Chapter Forty-One

August 1 ^st, 2021

Andy was stirred to consciousness by a hand smoothing along his chest. His eyelids felt heavy, and he didn't want to open them, but it wasn't as though he felt particularly tired either. Just, his body would like another five to ten minutes to get its shit together, please.

"He's waking up," Ash's voice said next to him, although it was somewhat muffled.

"How can you tell?" Phil's voice asked.

"His breathing sounds changed," Niko laughed as Andy felt her start to wipe a wet washcloth over his closed eyes, scooping off what felt like large clumps of crud off of his face. "You get used to recognizing the very specific sound of his snoring shifting from 'asleep' to 'waking up.' Ash and I figured it out before we even moved to New Eden, although Fi knows it right away as well."

"If I told you he smells different when he's awake from when he's asleep, would you believe me?" Piper's voice said with a soft giggle. His hearing also started to clear up as he felt another set of hands running a washcloth over his ear, scooping out crud from there as well. He was starting to wonder if his eyes and ears had been nearly completely covered over.

"A month back, nah, not a chance," Jordan's voice said. "Now though, wouldn't shock us, like."

"Yeah yeah yeah," Andy said, grumbling as he opened his eyes, seeing Em was tending to one of his ears and Sarah was tending to the other, each of them wiping him thoroughly clean of whatever gunk had accumulated on his face during the regeneration. "I'm awake, okay? I'm awake. How long have I been out?"

"A little under forty hours," Sarah said, rubbing his chest. "You're one of the last to get up. I think Lauren, Lexi and Nicolette are the only ones still sleeping."

"Jenny and Katie are both sleeping as well," Emily added. "Although most of us have only been awake for a few hours."

He sat up and saw that most of the staff and machinery had left while he'd been sleeping, although Phil, Linda, Jordan and Bill McKenna were all still hanging around. Bill had changed clothes since Andy had fallen asleep, but it looked like Phil, Linda and Jordan had all just slept in what they were wearing. "Don't you people have your own homes to go to?"

"The data's been too important to leave, Andy," Phil said to him, reaching over at pat Andy on his bare shoulder. "There's been so damn much of it. Your nanobots communicating with all your partners' nanobots. Your nanobots communicating with our nanobots..."

"You been able to decipher any of it?"

"Not even a bit," Jordan said with a smug grin. "But with all tha' data, it's gonna be a very good starting point."

Andy looked back at the bed and he was sure it had been at least partially cleaned, but there was still a large pile of shed skin and detritus where he'd been sleeping, as well as a small wastebasket full of soiled paper towels.

"You're probably--" Piper said to him while holding out a water bottle full of ice water that he immediately took from her and began drinking down as much of it as he could. "--Quite thirsty."

Andy nearly finished the entire bottle of water on his first draw off of it, having not realized how thirsty he was until water was offered, and then suddenly realizing almost nothing else mattered. "I wasn't that thirsty the last time I woke up from a regeneration," Andy said with a laugh.

"Yeah, well, you didn't have quite so much work done last time either," Phil replied. "New eyes, new ears, what we think is some kind of bone-conductive microphone on your jawbone, increased arm antenna density, foot sole reinforcement, increased reflexes, increased digestive capabilities, natural desalination of consumed water, thermal resistance to both highs and lows... I don't think we would've known about half of this shit if we weren't observing it in real-time, Andy. Like, I've spent a lot of the last few hours checking myself against your profile. At least a few of these things happened to me when I went through this, but I didn't even notice them because we weren't observing it in real time."

"And everyone got the same modifications I got?"

"No no, only about half of them. Eyes, ears, microphone and antenna. It's like your package was leagues above and beyond what all the women got, but hell, the women didn't get an even distribution of upgrades either. Your wives, along with you, have gotten an accelerated natural healing factor, like the nanobots are just 'always on' and checking for wounds. We did several blood draws while you were out, the last one just about an hour ago. Can you tell me where?"

Andy looked at his left arm, then his right arm, then shrugged. "I don't feel any soreness in either arm, I don't see any bruising or a bandage, so I'd just be guessing."

"See what I mean? This shit is wild. I haven't even shown you the wildest thing yet, and this is something none of us knew to look for until Piper, who woke up first, asked if we could take a look at her left forearm, because it felt 'a little itchy.' Check. This. Shit. Out." Jordan tossed Phil a black light flashlight and Em moved over to turn off the lights in the room. According to his phone on the nightstand, it was about two in the afternoon, but all the windows had been completely covered in blackout shades, just to keep them relaxed.

Once the room was mostly dark, Phil turned on the blacklight and grabbed Andy's left arm, turning it palm upward, before slowly bringing the UV spotlight up from his hand along his arm. At first, nothing happened, but around the midway point between his wrist and his elbow, a complicated seashell-like fractal design, about as large as the base of a soda can, started to glow, an odd combination of blues, greens and oranges, curls and circles in an expanding spiral before they just stopped. He guessed the circular shape was about a couple of inches in diameter, or maybe 50mm in metric units.

"Christ almighty," Andy muttered, "what the fuck is that?"

"As far as we can tell? It's your Team's unique identifying insignia, like a marker to match people up to one another," Phil said before sticking his own arm out. "Here, look. Mine's totally different."

As the blacklight moved to show Phil's lower left arm, an extremely different fractal design took shape on his skin, the lines more yellow and purple, but still with plenty of green. If Andy's looked somewhat aquatic and muted, Phil's looked almost garish by comparison. But there were still commonalities between the two designs, with some lines being solid and others being dotted, and both designs featuring a variety of line width within the pattern.

Andy ran his fingertips over the skin on his forearm, but couldn't feel any raised or lowered parts of his skin to indicate where the markings were. "Don't bother," Phil said. "It's like some kind of biofluorescent tattoo that your body's just got now."

Phil turned the light back to let Andy see his new marking, and suddenly Em and Sarah both thrust their arms beneath the light as well. Sure enough, the marking was the exact same on all three of them, although for half a second Andy thought Em and Sarah's were inverted before he realized their arms were just facing the opposite way. He brought Sarah's arm up to his eyes and focused on the skin, seeing that it was, in fact, glowing, and that the amount of detail on the pattern was even beyond what Andy could imagine a tattoo artist could do even if they were using a single needle. And his earlier thought about the design being fractal-like seemed even more accurate, because, like a seashell or those odd fractal artworks that had been so popular in the 90s, he could see each section seemed to contain the rest of it as a whole. "The amount of detail on this is insane, Phil," Andy said as Sarah giggled a little bit, Andy's eyes extremely close to her arm, trying to see as much fine detail as he could. "And every partner I have now has this?"

"Yep," Phil said before motioning for Linda to turn the lights back on again. "Just like everyone in Team Marcos has one that matches mine. I called Isaac on Team Gosher and they found they all have one too, so we're all learning new things about ourselves."

When the lights came back on again and the black light was turned off, everyone's arms immediately went back to normal, but even with the room lights on, the black light still revealed enough of the design to be seen clearly. "Fucking wild," Andy muttered as Emily handed him a bottle of orange juice to replace the water he'd finished. He immediately downed the first third of it. His body needed liquids badly. "Is the design decorative, or is there information encoded into these fractals?"

"I'm bettin' on th' latter," Jordan said confidently. "We might even be lookin' at their version of a printed language."

"You've got to be kidding," Piper said. "What good would that do anyone?"

"You're not going to believe me when I tell you," Phil said with a smug grin on his face as he crossed his arms over his chest defiantly.

"Phil, I'm not someone who only knows what they talk about on television when it comes to this nanobot shit," the Olympian said, rolling her eyes. "Don't make me come over there and wring it out of you with Linda's permission."

Phil glanced back at his wife and chief protector, and Linda just shrugged with a smile. "You wanna play big boy games, you're gonna win big boy prizes," she laughed. "You'd have it coming, and as long as she didn't permanently break anything, I don't know what the harm'd be."

"Hmph. Some guardian angel you are," Phil said with a laugh. "Fine. Andy, you remember that trick Dr. Lam taught us back in D.C.?"

"Oh, with the ident stuff? Sure."

"Bill, hold your left arm up for me, would you?"

Bill McKenna bared his left arm and put it up into the air. Then Phil ran the blacklight over it, and nothing showed up. "I don't see anything."

"I want you to concentrate, Andy, and focus, like you want to see something there," Phil said. "It'll take a second, but you can do it."

Andy scowled for a second, but tried to relax his eyes and then after several seconds of nothing happening, a faint pattern appeared on Bill's arm, similar to both his and Phil's but also radically different. And then, much like had happened in DC, a small scroll of information started in the bottom left portion of his vision, telling about Bill, Bill's partners, the last time Bill had sex. It was all there, in startling color and swatted at the strange text with his hand and it all disappeared. "Your middle name is André, Bill?" Andy asked with an odd smile.

"I really need a find a way to be able to turn that off," Bill grumbled.

"What happened?" Piper asked. "I couldn't see anything."

"We're not sure if it's exclusive to men, Piper, or if it just takes longer for women to gain the trait," Phil said. "But literally every member of your team now has a sort of LCD film over their eyes, which the nanobots can use to communicate with you, when they want to, and how they want to. You'll probably find them starting to give you information here and there, but it'll be sparingly at first. They definitely start communicating with the men long before they do with the women, but I know that Linda, Violet and Audrey have all been able to see it."

"Where's my phone?" Andy asked. "I need to check our app and see who's next for me to take care of.... Whoa." As he spoke the words aloud, a small window opened up in his vision, a floating box about the size of his arm, with all his partners' names and last recharged time, sorted from most recently recharged to those who needed to be taken care of soonest. The person who was the furthest out was Sarah, at eight days, which meant she was probably starting to sincerely feel it. "Apparently I'm not going to need the app anymore. I can see this screen that shows how long it's been since I've topped everyone off."

"That would be handy to--Oh!" Niko said as she began to see the same thing overlaid on her vision. "Okay, that's... that's fucking weird in a very cool way." She sort of reached up awkwardly into a space no one could see and brought her fingertips down, which let her start scrolling down through the list. Then she tried a similar motion to Andy and then looked satisfied that it had worked as well. "That's definitely going to take some getting used to."

"What else can I use that for?" Andy asked.

"We're not entirely sure," Phil said. "It seems to be custom tailored to each individual, and so you'll probably find more usages for it the longer you go."

"Mine's actually been helping me with firearm trajectory," Linda said proudly. "It hasn't done that for anyone else, at least not yet. Violet's still annoyed it won't do that for her."

"We do know you're pretty much always buzzin' with communication from the rest of your Team, now," Jordan said. "Th' upgrades turned it from sporadic to continual, like. Up to about a mile range, give or take. If y' step outside of that range, it'll just do an update when you're back in."

"What happened with the people who were out of range when we started this whole thing?"

"Damnedest thing," Phil said. "But as soon as they were within a mile of you, they immediately orgasmed and started a regeneration cycle."

"How thorough were the regenerations?"

"Nobody got anything less than a two, and a handful of people got threes," Phil answered. "You and your Team are probably collectively some of the healthiest people on the planet right now. In f--"

Aisling suddenly gasped loudly enough to draw attention from Phil over to her, a surprised smile and a look of shock on her face. "I... I just got a message that Honor is up and is hungry," his first partner said. "How... how does it know that?"

Jordan sprinted over and started glancing closely at the redhead's eyes, holding up a camera with a precision lens, as if trying to detect the small image overlaid on Aisling's vision. "Dunno. It's never done anythin' like that before. Not with any of us."

Aisling's face took on a slightly more serious look as she grabbed Phil's scouser partner. "Jordan. How. Does. It. Know?"

"Ey! Aright lay off, Dublin!" Jordan said, as if taking offense to Aisling's sudden concern, not recognizing parental concern on first pass. "Ain't like we've seen'em do anythin' like that before, so no idea. But me best guess? Your kids on yer network, if it's bouncin signals around. Their range is probably a pile of shite, but they're close enough that you can tell."

"I'm... equal parts terrified and delighted," Ash said. "But I think I need to go feed my babies. Excuse me."

Andy'd never seen quite such a shaken look on Ash's face before, but the Irish redhead didn't look mad - if anything she looked pleased, that something unexpectedly nice had happened, and that she would have a way to understand her newborns' cries and what they meant. Ash had experienced plenty of weirdness in the post-nano world, but this was clearly an up-close-and-personal look she hadn't anticipated getting.

Niko tilted her head to one side and an odd smile crossed her lips. "Matty?" she said out loud, wondering if it would do anything, then giggled. "Still sleeping safe and sound, well-fed and clean diaper. This thing is going to be great," she said.

"We'll have to tell Audrey about that," Phil said to Linda. "And that's something you'll need to keep in mind, too."

"It'll certainly make me less anxious of a parent," Linda said with a smirk. "You know I'll take any edge in any fight I can get, and that includes parenting."

"That's still something we definitely need to make a note of, though, Bill," Phil said. "We haven't had any indication that kids were communicating with their parents' networks up until now, and that's something that has a lot of ramifications."

"We knew children of Quaranteamed parents had immunity, but we didn't think they had full nanobot networks up and running through them," Bill said, typing frantically into his laptop. "That both answers a lot of questions and brings up a shit ton more."

"Like why we haven't seen the nano networks on the infants' bloodwork?"

"Unless they're in stealth mode again," Jordan off handedly remarked. "We know the cheeky fuckers can do that. Makes sense tho'. Keep the fancy new evolutionary tricks to 'emselves until they reckon we're good to deal with it."

"How much transmission data did you capture, Jordan?" Andy asked her.

"Oh, loads lad. Proper loads. Now I just gotta get me head around it." Jordan said. "Probably gonna have ta get a full-on cryptography and linguistics crew on things, see what they can do with all this data. It's deffo a language, I can tell you that. but how it works, we just don't know yet. Might be the first language we've ever seen invented by a machine."

"Anything else you need from us, Phil?" Andy asked him. "Because honestly, you look like you desperately need a shower and good night's rest. You sleep here in one of the guest rooms?"

"You mean one of the two remaining bedrooms you have left to call guest rooms?" Phil laughed. "I remember when you moved into this place and you thought it was going to be mostly empty? Ha! Those were the days, weren't they? Yeah, we took shifts, so someone was always watching out for you and the kids, but I think we've got everything we're gonna get at this point. We're down to just occasional trickles of data. We've already sent most of the scientists home, since the majority of information we got was within the first twelve hours or so, where loads of information was being sent back and forth. And not just between you kids either."

"What do you mean?"

"From what we can tell, your Team's nanocluster was communicating with ours, and with Bill's. What sort of information was exchanged, we're not entirely sure, but we know that we sent signals too," Phil said, "and we received a bunch as well."

"You feel anything?" Sarah asked them.

"Nope," Bill said with a smug grin. "I'm convinced they're doing all of this out of spite for me, now. Some sort of petty vendetta they're holding out on me, because I won't get a big enough Team for their liking."

"You make them sound so fiendish," Andy laughed.

"Spite! It's spite I tell you! I'm not gonna do it! I'm not gonna add more Team members just because some... tiny sex robots tell me I have to!"

There was a buzz and Phil pulled his phone out from his pocket, apparently checking an email. "What if the President tells you to?"

Bill tilted his head, as if he was annoyed Phil would make a joke about it, then looked crestfallen. "No..."

"'Fraid so. Message just came down from the President that all core development and research members of the Quaranteam research group have to be members of a twenty person or greater Team, starting next month," Phil said. "According to her notes, there's only three non-compliant people on the whole project right now. She also stresses that we've still got plenty of options for Project Funnel Cake, especially from China right now, so consider tapping into that pool."

Bill lowered his glasses down his nose and looked crossly at Phil. "I'm going to blame you for this. You know this, don't you."

"We all just want what's best for you, Bill," Linda said with a broad grin, mischievously cranking her creepy up a few notches. "Quit fighting people taking care of you. You're gonna be healthy and safe no matter what it takes, even if we have to force it down your throat."

"Or, more specifically, down your pants," Phil added.

Bill sighed then tossed his hands up into the air. "Fine. Fine. Whatever. It's not even worth trying to argue with a politician. But I'll definitely want a copy of that email to show my wife."

"Yes, yes, I'll make sure Grace gets a copy of it," Phil said as he started to gather what little equipment they still had scattered around Andy's bedroom. "Anyway, we should leave you kids to it. Feel free to try experimenting around with it. If you can't pull anything up at first, try try try again. Vocal commands seem to help some, but not always, and what doesn't work today might work tomorrow. Just, y'know, poke around with it. See what you can figure out. You've already got one thing we didn't know about, and that's just from the start."

For the next half an hour, Andy and company helped Phil, Jordan, Linda and Bill load up all their things into their cars. After the house was back to its normal compliment of people, he wandered up to the nursery, finding Ash breastfeeding Hope. Honor was napping in her basinet, and Niko was walking around the room with Matty in her arms. Jade was cleaning up the changing table area, and there was still a lingering whiff of toxic warfare in the air, something Jade was attempting to get rid of with a fan and an open window. "Can I-?" Andy mouthed before Ash grinned and nodded.

"Honor's out, so as long as you're not shouting, you should be fine to talk normally," Ash said to him.

"She had such an epic shit after Ash fed her that she fell asleep right after she was done with getting changed," Jade said with a quiet giggle, still getting comfortable with swear words coming off her lips occasionally.

"Good God," Andy coughed slightly. "Is that what that smell is?"

"You're going to be expected to do a bit more of the changing now, Mr. Rook," Niko said, "now that you're going to get optical text messages whenever they fill their diaper. Who saw that coming?"

"Seriously," Ash grumbled with an undercurrent of laughter. "You didn't tell us that... that... that we were going to having fucking television screens on our eyes, Andy." The laugh made it clear she wasn't mad at him but was more still in shock about the whole thing.

"Yeah, here's the thing, Ash... I'm pretty sure we've had those for months. I think they just got an upgrade," Andy said. "The implications of this are pretty giant and staggering, so we're going to have be very, very careful who we tell about any of this. Because I don't think this is the endgame. I think this is the beginning of something, something much bigger."

"How do you figure?"

"So... I really need to explore the interface a bit more, but you know that internal system I told you I can now see, about how long it's been since I've topped each of you up?"

"Yeah? I mean, when I was walking down here, I asked out loud to see a timer of how long it's been since my last top up, and it appeared in my vision in green floating text before I flicked it away."

"You notice anything else with it?" Andy asked her.

"Like what?"

"What information did it give you?"

"It said it'd been five days since we'd fucked last and there were some numbers and letters afterwards, along with like a small green arrow, but I didn't spend much time thinking about it. Why?"

"Because I figured out what all that stuff is when I was looking at it when I was walking back in - it's the number of meters you are away from me, and the direction you're in," Andy said. "In fact, in looking at that list, I can pretty much tell you where everyone is in the house with a little work."

As he finished the sentence, a set of four floorplans of his house appeared before him taking up the bottom third of his vision and, looking at it, he could see little circles with his partners' faces in them showing where they were in the manor. All twenty-five were shown there, as well as Matty, Honor and Hope. He suspected the floorplans came from his memory, because he couldn't imagine how else the nanobots would've had access to them.

"Holy fuck," Andy said, glancing at the information he suddenly laid out in front of him. "I... shit I can see where everyone is at this very moment."

"That'd be useful to have," Niko said before she gasped suddenly, as Andy suspected she was seeing the same map before her that he was. "Oh fuck. We're going to have to tell Lexi and Melody about this. It'd make their jobs way easier."

"I wonder..." Andy said as he gave a flick of his hand to make the map system disappear. "Send message to Lexi. Start message 'Come to the nursery.' End message."

Floating in the air before his eyes for just a few seconds were the words 'message sent.'

Andy almost had to reach up and push his jaw closed.

"Did that do anything?" Ashling asked him.

"We'll see," Andy said.

But sure enough, about three minutes later, Lexi showed up wearing an olive green tanktop and a pair of boyshorts, yawning a little bit. "Should I ask why I got a 'Mr. Watson, come here; I need you' message floating over my eyes a couple of minutes ago from Andy, or should I just assume this is some new weird shit we're able to do?"

"Apparently in addition to Wi-Fi and complimentary drink refills, I think our upgrades came with an internal communication system," Andy said, the words still feeling a little wild in his mouth. "And an internal tracking system. Linda also said hers has an aiming guidance system, but none of us have seen that yet. You might spend some time in the shooting range, see if you can get it to pop up."

"Internal text messaging. Locator systems. Guided firearms. Check," Lexi said starting to turn away from them before looking back. "I'm going to go down to the wet bar and make a drink that's far more alcohol than fruit juice and wonder when I took the red pill and how I get back into the Matrix. Anyone wanna join me?"

"I may in a bit," Andy said. "I think I need to give some serious thought about what other kinds of thing this stuff inside of us might be able to do now. But I definitely need to have a serious debriefing with you and Melody about all the shit we learned from Phil, and that Phil just learned from us, I guess."

Lexi sleepily raised a fist into the air, a bemused look on her face. "Power to Team Rook - one step ahead of our enemies and two steps ahead of our best friends." Then she wandered off to head back downstairs towards the bar.

"Think she was serious?" Ash asked him as Hope finished up her meal.

"I think she was pretty close to the textbook definition of sarcasm there," Andy laughed.

His laughter died very quickly as a small window appeared in the bottom left corner of his vision with an open webpage to Merriam-Webster's definition of the word 'sarcasm.'