Intermission Seven - Pete/Alex/Louise/Onyx

June 17 ^th, 2021 - Los Angeles, California

"Put some pants on, Louise," Pete said as he glanced out the window. "They're here a few minutes early, and the last thing I want is us talking to the government without pants on."

"So, I'm getting up late," Louise grumbled. "Since when did we start caring about what some government hotheads think about us? They've constantly had a flood of people coming over to poke and prod--"

"It's Dr. McKenna and Dr. Marcos, come to do the checkup themselves, and considering they're the ones who got us to where we are today, the least we can do is be wearing pants and talk to them like human beings, instead of four slobs who can't be bothered to get dressed until the afternoon," Pete scolded, picking up a couple of dirty t-shirts from the couch, moving into the bedroom to toss them into the dirty clothes hamper. "You too, Onyx! Up! Up up up!"

The body beneath the sheet grumbled before pulling it down, shooting her best glare at Pete. "Do not let that man see me before I have my hair on," she said as she moved to try and pull herself out of the bed, struggling to get to her feet and head into the bathroom. "Is Alex up already?"

"He started streaming on Twitch about two hours ago, although he's taking a break for the doctors' visit," Louise said, grabbing a pair of cargo pants from one of the dressers, pulling them on. "I didn't want him to get up, but he said there's a new Apex Legends patch dropping today and he needed to get a little bit of screen time in, so when he comes back later, he can compare the state of the game for his audience."

Onyx smiled as she moved into the bathroom. "It's cute how you think I care about any of that shit. He's your nerdling; you go tell him to log off."

"I'm off! I'm off!" Alex said, stepping out of his 'streaming den,' just as the knock happened at the door. "I know, it's important that we be present and attentive for this meeting. So, I'm ready. Everybody else in Team ONE?"

The nickname, 'Team ONE,' had been something they'd come up when they'd been put together a little over a month ago, and it was an acronym, for 'Odds'N'Ends,' which was sort of how they saw their particular four-person polypod. It had been made clear to them all that they were a test case when they were put together, but in the month they'd been imprinted upon each other, they'd bonded as a Team incredibly well.

Onyx stepped out of the bathroom, her wig in place, having done a quick bit of makeup. "They best not be recording this shit," she said, moving out to the hallway to join the others, who were waiting for her before they opened the door. "Greetings! Welcome to our home! C'mon in, let's go and sit in the living room."

The two doctors smiled and moved in, carrying nothing more than an iPad each, as the six of them moved into the house up in the Hollywood Hills part of Los Angeles. It had originally been a training camp spot for Alex's Apex Legends squad, but both of his teammates had died, leaving Alex as the only one with a stake in the place, so he'd just stayed there to weather out the storm with his girlfriend Louise. That had been March of 2020.

Alex 'BiWitSec' Carver was 24 and felt like he had the world at his fingertips, or at least, he had felt that way until the pandemic had sat in. He'd started streaming and on YouTube when he was 20, after an injury to his legs had resulted in him getting bounced from the UCLA football team and laid up in physical recovery for the better part of a year. That was when he'd discovered YouTube, and his natural going charm had made him a successful streamer within a year, and he'd turned pro-gamer within another, sticking mostly to first-person shooters for the time being, Apex Legends, Valorant, Overwatch, Counterstrike even. He'd dropped out of UCLA with only a year left to go.

Originally from Kansas, Alex mostly had a classic farm boy, good-natured if a little rugged look about him, with the exception of his tri-color dyed flop haircut. He often liked to mousse it up into a mohawk, but since lockdown, he'd mostly just been letting it grow into the largest quarter-face guard ever. He'd also tried growing facial hair a few times, but considering everyone else in Team ONE continually made fun of him the most recent time he'd tried, he was starting to think that maybe facial hair just wasn't for him.

Louise Shumacher had been his girlfriend since freshman year. While Alex mostly looked like a clean-cut all midwestern guy, Louise was a classic New York Jewish girl who'd grown up loud and punk. Short brown hair in a pixie cut, flannel shirts, long skirts and Doc Martins with thick enough soles to stop a bullet with. She'd introduced him to grunge, and he'd introduced her to EDM. They'd been a perfect case of opposites attract.

But around the time that Alex had been bedridden for two months in his junior year, Louise had approached him about the idea of 'opening up' their relationship, adding more spice back into their dish. Both Alex and Louise were openly bisexual, and Louise had been having a hankering for sleeping with a woman again, and she knew Alex was eager to stretch his legs with men now that it was much easier to be open here in Los Angeles than back home.

Over the last few years, both Alex and Louise had gone through their fair share of partners, but about four months before lockdown, Alex had picked up a regular boyfriend - Pete. And Louise had picked up a regular girlfriend - Onyx.

Pete Fleming was a kindergarten schoolteacher, a doughy friendly guy who seemed more like the kind of person you would expect sitting at the end of a bar discussing the fineries of the latest small-batch craft brew beer he'd just tried from some local microbrewery. His hair was thinning on top, and his skin was more the color of his Armenian mother's than his Dutch father's. He'd been openly gay his entire life, and his parents had always been incredibly supportive. Pete had been spending his weekends working at a local comic bookshop, which was where he and Alex had met.

Alex had a love of The Flash comics, and Pete had been more than willing to fill the love, among other things. They'd hit it off, had a long conversation over dinner and dinner had turned into drinks and drinks had led to a wild night that had led to a relationship, one which Louise had approved of, even if she didn't completely understand the appeal.

But Louise had picked up an addition of her own.

Onyx Peyton was a personal defense attorney whose life had gone through more than a few giant changes, not the least of which was that she used to be a he. Onyx had transitioned in her hometown of Austin, and then post-surgery she'd moved to Los Angeles to get a fresh new start, as trans black women were more common (and welcome) in California than they were in Texas. New name, new gender, new home. After a year or so of drifting through the L.A. club scene, she'd met Louise at a local farmer's market, with Louise admiring Onyx's 'bold and striking fashion sense,' which was Louise's polite way of saying how she admired Onyx's ability to make colors that would've been bright in the early 1980s work for her. Day-glo, hyper saturated everything. They'd started dating shortly after then, and Alex had been glad to see how happy it had made Louise.

When it looked like the lockdown wasn't going to go away, Alex and Louise had invited Pete and Onyx to move into the house, and form their own little four-person polypod, a safety bubble that would help all of them get through things on a day-by-day basis. They just didn't realize how long it was going to be just the four of them.

Weeks had turned into months, months into seasons, when finally the President of the United States had gotten on the television in November of 2020 and explained they had a solution that would work for most Americans.

But not them.

Pete had remembered how frustrated he'd been that night, the night of the speech, because he knew that if Alex had wanted to, he and Louise could be on a list the very next day and probably be free to walk about the world within a week or two. But because he loved men and only men, Pete personally didn't have that option. Neither did Onyx, whose genetic history was certain to complicate things. There was no plan for them at all.

But Pete had contacted the number they were supposed to call anyway, and had done his best to explain how the four of them didn't want to be separated, and didn't want to stop loving each other. The response had been: 'hold fast, stay strong; you will not be forgotten.' It didn't hurt that Pete's older sister, Rebecca, was serving in the Air Force, the military branch who'd been leading the vaccination effort, and she'd been sure her brother's name had been near the top of the lists when they'd had finally come up with options.

Just when they'd been close to giving up, in the first week of May 2021, two doctors had knocked on their door with what they thought was a solution, except for one big, glaring, dangerous problem - it hadn't been tested on humans yet. They felt confident that what they had would work, but with what sorts of side effects, they just weren't sure. What the doctors were offering them was a chance for them to be the first ones through the door. It carried with it risk, but fuck it, they just couldn't wait any longer, so the four of them agreed to be Patient Zero for something called 'Second Sergei.'

Onyx had insisted they change the name of it, though, saying a name like Second Sergei would be abbreviated as 'SS,' which didn't have any great associations that people wanted to get caught up in. As a result, lately they'd been calling it Quaranteam Quad, or QTQ, which was much more palatable to everyone as shorthand.

The four of them moved to squish in a little on the couch as the two doctors took chairs on the other side of the coffee table. "Is that a baby bump I see there, Doctor Marcos?"

Doctor Charlotte Marcos smiled a bit, reaching down to rub her belly with a nod. "We had to adjust my wedding dress a few weeks ago to adjust for it, but it feels good to be with child again. I'm only five months in. But my new husband, Phil, is under a lot of pressure to set a good example for everyone else around him."

"He seemed like a pretty good guy in the television special," Alex said. "I imagine there's a lot of eyes on his work. Was he the one who developed QTQ?"

"No," Doctor Bill McKenna said. "That was mostly me, Charlotte and Dr. Eve Merriweather. Phil did some of the early work on the stuff, but this is what we've been working on for most of the year. He's had other priorities that he needs to focus on day-to-day. There's a million things we're responsible for now, so we have to spread the workload as best we can. We haven't heard from most of you over the last month, so we assumed that any unusualness was just stuff you had accounted for, other than you, Onyx. I told you that I thought it wasn't anything you'd need to worry about when we saw you in person, but today I'm pretty sure I can answer most of your questions. We brought by all the detailed results of your tests, so we can go over them with you, with all of you. But before we do that, anything else particularly unnormal, other than you two women now squirting with every orgasm? Anything else unusual among the three of you?"

"Getting used to squirting all the time has been very strange," Louise said, "but my Crohn's completely seeming to go away? That made the tradeoff entirely worth it."

"We're sometimes finding large amounts of white dust in bed with us when we wake up in the mornings," Alex said, pushing his hair out of his face fashionably. "Any idea what that is?"

"Instead of your bodies doing large, at-once regenerations, it seems like QTQ is doing them gradually, and if you're waking up with sloughed off skin or other detritus, that's waste from something your body has repaired, and it's casting off what it doesn't need, doesn't want and can't recycle," Bill told them. "Unlike those on the standard Quaranteam serum who typically only get 'triggered' regenerations, those of you in the QTQ path seem like your body is always functioning with a low-level of regeneration running the whole time. We're not sure how it would compensate for things like lost limbs, damaged senses or nerves or defective organs, but we're starting to think what's happened with Onyx is going to be a signpost for what's going to happen with other people. Hopefully you're excited about that, Onyx?"

"Then... what I think happened to me... it actually happened happened? Like, for real?" Onyx asked, leaning forward, her hands folded together in front of her nervously. "The changes are real changes? Like, permanent ones? And there's no chance of reversion?"

Charlotte smiled with genuine excitement, extremely glad she was here to provide this news personally. "Let's go through what we know, then we'll move on to what we think, but yes, to answer your first question, what you think happened to you did in fact happen. The QTQ serum flowing in your veins took the various procedures you'd had as a guidepost and took that work several steps forward, far beyond our medical capabilities and bordering on the edge of our understanding, even. It took the work that the doctors did with your vaginoplasty, orchiectomy and breast augmentation, and taken it much further than we're currently capable of. You've said your vagina has begun lubricating on its own, even when the doctors who performed your vaginoplasty said that it likely wouldn't?"

"Yes, but... that's not the thing that I came into you about," Onyx said, her voice more nervous than she'd like it to be. "I was more worried about the bleeding..."

Charlotte reached across the coffee table and took Onyx's hands in her own. "You're going to have to get used to that, for a while anyway. For, oh, two to seven days every month. Just like the rest of us women."

Onyx's eyes started to well up immediately, as her voice broke, barely able to say a single word. It escaped her throat like a lead balloon. "What?"

"The serum has not only grown you an entire womb, Onyx, it's built the entire support system to go with it, including fallopian tubes and ovaries, complete with eggs. The breast implants you had? They've been consumed and replaced with fully natural tissue. In fact, if you were to walk into the office of a doctor who didn't have access to your medical history, they would likely find next to no signs that you were not born a woman."

"I... I could get pregnant?" Onyx said, tears of joy rolling down her cheeks, her mind overwhelmed with the information flooding her brain with unexpected joy. "If I wanted to... I could bear children?"

"The QTQ serum seems like it followed the signposts you'd set for it with your hormone therapy and transformative surgeries and just kept going," Bill said to her. "That's why your voice cracked and changed. We started to suspect the changes when you told us about that a couple of days ago. In your mind, I'm betting you'd always wanted your voice to be more feminine. That's also why you were having such intense hunger for a while - your body was busy destroying some systems and replacing them with others. We've got a few other test cases going on right now, but the results are promising. People who are in some state of transition when they take QTQ are likely for the serum to keep doing the work over the course of a few weeks, maybe months. None of us expected this, but this serum has been one terrifying medical miracle after another."

"You're kidding me," Pete said, more than a little surprised. "So, what about someone transitioning from female to male who hasn't undergone almost any of the surgeries, but is doing hormone replacement?"

"We have one case of that right now in the study, but a sort of regenerative husklike codpiece formed over the vagina with a hole for urine after imprinting, and about two weeks later, the husk shucked off to reveal a shiny new penis beneath it," Bill chuckled. "And an entire scrotum to go along with it. With testicles and everything. And it's all functional. His voice dropped. His breasts disappeared. And we're finding, like you, a few weeks later, that every test I have is telling me this is a person who has been a male since birth, despite the fact that he himself has provided photographic evidence to the contrary. Facial restructuring, physiological reshaping, even down to the visibility of an Adam's Apple. It's taken transitioning to a whole new level." He shrugged a little bit with a slightly perplexed smile. "It's an unexpected beneficial side effect of what we were aiming for, in getting this serum to let us work outside of the one male to many female restrictions of the original. We're mostly just guessing at what causes it or what the threshold levels are. We don't know at what state in transition a person has to be for the serum to pick up the torch and push it forward. We're throwing darts at a wall here. This is truly Wild West science in the extreme. The QTQ serum is an offshoot from the main QT serum using a secondary serum that we found along the way spliced into it. We knew that in working within the sort of limitations of the original Sergei Swerve and what the original QT serum was capable of, we were going to have to do everything we could to overcome the shortcomings that came along with it. And don't kid yourself, there are some shortcomings to all of this."

"You said we're never going to have the level of immunity to DuoHalo that some people on the regular QT serum are?" Louise asked.

"The four of you, you're about 80-85% resistant to DuoHalo. Original reports looked like that was closer to 90%, but that's fallen a little, although not as much as we feared it might. That means, generally, if you come down with DuoHalo, you're going to be bedridden for a few days, maybe need to go to a hospital for a few additional drug regimens, but your body will still very likely be able to survive on its own. That's better than some of the smaller Teams out there. That's not the two shortcomings we're most concerned about."

"Then what are you concerned about, Doctor McKenna?" Alex said.

"First, we aren't sure about when the regenerations are going to stop and start. There's some aspects of the four of you that haven't changed that we would've expected to," Charlotte told them.

"What did you expect that didn't happen?"

Bill offered a small, weary smile. "Most of the people who've gone through regenerations end up with full heads of hair, but Pete still has his bald spot. That's... unexpected."

"Every man who's balding and goes through a regeneration gets a full head of hair back?" Pete asked. "Everybody but me?"

"Well, no," Bill admitted. "But it's a lot more common than not."

"Andy didn't get his hair back," Charlotte laughed, poking at her colleague. "It doesn't have to be part of a regeneration. Mister Rook, the guy everyone saw on the 60 Minutes episode? He went through a full regeneration and it didn't restore the hair on his head, although it did fix his vision and cured his tinnitus. How about your eyesight? Everyone no longer using glasses?"

All four of them nodded, and Bill happily tapped at his iPad. "Well, we've got that, at least. It's possible that any further regenerations you four might go through won't be quite as conclusive or detailed as some other folks are getting. Our working theory is that the serum is focusing on prioritizing anything large, or life-threatening. So, in Onyx's case, getting her body to what her mental expectation of it was of very high priority, seeing as the serum encourages people to, ahem, 'be fruitful and multiply,' if you will. If any of you might have lost a limb or something--"

"I had my appendix out when I was younger, and that scar's gone," Pete said.

"Well, not only is that scar gone, your body may have actually grown a new appendix. We will look into that. Missing and nonfunctional organs are one of the serum's top priorities, so maybe it chose to fix that instead of working on your male pattern baldness," Bill said. "Or there may have been some sort of undetected problem that was going to spring up later in life, and it fixed that instead. QTQ functions on different timelines and schedules than the normal QT serum, so everything we know about that is sort of out the window, not that we're authorities on that much either, if we're being honest. Regenerations are sort of a crap shoot anyway, so we try and tell people not to get hung on up on what will or won't happen to them."

"Not to be 'that bitch,' but can we circle back to the thing where I'm able to get pregnant?" Onyx said, her eyes still wide and incredulous. "Are you sure about that?"

Charlotte offered a soft smile and a slight shrug. "Certain? No. But we would put the chances of you being able to conceive and carry a child to term at something around 75-80% likely. You could go about it the old-fashioned way--"

"Not happening. No offense, Alex, but dudes don't do it for me."

"None taken, Onyx," Alex said. "We knew that going into it."

"But you'd be an excellent candidate for IVF if you wanted it," Bill said. "In fact, we'd even pay for the treatment if you wanted it, as long as you'd agree to continually check in with us, so we can track your progress and make sure we're around to help with any complications."

"Complications?" Onyx asked.

"Not that we expect there would be any," Charlotte said, wanting to put the trans woman's fears at ease. "Simply to document the process. As Bill said, we've got a dozen test cases with QTQ going right now, and both you and the other trans woman have grown all the necessary biological organs needed to give birth if you want. She's already decided she wants to try and have a child the natural way with one of her partners."

"Can I think about it?" Onyx said, her smile more than a little nervous. "It's a whole hell of a lot to spring on a girl in one day. 'Oh, hey girl, you know that new cooch you paid a shit ton of money for? Yeah, this lifesaving medicine we gave you also gave you a free upgrade to that, no additional charge. Working eggs, working womb, the whole deluxe package.... No, it don't come with ESPN. You trippin'.'" She laughed, reaching up to wipe tears of joy from her cheeks. "The first one of y'all who starts singing 'You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman' is getting one of my boots up your ass, you feel me?"

Everyone had a good chuckle at that.

"You said there were two things you were worried about, Dr. McKenna," Alex said to him. "What was the second?"

"Well, the other thing you're going to need to be aware of is regarding what's colloquially known as the Dead Man's Switch," Bill replied. "I'm sure you've all read up about that particular aspect of the normal serum, yes?"

"When a man dies, the women imprinted on him can be reassigned using some of his sperm mixed with some of the Quaranteam serum," Alex said. "Yeah, we all studied the public information quite a lot while we were wondering what you were going to do with people like us."

"Yes. Well. Right now, we don't know for certain how the Dead Man's Switch protocols will apply to people using QTQ, if they even will. There's two most likely options. The first is that we can use a sample of the serum taken from the dead person, introduce it to all their other partners, and then it will simply delete the deceased from the chain and open up a new slot for someone else to get added in. More likely, however, is that doing such a thing won't have any impact, and your four-person pod will just become a three-person pod. When it gets down to just two of you, that might become a bit of a problem, but we won't know that until we've got actual data to study, and I think the only way we're going to get that is by waiting."

"Why would that become a problem?" Louise said, leaning forward with stern intent.

Bill started to say something, stopped, sighed then started again. "This is a good point for me to remind you that you're under very strict non-disclosure agreements."

"We won't talk about what you tell us with anyone outside of this room, Doctor," Pete assured him. "Whatever you want to say, I feel like we deserve to hear it."

"The serum in your body is actually millions and millions of tiny nanobots," Charlotte told them. "That bit is highly classified, at least until everyone's on some form of QT, just because we don't want the more conspiratorial minded to be freaking out or anything, claiming that we're putting microchips in them and refusing to get vaccinated. That information will become public before the end of the year, we expect. The Quaranteam nanobot system is designed such that it requires at least two people to function for any real length of time, each person, in essence 'washing' the other's nanobots, tempering them and keeping them in check before sending raw materials back for the other to recharge. The problem your pod is eventually going to have is the same one that every other Team will eventually face - if they get down to a single man and a single woman, the number of options remaining is significantly dwindled, because we don't want to really add any new women to the program at that point if we don't have to. So, it sort of becomes a 'die together' scenario, at least if the woman dies. If the man dies, we can reassign the woman to some other existing Team. But with those of you in the QTQ program, you're going to be put to quite the predicament when you're down to just two of you. Hopefully, though, that'll be plenty of time down the line, and we'll have better options for you by then."

"But other than that, we're completely safe to go back to our lives? We can leave the house safely?" Louise asked. "Whenever we want?"

"As long as you're connecting with someone else in your pod every few days or so, sure," Bill said. "You can go out, travel, see friends again, go to work again, whatever you want."

Pete let out a sigh of relief. "That's good. I know I'm very much looking forward to going back to teaching classes again when the schools reopen in August. I'm also very thankful I've only been teaching for about four years, meaning every student I've ever had is within the Safe Zone, and didn't just die immediately from this damn virus. I know that's cold of me, but... it's easier to manage this when it isn't a large group of people I can relate to."

"I'm looking forward to going back to school, too," Louise said, "even if Alex isn't going to go with me."

"My pro-gaming career and my streaming career just mean it's not worth even talking about going back for me right now, babe," Alex said. "Our income is holding up the house, otherwise how could we afford owning a place like this in the hills?"

"I'm not saying you have to, Alex," she sighed. "I'm just saying having your college degree might be worth getting in the end."

"To do what? Get a real job? The way the world's looking, the government's doing everything it can to keep men from being in danger, and it sounds like they consider working itself to be somewhat of a danger," Alex laughed. "They don't want us doing anything other than knocking up women and creating the next generation, to give us a future as a species."

"I can't speak to any of that," Bill said, "but I know they're going to do everything they can to push our population numbers back up."

"Have any kids, Doctor McKenna?" Louise asked.

"Not yet, but they're on the way. Everyone on the base has been told to do our part, and it's a little hard to tell the President of the United States no when she asks you to father children as part of our species survival," Bill laughed.

"How soon are you going to start ramping up production of this QTQ serum, Doctor?" Alex asked. "I know there are a whole hell of a lot of gay men and women out there still trapped in their homes, desperate to get back to the real world again."

"Since this meeting has gone so well?" Bill said. "We start mass production this afternoon, and anyone who wants to get treated with QTQ should be able to take it by the end of the month at the latest. We'll start actively giving the first new people their shots by this time tomorrow. A lot of the work with Oracle's already done and prepped and just waiting for us to have a solution, and now that we do, I don't think we should keep anyone else waiting, do you?"

"When's it going to be announced?" Alex said. "Can I go onto my Twitch stream right now and tell people all about it?"

"As long as you remember to keep the nanobots out of it, I think that'd be a great idea."

"Even talking about Onyx's changes?"

"Make sure you're telling people we can't guarantee it's going to work the same for all trans people as it did for Onyx, but that we feel likely it's going to be most of them, then I think that's going to be fine. Just try not to get too into the weeds with details, because like I told you, this whole thing's a total crap shoot."

Alex turned to Louise and grinned from ear to ear. "We're about to break the Internet, babe."