Chapter 23

November 18 ^th, 2020

One of the things Phil had learned was completely inescapable in his life was that if Linda had something he needed to do, he'd better get used to the plan that he was just going to have to do it, and the less questions he asked in advance, the better off he'd probably be, because she rarely gave him tasks to do, and whenever she did, they were important enough to set everything else aside and make them a top priority. Especially since she was going to be off base for most of the day, and Violet would be making sure he was okay.

Phil's day began, as it always did, by reviewing the overnights, looking to see what new information had come in from outside research teams or the 'blue sky' experimental teams, those who were trying the very fringes of ideas regarding the serum. There were more and more of these sorts of teams starting to spring up, so for the most part, they would keep quiet unless they had discovered something significant. Quiet was often good, though, as one of the most recent reports from one of the 'skunkworks' experimental team was that in an attempt to get the nanobots to target genetic diseases and chronic complications, the nanobots went into overdrive and consumed the host. Thankfully, they'd been testing on chimpanzees and not actual humans, but the end results were no less grisly. He got started on this when he was almost the only person in the office, and by the time he looked up from it, the department had mostly shown up, coffee and morning bagels in hand.

From there, he moved to the on-base stand-up meeting, where each department head stood up and detailed what their department was working on, what needs they had from other teams and any progress they'd made.

Miguel's team had been making loads of progress on getting the Oracle parameters expanded to better accommodate larger Teams, and they'd integrated some additional systems which would automatically pass anyone running a Oracle screener through one of the licensed non-domestic versions of the service through the US database as well, which had resulted in a number of identified high-value targets for Operation: Funnel Cake.

Dr. Aisha Collins had taken over the role of liaison to the UK Gemivax team, and she had been following their progress as they'd readied their own programming, with speeches from the Queen and Prime Minister, to be aired after the President. There had been some last-minute complications behind the scenes however, and she still wasn't quite sure at a distance exactly how well things had played out. Either way, the UK had been enrolling and injecting people on their system for weeks now, and it was obvious that their media blackout wasn't going to hold, the only question was how much panic would happen when it lifted. Smokescreens like that couldn't hold forever.

That coincided with the expected distributed denial-of-service attack they were going to get when tens of millions of Americans went to the website regarding DuoHalo, the Quaranteam serum and what the next steps were. Thankfully, the main site people were being directed to was on an entirely different set of systems as the Oracle surveys, so those, at least, would continue flowing in non-stop.

It was hoped that the allure of being paired up with women would be an easy draw for men who had been isolated for nearly an entire year now, and that remaining survivors would self-identify, let the government know who and where they were, so that teams could be dispatched to them as quickly as possible. That was part of the reason Andy's team had been chosen to be one of the faces of the serum - having Emily Stevens and Sarah Washington show up as the kind of women who could just show up on your doorstep was as much about the showmanship of it as it was giving people things to hope for. Phil had joked with Katie Couric that Andy's entire segment should run with a disclaimer at the bottom that read, in tiny letters, 'results not typical,' but Ms. Couric agreed with the President's assessment that it was important to focus on the hope rather than the bleakness at this moment in time.

It wasn't just the US who would be seeing all this.

The world would be watching.

They were a little over two days away from 'global launch' and once that happened, there would be no second chance to make a first impression. The President's speech would be the first time over 2/3rds of the planet would be hearing the term 'Quaranteam' and Phil wanted those people comforted, not panicked. In fact, part of his day would be spent looking at a preliminary draft of the President's speech, as a technical advisor, to make sure nothing she said veered too far into scary territory. The decision had been made to leave the discussion of how the vaccine worked - i.e. the nanobots in the China shop - until after the majority of the population already had them coursing through their veins. The last thing Phil wanted was for a bunch of scared uneducated people refusing to take the vaccine because they thought it would give them cancer or allow Jewish space lasers to target them anywhere on the planet. Which was ridiculous, Phil thought to himself, because obviously the Mazel Tough program was already using cell phones for suborbital targeting, and had been doing so for years, since the second Bush administration.

He sometimes wondered if his humor was getting too dry even for his own liking.

Lots of people had loads of little jobs, each of which needed to go off without a hitch, and Phil was doing his best to try and keep track of just about all of them, although in many aspects it was a case of 'trust the people you put in charge of those things to do their jobs,' and Phil was just hoping nothing went sideways.

Once the standup was done, he reached out to a handful of key figures in overseas research groups, making sure they were doing okay. Some of these were incredibly brief, touch-and-go's, but others he liked spending a decent amount of time on. Like Jordan, a 36-year-old researcher from Liverpool who was heading up one of the I/O teams, attempting to be able to establish some sort of baseline communication (or at least language) with the nanobots. It had been very rough going, but Jordan's team had been the ones to discover the nanobots were communicating with each other, which had led to the discovery of artificial antennas grafted onto the forearms of members of large teams.

Jordan was more than easy on the eyes, with a naturally sharp and beautiful face, long blonde hair and pale, creamy skin, but her Scouse accent had meant loads of people had discounted her as "too working class to be smart enough to be where she is." Phil had gone through a similar push when he was coming up, simply because he was the son of immigrants, and he still had trace bits of his parents' Filipino accent dancing around the edges of his speech. But she was insanely smart, and Phil couldn't help but find himself flirting with her every chance he got.

"Mate, it looks kinda choka in there," Jordan said, her accent thick with hard k's and glottal stops as she peered over his shoulder from the screen to see people rushing around behind him just outside of his office. "Getting a bit mental with the big day and all tha?"

"You know it, Jordan," Phil sighed. "Two days until the all the shit hits the fan, and I end up becoming one of the public faces of this whole disaster."

"Come on, it won't be tha' bad, I'm sure you'll be able to blag your way through to the inevitable fame and fortune and all tha' and settle into things." Jordan said. One of the things Phil had noticed over their Zoom conversations over the last few months that Jordan had started wearing less and less for their calls, showing more and more cleavage his direction, and he hoped that it was because she was into him as much as he was into her. "Seriously, you're gonna smash it. Besides, you're in yer little private garden over there, in yer mansion and without the weather chuckin it down every other day. You gotta admit yer life's pretty boss when you look at it."

'Fuck it,' Phil thought to himself, 'shoot your shot.'

"Well, if you decide you don't want to be over there any longer, Jordan, we could always see about getting you into Project: Funnel Cake and bring you over here, if you could stomach being with me and the rest of my troublemakers."

"Already paired with someone over here, innit. Sadly. Or I'd take you up on the troublemaking in a heartbeat." Jordan sighed. "Rough as the match is, I wouldn't want to wish a Dead Man's switch on him, yanno? He's still sound enough and that like. Just not for me."

Phil bit his bottom lip and then decided, in for a penny, in for a pound. "And if you had another option? If you could be reassigned to me instead of being with the guy you're paired up with? No harm to him in any way?"

Jordan leaned in close to the camera, giving him a dangerously large eyeful of cleavage. "Yeah? Ain't like you've got that though."

"We might have such a thing in the very near future."

"Well, if you do, I'd probably be all over it...I'd just have to tell me ex, and me Auld Fella."

Phil stared at her for a second, some of the words not quite making sense to his ears.

"Y'know, meeda," she added, as if that was meant to help.

"I'm still not following, Jordan," Phil laughed.

She rolled her eyes, sat up perfectly straight like she was imagining balancing a book on top of her head and in her best Queen's English said to him, "I would have to inform my faaaaaaaaather, but such an idea excites me very much, Phillip."

They both tried to hold their serious faces for as long as they could before both devolved into fits of giggles. It was Phil who spoke first. "If this thing is everything it's supposed to be, we might have a way to reassign you as early as next week, and hey, you're gorgeous, Jordan, but you're also, like, one of the ten people on the planet I can have a total conversation about these nanobots with and know you're understanding everything I'm saying, even if every so often you're talking over my head. Not many people can do that, and, not gonna lie, it's dead fucking sexy."

"I know, I'm fucking boss." She followed it with a saucy wink and Phil felt his heart skip a beat like he was a gangly teenager again. "Still, an entirely new start... it's a big thing yer askin' Phil," Jordan said with a sigh. "Can I get a bit to think it over?"

"Hey, relax. You've got plenty of time to consider. I don't even have the thing that would let you get reassigned yet, so I'm not entirely convinced it's real. But if it is, and if we get it, I want you to know that door is open. And we'd... I'd love to have you here. Mom always told me surround yourself with people smarter than yourselves and you'll get far in life."

"Yer Ma' sounds smart. And yer minder? Linda? She'd be okay wit' it?"

"She thinks you're adorable," he told her. "She was joking last night that she wondered how long it would be before you were taking my calls in your bra."

Jordan blushed a bit and tugged a little on her top, pulling it up. "Yeh? Well, I hope I haven't been makin' a tit of meself, but it started out as a game. You were always listenin' to me like, and I remember the first time thinkin' you were the first lad in ages to not look at me like I was just some bird who'd walked off Love Island, so... I wanted to see if I could get you to look at me that way, for the sport of it."

Phil grinned, rubbing the bridge of his nose with a smile. "Jordan, you're drop dead fucking gorgeous. You're the kind of lovely that makes men trip over their own words. But all that doesn't hold a candle to how fucking sexy that brain of yours is. The rest? That's just gravy on top."

"Fuck off!" she laughed, holding her hand up to her face. She had a tattoo on her right forearm of the Banksy stencil of the girl with the heart shaped balloon that Phil found both daring and charming. "Look, I gotta go. But Phil? If it's a thing... you tell me first, yeh?"

"As soon as I know it works, Jordan, you'll be my first call."

"Ok...nice one." She was about to tap out to end the call but seemed to have a moment's thought where she wanted to end things differently. "Oh, and tell Linda she's a babe an all."

"That'll make her day."

"Later La'."

She turned off the call and Phil leaned back in his chair, fanning his face with a laugh as Violet looked over at him, shaking her head. "If this reassignment thing really works, boss, can you do me one very small favor?" she asked him,

"What's that, Vi?"

"Can you wait to reassign that hot young thing to our family until December?"

Phil tilted his head to one side. "Why's that?"

"You get her into the family this month and Linda wins $100."

He snickered a little bit and rolled his eyes. "And what if it takes until January to get her here and reassigned?"

"Then Audrey gets it," Violet said. "My money's on December."

"You thought it was that much of a foregone conclusion she'd want to get with us?"

"Boss, the first time you two had a conversation about the nanobots, you two were talking for nearly three hours uninterrupted," Violet laughed. "About an hour into it, I realized you were both just thirsty for talking to someone who understood what you were talking about. Brains can be sexy, and you two just get each other. So yeah, if this thing's real, get her on a plane over here as soon as you can. Tell'em we'll trade, I dunno, two researchers and a shortstop to be named later." Phil rolled his eyes, which only made Violet laugh more. "Seriously. Boss. Our Team is smaller than it should be, and you can basically ask for just about anybody on the planet you want to. SO ASK."

Phil raised his hands in surrender. "Okay, Vi, okay. If it's real, I'll ask. You heard anything from her yet?"

"Got a text message from her when she picked up the package, and about five minutes ago when they were at the gate of New Eden, so I imagine she's just now getting to the safe house and getting settled in," she said as her phone buzzed again. "And your appointment's here, so that means Linda's probably going to call sooner or later. But for now, you've got questions to answer."

As soon as Phil glanced out his window, he spotted Agents Lopez and Connolly standing outside of his office, looking far better than either of them had when he'd last seen them eight days ago. Their faces were completely healed of scars, and they had four working eyes between the two of them, instead of just the two they'd previously. Most notably, though, Lopez was standing on her new legs, although she still looked a little unsteady on her feet.

Phil suspected he knew why they were here, so he stood up and stepped out of his office. "Agents," he said warmly. "Good to see you both. I'm guessing you're here for a checkup and to discuss how things are coming along."

Connolly was grinning from ear-to-ear and Lopez was smiling and looking like she was struggling to hold back tears. She was the one to speak first. "Indeed, Dr. Marcos. Is there somewhere private we can speak?"

"C'mon, follow me down to one of our privacy chambers," he said, tucking his iPad under one arm as he started to lead them down a couple of narrow, winding corridors, Violet in tow right behind them. "I didn't expect you two to be up and at'em so soon."

"Greerson thought he could kill two birds with one stone, having a friendly face drop off your package, and us getting a checkup from you at the same time," Lopez said. "We've gotten our--"

"Ah ah," Phil said. "Wait until we're inside one of the rooms. Patient/doctor confidentiality."

They finally reached a room a good distance from the hustle and bustle and Phil opened the door to let them in to what felt like a rather bog-standard doctor's office, complete with bench covered by a white sheet of sterilization paper. There was a flatscreen television on one wall, though, which was on and playing a looped video about the Quaranteam serum as soft instrumental music played beneath.

Once they were in, Violet closed the door behind them, the four of them in the room, as Connolly looked over at Violet questioningly.

"Master Sergeant McGuinness is not only partnered with me, she's also one of the members of my protective detail," Phil said. "Since my lead bodyguard is off relaying the package you brought me to its temporary home, she's going to be by my side this whole time. But you can trust in her discretion. So, what's going on?"

"Well, we--" Connolly started before Lopez put her hand on his shoulder, taking over speaking from him.

"We're not sure the regenerations were complete successes, Doctor," Lopez said to him. "We've both gotten the use of our eyes back, and all the scars have healed, but our new limbs... they're... well, they're still kind of weak, Dr. Marcos."

Phil looked at Lopez, then at Connolly, then back at Lopez, and then did the only thing he could - he laughed. "It's been eight days, Agent Lopez. Did Agent Greerson neglect to tell you that new limbs would take at least two to four weeks to be up to full strength?"

Lopez and Connolly both frowned, as if they felt a little foolish, but both shook their head.

"Okay," Phil said, "since neither of you remember it, let me walk you through what happens when a limb is regenerated by the serum. We documented this process a few times off various regenerations we've seen on site, and I'd have thought Greerson would've gone through this with you. But now I can walk you through it, and you can save me from having to give this speech to whoever else he's giving those vials to."

Phil opened his iPad and linked it up to the television, commandeering the screen to use it to give a presentation to the two soldiers. He pulled up a series of slides that showed an eyeball over the course of regeneration - three images laid out like a comic strip. The one on the left was the eyeball in its highly damaged and nonfunctioning state. The second was the eyeball mid reconstruction, parts of it being stripped away and replaced with new bits. And the one on the right was it in its repaired form.

"As ridiculous as this sounds, regrowing and/or repairing an eyeball, or hearing, is far easier than growing a new limb. For the most part, when the nanobots in the serum repaired your eyes, the size of the job wasn't that big. The complexity might've seemed high, because it deals with signals to and from the brain, but the nanobots can handle that easily. So that's why when you woke up from your regenerative sleep, your faces were healed, and your eyes were working again," he said. "The thing about this is there isn't a ton of mass that needs work. You follow?"

"Yessir," both replied.

He inhaled a deep breath then sighed. "This is why limb regrowth is a far more complicated and longer-term project for the nanobots. The average human arm weighs about eighteen pounds, and the average female leg weighs about forty pounds. You don't have that much excess raw material in your body to work with, unless you're obese. So, like all good repair systems, it works with what it can."

He closed the slides about eyeballs and opened a folder called arm regeneration, bringing up a new slideshow, showing a man whose arm had been severed just above the bicep, close to the shoulder, long since scarred over. In the first slide, the scarred stump was visible, as the caption at the bottom says 'pre-regeneration.'

"This is Captain Beyruth," Phil said. "He had to have his arm amputated after it became badly infected when it was sliced up very badly during a plane crash. He'd been without the arm for about five years at the point you see here."

The next slide showed the Captain, shirtless, on his back in a hospital bed, his stump pressed as much against his chest as he could, clearly unconscious, the beginning of a growth over his missing arm as well as most of his chest.

"This is about an hour after he'd passed out from imprinting a new partner. This is one of our earliest regeneration cases, so we went overboard and documented everything."

Moving forward a slide, there was a large scab over the Captain's chest, completely obscuring the stump of his arm, the almost cocoon like husk wrapped around most of the man's torso at that point.

"Jesus, did we look like that?" Connolly asked.

"You did," Phil answered. "Leg regenerations are even more complicated, so I'll cover them next, but they aren't all that different, except for a few key things. Anyway, let me show you a bit what's going on underneath that protective shell."

The next slide showed an ultrasound of what was happening beneath the surface of the shell, where a new arm was being built bit by bit, the scar tissue having been entirely consumed for parts, as new bone was being built, along with muscles, tendons and nerves. The skin would be the final step, obviously, but everything had to be done in stages. The parts closest to the shoulder were getting muscles built while the end was new bones, being constructed in small layers.

"To get everything they need to build you a new arm, they are consuming every bit of spare resources your body has and repurposing them, much like the way a doctor might do a skin graft to a damaged section of flesh," Phil told them. "To get the collagen and calcium phosphate to construct you a new arm, it has to strip bits of them from all the other bones in your body. That's why the pamphlet told you if you go through a major regeneration, you'd wake up both sore and ravenously hungry. Your body needed to produce as much as it could to replace what it had taken. I specifically told Greerson to make sure you had as big a meal as you could stomach before you imprinted on each other, but I'm guessing he forgot to tell you that as well, so that can be another thing to put in the column of 'shit you'll tell the others before they do this.'"

Phil hopped to the next slide in the series, where the ultrasound could show the beginnings of a hand starting to take shape.

"To get all of this, the nanobots used your DNA to rebuild the arm as it should've been, according to all the genetic information you carry with you. But the nerves are new, the muscles are new, and while your brain understands how to send signals to them, and your arm understands how to process the signals they're receiving from your brain, getting everything to move from large orders to fine motor control is going to be a process, one you're going to need to work at for a month or two," Phil said. "It's not like your new arm's going to be perfect right out of the box. You and your body have to get used to it."

The next image showed the new arm just after emerging from the protective regeneration husk, and it looked significantly weaker than the man's other arm, emaciated and thin.

"Captain Beyruth ate like a vacuum cleaner for the next month or two, as per our instructions," Phil said to them. "We told him not to worry about getting fat, not to worry about over-eating. His body needed to take in a lot of raw resources, and we encouraged him to let it do that. We also told him to practice doing things with his new arm as much as he could, and eventually, he found a number of surprising things that you'll likely also discover. If it was your non-dominant arm that you lost and had regrown, you're going to likely be ambidextrous within a few months' time. You'll be able to use it with the same fine precision that you use your dominant arm, because the nanobots have built it up to code matching your other arm. You'll also find that your fingerprints on the new arm are not the same as they were on the old arm. Because you still had an existing arm for the nanobots to copy, you'll find the new hand has mirrored fingerprints of the hand you still had on you, right down to any environmental changes that might have happened to them over the years. If it had been both arms you'd needed to regrow, you'd have all new fingerprints on both hands. Lastly, if the lost limb was longer or shorter than the other, it'll now be an exact match with your remaining arm."

"My arm's still pretty weak, though, Doctor Marcos," Connolly said to him.

"Sure, because it's about a week old, Connolly," Phil laughed, wondering how much he was going to have to drill this into their skulls. "For the next three to eight weeks, every minute of every day, the nanobots in your body are shoring it up, adding more bone, more muscle, more nerves, continuing the project they started while you were unconscious. You don't feel it because it's happening slowly enough that your body isn't recognizing the changes, but by January, you'll probably be able to shoot with your left hand as well as you do with your right."

"And my legs, Doctor? Is that why they're still so weak?" Lopez asked him.

"Honestly, Lopez, the fact that you're walking at all so soon is ridiculous. Unless you absolutely have to be on them, I'd recommend being in that wheelchair for another couple of weeks to let the nanobots do their damn jobs without too much risk," Phil admonished, as he tapped on his iPad, bringing up a slideshow called 'leg regeneration.'

The first image was a woman whose leg had been blown off just above the knee, the bottom half of her thigh turning into a stump.

"Leg regenerations come in several varieties. If you'd just lost your feet, or, say, one of your calves below the knee, the process would've been much faster, because there's less ground to cover. For you, Lopez, both of your legs were blown off mid-thigh, meaning there was a lot of bone, muscle, flesh and nerve to rebuild, and I warned Greerson that it wasn't going to be one quick regeneration and two days later you'd be back to fighting strength. I told him specifically to give you a few months to recover from this. Did he think I was exaggerating or something?"

A new image appeared on the screen, showing how a giant scab had formed over the entire bottom third of the woman, from the thighs downward, obscuring the missing limb.

"This is basically the same as your arm, but it's done in sections, and it's frail when you get out of your regeneration cocoon, because the body has used up all the available resources it has, and it needs you to input more raw materials. Maybe you two were both caught up in adjusting to your partially regenerated limbs that neither of you noticed that you didn't shit or piss for almost five days after you woke up out of the regeneration cycle?"

"We, uh, didn't know if that was related to what we went through or..." Connolly started.

"Well, to be honest, sir, we were a little distracted having both eyes and all our limbs at least semi-functional again," Lopez said. "Even if they weren't working quite as well as we'd like them to."

"Which, when are they going to be?"

Phil burst into annoyed mirth, gesturing his hands downward. "I grew you new legs! They weren't going to be peak performance on day one! I told Greerson that."

"But--"

"But it's been little more than a week!" Phil cackled, pulling up another image, showing the same leg, the bone thin but a little thicker. "Week two!" Another image, again, the same, but thicker. "Week three!" Again, thicker still. "Week four! It's going to be a month or two before they're up to full strength! Maybe even three, considering it's regrowing two full legs. But they... you will get there, Lopez, okay? You just have to show a little patience."

"Sorry sir," Connolly said.

"Yeah, sir. Sorry, sir," Lopez echoed. "We... we should've asked more questions upfront and tempered our expectations properly."

"Well, do me a favor and make sure Greerson's tempering them correctly for anyone else he's giving the serum to. And do me another favor - don't freak out if you find an antenna grafted onto your forearm. The nanobots do that when they're doing mass repairs, so they can communicate with other swarms of nanobots. So, we know about it, and you don't need to freak, okay?"

"Can that information be used to give our location away in the field, Doctor Marcos?" Connolly asked, his voice suddenly much more serious.

"Not unless you know how to get the nanobots to send a signal, which is something neither me nor the ten smartest people I know have been able to figure out how to do, so stop your belly aching," Phil sighed. "Now, I have a few questions of my own. Are you holding up your end of the deal?"

"We delivered the package to your security lead, Doctor Marcos, yes."

"And it was?"

"Three people. One American, two Russians, as anticipated."

Phil arched an eyebrow at that. "As anticipated? I thought we were getting one person, and you're telling me it's three?"

"The American brought the two Russians with her as 'part of her promised delivery,' and your woman should have all the details. Have you--"

"We're radio dark until we get home tonight," Phil grumbled. "We've had some leaks on base that we're trying to avoid."

"Then I'm sorry we caused you such complication, Doctor Marcos," Lopez said. "We mostly just wanted to be sure the regenerations weren't finished with us in these states..."

"No no, Agent Lopez. Within a couple of months, you'll be back to full strength, but until then, the new bones are fragile and frail, and you shouldn't put too much strain on them. Let them heal. Let the nanobots do their thing."

"Got it."

"Can I ask one final question before we go, Doctor Marcos?" Connolly said.

"Shoot."

"Before the regeneration, I had two blue eyes and Lopez had two brown eyes, but both of the eyes that regenerated... well sir, they're green. Is that normal?"

Phil turned off the screen and the image returned back to its standard presentation. He reached over and patted Connolly on the shoulder as he was on his way out the door. "Soldier, nothing about any of this is what someone would call normal. But it's what we got. So, learn to live with it."