Chapter Six

July 17 ^th, 2020

"Good to see you Tims, Tom," the General said, looking between the various windows of the conference call. He was a man in his early fifties who'd spent much of his career in Pararescue, the special ops division of the Air Force. His hair had gone from red to silver over the last several years, but it was still thick and lustrous, with a sharp, angular face and a nose that had been broken a couple of times over a career of dangerous and challenging missions before he'd slowly started to drift backward onto the path towards eventual retirement. As good of shape as he was in, for the last decade or so, he'd mostly been giving orders rather than taking them. "Glad to see you're all looking well. I assume everyone's doing well with their new partners?"

"General, forgive me for cutting straight to the point," Tom's brother Tim Jr. said, "but while Tom might be on permanent vacation for the time being, the rest of us are up to our eyeballs in trying to keep the goddamn species alive. No offense, little brother." Junior looked like he'd been through hell, only seven years Tom's senior, but the bags under his older brother's eyes made it look like he was approaching fifty rather than having just turned thirty, the latter of which was actually true. Junior was a doctor, a virology researcher at John Hopkins University, which meant that he hadn't been able to tell Tom what he was working on for the entirety of the year, but Tom had a pretty good guess at this point.

Since Tom had arrived on base, he'd sort of suspected that DuoHalo was the sort of thing his brother would've been assigned to. He hoped that they'd be able to talk about it now that they were all on a secure channel, but he couldn't imagine that was why they'd been called together.

"Now son," their father, Tim Sr., said to them. "Let's keep our tempers in check and figure out why the General's called us all together like this. I imagine you've got something rather sizable, sir, as sending a secure terminal out to John Hopkins couldn't have an easy ask."

"We've got one on site already, Dad," Junior said impatiently. "We've been one of the sites doing research into... the thing..."

"Everyone here's cleared in, son."

"Fine," Junior replied. "We've been doing so many studies into DuoHalo that the Air Force just had a secure terminal stationed here for us to relay information back and forth. They didn't set this up just for this call. I figured you'd have known that, sir."

The General offered a tight-lipped smile. "I've got far too many data streams coming at me now, son, to remember where they come from." The General wasn't related to Tom or Junior, but had been close enough with the family growing up that he'd always referred to them as 'son' in casual conversation and nobody had been bothered by it. "Perhaps we can move past the chitchat and move straight into the matter at hand?"

"I can't imagine what matter you could possibly have at hand involving all three of us, General," Junior said with a sigh. "But alright, let's get down to brass tacks. What's the emergency?"

"All three of you have been read into Project: Quaranteam on some level or another, as all three of you are already paired up with multiple people, including Tom being partnered up with my daughter, Ainsley."

"About that, sir--" Tom started.

"Relax, son," the General laughed. "It's fine and I'm not wasting a half a million-dollar conference line to bust your balls over it. I'm telling you all this so you all know that you all know at least something about the Quaranteam serum, and the DuoHalo virus it's meant to combat. My daughter's perfectly happy with you, and that's all anyone can ask for."

"If this isn't about that," Tom said, "then what is it about?"

"Well, in some ways, it is about that," the General said. "Now, as your father and brother are now aware, you're currently part of an experimental offshoot from the standard Quaranteam vaccine, one that's a little unconventional. But it was a chance for us to get you in front of the vaccine as quickly as possible, and to get a pair of eyes inside of this research project. You should be getting a front row seat to the experimentations the Doctors' Meyers are working through."

"So... you know about the molding process?"

"We do, at least in theory," the General said. "How would you say it's working out so far?"

"So far? I'd say it takes some definite getting used to having three women who, from the neck down, are physically identical," Tom said. "That's crazy. If I feel someone's hand on my shoulder, it could be any one of them and I won't know which until I see their face. There's something a little unnerving about that but thank god the mold they have is a pretty one. And watching them change from who they were into who they are is more than a little wild."

"Are they acting any differently?"

"Acting?" Tom asked. "No sir, not that I've noticed. Should I be watching out for that?"

"You should be watching out for everything, Tom. You're our eyes and ears inside of that testing group," the General said. "The Meyers claim they don't have any mental aspects to their variation, but recent, ah, security breaches have taught us not to necessarily trust anyone."

"What sort of security breaches?" Junior asked.

"You're not cleared to know about that," their father said. "Neither of you. Let's just say we had someone we trusted we no longer do, and it's looking like it's not going to end well for us at all."

"Your father and I are... part of the Oversight Committee within the Air Force, created to keep tabs on all the various research project offshoots we have incubating from the Quaranteam serum right now."

"Offshoots? As in plural?" Tom asked. "How many of them are there?"

"The exact number is classified, but you'd need two hands to count it."

"Jesus, General," Junior muttered. "This is scary shit enough on its own without people tampering with it."

"We're going to need ways to get beyond the problems we have with the existing serum, Junior, and we can't rely on Dr. Marcos to solve everything. He's got his hands full just trying to figure out ways past the death window."

"The death window?" Tom asked.

"The only way we have right now to reassign a woman from a man is to kill the man," Junior said, "and that's not exactly what anyone would consider optimal."

"You don't say," Tom shot back, unable to contain his snark.

"The research teams are important, as we learn more and more about what's going on with these serums and how they interact with strains of the virus, especially since the virus is continuing to mutate into all sorts of new problems that we need to keep our eyes on."

"Isn't this something of a conflict of interest, considering I'm one of the test subjects they're working on?" Tom asked.

"Literally everyone is a test subject of some variation of this serum," Junior said. "We're all having to endure Operation: Ludicrous Speed or whatever they're calling it, so we can live, but the science behind all of this is still being tested as it goes. We're literally knitting parachutes after jumping out of the plane. The amount of medical ethics we had to set aside in order to just live is astonishing, but at the end of the day, survival is more important, so we made a bunch of moral compromises in order to stay alive. Get over yourself, little brother." He sighed, raising a hand. "Sorry. Sorry about that, Tom. Didn't mean to bite your head off. I'm just... we're all under an insane amount of stress right now. If I wasn't getting fucked now more than I had the entire rest of my life, I'm sure I'd be even worse."

"Eight months ago, I was a one-star general months away from retiring and getting to play golf three times a week," the General said. "Now I'm a three-star and haven't had ten minutes in the last few months to sit and enjoy a shit."

"General," their father scolded. "Can we move back to the subject matter at hand?"

"I'm just pointing out we're all doing a lot of jobs we would've thought unthinkable a few short months ago," the General said. "We're not asking a lot of you, here, Tom, just to help us keep tabs on the Meyers and report back when anything gets unusual."

"More unusual that regenerations turning people into near clones of each other?" Tom asked.

"Are they still themselves, though?" the General asked. "Memories, personalities, the like?"

"Oh, definitely."

"Then that's somewhat within the parameters of what the Meyers are reporting to us."

"If you don't trust the Meyers, why are you letting them experiment like this?"

"Because we need options, son," his father said to him. "We need as many people expanding the capabilities of this serum as quickly as possible and that means sometimes having to trust people with less than stellar reputations. People who are on the cutting edge of science sometimes forget their morals somewhere along the way."

"The Meyers may be unorthodox," his brother said to him, "but they have a reputation for making jumps that no one else could see or even theorize. I can't say I care for their research methods, but right now isn't the time to be squeamish. We're talking survival of the species here, gentlemen, and that means most of us are going to have to get our hands dirty."

"The path they're going down could have major implications and benefits for us, what with this molding process letting us get a physical archetype that we could have an entire Team configured off. With the massive casualties we're seeing in men, we're going to have to put together a new work force made almost exclusively up of women - soldiers, law enforcement, firefighters, search and rescue, construction, manufacturing - all jobs which require a certain kind of physique and strength that most women don't have," the General said. "Imagine we can skip past several years of physical training and just... retrofit women into the bodies they would need for that role. With their permission, of course. It would give this country a quantum leap ahead of other nations."

"We needed the Meyers more than they needed us," Junior sighed. "They were basically guaranteed to get a Nobel prize at some point soon and had invested in several startups that were practically worth billions. They were even talking about retiring, and we needed their brains focused on this problem. Shit, we need every brain we can get pointed at this thing, and we lost a lot of very smart people to these twin plagues, so it's not like we've got spare geniuses laying around."

"Should I have a reason to be worried here?" Tom asked. "You three seem to be going back and forth about whether or not there's cause for concern."

"To the public eye," Tim Sr. said, "there's never been any cause for concern, no accusations of the Meyers doing anything improper or illegal."

"And to the not so public eye?"

"There are plenty of whispers behind closed doors and in private company, a number of investors and colleagues have expressed some level of concern about the Meyers willingness to push the envelope by any means necessary, and sometimes that may include some slightly less stringent safety protocols," Junior said with a worried frown.

"And you put me up for this, Dad?" Tom asked incredulously.

"I'd like to put on the record that I was against it when he told me, little brother," Junior said.

"And I told him, and the General agreed with me, that the risk was minimal while the amount of intelligence you could gather would be exceptional, especially with your background in data science," his father told him. "And it would get you and your best friend vaccinated and taken care of much faster than we would've been able to get to you otherwise. You and Joe would've been locked down in place wherever you were and we would've done what we could to get you, but we couldn't have deployed the forces we did without using them to slide you into that place as 'excellent test candidates.' The Meyers think it was just so we could get you two to jump the line as quickly as possible, and it's in your best interests to let them keep thinking that, Tom."

"And I'll point out, Tom, that I've got skin in the game myself, considering my daughter is shacking up with you there, and also part of the experiment," the General cautioned. "But she's been infatuated with you since the camping incident, and I can't say I blame her for that. You showed remarkable courage, wisdom and intelligence for as young as you were, and neither she, nor I, have ever forgotten that."

The General was referring to a camping trip the two families had gone on over a decade ago. Tom couldn't have been more than seven or eight, and at some point, his older brother had lost track of him and Ainsley, and Tom had been forced to take care of Ainsley for an entire night and in the morning, he had guided them back to the campsite, where two very worried families had been panicked to the edge of their nerves.

"Well, thank you, sir," Tom said. "You know I'll do my very best to take care of her."

"I know you will, Tom, which is why we're counting on you for this project," the General said. "As part of it, you'll officially be commissioned as a 2^nd Lieutenant in the California Air National Guard with the date of your commissioning and call to Federal service will be backdated to the day you arrived on the test base, making you eligible for back pay for while you've been stationed there."

"I appreciate that sir, and I did go through the Guard's Officer Candidate School last summer, I still don't have a college degree, which makes me ineligible for commission." The other three men on the call started laughing at that, and for a moment, Tom felt like he was the only one not in on the joke. "Okay, what am I missing?"

"You must not have been able to access your university email while you've been there, Tom," his brother said to him. "In order to get people into the workforce, a lot of universities are hand-waving the last semester or even the last year of some people's educations, if their grades are high enough. The idea is just to get people into the workforce as quickly as they can, and that's going to apply to everyone who's part of your program, as part of the conditions of the program itself. You, Joe, Ainsley... the whole lot of you will have college degrees when the world reopens."

"Are you going to tell the Meyers about my reporting to you?"

"You're going to be the official liaison, Tom," the General said. "And you're technically now on active duty, which means we're going to hold you to the same standards as the rest of the active-duty military, barring the dress code until we can issue you uniforms, seeing as you're still technically in a medical base. You're going to be a constant reminder to the Meyers that we've got our eyes on them and that they can't just do whatever they want without consequences. We've already had one mad scientist tangled up in this mess; the last thing we need is another pair of them."

"Got it," Tom said. "Anything else I need to know?"

"I think that's it for business," Tom's father said to them. "But no need for everyone to scurry off so quickly. We can spend a bit of time getting caught up."

"Not too long, Dad," Junior said. "We've got plenty of research piling up."

"You can spend another fifteen minutes talking to your brother and your father, son."

"I suppose," Junior said with a weary smile. "How've you been, Dad?"

"It's been odd, son, but I'm learning that living in interesting times means in many cases you simply need to go with the flow as it hits you. I think your Mom would've wanted it that way. I've got a seven person Team right now, not including myself. They're all former military and civil aviation professionals, so despite my role on the committee, we've been helping out, manning some of the Love Bus flights when they're short of crew."

"Love Bus flights?" Tom asked.

The General chuckled. "While it doesn't really apply to you in the program, most people are being paired up using a program called Oracle. Others are being allowed to request specific people to be paired up with, and in some cases, those people need to be transported across the country. The Air Force has retrofitted a number of the big transport planes into what're being called Love Buses. They'll transport some men and some women, moving people around in isolation chambers, getting them from one place to another. In many cases, they're actually being given the Quaranteam serum in mid-flight, so that there won't be any time wasted."

"That sounds wild, but dangerous," Tom said.

"I've got plenty of partners with me, so even if we come in contact with DuoHalo, we can get it purged from us immediately," his father told them. "I was a little worried that I would be a less-than-optimal candidate, seeing as I only had one remaining testicle, due to the cancer."

Junior laughed. "Not anymore, I imagine."

The senior Tim allowed himself a little smirk. "Yes, well. I've gone through a regeneration, and that's restored both my equipment and my sex drive. I didn't think I was going to ever have sex again after the accident took your mother from us, but... well, here I am. It's strange, especially since I've been urged by my superiors to consider giving you boys some brothers and sisters, but we're taking that one day at a time. I'd like to know what the world's going to look like next year before I consider bringing more life into it."

"What about you, big brother?" Tom asked Junior with a laugh. "I imagine it's been quite the change going from getting laid once an ice age to several times a day."

Junior shot Tom a dirty look but seemed to realize it was just brotherly good-natured ribbing. "Yeah, well, I certainly don't have to watch what I eat anywhere near as much, considering the amount of calories I'm burning every damn day."

"All nurses, I'm guessing?"

"Mostly undergrads and grad students in STEM although Kathy's an Army MP and is doubling as my bodyguard. She's sort of the lone Jock playing shepherd to a geek flock."

"Isn't it bad form for a professor to be dating students?" Tom joked.

"Add it to my tab," Junior shot back. "And they weren't all from John Hopkins - a few of them come from other nearby universities. A lot of the colleges did large swaps of students, putting people with the key individuals that couldn't be moved."

"And you couldn't be moved?"

"I was already looking into genetic remapping and nanobiology, so I was pretty well equipped to start running one of the satellite research teams on the Quaranteam serum," Junior said. "The place where they're doing most of the research on the serum, they don't really have the time to stop and consider long-term ramifications and whatnot. That's what we're doing here - trying to spin out larger scale scenarios, try and game theory where a lot of this is going to end up. I'm one of the people who greenlit the Meyers proposal of trying to get 'molds' going."

"And you General?" Tom asked. "How's your Team?"

"Smaller than I would've liked, although I think under new management, we're going to start to see a lot more movement," the General admitted. "Other than the Mrs. and a couple of my aides, one of whom was immediately assigned protective detail over me, my level of clearances has made it somewhat trickier for them to find me partners. One of the new President's suggestions has been that the remaining high-ranking military start looking to surviving political figures for pairings."

"Remaining?" Tom asked.

"Son, it's extremely bad out here," his father said to him. "And most of the other Armed Forces didn't take this anywhere near as seriously as the Air Force did. So a lot of them are still picking up the pieces of their own command structures and trying to get things back into some form of normal operational procedures. The Air Force was the best of the services, and we're still only operating at about 40% capacity of what we were a year ago. And we're far better off than the rest."

"How's my daughter doing over there, son?" the General asked.

"Ainsley's doing well, sir, although she's still having trouble adjusting to her new physical characteristics," Tom said with a soft laugh. "Growing about a foot in a couple of days will do that to you. She's having to relearn how to walk, how to run, how to move, dance, the whole nine yards. Her arms don't move quite the way she wants them to, either. She's always knocking things over if she's not stopping to think about it. It'll come to her eventually, but until it does, she says she feels like a little girl wearing a grownup's body. She has to move a lot more slowly than she likes."

"It'll fix itself in the end," Junior said in a tone that made Tom think maybe he'd seen something similar happen before, maybe with a regeneration or something. "A few weeks and she'll have made it all second nature."

"Sorry to wrap things up so abruptly," the General said, "but we need to get this channel back to its usual usage, and let people go back to what they were doing before some one thinks we're abusing our privileges." He clicked off the line first.

"Heaven knows, we wouldn't want that," his father said. "Good to see you both, boys. Take care of yourselves and hopefully I'll see you both soon enough. Stay safe." Then his line went dead.

"Tom, I didn't want to be quite so blunt when Dad was around, but I don't trust the Meyers as far as you can make a gimme putt," Junior said to him with a very heavy sigh. "They're brilliant, but brilliant people are often loose cannons who don't pay any attention to rules they don't think suit them, and that's enough to make anyone go crazy. Keep a very close eye on them, otherwise I have a feeling we're going to miss when they start getting up to the super shady shit. Eyes in the back of your head little brother, I'm telling you." And then the line clicked off before Tom could respond.

It was a lot for Tom to think about, so he decided to go for a run in an effort to clear his head, or at least line up all the various strands of trouble in his head. His older brother wasn't one to worry lightly, so if he was nervous about the Meyers, it was fair to say he should be nervous as well. While the two hadn't done anything overly suspicious as of yet, the idea of playing God with people's bodies made Tom nervous in general. And he and his newly minted partners were in the thick of it, with the Meyers still running tests on them.

He meant to go running for just ten or fifteen minutes, but it turned out he was nearly jogging for an hour before he realized he needed to get back to the barracks and to his partners as darkness was starting to settle in over the base.

Tom could hear them fooling around already, so he made it a point to head straight into the bathroom, taking a quick shower to get the stink of sweat and dust off him, even as he listened to his three partners making constant moans of delight just next door to him.

When he finally got to the bedroom, he saw Ainsley on her back, Mel straddling Ainsley's face and Meg between Ainsley's legs, her tongue inside of Ainsley's pussy. The three were so caught up in each other, that Mel was the only one who noticed him entering, although she was just about to climax when she did, so she simply rode on through, letting out a feverish shriek of pleasure, timed almost perfectly to accompanying howls from both Ainsley and Meg, who had brought herself off with no one else tending to her needs.

Ever since Ainsley had been imprinted, his Team had gotten closer and closer, and much faster than what the Doctors Meyer had told him to expect, something he'd noted for them in their reports, but also in what he would note back to the Oversight committee. The girls were just as comfortable being intimate with each other as they were with him, and while sometimes they would try and fit all four of them into one bed, on other nights he would just pick a bed partner, and the other two would partner up as happy as Larry and after making love drift off to sleep together without so much as a peep of protest.              

"Hey, Tom's back!" Ainsley giggled, wiping Mel's juices off her face. "You know, Tom, despite the fact that they're physically identical from the neck down, I'm starting to be able to tell the differences between how Mel and Meg move, even if I can't see their faces."

"That's great, Ains!" Tom said, high fiving her. "I've got great news as well."

For the next few minutes, as he went over the broad strokes of the conversation, decided to leave out the part about his brother's suspicions, not wanting to needlessly worry the girls. "I think this is grounds for celebration," Mel said as she looked at Tom. "Clothes off. Now."

"You don't have to tell me twice," Tom shot back as he began to strip.

"Dibs!" Meg exclaimed as she pushed Tom back onto the bed and started to blow him. Out of the three, she was the most enthusiastic when it came to oral sex, equally happy to go down on any other member of the team, regardless of gender.

Mel and Ainsley had folded their legs together and had begun scissoring one another, grinding their wet cunts against each other's as their breasts swayed with each move. Tom knew that they were doing this not only for their own enjoyment but for Tom's viewing pleasure as well.

Meg was hellbent on timing Tom's orgasm to coincide with Ainsley and Mel's, slowing down or speeding up her pace as needed. Her efforts were rewarded when the three of them came within seconds of each other.             

Once she'd gotten a mouthful of his cum, she moved to share it with the other two in a kiss that drizzled the three of them through a couple of chemically induced orgasms before all four of them climbed up into the bed, snuggled up against each other and then drifted off to sleep.