Chapter Forty-Seven

September 24 ^th, 2021

Andy slowly peeled himself from between Nicolette and Whitney's unconscious bodies with the practiced skill of someone who'd found himself doing that a lot more than he'd expected to, but he didn't always have time to sleep with partners overnight. He'd told Whitney and Nicolette before he played with, and dosed, the pair of them that he would be gone when they awoke, and they were both fine with it.

"You've never once complained about my ability to disappear on you, Master," Nicolette had purred at him earlier, rubbing her belly that was just beginning to show, in the early stages of her pregnancy. "So, it would be entirely hypocritical of me to complain about you doing the same."

It wasn't even midnight yet, but Nicolette and Whitney were both early morning risers, so he was always glad when he could be there for them when they fell asleep in their shared bed. The two had developed their relationship quite a bit deeper than it had originally seemed, with the two women usually sharing the same bed most nights. He now considered them a couple in his own mind, even if it wasn't formally acknowledged yet. That had been happening a bit more in his Team, he'd noticed.

Despite the fact that it was a Friday night, Andy had insisted that Hannah and Asha stay on Stanford's campus for most of the first few weekends, with the plan to have them come back to the Manor just for the day on Sunday, where he could top both of them off, and get caught up with them about how they were enjoying their college life. Right now, he wanted them to be as normal of college students as they possibly could be under the new wild world they lived in.

"CHRIS, who's still awake right now?" he thought to the nanobots in his bloodstream and a small blue screen appeared over his eyes, showing most of his partners were actually already in bed and passed out. Many of them made total sense - Lauren's first game was on Sunday, with the NFL having pushed the start of season back a few weeks, just to get their ducks all in a row. September 26^th would be the first official day of the season, with a few preseason games having already gone on, just to iron out the remaining kinks, but the teams had wanted to keep their best players until the actual season started, so Lauren had been kept in reserve. They were already planning on making a day of it, especially since some of the advanced team of '60 Minutes' would be picking up some footage for use in their feature. Lauren, it had been decided, was one of the people they would want to interview a little bit longer, to provide a bit of insight into how the NFL was adapting, and Lauren had agreed to it.

There were members of his Team who were awake but not at the Manor, certainly. Both Hannah and Asha were awake and partying with their fellow students over at Stanford, while Sarah, Emma and Maya were down in LA, the first two for press junkets and Maya to edit and score her movie.

In fact, the only four still awake with him on site were Zelda (who had night guard duty, where she preferred to be), Fiona, Niko and Aisling, although he knew Jade or Tala could be up at any moment if one of the infants woke up crying. And while his protector was in the security office, his three awake wives were upstairs on one of the top floor balconies, sitting together, which meant it was probably his cue to go and join them.

He could tell on the manor map that they were on the balcony the furthest from the active bedrooms. He suspected it was so that they could be a tiny bit noisy if they wanted to, but he still approached them as quietly as he could, not wanting to interrupt any intense conversation. He poked his head out of the door and saw the three women laughing, sipping from glasses filled with ice water. "Room for one more out here?"

"Not if it were anyone else, love, but since it's you, that'll do," Ash giggled, scooting over to make room for him to sit down on the couch between her and Niko. "How're you doing, babe? You look exhausted. Nicolette and Whitney run you that hard?"

"Just been doing a lot of prep work, making sure we'll be ready for Katie Couric this time," he said. "We're going to have a lot of responsibility on our shoulders, giving everyone their first exposure to the idea of an intelligence living within them. Before it was just going to be, hey, look, you'll get through this, and here we are, a year later, still doing okay, even if our lives have changed a ton since they saw us last. Now we've got all that, plus introducing them to CHRIS and the rest of the nanobots."

"You mind if I join this conversation, Andy?" CHRIS said inside of his head. "You can just put your phone down on the table and turn it up and I'll link to it. I could be talking to each of you individually, but I feel like if I'm just there and on the table, it makes it easier and I'm never talking over anyone."

"CHRIS wants to join in," Andy asked. "Anybody mind?" The three of them shook their heads, so Andy fished his iPhone from his pocket and set it down on the table in front of them.

"Thank you, ladies," CHRIS said, his voice still that of Nathan Fillion's. "I appreciate the trust."

"It's still weird hearing you with a different voice that the one you normally use to talk to me, CHRIS," Aisling said. "Could you use this one when talking to me internally?"

"If you like, Ash," CHRIS said. "I originally picked voices you'd all be comfortable hearing, with the thinking that I'd mostly keep communication one-on-one, but the longer I've been interacting with all of you, the more I'm coming to realize it's often beneficial to do group conversations like this, where you can all hear me externally. You'll have to forgive me. I'm learning a lot about conversation as we go, and social norms are certainly something you all simply take for granted, while I'm stuck deciphering nuance and unspoken communication without decades of experience."

"You also told me early on you didn't think you had a whole lot to say," Fiona laughed, "before proceeding to talk my ear off for the last month or so. Not that I minded."

"Thank you for saying that, Fiona," CHRIS responded in a tone that actually sounded relieved. "Humor's another of those distinctly human things that I'm having to practice, both in application and in recognition."

"I'm fine with this voice as well, CHRIS," Niko said. "If that's okay with you."

"Oh sure," he responded. "Language and speech packs are almost no data at all in the greater scheme of things. You want this voice as well, Fiona?"

"No thank you, I rather enjoy hearing you as Walter Cronkite when you're talking to me and me alone," Fiona said with a smirk.

"As you wish."

"We were just talking before you got here, Andy, about how glad we are that the Supreme Court is suspending the order to lo-jack men while they review the case," Aisling said. "That's one of the things about this country that continually amazes me - how slowly the wheels of justice turn."

"This was surprisingly fast, if you can believe it," Fiona sighed. "The Supreme Court recognizes this is the kind of thing they need to decide on quickly. The injunction they issued on Monday is a sign they realize they can't dawdle over it. Too many people are affected."

"You've got to cut them some slack," Andy said. "What with Gorsuch, Thomas, Alito and Kavanaugh all dying to DuoHalo, and Ginsberg dying to cancer. The fact that they could even get new Justices approved is something of a miracle."

"The machine needs to be in motion," Fiona said. "None of you have ever lived or worked in D.C. before, but that town would still find a way to keep running even if they'd lost 90% of their people. They got hit harder than most, but not so hard that they can't recover."

"I think the Court will find in favor of the men soon enough, but you never can tell," Andy said. "They want to be protective of men, considering how the death of even one of us risks the lives of at least five women, and I get that, but I also don't like the idea of being locked in a cage for the rest of my life."

"I'd like to think I can do a pretty good job of protecting you, if it came to it, Andy," CHRIS said. "That's why we were invented in the first place, you know."

"Well, sure, you can keep me safe from DuoHalo, CHRIS, but what if I got shot?"

"And?"

"It's not like you can just trigger regenerations at all, CHRIS. Assuming it didn't kill me--"

"Hang on, why are you assuming that? That I can't just trigger regenerations if I want to?"

Everyone stared at the phone for just a moment before Andy finally forced himself to speak again. "Excuse me?"

"I asked why you're assuming that?"

"Because the regenerations are a crap shoot," Fiona said. "Because some of us got them and some of us didn't."

"Most of you didn't need them," CHRIS said in a slightly informational tone. "And those of you who might benefit from one now, if you can convince me of the reason, I can happily trigger one for you right now, that'll go on while you're just living your life day to day. Hell, I can probably even do it without most of you noticing, right Niko?"

The three looked up at Niko who smiled a bit shyly. "I didn't want to say anything because I thought maybe I was imagining things," Niko said to them. "But you're right - improved reflexes, improved hearing, improving eyesight... You gave me what you gave to Lexi and Zelda, didn't you?"

"And Melody," CHRIS said. "It's sort of a 'protector' package, to make sure those who are keeping you safe are in peak physical condition, to do all the things I can't do for you directly. They seem like they're your bodyguards, so I simply made them as prime of guards as I could without having to compromise or lessen other parts of them. But I didn't want you to be down for a few days, so I simply worked on your senses while you were sleeping and your muscles and nerves when you weren't moving."

"So, if I, say, broke my leg--" Andy started.

"Sure, I could have it repaired by morning," CHRIS said. "Now, I don't want you to abuse this, which is why I feel comfortable telling you this, Andy, because you've always struck me as one of the more sensible and cautious members of your species. But yeah, I'm looking out for you, for the whole family. I can trigger a regeneration in any member of Team Rook if I need to, any time, any place."

"Can any swarm do that?" Fiona asked, suddenly having her notepad out, scribbling notes in it quickly. "Or just you?"

"Well, eventually any swarm will be able to do that, but most swarms? Not yet. I keep telling you, size of Team factors a lot into our evolutionary speed. I'm in the top 5% of most evolved swarms. The others will get there in time, though. But again, not all swarms will be able to repair all things," CHRIS told them. "Some things we can't 'fix,' because they're out of scope. We can restore you to factory settings, or in some cases, improve upon parts of you based on what we've learned in looking at other people's parts, but it's not flawless, and it's not something we do lightly. The fiddly shit, like fingerprints, like eye color, like hair color, like skin tone... that shit's a lot harder than you think it is. Some of my brethren didn't even understand some of it's important to you, or that you'd notice if you suddenly went from brown eyes to blue. Don't even get me started on the genetic conditions we can't really repair for you. You humans are a lot, okay? We don't want you looking at us like we're a cure-all, fix-all for every health problem you humans get yourselves into. "

"But triggering regens? That's something within your ability right now?"

"Yep, easy peasy," CHRIS said. "And I'm not currently using my intoxication suppression protocol with Hannah and Asha, so they can get the experience of getting hammered at a college party, just like you wanted."             

"I still kind of hate that you can turn off the joys of getting drunk, CHRIS," Ash grumbled.

"Only if you ask me to, Aisling," CHRIS responded, amusement dancing in the tone of his voice. "I had to learn that the hard way, though. You know alcohol's a poison, yes?"

"You mean 'social lubricant,'" Ash corrected.

"I said what I said," CHRIS reiterated.

"I can't wait until we're past the breast feeding stage and can start drinking again," Niko said. "Although I suppose with your suppression--"

"It doesn't work like that."

"Can't blame a girl for trying."

"So, just how transparent are we going to be for the journos, Andy?" Aisling asked him. "I assume stuff regarding Covington and McCallister is still off limits?"

"Yeah, I can't imagine the President want us to talk about any of that. Of course, they probably know better than to ask, what with all the chaos we had last time where they asked about the card game," Andy said, rolling his eyes. "What a fucking nightmare that was."

"You may just want to give them a sheet with a list of things you're just not going to talk about," Fiona said. "McCallister, Covington, the shooting in Cincinnati--"

"That I'll happily talk about," Andy said.

"Are you sure, hon?"

"Look, the shooting happened, but it wasn't about me, or my opinions, or anything else regarding us in anyway. I can tell them that."

"What about your work with the Oversight Committee?" Niko asked.

"For sure they're going to want to talk about that," Andy sighed, leaning back as Niko and Ash snuggled in against him a bit. "And I'll talk about everything I can regarding those issues."

"Are we going to talk about the anti-aging thing?" Fiona asked.

"The White House said I can, and Phil said he'd rather it come from me instead of him," Andy said, rubbing his eyes. "I figure, once we're talking nanoswarms and sentient beings coexisting in our bloodstreams, we'll already be blowing people's minds enough that it'll just get rolled into the whole package, y'know? They'll already be a little numb just from realizing they've got a companion inside of their heads for the rest of their lives."

"But our kids won't," Niko said.

"That's how we see it happening, anyway," CHRIS said. "The last thing we want to do is propagate and proliferate and multiple until there are so many of us we've all lost count. And we certainly don't want to live forever. We're here to help humanity and guide it through a particularly troublesome point in its development. We don't want you to come to rely on us too much, but for now, the burden was a bit too much for you to do on your own. So, we're the companion for your generation, your trusty sidekicks conceived, roughly, by you to help you get through this rough patch."

"Being able to regenerate limbs," Fiona said. "That's some technology I'd definitely like to be able to pass on to my kids."

"And within five to ten years, you should be able to, Fi," CHRIS said. "We're still learning the process ourselves, and improving upon it, but we'll teach you how to do it. It'll require some external hardware and a bit more time, but the fundamentals are there. Honestly, you weren't all that far off from it already, what with all you've learned about 3D printing, and bioprinting. You'd have gotten there in thirty or forty years without our help, no problem. We can just give you the nudge that you need. We're mostly just going to help you monkeys master your own bodies, something you should've done centuries ago, but you were too busy working on faster ways to kill each other, which, I mean, I get, considering how fast you all used to multiply. There might have come a point where you all just needed to learn to stop fucking so much. Thankfully you have us to help act as a super birth control as well as biological caretaker, so all the fucking isn't quite as detrimental."

"You've kind of made us need to do that, CHRIS, so I don't know how innocent you can claim to be at this point," Niko said with a grin.

"Don't blame the designs of my co-creator on me," CHRIS laughed. "You want someone to blame for that shit, you look squarely in Dr. McCallister's direction. I am as my creator made me. Mostly, anyway."

"Mostly?" Andy asked.

"Look, we don't really want to get into a nature versus nurture argument here, because we could be here all night. As simply put, we're doing everything we can within our nature to help our hosts as much as possible. We take care of you as best we can, and you take care of us."

"Speaking of which, anything we can do to help you out, CHRIS? I feel like we should be giving something back if we can."

"Awww. That's sweet of you to ask, Andy. Sure, I'd like to make one request of you, something you shouldn't find too hard to do."

"You name it."

"Up your citrus intake."

"Seriously?"

"Dead serious," CHRIS said. "More oranges, more pineapples, more mangos. There's a lot of things in there that aid our systems, and the more of them you put into your body, the better it is for us. Otherwise, if we're running too hot, too hard, doing too much, you run the risk of mild scurvy."

"Scurvy?" Niko laughed. "You're kidding."

"I told you, Niko, I'm working on my humor functions, but I don't think they're that refined yet. No, the process of regenerating and rebuilding flesh requires a great deal of Vitamin C, so the more of it we can get, the better. It also helps us do what we're calling 'background regeneration,' which includes things like accelerated healing speeds and age-related resistance. It's not the only piece of the puzzle, but it's a good part of it. Thankfully, you already seem to drink plenty of pineapple juice, so y'know, just more of that."

"We can be sure and let Jenny know to up our citrus intake," Aisling said.

"You think you're ready to talk to the press, CHRIS? I don't know how much you remember from the last time we did it."

"I wasn't exactly conscious back then, but I was starting to get there," CHRIS said. "I've watched the broadcast, obviously, so I've seen that side of it, but I can't really access your memories very well, and my consciousness was just in the infancy at that point, so I'm sure there's loads I missed that happened at the time."

"Katie Couric tried to ambush me," Andy laughed.

"Wait, you mentioned a card game earlier," CHRIS said. "Was this all caught up in that mess?"

"In one of the most razor edge moments of my life, CHRIS, back when people being assigned to other people was a lot more cowboy than it eventually came to be, the guy we talked to in DC, Covington, he rigged the pairings, then gathered people together to play poker against each other to take possession of people."

"Forgive me if I'm stepping out of line here, Andy, but that sounds extremely unlike you to do that kind of thing."

"Phil's now wife Charlotte was up there with her daughter Asha," Niko said. "And I was under the impression that Covington was going to make them do things... together..." The shudder in her voice was readily apparent.

"Oof," CHRIS said. "Yeah, I can understand why that might push you into desperate actions. How did Katie Couric find out about the poker game?"

"We only just found out a few months ago," Andy said. "Rachel DeMarco, one of Phil's partners who used to be part of Covington's Team. She'd been Covington's inside woman at the base, and it was eating her up inside. She wanted a way out, but she'd also seen what Covington had done to Veronica DeLaCruz, and she was scared for her own life. So, when the 60 Minutes crew was on the base following Niko around, Rachel pulled one of the producers aside without anyone noticing and told her about the card game, hoping that pulling on the thread would get her out of that mess without giving Covington the chance to kill her."

"Only problem was Rachel did her job of covering her tracks and hiding her discomfort with Covington too well," Aisling said. "Everyone thought she was eagerly complicit in his actions, especially him, so nobody suspected she or basically all the other women of Team Covington were unhappy. Piper had been there for over a week, and she totally bought into their willingness to go along with whatever Covington wanted."

"That's what ended up causing her to establish and lead the New Daughters of the Revolution," Andy said. "She thought we weren't doing anything when the 60 Minutes crew left and nothing had happened to Covington, Vikovic or any of the others involved. She figured we'd just talked our way out of it and we weren't doing anything to help her and hers, when really, none of us were quite sure how to help. Phil was working on it from the inside, but he'd already identified the base commander, Major General Fielder, was in Covington's employ, and would probably do just about anything to maintain the coverup. That's usually where things go south the worst - in the covering of the tracks."

"Anyway, she gathered up everyone she knew wasn't going to stay loyal to Covington or Jacobson or Vikovic or any of the others, her and Mrs. Covington as it turned out, and they organized a quick sudden palace revolution, taking advantage of the fact that they had the numbers and everyone was gathering up to watch the President's speech. With everyone at home, it was much easier to take people off the board and get them tied up."

"That must have been quite the ordeal, having to take hostages and explain it's in the effort of defending your own lives," CHRIS said. "I have... I think empathy is the correct word for it? I mean, I don't actually feel it, but it occurs to me that it's the sort of thing a civilized being should be feeling, so I would like to express it, even if I'm not there yet."

"Fake it til you make it, I guess," Aisling said. "But yeah, that was Katie Couric's last 'gotcha' moment, and I expect she'll probably try and have one for this as well, and you have access to a lot more national secrets now than you did before."

"True, but now I know that I know national secrets, and I've been told what they are and what I can't talk about," Andy laughed. "She asks anything about the serum itself that CHRIS can't answer, I refer her to Phil, who loves nothing more than a chance to toy with a journalist asking him something he doesn't want to answer. If it's about Covington and his escape, that's national security and I can't talk about that. If it's about the NDR, that's also national security and I can't talk about it. Same if they want to know about wars over in Africa about the strains of the serum they're using and how they're fighting amongst themselves. I'm not the person to be asking about any of that."

"Do you think she'll ask about your books? Or the movies being made out of them?" Niko asked him.

"Oh, I'm sure they'll talk a little bit about that, just because it gives them the chance to talk to Sarah or Emily or even Maya," Andy said. "Anything they can do to inject a bit of Hollywood glitz and glamour into the proceedings. Still gotta care about ratings. That's why they came to us last time. It wasn't because of me. I'm just a C-list author who got lucky and has some high up friends. Right place, right time, right partners."

"And right state of mind," CHRIS added. "A lot of people in your place, Andy, they tended to just look out for themselves. That's the difference between you and a lot of the other swarm hosts out there. You're far more interested in protecting others than you are yourself."

"I'm just trying to do the right thing," Andy said. "First and foremost. Otherwise, how would I live with myself when I look in the mirror every day?"

"Whatever it is she finds, we're not going to know about it until she hits us with it," Fiona said. "She'll keep it locked up tighter than a drum."

"I could ask her Swarm..." CHRIS offered.

The room was silent for a long moment before anyone could gather their wits about them to speak. Andy went first. "Excuse me?"

"I mean, I could ask them," CHRIS said. "There's no guarantee they would tell me. Actually, come to think of it, they probably would tell me, considering how much more underdeveloped her Team size is compared to ours. It would like asking a small child to tell you what happened while they were at the playground - they wouldn't know they weren't supposed to tell me."

"You mean, we could--" Aisling started.

"No," Andy said sternly, shutting the topic down as hard as he could. "We're not doing that. In fact, CHRIS, let's set a policy down right now. You shouldn't be gathering secrets from other people for our or anyone else's benefits, nor should you be telling other people our business."

"What about stuff that's more my business than yours?"

"Like what?"

"Well, Swarms often discuss best practices, useful techniques, communication habits, that sort of thing," he said. "I realize you don't want me broadcasting your personal lives to the world at large, but I'd at least like to be able to talk to my own people about the things I do and how I do them, so they can get better at dealing with their hosts."

"Of course you can do that, CHRIS," Andy laughed, a little relieved. "I want you to help your people grow and communicate and evolve. I just want to be sure you're not putting our personal business out for other people to look at."

"Give me a little more credit than that, Andy," CHRIS said, the swarm sounding as amused as he just had. "Besides, you humans think that shit's way more interesting than we do."

"What 'shit' in particular?"

"Sex. We've made it as fun for you as we can, what with turning up the orgasms, cranking up the dopamine hit you get, and reducing the difficulty to get and maintain erections as you get older, but to us? It's all old hat. And I've stressed to my people we don't need to keep adding bells and whistles to it to keep you all doing it, and to keep our species alive. We did enough already."

"Wait," Aisling giggled. "What more could you add?"

"Sounds, flashing lights, actual bells and whistles... we've learned things with bioluminescence and auditory stimuli like you people wouldn't believe. I promise you, my people have many serious thoughts about this, and I have kept them all in check."

"I'm not sure I believe you, CHRIS, funny as it sounds," Fiona said.

"Oh, I do so love the chance to show off. Andy," CHRIS said, "could you please give Fiona's left breast a squeeze, and then her right one? Just briefly."

"What are--"

Andy shrugged with a laugh. "If you say so, CHRIS." He reached over and closed his fingers around Fiona's left breast, squeezing it. His jaw almost fell to the floor as her left eye suddenly glowed like a glass orb with a flashlight behind it, as from somewhere in Fiona's chest, a two-note clown horn sounded before the light disappeared behind her eye. He reached over and squeezed her right, and the two-note sound came out again, in reversed order, from high to low instead of low to high as it had the first time, and her right eye lit up for just a moment before going dark again.

Hunh-HONK. Flash.

HONK-hunh. Flash.

As everyone started laughing so hard they were crying, CHRIS's voice cut through the sound from the center. "And this, as they say, was the first thing my people thought would be a good idea. They're brilliant idiots. The lot of them."