Chapter 24

November 18 ^th, 2020 (evening)

When Phil got back to the house for the night, he saw Linda standing outside the house, pacing impatiently. She didn't look upset or angry, merely anxious, and that was enough for Phil to be a little bit concerned, especially where she'd spent most of her day.

"Oh good, you're back," Linda said to him, wrapping her arms around him, hugging him tightly for a long moment. "It's been a weird day."

"But you've seen her?"

"It's her, Phil. It's really her."

"Does she have what she says she has?"

"I'm pretty certain she does, otherwise she's signed her own death warrant," Linda said, nervously. "You put Andy on getting her a new partner, right?"

"Someone outside of us, so nobody will know what's going on," Phil told her. "Just like we planned. The last thing I want is someone with a nefarious agenda trying to co-opt this thing and use it for some kind of power grab."

"The ability to freely reassign women? That's a complete gamechanger, baby, although she did say it had some caveats about how it works and doesn't. She wouldn't get into specifics, but she said it wouldn't be so bad as to make it worthless. Just more that we'd have to be smarter about using it. Like, it's not an unlimited 'get out of jail free' card. She's ready to use herself as proof of that. That'll certainly put any doubts I would have to rest, if she's willing to be a guinea pig just to prove to us that it's legit. The only way she'd do that is if she had utter confidence in the process. She just wants to be sure she gets paired with someone new who she won't hate."

"You met Adam McCallister," Phil said. "Can you blame her?"

"Not one bit," Linda grumbled. "We can talk more about it on the go, though."

"Where are we going?"

"Back outside."

Phil's eyes narrowed a little bit as he moved over towards the car again, Violet tossing a wave in their direction as she headed into the house to crash and get some sleep. "You know, considering you're supposedly keeping New Eden on lockdown, we have been going an awful lot in and out of the borders of the city," he said to her.

"When you make the rules, you get to break the rules," Linda said, hopping into the driver's seat as Phil hopped in up front instead of the back, where he'd ridden over to the house in. "C'mon, we have another meeting we need to take."

"Am I going to like this one?"

"Probably not, but we need to have it."

The car headed towards the checkpoint in and out of New Eden, and the guard at the checkpoint motioned for Linda to bring the car to a stop. Linda rolled down the window as the guard, someone named Foster, walked up to the window. "Oh, sorry, top. Didn't realize it was you. How long are you going to be out?"

"Hour, maybe two?" Linda told the woman guard.

"Aren't we supposed to be on lockdown, top?"

"We are, but who instigated that lockdown, airman?"

"You did, ma'am."

"You think that means I can't un-instigate it for myself and a VIP?"

"You were pretty clear about how serious we were supposed to take it, ma'am."

"Yes, well, think of just how important that means this meeting must be that I'm breaking protocol for it," Linda sighed. "And I'm doing it on the orders of somebody above me, which means it's getting done, and the longer you keep me here waiting, the more trouble we're all going to be in."

"Yes ma'am," Foster said, moving to lift the yardarm blocking the gate. "Should I mark down your departure in the log?"

"Absolutely, Foster," Linda said. "We're always going to track in and outs. We'll be back soon enough. Might be a bit longer than that estimate, but we'll be back before daylight."

"Gotcha. Fly safe, top."

The lights of New Eden were in their rearview mirror in seconds, and they were heading towards 680, southbound, which Phil felt sure of meaning they were heading towards Livermore airport. It seemed like a place he was starting to get intimately familiar with.

"Another out of town meeting?" he asked Linda.

"Yeah, but this is one you asked me to try and get set up for you," Linda said. "You wanted the least corruptible woman in the Air Force to be looking into General Fielder, yeah?"

"True," Phil said. "And this person is?"

"General Bonner's a hardass, but she's principled like you wouldn't believe. So we're going to have an off-the-books meeting with her and see what she thinks. She's always been an idol of mine, and I figure she can at least let us know of how deep of shit we're in."

Phil's mind was still a mile-a-minute on a dozen different things, but more than anything, he hoped that what Eve McCallister had promised was true and real. The inability to reassign people had been plaguing Phil all year, and the last thing he wanted was for folks to be trapped in relationships they hadn't been happy with.

The poker game Andy had told him about had nearly broken his heart. It was the sort of rampant abuse he wanted to avoid in letting his work be used by the government. But there was always someone out to make a buck, get an edge or turn misery into profit. But after Phil had gotten sad, he'd done what made a lot more sense - he'd gotten mad.

He'd spent at least part of a day thinking of ways to try and link a partner's satisfaction with their orgasm with the quality of the immunity the nanobots provided, but he'd written it off as cruel and needlessly complicated.

Still, this was going to get to be a problem moving forward, at least for a while. The children who'd been below the Kill Zone seemed to have complete immunity from the effects of the virus, but they could easily be carriers of the thing, at least for the time being. But they would live on. And it was starting to seem like their bloodstreams were developing containment strategies, as if they were trying to keep the virus from spreading too much. That was a new development, but one that Phil was already optimistically looking into, hoping it might be something he could capitalize on.

And the threat of all the hard work he'd done to try and keep people alive being undone because a handful of assholes decided they didn't want to play by the rules was driving him crazy. Andy had mentioned that Katie Couric had threatened to go public with the information that people had been circumventing the Oracle system, something they had implored her not to go public with yet, simply because it would prevent so many people from getting imprinted and getting safe from DuoHalo.

Phil could see the disease still taking more and more lives, and even as hard as they were pushing to get people into the program, there were still people claiming they 'knew better' or they 'didn't trust the science' or 'y'all are trying to implant microchips in my brain so you can take my guns to pay for your drag shows for children.' (The last one wasn't an exaggeration - someone had actually said that to a sweep team, because stupid people were getting weirder by the day.)

Linda brought the car off the road and to the gate of Livermore airport, and within a minute or two, they were past the gate and headed over towards a hanger towards the back. The car was stopped at the edge of the hanger by a Security Services officer and Linda's ID was checked a third time while another officer swept the car for explosives or concealed weapons.

Finally the car moved over to rest near a parked airplane, and Linda and Phil both got out and headed towards the staircase.

"Let's not have you getting on board, Doctor Marcos," General Bonner said as she walked down the stairs. "That would be much harder to deny than us just sort of having an conversation on the sly, don't you think?"

"General Bonner, I assume?"

"Why am I here, Doctor Marcos? Linda's not one to panic lightly, and she sounded a little bit rattled, which is why I'm out here, making an unannounced, unscheduled and off-book stop," the woman said as she sat down on some of the bottom few stairs. She looked to be in her late forties or early fifties, with a squat, almost pug-like face, although she had a sort of hardened beauty to her, like a weary battle angel who'd done her best to remain at least pleasant to look at without making too many concessions. Still, she also had the look of a woman who'd seen more than her fair share of distress over the years, not someone who'd been sheltered from making the tough calls, but someone who'd willingly embraced the challenges presented to her by her position.

"We have a problem in New Eden, General. We're fairly certain someone circumvented the Oracle system for a while, assigning people to specific people by design and ignoring what the results were actually."

"Isn't the Final Choice Protocol in place to prevent someone from just being assigned to someone else without their permission?"

Phil smiled a little bit because it was clear the General had been doing her homework, because she knew some of the very specific terminology that was used internally. 'The Final Choice Protocol' was the caveat that nearly every woman who went through the program would eventually be presented with a selection of men to choose from at the very end, never just 'this one or nobody.' It was essential that a woman always have a choice, even if it was simply from two or three people, so that nobody felt 'railroaded' into being paired with just one person not of their choosing. It had been one of the things that Miguel had laid down implicitly when coming up with the Oracle system. Sure, there were battlefield pairings and last-ditch scenarios, but for the most part, the system was designed to always give women some degree of selection at the very end. "I see someone's been doing her reading."

"I want to know as much about this clusterfuck we apparently have on our hands, Dr. Marcos. So why didn't the FCP prevent this problem?"

"Many of the women in question weren't told about it," Phil said. "They were just given one person, told that if they said no that they would go back into the queue and would likely be waiting another two to four weeks, which nobody wants to do. In a few cases, they were given a false choice of two options, but then offered up as stakes in a poker game, and traded between players based on the outcome of the game."

The General's eyes narrowed sharply at that. "That sounds quite a lot like people are being treated as property, Dr. Marcos," the woman said to him. "What kind of Handmaiden's Tale bullshit are you people running over here?"

Phil put his hands up immediately, and Linda stepped in front of Phil protectively. "Not him, General. Not us," she replied defensively. "We're bringing this to your attention because we've tried to plug the hole and to make sure nobody tries to reintroduce it."

"Who could do something like this?" the General asked.

"Maybe twenty or thirty people in the base," Phil said. "Most of them I trust not to, but there's maybe five to ten people who could possibly have done it that I don't know that well. People who were brought in once we started scaling upwards."

"Why not report them to the base commander?"

"We're--"

"To be honest, general," Linda said, "we have good reason to believe he's in on it. We don't have definitive proof of that, but one of the telltale distinctions of anyone who used this backdoor to falsify pairings is that it always returned back 98.7% compatibility ratings, regardless of the people in question. So we dug into every 98.7% rating we've had since the program began. Most of them were one-offs we could dismiss as legitimate results, but when an entire Team is made up solely of 98.7% results? That's when we knew we had severe problems."

"And nearly all of those clusters are centered in or around New Eden," Phil said. "There's a couple of exceptions in New York, Los Angeles, D.C. and over at Valhalla Shores as well."

"How many Teams in total?"

"About two dozen."

"Fuck's sake," the General grumbled. "Anyone particularly high in politics?"

"Nobody significant on the national stage," Phil said. "Fixers mostly. I'm not asking you to go breaking down any Senators doors or anything, but we're going to definitely upturn some apple carts with all of this."

The General rubbed her eyes for a long moment, drawing in a very controlled breath before letting it out again, as if she'd used this technique to ensure her calm, and to not let her temper get the better of her. "Can I ask for a bit of time to try and manage this?"

"Of course, General," Linda said, Phil frowning a little bit at not even being given a chance to add in his opinion. "We get that you need to make sure there are ducks in a row before we start rounding people up and putting cuffs on them. Of course we get that." Phil felt Linda shoot a look his way and he had to agree she was right. "Just as long as there's a plan to make this right, to set things right."

"Is there a way to do that, shy of killing these men?" the General said, forcing herself to stand up again. "Because if there is, I haven't seen it in any of the paperwork."

"We might have something," Phil said, "but it hasn't been tested. It's going to be very soon, but knowing what I do about the particulars, I'm fairly certain it's going to work."

"How reliable is the information?"

"It comes from an odd place, but the information, the scientific basis for it, I think that it's going to turn out to be real," Phil said. "It can't be perfect. Nothing ever is. But I expect we may have a way to reassign people very soon, something we're going to work very hard to understand."

"If that's true, then we'll double down on it hard," the General said. "But as it stands right now, if you don't have a way to reassign these people, we'll be condemning them to tending to a prisoner's needs for their entire life. We're going to need to evaluate how bad off they have it versus what it would cost us to upend the system."

"But General!"

"Doctor Marcos," the woman said to him. "I agree we cannot let these women suffer too long in their current situations, but we also need to make sure our case is ironclad or these people are going to fuck us up, six ways from Sunday. We are still in a massive legal minefield, and two of the three branches of government are being held together with duct tape and chicken wire. We're trying to get people to step up and take over for the Senators and Representatives and Governors that we've had drop dead, but you're talking about filling a whole lot of positions with second, third, fourth, even last-tier options. Some of these people could barely get elected as dog catcher."

"Nobody votes for dog catcher," Linda said.

"Tell that the people of Duxbury, Vermont," the General shot back. "Anyway, this is very much a case of measure three times before you cut once, because there's no way to get this toothpaste back into the tube after you squeeze. So I'm going to do some research on my end, and you can do some on yours, and if it turns out you have a solution that'll let people get reassigned, we'll move in as quick as we can and get it all taken care of."

"Alright," Phil sighed, "I'm going to trust you, General. Or, to be more accurate, I'm going to trust Linda, since she trusts you, and she hasn't lead me astray so far."

"Good," she said to him. "Pick your friends and allies carefully in these modern times, Doctor Marcos. You never know who's out to lodge a dagger in your back."

"I'll keep that in mind, General. And I hope you'll do us the courtesy of letting us know what's going down when, so we aren't blindsided by anything."

"You're partially responsible for saving the planet, Doctor Marcos. Who wouldn't want to be your friend?" The General laughed and then turned to head back up the stairs again, getting back on her plane, as Phil and Linda heard the engines warming up.

They backed away from the plane and started heading back towards the car. "Quite the character you've got there," Phil said to Linda. "How did you say you knew her?"

"She was the base commander at my first assignment," Linda replied. "Hard ass, no-nonsense woman who didn't take shit off anybody. I looked up to her. I told you, she's sort of my idol." As they got in the car, they started heading off the airfield and back up towards New Eden. "How soon is Andy going to know about whether or not Eve's telling the truth or not?"

"It won't be long," Phil replied. "You heard how tight that window is on how long it's been since she was last dosed by Adam, so I imagine she's halfway to climbing the walls already, meaning if she's got a way to get reassigned, she's going to take it and demonstrate it soon."

"You really think she's going to pair up with Andy?"

"No, I think Andy's going to find someone for her to pair up with, and then it can't be tracked back to me or to us directly," Phil laughed. "Andy doesn't want any more partners, unless it can't be helped. But if I were to go looking for someone to pair her up with, it would draw attention to the fact that I know where she is."

"Technically, you have no idea where she is, babe," Linda said with a laugh. "Niko and I are the only two people other than the ones guarding her who know where Eve McCallister is right now."

"And I want you to keep it that way. Don't tell me. Don't tell Andy directly. In fact, I don't want any men knowing about it until she's got a new partner and we've got plentiful samples of this reassignment stuff in the lab, so I can start figuring out what makes it tick."

"You haven't had any luck in developing a reassignment formula at all?"

"Complete goose egg," Phil grumbled. "A couple of times I thought we might be getting close, but the nanobots had adverse reactions and I had to scrap the tests. Little buggers are persistent and refuse to give up a fair fight."

"Not to delve into something I don't understand, but you tried attacking the problem from unusual directions?" Linda asked. "Sometimes you get too entrenched in old ideas and you gotta come at it from a new angle, a new approach."

He shook his head slightly, leaning the chair back as he stomped his foot in frustration against the car's floor. "Last time I did that, we ended up with a dead test monkey. In trying to reset the nanobots, I made them accidentally fry the monkey's central nervous system. They didn't have any long standing orders, and it made me super nervous, so I lost nearly a week's worth of research proving that an EMP wouldn't kill everybody on the planet."

"What made you think it might?"

"I used an EMP to trigger the monkey's reset," Phil said with a smirk. "But don't worry - our strand of nanobots is entirely EMP resistant. So if someone drops a nuke, the nuke's all we have to worry about."

"Oh, is that all we have to worry about?" she parroted back mockingly. "Well, then, that's fine then, innit?"

"Better than all of us in a two-hundred-mile radius getting switched off like a light," Phil said. "Which would've been a possibility. But I guess whatever stuff Adam McCallister introduced into the serum when he joined the team took care of that particular weakness. So, as much as I hate that fucker, he did do some important things in keeping us all alive."

"Even a stopped clock's right twice a day, love. Just don't set your watch to it."

When they got back to the base, Linda headed them back to their house, where Paloma was waiting for him, eager for her turn to get some intimate time with Phil, as he could see it in her eyes, and she was pacing back and forth.

Paloma had gone through more changes than almost anyone else who had joined Team Marcos, and Phil was still struggling to understand just why. His current theorem was that she had been exposed to some particular strain of DuoHalo before her arrival in the States, and that she had survived it, only for her immune system to develop a sort of 'partial immunity' that reacted strangely in tandem with the nanites.

The Spanish woman rushed up to him and jumped at him, wrapping her thighs around his waist as she began to kiss him hard. "Why do you do this to me, Phillip?" Her lips pressed against his own, then his cheek and down to his neck, her hips grinding against him firmly. "I tell you this morning I am starting to feel the itch, and you tell me I must wait until this evening. And I have waited and I have waited, and I cannot wait any longer."

Paloma's loyalties had been in question at first, since she had come from the Spanish equivalent of the CIA, but since then, she'd been unbelievably forthcoming about anything he asked, to the point where he'd finally asked if she was even capable of lying to him, only to find out that she was not. She had tried just after imprinting, and had found it had physically hurt her, considering deceiving him. That in and of itself had been an actual point of concern for Phil, and he'd added it to the list of things that set Paloma's case aside from the others.

"You said you thought you could wait," Phil said, heading towards the master bedroom, carrying Paloma's slender form the entire way, even as she continued to writhe against him, while Linda headed into the kitchen. That was one thing Phil definitely enjoyed about being at home - he didn't feel like he was always under military watch. He was, but Linda and Violet and Paloma had gotten much better at making that less prominent for him.

"I did think I could wait, but the desire has grown rapidly, much more quickly than anticipated," his partner from Barcelona purred, suckling on his ear before she grabbed her loose shirt and pulled it up over her head, no bra on beneath it. "Do not make me wait, lest I shove you down on this bed and take what I want for myself."

Phil laughed and moved to toss her onto the bed, almost having to pry her legs off his waist, seeing she was wearing a pair of gym shorts with nothing beneath them, and as soon as her back hit the bed, she was sliding them off, exposing herself to his eyes. "You are okay, though, right? This is the doctor in me asking, not your partner."

"Then I will tell the doctor part of you that I still feel in complete control of myself, I am in no actual pain although the need is starting to grow towards the level of intensity where both of those statements would need reevaluation," she said as she pushed her thighs as wide apart as she could, her eyes fixated on Phil's. "Now, will the doctor part tell the partner part exactly which part I have need of right now, before my grip on this control slips?"

"You don't have to tell me again," Phil chuckled, pulling his shirt off as quickly as he could while kicking off his shoes simultaneously. Normally he took them off at the door, but Paloma's sudden attack as he'd returned home had made him a little off balance. Midway getting his shirt off, he felt Paloma's hands on his waist, wrenching his jeans open and pushing them down towards the floor along with his heart-covered boxers that Audrey had gotten for him.

Each of his partners had their quirks and foibles, and Phil had been doing his best to learn each one and commit them to memory, so that he wouldn't make the same mistake twice. Paloma's personal idiosyncrasy was that she always wanted to be looking in his eyes when they were fucking. The one time she'd been willing to try it doggy style was when they had a mirror in position, so she could hold eye contact with him the entire time.

He crawled up on the bed between her legs and she wrapped them back around him like a pair of pythons trapping their prey, pulling his hips in until they ground against his, the angle making his cock deflect and lean downwards, not penetrating her, but letting them both feel it throbbing as she kissed him again, their tongues sparring with one another as her fingertips sifted through his jet black hair and raked down his back.

"Please don't make me wait any longer, Phillip," she whimpered, and so Phil reached down and had to forcibly pry her hips back enough to get himself lined up before pushing inside of her, and the absolutely filthy sound that burbled from her lips sent a shiver up his spine, feeling her slick walls clinging to him desperately as her eyes immediately rolled shut despite herself. Her lips rambled off a few sentences in Spanish before she opened her eyes with some effort to gaze directly into his. "You feel so damn good, Phillip..."

"You're not so bad yourself," he teased, although he was mostly working on keeping his hips moving at the tempo she expected from him - rough, but not so coarse as to chafe.

"Hold me. Fill me. Empty yourself within me, Phillip, I am begging you," she said, in between gasps and pants as he tried to keep his fucking to her liking. He could feel her heels digging into the small of his back, and so he couldn't pull back as far as he would prefer, but Paloma loved to keep as much of him inside of her at all times as she could.

"I'm about--"

"YES!" she roared at him and mashed her face into his as his orgasm crested and dragged hers along its wake, the two of them glowing at the intensity of the release, as his cock filled her up with spurts of his cream, and their nanites transferred merrily while the two of them were strung out on the thready bliss pulsating through their bodies.

Phil tried to roll off the top of her, but instead, she held onto him and when he rolled onto his back, she rolled atop of him, smiling down at him. "Comfy?" he asked her.

"Where did you think you were going?"

"I just wanted to not be pressing down on you."

"I like the feeling of your body against mine during the afterglow, Phillip."

He paused a moment and then asked the first of two questions he felt like he needed to. "Do I make you happy, Paloma? I mean, I know I was partially an assignment, but is this satisfying for you? I mean, it's great for me, don't get me wrong..." he added with a laugh, seeing her quizzical look peering down at him.

"It is marvelous for me as well, Phillip. And yes, initially I was tasked with making sure you didn't have a hand in creating the DuoHalo virus itself, my loyalty is to you and the rest of this family, this Team, before anyone or anything else, my home country included. You do not have ill-will in your heart towards anyone, and that is good enough for me."

"Good. Great, good and great," he said almost absentmindedly. "Can I ask you one other thing?"

"As long as it is not to get out of this bed or off the top of you, of course you can, my love..."

"When you first got here, you made it pretty clear you always wanted us to just be one-on-one... I've got a long list of reports of women who have been slowly turning bisexual. So I need to ask, Paloma, are you having those kinds of thoughts?"

Paloma smirked, glancing away with a mischievous grin before she rested her head down against Phil's bare chest. "I want Violet to be our first together," the Spanish woman told him. "Dios mio, those chichis..."

He was glad she started laughing before he did, because otherwise he suspected he would've been in trouble. But he made a mental note to talk about it with Violet in the near future. "Okay, as much as I'd love to just fall asleep like this," Phil said, "Winnie will have our asses in a sling if I miss another family dinner. So, let's get a quick shower in and then get out there and join the others. And remember, we're doing dinner at the Rooks' house for the President's speech, so I want you on your best behavior."

Paloma rolled her eyes as she finally moved to get up off Phil and helped him to his feet. "When am I not?"