Chapter 25

November 19 ^th, 2020 (morning)

Phil valued his sleep more than just about anything, but when the phone rang and the caller ID on the face of the cell phone read 'White House Switchboard,' ignoring the call seemed a particularly poor option to entertain.

He hopped out of bed, grabbing the phone, walking out of his bedroom and down the hall before he answered the phone. "Hello?"

"Doctor Phil Marcos?" a voice he didn't recognize said to him.

"Yes, that's me."

"Please hold for the President."

Phil was standing at the end of the hallway in just his heart-covered boxers, and he still nearly dropped the phone. But after a quick fumble, he got a good grip on it and started walking downstairs, wanting to get as far from his family as possible, just in case he had to discuss classified information. He wasn't sure if that was a thing he was supposed to be doing over an unsecured phone line, but he certainly hoped the President would know better than he would what was and wasn't allowed to talk about. Once he reached the bottom of the stairs, he sat down on them, as he heard the other end of the line start to click a few times before a familiar voice spoke to him.

"Doctor Marcos, how are you doing this morning?"

Phil glanced at his watch and realized it was a few minutes past 4, which was why he felt so completely off-balance. "Uh, I'm afraid you woke me up, Madam President, so I may be a little discombobulated, but I serve at the pleasure of the President. What can I do for you this morning?"

"Ah yes," she said. "My apologies, Doctor Marcos. I forgot you're on West Coast time and not East Coast."

Phil didn't buy it for a second - she knew exactly where he was, and maybe that had even been part of the plan, to wake him up so he would be more open and immediate in his responses, not couching his language or thoughts. "I'm up now, Madam President, so again, how can I help?"

"I've been watching the first few rough cuts of the '60 Minutes' special that's going to air tomorrow after my speech, and I wanted to get your opinion on a few things."

"I haven't seen them, ma'am."

"But you do recall being interviewed for them, I hope?"

"I do," Phil said. "Why? Did I say something I wasn't supposed to?"

"Not at all, Doctor Marcos," the President replied, her voice kind and reassuring. "You kept to the talking points and didn't veer too deep into the details that don't want the public at large focusing on yet, such as where the virus came from or how we're going to get the members of our LGBTQIA+ community protected."

"Yes, well, your memo said to paint in big brush strokes and not to get too weighed down in the specifics, beyond the ones that were of vital importance."

"Some of those specifics were things I wanted to talk to you about, Dr. Marcos. The '60 Minutes' team is bouncing back and forth about whether or not to include the photos from the Veronica Delacruz case as a warning for women not to veer outside of their teams. On one hand, the photos are extremely graphic, but on the other--"

"On the other, Madam President, if we don't drive it home hard enough how much danger women are in with infidelity, the more likely they are to risk it and seriously harm themselves," Phil said, interrupting her. "We feel like most women will get a tiny bit of precum from an unmatching partner and the burning sensation from that droplet alone will do some minor damage, but will hurt enough to cause them to think twice. That said, anything we can do to prevent things from getting that far is a step in the right direction, if you ask me. I'm in favor of us showing those graphic photos as much as we can, so that nobody can say 'We just didn't know.' I'm trying to save as many lives as I can here. So, the more knowledge women and men are armed with, the better."

"I'm inclined to agree with you, Dr. Marcos, and I'll offer that opinion to the news team when I speak with them later today," the President said. "I was a little apprehensive about identifying you on national television, but I understand that you insisted to the news team that they talk to you. Looking for a bit of fame, were we?"

"No ma'am," Phil said. "In fact, it was against the sternest recommendation of my security detail that I spoke with Ms. Couric, but I felt like it was important not to have an ambiguity about the serum and how it works, and letting anyone else answer those questions instead of me, well, they might have messed up or overpromised or misrepresented something. This thing needs a face, and for better or worse, I'm the lead researcher on this project, so if anyone should take all the anger and hatred for it, it should be me."

"Doctor Marcos, you've literally saved the human species from extinction," she said to him. "Yes, I understand you couldn't save everyone, but you did the absolute best you could with the tools you had available at the time."

"We lost an entire generation of children, Madam President," Phil said with a very heavy sigh. "That weighs on me a great deal."

"Well, then, I want you to weigh that against the literal billions of lives you're helping save with what you've done," she said, her voice taking on a sort of stern, resolute tone to it. "That outweighs those you couldn't save by several orders of magnitude, and I need you at your best still. There will be time in our lives for regrets about what we couldn't do, but that time isn't now. Now, there is still much work to be done."

"Yes, Madam President. I'll try to keep that in mind."

"One thing I'm going to need from you, Doctor Marcos, is to not do further interviews for a month or two after all this airs."

"Ma'am?"

"Every journalist on the planet is going to want to talk to you, Doctor Marcos, and I'm going to need you to keep them at arm's length, at least until the New Year. You and all your staff."

"People are going to have questions, Madam President."

"Of course they are. But our message needs to be we are focusing on getting America up to 100% immunity, and that means all hands on-deck working to solve our other problems. I want your group focused on finding a solution for those members of our great nation who are currently unprotected, hiding in dark corners, trying to avoid human contact so they can live as long as humanly possible."

"Got it, Madam President. No interviews, no one-on-one chats, not even email responses. We'll keep it as dark as we can, at least until the New Year, and refer everyone to someone in DC who you've got set up to be the defacto point person until next year. But as of January, I start answering my own phone again, yes?"

"That sounds acceptable, Doctor Marcos," she said to him. "Now to move on to a few more concerns I have about other parts that I wanted to talk to you about. Next, I don't know if their special features enough of a call to action, like, what should they do if they see this and they aren't already taken care of by the Quaranteam program? We've also set up a 1-800 number, but I am worried it's going to be absolutely overwhelmed at first."

"It is vitally important we get as much information about current survivors as we can, to get them into the Oracle system, and to get them paired up with people as quickly as possible. And, on top of that, if we encounter people who are in the early stages of DuoHalo, we can expedite them to the top of the line and keep them alive. Stress in your speech that you expect the line and the website to be busy and to keep trying, and the '60 Minutes' story could have it in a constant chyron at the bottom of the screen for their entire story. The '60 Minutes' story could also just give out a raw Oracle link, but to a specific version of Oracle that doesn't have a personal identifier tag. We can splice in a bit of data gathering to let these people self-identify, and put information into the system. We've already dispatched additional personnel to man, er, staff some newly acquired and retrofitted server farms, both from a technical and a cyber-security point of view."

"I don't like the idea of American citizens getting robo-screened if we can help it, Doctor Marcos, so we have to hope that the huge number of people staffing phone lines in an effort to gather as much of that information humanely as possible works out for us," the President said. "Many of the people calling in are going to feel like they've been abandoned or forgotten about, so having a human contact to talk to will definitely help brighten their spirits some. They'll know we're still aware they're out there, and can understand that we will get aid to them as quickly as possible."

"Yes, Madam President."

"About what percentage of the US population is currently vaccinated with the Quaranteam serum? Remember, Doctor Marcos, this is me you're talking to, not someone you're trying to keep from panicking."

"We're approaching 50% of what we expect to be the surviving male population, give or take," Phil said, leaning against the banister of his staircase. "That's a pretty big ballpark number, but it is what it is. We're doing what we can to get to as many people as we can as quickly as we can. This sort of thing is completely unprecedented in the history of the planet. You could probably get away with saying 50% tomorrow and nobody's around who could disagree."

"And the global male casualties?"

Phil inhaled a deep breath and slowly let it out. "3 billion. Probably a little more than that, but with China being the complete informational blackhole it is right now, there's definite guesswork thrown in there. It could be half a billion in either direction, but my gut feels like 3 billion's fairly close, although that might be on the high side."

"Just hearing that number spoken aloud, Doctor Marcos, chills me to my bones," the President said, her voice sounding much wearier than it had at the start of the conversation, and that was saying something. "Our entire system of society is going to go through fundamental, core changes because of this, but at least, I suppose, it's not so bad that we can't recover as a society, thanks to you and this wonder serum your staff put together."

"I'm doing what I can to plug all the holes in the dam, Madam President, but nothing's perfect, and I suspect we're going to find a lot more flaws in our system, the further we move forward with it. All that said, we don't have any better options right now, so we'll make of it what we can, and do the best with what we've got."

"I appreciate your resilience, Doctor Marcos. Speaking of best we've got, let's talk about your friend for moment, shall we? Andy Rook. I understand he's better known by his publishing pseudonym - Blake Conrad? I know we vetted him before, and I've watched his interview portions several times, and he does seem like he's quite a good speaker, considering how under the gun he is. I'm meant to understand he's an old friend of yours?"

"Andy and I have known each other almost twenty years," Phil told her. "He's not only a good guy - he's one the best men I know, with completely unshakeable morals. He's the kind of person I definitely wanted to make sure we kept safe, because we're going to need men like him on the other side, once all the shakedowns happen."

"'Shakedowns,' Doctor Marcos?" the President asked. "What do you mean by that?"

"You would know much better than I would, Madam President, but our government's in shambles right now, and we're the luckiest of the bunch across the globe. Most of the Senate and House are dead. We lost two-thirds of the state governors, although Newsome certainly made a point to adhere to our safety rules, so at least he's still alive. But when you look at every layer of government across the board, there's enough holes in them to call the whole mess cheesecloth. You need to find some way to get representation into as many positions as possible, to keep the whole thing from toppling over. That probably means appointing people into a lot of positions temporarily."

"The plan is we're going to take the next couple of year to stabilize everything, and then in fall of '22, we'll have open elections for every single position, top to bottom. The presidency, the senate, the house, the governorships, judges - anything that can be voted on, will be. I'm not going to run for re-election, although I am probably going have to appoint a slew of Supreme Court Justices, now that we've lost the majority of them."

"Mostly women as replacements, I would assume."

"I am going to do my best to represent the spread of demographics remaining in this country to the best of my ability, Doctor Marcos, but yes, it does mean more women than men, simply because we have significantly more women than men now, and women's voices need to be heard, especially when it comes to any new laws we enact as a result of this serum of yours. But to get back to my question, do you feel your friend Mister Rook will be okay in the spotlight of all of this? We are sort of putting only a handful of faces out there to represent the pandemic and how we are dealing with this, and while you may have been helping Mister Rook survive through this, I imagine there may be some blowback at him, that he's living a posh life and is kept safe behind closed doors."

"You've seen Andy, Madam President - he's kept it as humble as anyone possibly can. And he covers so many of the bases that we need the unvaccinated to be prepared to accept: he was paired with a sizable number of partners, he was relocated out of his existing home with very little warning, the amount of sex he's having would've made Andy of last year faint in shock and he's now very literally responsible for the health and safety of over a dozen women. You'll notice the '60 Minutes' story doesn't show all that much of New Eden, or of Andy's new house. They let Andy's words fill in the spaces for you, so the listener can draw their own conclusion, but they still have the views of a number of rooms inside of Andy's house to see we're not pushing them into squalor, not if we can help it. For most of the male Americans we've got left to save, the new housing initiatives are going to be upgrades, not downgrades. They'll be going from studio apartments and one-bedroom houses that are only a few decades from collapsing to nice new multi-bedroom units in city towers, or expansive houses for those in the more rural areas. But people are going to have to do a lot of moving. Any man who doesn't have significant roots, personally or professionally, to the area they're currently in, we're likely going to move them. May not be super far, but they are going to move. Because moving one man is much easier than moving eight to fifteen women, if that's an option, which in many cases it is."

"I was also particularly impressed how your friend's new partners with a bit of celebrity weren't afraid to use that to help push our agenda, and to get people safe. Miss Stevens and Miss Washington certainly help our cause, showing that everyone's doing their part to get our men safe. Should I be concerned that we could see a massive uptick of people all wanting to request Scarlet Johannson or something?"

"The request program automatically runs any person against a list of already paired people, and people are given a 30-day cooldown each time they run a batch of requests, so they're encouraged to only request people they already know. If they want to throw some wild-ass requests in, sure, they're welcome to do so, but most of the A-list, B-list, C-list, D-list and even Z-list celebrities are in pairings now, so the system will just kick back all of those requests without bothering the person in any way, shape or form. Now, if you know someone who's very high profile who isn't paired, you should probably get them into Oracle today or tomorrow before your speech - that'll prevent them from getting swamped."

"How do you define 'very high profile,' Doctor Marcos?"

"Anyone who's ever had a national news story written about or including them, frankly," he said calmly. "Like I said, we're through most of the weeds now, since we took care of most of the greater Los Angeles in late September and early October, long before this could become an issue, but you know how awful some men can be. They're going to request models, actresses, athletes, the local TV weathergirl, some airline stewardess they met once and had a crush on... not that they'd be able to do much about those without a last name and a location, but I'm getting off track. The first two weeks after your speech are going to be the most chaotic by a landslide, because everyone who's alive is going to swarm the system hard, and we're doing everything we can to help distribute the Oracle system a bit, so there's no single point of failure, but nothing quite prepares you for five or ten million people all going to the same website at the same moment in time. That's outside of my area of expertise, though, and you'd want to talk to the Oracle department about that."

"I should probably ask them this next question as well, but do you know what measures we've taken to prevent hackers from causing problems with Oracle?"

Phil let out a dark and bitter laugh. "Well, many of the hackers across the globe are dead, so that's definitely crimping their attacks, but also we've got the best tech security team on it we can, and we're doing this to keep people alive. There's nothing profitable in maliciously disrupting that. We're not a business. We're not out to make money. There have been a couple of crazy blackhats who think the whole Quaranteam program is designed to get microchips into everyone's bloodstreams."

"You and I both know they aren't entirely wrong, Doctor Marcos."

"Well, the nanobots are far too small to be microchips, Madam President, but yes, I agree, we'll keep the information about the nanobots quiet for now, so as to not scare off any of the less intellectually minded men out there who see your speech."

"You think the word nanobots would cause them not to call?"

"I think the word nanobots would cause them to try and attack our injection centers," Phil chuckled. "Which is the last thing any of us wants. That said, I think a lot of nut bag fruit loops in the fringe groups ended up getting wiped out, because they kept holding their secret meetings, and one sick apple killed the whole damn orchard. But there's always at least a few radicals who manage to hunker down and are eager to blame somebody else for their problems. So let's not give them any red meat we don't have to."

"I agree whole-heartedly. I would much rather have the problem of people being too enthusiastic than not enough. The more people we have under your serum's protection--"

"I really wish you wouldn't call it my serum, Madam President."

"Alright, Doctor Marcos. The more people we have under our serum's protection, the better this country is positioned to prosper in the new world we find ourselves in. We're very much ahead right now. We need to make sure we stay ahead."

"I'm not a social scientist, Madam President, so I can't speak to any of that. What I can tell you is we're doing everything we can to leverage our medical advantage into other advantages. You probably know more about things like Operation Breadbasket and the other associated programs going on. I know we've certainly gained a number of foreign soldiers and intelligence operatives from other countries into our borders. I have one myself."

"The military still has no idea what's going on within the country of China. Satellite photographs have shown endless bodies in the streets, but even the trained infiltration experts we've sent to investigate China have failed to return or even check back in. Have you heard anything on the internet or via any back channels you might have with scientists over there?"

"I'm afraid not, Madam President. That's not really my area of expertise, and I don't have any contacts over there who would be able to help out," Phil said. "I, too, would really like to know how the world's most populated country is doing, and if there's even anybody alive in there. I'm not very optimistic but knowing something would be better than knowing nothing."

"I'll keep the military looking into it, Doctor Marcos, but I too am starting to grow heavily concerned. There's only so much we can do, though, what with their internet blackouts still in effect."

"I mean, whether we admit it publicly or not, Madam President, we did some of that too, here, trying to keep DuoHalo news in check. I understood why we were doing it, even if I didn't agree with it."

"There's a grave difference between what we're doing and what they're doing, Doctor Marcos. I would think we could at least agree upon that."

"Oh, we can, Madam President. I'm just saying, let's not go throwing stones from our glass house, yes?"

"Fair enough, Doctor Marcos," she sighed. "If you don't mind me getting personal, how are you holding up, Phil? I know we're asking a lot of you, but I'm asking you as a person right now, not as your Commander-In-Chief. You've done so much for this country, and if there's anything we can do to help lighten your load any, just ask. Don't give me any nonsense about politics or favoritism - we want you to be taken care of as best as we're capable of. So if you need something, don't stand on patriotism - just ask for it."

"Nothing I can think of Madam President."

"Phil."

"Ma'am?"

"Phil."

He sighed and laughed a little bit. "Fine. Increase our office size and add more staff here. We're the central hub for research into the DuoHalo virus and the Quaranteam serum. I know you just added a little bit, but, seriously, put some actual cash and people power into it, not just a wave that looks nice in the history books. We've got to start covering some of the more unusual cases, and dabble a bit at skunkworks research, just blue-sky theory stuff, so we can find things to help those our serum doesn't currently cover. I would try and continue looking for solutions to keep those in the Kill Zone alive but..."

"...but there's no one left there to save. Yes, I agree, it's not worth trying to put time and energy into it, especially since we want to be sure none of these mutations that are starting to pop up would affect the children who were below the Kill Zone. Are you certain they're going to be completely immune to the effects of DuoHalo for the rest of their lives?"

"Nothing's certain in our kind of science, Madam President, but we've tested some of the kids against the various mutated strains we've been able to safely contain, and so far, they haven't had any problems. They've been carriers for a few days, but even that seems limited to just two or three days, maximum. For the time being, it's another area I can think of to keep our research lax in, to focus on higher priorities."

"Alright then, Doctor Marcos. I should probably let you go. I'm afraid I've kept you up too long for you to get back to sleep, but be sure and try and take a nap during the day so you aren't missing out too much on sleep."

"Thank you, Madam President. I'm happy to serve."

"And we're lucky to have you, Doctor Marcos."

Phil watched the screen go black as the call terminated and he let out a sigh of relief. Once the knowledge of the virus and the serum were out in the public, he could be more transparent about what he was working on with friends and family, and he could finally relax a little.

There was just the matter of the few weeks following the announcement, and the fervor it was going to cause for people trying to get into the queue.

'Buckle up, America,' he thought to himself as he finally stood up. 'It's all about to come to light...'