for a second. “Maybe up to last virgin at the class orgy on prom night levels of intensity?”
“Jesus, Bill, really?”
“The first person who was detected with this was out in New York, and she was so desperate to get fucked by her partner that she punched another member of her Team for standing in her way, even for just a few seconds.”
Phil winced. “It’s another tweaked case, isn’t it?”
Bill nodded. “Sure looks that way. If I’m guessing on proximity, maybe the Canadians, as some sort of retaliation for not getting as many doses of Quaranteam as fast as they wanted?”
“There’s only so fucking fast we can produce them, Bill,” Phil grumbled. “Even the Canadians have got to learn to be reasonable about this kind of shit.”
“Maybe this is what they consider being reasonable.”
“Fucking hell. And they used to be such nice people.”
“Well,” Bill said, “I also can’t prove it was them. It could easily be someone else. And I like to think that even in their moments of greatest darkness, the Canadians aren’t capable of intentionally trying to make all this shit worse.”
“Any other variants I should be scared shitless about?”
“Shitless? No. Pantless? Maybe a couple.”
Phil threw up a hand into the air. “Sure, okay. Go ahead. Why not. Let me have it.”
Bill took his stylus and moved back a few screens. “I call this one the Florida Spring Break variant, because it impairs judgment the way, say, four or five tequila slammers would do, and can also result in blackouts, bad behavior with a high risk of bodily harm.” He swiped back a few more. “You might be familiar with this one – I call it the Waxed All Over – it causes all of a person’s hair to fall out. It starts regrowing immediately upon getting a serum reignition, but it’s very strange, especially since it seems to overcompensate for like a month as the serum continues to fight off DuoHalo, which means women are cutting their hair once or twice a week otherwise they’re going to have hair down to their asses.”
“You’re exaggerating, aren’t you?”
“I only wish I was,” he sighed, tapping a collection of images beneath the visualization of the variant. The images hopped up and showed one of Linda’s Girls, Lieutenant Kiki Pak, who’d been assigned to Bill as a partner but was also still doing lots of security work around the base. “Kiki’s had to have her hair cut twice a day since she caught the variant, but we did a week’s worth of just letting it grow to track it, so watch this.”
In the first shot, they showed her completely without hair, including eyebrows. The next shot was timestamped twelve hours later, and her hair was already long enough to be put into a pageboy shaping, down past her chin, her eyebrows fully regrown. Twelve hours past that, and Kiki’s hair was down past her shoulders. A day later, it covered her ass. A day after that, the shots had to back up, to show that it was long enough to actually hang below her feet. From that point out, they’d started cutting it, and just totaling up the length of it. By the end of two weeks, she’d been averaging 18 inches of hair every 12 hours, meaning she’d grown close to fifty feet of hair.
“I have to ask, Bill…”
“She told me to just treat it like it was the seventies all over again,” Bill chuckled. “Thankfully, her arm hair and her eyebrows all basically stop at some point naturally. But she’s just trimming the rest the best she can, and I’m doing my best not to care. If the reports are to be believed, she’ll be back to normal next week.”
“Until then, you’re tending to Sasquatch, huh?”
“Hey now,” Bill said, frowning. “I won’t have you disparaging one of my partners, okay?”
“I was just joking, Bill.”
“Yeah, well, she’s sensitive about it, so I’m not.”
“Apologies,” Phil said. “I need some levity right now and I was hoping it was okay to joke about it.”
“Give it a few weeks, and it will be, I think, but right now, she’s still all wound up about it, and the constant pressure of having to basically run a hedge trimmer over parts of her body twice a day isn’t helping that much. So I’m just trying to keep a positive attitude for her on her behalf.”
“There are days where I’m going out of my mind here, Bill,” Phil told him. “We’ve got problems in the Oracle system, we’ve got problems with pairing… we’ve got problems on problems on problems.”
“Well, the good news is that the Vitalogium serum is showing promising test results in combating DuoHalo,” Bill said. “I know it’s not us, and so we probably shouldn’t get too excited about it, but hey, it’s progress, and at this point, I’ll take any progress I can get, right?”
“I don’t trust those guys over in Boston,” Phil grumbled. “They have a tendency to try and take as many shortcuts as they can.”
“When we’re trying to save the human race, Phil, sometimes we have to cut corners.”
“Sure, but they make for shitty science, and every time those guys in JanusTech try and push something out to a wider audience, we find it’s more fucked up than the problem we’re trying to solve for in the first place.”
“What’s more fucked up than what we’re offering?”
“Stuff that flat out kills men, regardless of how they get it?”
“They’ve been testing it on men for over a week now, and so far, everyone’s just fine.”
“A week’s fucking nothing in terms of a long-term curve study, Bill, and you know that!”
Bill sighed, leaning back in his chair. “I do know that, and for what it’s worth, I agree with you, Phil, that they’re rushing it, and it’s probably going to come back and bite them in the ass, but until it does, we stay the course – giving people the Quaranteam serum where and when we can, and prepping to hand off to the JanusTech guys if their science holds up to more severe scrutiny.”
“I just have this feeling that it’s going to blow up.”
“Well, until it does, try and give people some hope that we might have a different, easier path out of this within the next week or two.”
“And if it doesn’t pan out?”
Bill grinned. “Then, knowing us, we’ll have kept our heads down, kept working on our solution, and we’ll look more like the smartest people in the room because we knew we had something workable and didn’t let our foot off the gas until we were sure the other road was better.”
Phil patted Bill on the back. “Y’know, I’m really fucking glad you’re here, Bill. You’ve kept me from losing my goddamn mind more times than I can count.”
The much older man chuckled. “Then you can tell me why my request to get Alexandria Daddario was turned down.”
“She was already paired up with some producer, Bill,” Phil laughed. “I can’t work miracles. A woman’s still got a right to say no to anybody she doesn’t want to go with. Besides, don’t you have your hands full enough as it is?”
Bill swatted his hand in the air. “You never watched ‘True Detective,’ you don’t get it. Besides, you’re still being protected by Superwoman over there,” he said, gesturing to Linda, who was standing outside of the office keeping watch. “How’s that going by the way? Her and Audrey still getting alone okay with each other?”
“I think they get along just as well without me there as they do when I am there, truth be told, but that’s probably for the best. Audrey runs the emotional half of the house; Linda runs the practical half. The two have settled things exactly how it works for them. And me.”
“And the sex is still good?”
Phil laughed. “Jesus, Bill, the sex is better than it’s ever been, better than it has any right to be, and I’m just along for the ride, so I’m doing everything I can not to fuck it up. The Daniels Effect is in full force among Team Marcos, and I intend to not do anything to disturb it.”
“Did you see the collection of insane women we had showing up yesterday for delivery today?”
“I glanced a little bit at it, but didn’t take a full gander, why?”
Bill let out a slight whistle. “Three actresses, two musicians, an acrobat, one of the Fortune 500 CEOs, an athlete, a porn star and a couple of strippers, among the more usual collection of beautiful women who are doing well in their field. A bit more fame all at once than I think I’m used to, although I have to admit, the acrobat impressed me a lot more than most of the celebrities, although I’m hard to get star struck any more, considering who we’ve had come through our gates over the last few months. When we were injecting her, she was showing me how she could bend her leg to put the bottom of her foot on the back of her head, and you know that kind of thing’s going to be crazy in the sack.”
“Did it seem to you like we got a lot more all at once than we normally do?”
“Yeah, the General said it was a double batch. They were even pairing up women to share observation tents because we didn’t really have room for it, but Fielder said it was necessary.”
“You think it was?”
Bill sighed, gently putting his hands up in the air. “We’re not paid to ask those kinds of questions, Phil. I assume maybe there was a scare that the efficacy numbers were getting too low for the resistance reports here in New Eden, and they wanted to shore up all the people here.”
“But we generally stagger them in one at a time. Doing a double drop on so many households, even here in New Eden… that strike you as odd?”
“We’ve had a couple before,” Bill pointed out.
“Right, but those were relatively early days. This feels different.”
“Well, a lot more of these were HPR’s.”
“HPR’s?”
“High Priority Requests,” Bill replied. “You know how the people with the money are. They’re paying to produce the serum in mass quantities, so they expect it entitles them to a few perks here and there, so maybe they just decided they wanted a double drop this one time.”
“How many people are getting new partners in New Eden today?”
“Let’s see…” Bill turned back to his actual desktop computer and used the mouse to open up the deployment and pairing reports system, calling up the listings for people who’d been sent to New Eden for processing yesterday. “Huh. That’s… odd.”
“What’s that?”
“It looks like over half of the men in New Eden are scheduled to get two women each today, which is… well, it’s an outlier on the averages, to be certain.”
“Over half? That include—”
“Yep, your name’s on here.” Click. Click. “So’s mine.” Click. Click. “So’s both of your friends you had me looking out for.”
“That’s very strange.”
Bill was scanning through the names and then his eyes narrowed. “That can’t be right…”
“What’s that?”
“Look whose name is on the list,” he said, tapping the monitor with his stylus.
“That can’t be right…” Phil agreed.
“We could go down and see if she’s down there.”
“Why would she be down there?”
“Why would she be on the list of people being paired today if she wasn’t down there?”
“What the fuck?” Phil said, leaning in to look at the monitor closely.
“What am I missing?” Bill said.
“Look at who’s with her,” Phil said.
“Now I know that can’t be right,” Bill agreed once he finally saw what Phil was looking at. “We need to go and talk to her, and I mean right now. I know we’re not supposed to be in that area because of protocols.”
“Fuck protocols,” Phil said. “I want to know what the fuck is going on, and I want to know now, so I’m going in there.”
Bill nodded, getting up from his chair quickly. “Yeah, fuck it.”
As soon as they stepped out of Bill’s office, Linda looked at Phil with concern. “Something’s wrong,” she immediately said.
“We’re going into the observation area for a few minutes,” Phil told her.
“Baby, it’s your rule that men aren’t supposed to be in there.”
“That should tell you how important it is that I’m willing to break it this once.”
Linda scowled. “Yeah, fuck it. Let’s go.”
The trio headed towards the elevator, making their way upstairs before heading over to the small hangar that had been constructed for overnight observation of injected women. The woman guarding the post looked at Linda, looked at Phil, looked at Bill, then back at Phil, before shrugging, opening the door for them. She’d obviously decided that whatever Phil was doing, he must’ve been cleared for it, so she wasn’t going to be the one to get in his way.
Once inside the hangar, they kept their movements as quiet as they could, as most of the women were still sleeping in their cots within their private sealed tents, but Phil knew exactly the number of the tent they were headed for.
They arrived at tent 33 and Phil cut the ziplock tie off the outside and opened the zipper to set foot inside of the small tent, Bill and Linda just a step or two behind him. “Why didn’t you tell me, Charlotte?” Phil sighed, as Dr. Charlotte Varma and her daughter Asha sat upright on their cots, both having still been asleep.
“Tell you what, Phil?” Charlotte asked him.
“That you were ready to get paired with someone.” In his mind, he was already starting to worry that Charlotte had been caught up in the 98.7% debacle, although he realized consciously that he didn’t have any real reason to expect that.
“It’s because I wasn’t ready,” Charlotte said. The blonde French doctor had been part of the team for so long that Phil had just assumed if there were going to be any big changes, she would’ve told them in advance. When her husband had died, she had almost seemed to go on autopilot, but the last few months, it had seemed like she was starting to wake up again. “But yesterday, one of the people I was about to inject bumped into me and I accidentally injected myself with the serum. That, we can agree, sort of took the decision from my hands. So I called Asha to the base, got her injected as well, had our test results run through Oracle as fast as we could and found the closest positive pairing we could get, which turned out to be right here in New Eden, thankfully. I’m a little leery about one man being imprinted to both myself and my daughter, so I’m going to ask him which of us he’d prefer when we get there, and the other of us will come back to the base for reassignment.”
“Who are you paired up with?” Phil said. “I saw your names on the list and didn’t even look to see where you were assigned to.”
“The gentleman associated with the serum’s scaling solution. Arthur Covington the 4th.”
It was Phil’s turn to scowl. “Isn’t he a little old for you, Asha?”
The 18-year-old stuck her tongue out. She was half-French and half-Indian, so she looked exotic and sounded even more so with her thick London accent. “Age is just number, I ain’t bothered.”
“I’m hoping he’ll take me, and we can find my daughter a suitable replacement elsewhere.”
“And if he doesn’t want to let her go?”
Charlotte frowned. “He’ll have to, won’t he?”
“He should have to, yes.”
“What aren’t you telling me, Phillip?” Charlotte said.
Phil sighed a long, deep breath. “I don’t trust that guy, Charlotte. I feel like he’s been playing the system for his own advantage from almost the very moment the whole crisis started.”
“Do you think he wouldn’t let me leave if I wanted to?”
“I don’t know if he would try, but I won’t let him if he does.”
Charlotte offered him a weary smile. “Bless, Phil, but what will be, will be.”
He took Charlotte’s hand in his own. “I’m telling you, Charlotte. If things seem skeezy, you call me and I’ll figure out how to make it right.”
Charlotte’s weary smile faded and was gone in moments. “My Dev is dead, Phil. I’m just trying to make sense of what’s left.”
Comments
Kaywye
God I love this. Everything that seemed to be chance for Andy in QT is turning out to be a totally different thing from Phil's perspective. This is a level of writing that makes my jaw drop, especially because we all know you hadn't planned for this (Phil's Tale at this point in the main storyline wasn't a thing).
Dinosaur Dude
What if there's a variant that increases women's skin temperature? Then all their clothes fall off. Of course they would try to cover up but it's too late. I've seen everything.
