Quaranteam: Selected Servicing - Ch. 3 (all readers)

Part Three - “Weirder By The Day”

January 3rd, 2021

            Fiona had woken up early in the morning and yet again, for the third day in a row, Andy wasn’t asleep in bed beside them. She was starting to get a little annoyed and wondered if something in the New Year hadn’t been settling right with her husband-to-be. Her watch said 5:30 and Andy was almost never asleep before midnight, so she was going to need to make sure he was cramming in naps during the day.

It was a Monday, meaning that those with jobs were headed back into their respective places of work. Niko had gone to the base, and Lauren and Taylor had headed down to Santa Clara for the 49ers training camp, which meant that Jenny was up and had made some breakfasts, but the rest of the house seemed totally asleep, most of them not starting their days for at least another hour or two.

            At first, she suspected Andy had gone downstairs to watch more of the Brian Morrison trial, but when she wandered down there, she didn’t find him. So she moved on to the next logical place she expected to find him – in his office.

            Andy was known for getting strange ideas in the middle of the night and dashing off to a computer to try and scribble them down before they disappeared into the ether. He’d been that way even back in college, usually keeping some sort of diary or notebook next to the bed, but a couple of his partners were light sleepers, so when Andy had an idea, he would typically sneak out of bed and head down to the office where he could work undisturbed.

            But a quick check of both his upstairs office and his secret bunker basement office turned up no sign of Andy. At that point, Fi decided she didn’t want to play hide-and-seek with Andy, so she grabbed her phone and texted him.

            -The hell are you?-

            -Ha! In the garage!-

            -What are you … nevermind, I’m coming.-

            Fiona could think of absolutely no good reason Andy should be inside of the garage before six in the morning and was certainly more than a little curious as to what would drive him to be there, especially at that hour.

            But, as he’d said he would be, Andy was in the garage, although once she got there, she immediately understood why. Andy, Muninn and Huginn were apparently having a great big game of chase, with the two cats running rampant after a red laser pointer dot that Andy was darting around the space.

            Andy hadn’t spent enough time with his two cats since they’d moved in, and while the cats had befriended all the women in the house, they were still, at the end of the day, his cats, and had been with him for years. The two felines were certainly in their older years, but they seemed to take the Master’s attention as a revitalizer, as they were sprinting around the room, atop the cars and along the shelves of storage against the back of the building. It felt as though the two housecats were showing off, each trying to sprint past the other, making a desperate attempt to capture the red dot that would never be trapped.

            “I swear, you’d think I hadn’t played with them in months,” Andy said to her as she entered the room. “Mun’s been on non-stop zoomies for the last ten minutes, ready to attack at the drop of a hat. “I woke up this morning to Hue batting me on the nose, trying to get my attention. He’d managed to weave his way into the cuddle pile without waking anyone else up, so I figured I’d better reward him for that sort of cunning, otherwise, next thing you know he’s sitting awake and writing a tell-all behind the scenes book about what life in this house is really like.”

            Fiona nodded sagely. “He’d dedicate at least a chapter to how angry he was you took his balls from him, wouldn’t he?”

            “More than that, I’m sure,” Andy said. “At least they’re not declawed. We can only imagine how pissed off he’d have been at that point.”

            “Being declawed would’ve made it much harder for him to type, though.”

            “You don’t know Huginn like I do. When he’s determined to get something, he’ll do anything to make sure he gets what he wants.” Andy moved the laser pointer, and the two cats went leaping from one car to another, running up the hood and on top of the roof before jumping over to one of cars next to it. “If I didn’t get up to play with him for a bit, he would’ve made life living hell for just about everyone.”

            “You were up already though, weren’t you?”

            Andy sighed and nodded. “I was. I’m… I’m still wrapping my head around the thing from a few days back, the one with Katie.”

            “Well, I’ve got to talk to her sooner or later for the project, so if you want me to go and talk to her with you, I can do that,” Fiona volunteered. “What’s weird about it?”

            “The fact that an ardent, strident hard-core lesbian now says she finds my cock, and only my cock, to be an attractive piece of equipment?” Andy laughed. “I’m sure it’s tangled up in the serum somehow, which means there’s very little, if anything, I could’ve done to prevent it, but I just can’t stand making people do things they wouldn’t normally want to do.”

            “Back it up a minute there, Mister Rook,” Fiona said, trying to put a bit of authority to her tone. “Katie didn’t do anything she didn’t want to do. And based on what little gossip I can drag out of the rest of the staff, she certainly enjoyed the experience.”

            “I mean, yeah, it felt like she enjoyed it,” Andy said as Muninn grew bored chasing the red dot around and moved to hop into Andy’s lap, turning exactly two and a half times before settling down, as he usually did. “She said she very much did, but sometimes I think the staff is just placating me, telling me what they think I want to hear from them.”

            “Katie doesn’t strike me as that kind of woman, Andy,” Fi said with a playful smile in his direction. “Unlike most of the staff, who are capable of some serious subterfuge, Katie strikes me as a ‘speaks first, thinks after’ kind of person.”

            “That’s true, and even if she is downplaying what she’s feeling a bit, it’s probably just to try and make me feel better instead of worse,” Andy admitted. “But still, I hate thinking that I’ve caused her distress.”

            “Tell you what,” Fi said. “Let’s go talk to her and she can decide for herself what she’s thinking today. She’s never struck me as one that’ll be hard to get to speak her mind.”

            “Oh yeah, I told her and Jenny that you were doing a book and that you’d want to talk to her if that would be okay, and she said it would be fine, as long as you were willing to keep some of the stuff about her parents off the record. She said they’re still coming around to her personal sexuality, and she would rather not shame them. Says it’s not that they’re homophobic – just having a bit of trouble wrapping their heads around it.”

            “You know I’m not going to do anything anyone objects to, babe, you know that,” Fiona told him. “Where you expect she is this time of morning?”

            “She’ll be out back, mowing the massive expanse of land I’m supposed to call a back yard,” Andy said. “She does it every Monday.”

            “How come it never wakes us up?”

            “She starts on the far end of the property, and it’s far enough that we can’t hear it. You’ve walked it, haven’t you?”

            Fiona laughed softly. “I tried taking a stroll all the way to the back of it a few days after I first got here, but it’s a long goddamn way to get back there, and honestly? It just felt like a whole lot of forest, which is not really all that interesting to me. I’ve never been a naturalist.”

            The two of them gave the cats a few more minutes of affection and then headed out the back door and started walking across the giant expanse of grass that was supposedly the Rook lawn. It was a couple of minutes before they could even hear the lawnmower, but the closer they got, the more the roar of it became inescapable. It was, as Fiona had suspected, a riding lawnmower, although it looked like the loose grass was being left in the wake to keep the soil healthy and not consume a ton of water. The grass itself was even a hybrid Bermuda grass, designed to function and thrive with smaller amounts of precipitation.

Part of living in the dry parts of Northern California, she guessed, as she’d heard there’d been a lot of droughts over the last few decades. Andy had even made a crack about it in more than a couple of the Druid Gunslinger books. A good part of the land was covered in trees, though, which made her feel a bit better. Andy had been clear a number of times that if the area needed to be cleared and someone else needed to build a house on the property, he wouldn’t mind selling the excess land. Right now, however, it seemed like New Eden was intent on staying just off the beaten path, and not growing too large too quickly, despite its status as the centralized hub of DuoHalo research in the world.

As they started approaching the lawnmower, Katie brought the machine to a halt, quieting its engine. She was dressed in denim overalls atop a light long-sleeved shirt beneath, her hair up beneath her cap, her eyes covered with plastic safety goggles. “Hola, sir, madam. What brings you out to the Dark Side Of The Lawn?” she asked them with a laugh. “I can’t imagine you’re just out for a casual stroll.”

“Came out to talk to you, Katie,” Fiona said to her. “You know I’ve been putting together a book, right?”

“Yep, I did in fact hear about that, ma’am. And today you thought you’d delve into my background, learn a bit more about the staff?”

“Well, it also seemed a good excuse for me to check in on how you’re doing since the other day,” Andy said. “I wanted to make sure you were still feeling okay about all of that.”

“Okay?” Katie said with a slightly goofy smile on her face. “I actually feel pretty great about it, sir.” She paused for a second and then looked at him nervously. “Did… was I not a good fuck? I’d hate to have disappointed you.”

“No! No no,” Andy rushed to clarify. “You were great! Wonderful! I just know it wasn’t how you normally get off, and—”

“Andy! Sir!” she laughed, sultry and playful. “If I hadn’t wanted to do it, I wouldn’t have done it. But I did do it! And I liked it! A lot! In fact, I am already developing a list of all the things I am going to want to try with you as we continue to move forward. Jenny’s even putting together a suggestion list for me, stuff that I’d never really done before. We’ll run it all by you, of course, and anything you’re not up for, I won’t push you on it.”

“We’ll make it work out,” Andy said to her. “Anyhow, want to fill in Fiona on your life story?”

“Sure, but there’s not all that much to tell.”

                                                    *

I was born.

I grew up.

I moved up here.

I married Jenny.

We got paired with Andy.

The end.

                                                    *

Fiona rolled her eyes loud enough that she half expected to hear ten pins being knocked down in the distance when she opened them again. “Ha ha,” she said to the smirking Katie. “You want to try it again from the top, and this time, leave the sarcasm on the side?”

“Fine, fine, you’re no fun, ma’am…”

                                                    *

My parents, Eduardo and Anjela Rodriguez moved to Los Angeles from Juarez, Mexico in 1974 when they were basically still children. Dad had gotten an offer to work full time as a set builder for Paramount Pictures and he thought it was going to be a great new life for him and his new bride. He was all of twenty-two and she was only nineteen.

I’m the youngest of five kids, all girls, born between ’75 and ’88.

I don’t really remember Dad all that well. He died in a workplace accident in ’95 at the young age of forty-two. Mom ended up remarrying a few years later, because with five daughters, well, she needed the help in raising us all.

My oldest sister, Valentina, she and her husband Eddie had opened a restaurant called Dama Picante down by the movie studios, and it was doing well enough that she offered to let my mom come and work with her to supplement her income, and that sort of turned into the place where we would all be after school. We weren’t technically working, but we were helping out, and keeping costs low meant Valentina could help mom take home a bit more money to care for us.

 The Spicy Lady became a one-stop shop for my older sisters to find husbands and get jobs, because Yolanda, Esmerelda and Renata all ended up finding boys they would date and eventually marry working at the restaurant, but not me.

Not to say I didn’t have my fair share of boys sniffing around, but by the time I was old enough to know what to do with them, I knew I didn’t really want anything to do with them anyway.

I was ten when I realized I only liked girls. I remember, because I only told Valentina first, and her first reaction to it was, “It’s a phase. You’ll grow out of it.”

It wasn’t, and I didn’t.

In high school, I became the first girl in our family not to be working at the Dama Picante. Instead, I got a job working for Wang’s Landscaping Services, because I liked working with my hands, and as hard as we all worked at the restaurant, it was more fun building things that lasted, you know?

But in Los Angeles? I was living in the shadow of my family, and I hadn’t exactly felt comfortable coming out to most of them. They weren’t homophobic, but they just didn’t really know what to make of me.

So I decided to go out and live my life on my own terms, and that meant leaving Los Angeles. The place I’d grown up, you’d think it’d be harder to leave behind, but actually, I found the whole thing rather liberating.

I moved into the Tenderloin part of San Francisco in 2012, and once I got there, I found myself a gig working for a local landscaping company very quickly and getting a reputation of being a woman who could do three times the work for half the pay. I couldn’t afford to live in San Francisco for very long, though, even with people trying to get me to work for them exclusively. Everyone likes the idea of someone who works better than you expect them to, and I had that skill in spades.

That put me in high demand, so I moved south, where there were more rich people with much larger swaths of land they wanted taken care of. I was banging Morgan at the time, the woman I tried to talk you into back when you were taking suggestions. You remember, Andy? Now that I think about it, I’m actually a little glad you didn’t send her an invite, because I suspect it just would’ve been super awkward in the long run. We didn’t really part on the best of terms, no matter what I’m trying to tell myself.

Anyway, Morgan was working down in the South Bay and I was living up in a tiny little apartment in Redwood City working for a billionaire up in Hillsborough Hills, commuting in my dinky old Toyota pickup truck that was barely holding it together when one night I decided to stop in at Harry’s Hofbrau in Redwood City and get some dinner. Morgan and I had just had another one of our epic fights, where we couldn’t tell if we were on a break, totally over or just cutting into each other out of boredom, and honestly, I was just fucking exhausted with the whole thing and wanted to call it done.

In walks the cutest little thing ever, herself just fresh off a breakup literally five hours earlier.

That was when Jenny and I got together, and we fell in love hard and fast. Within a matter of days, we were finishing each other’s sentences. It wasn’t like we were the same person; if anything, we were sort of chocolate and peanut butter – two things that sounded ridiculous together on paper but worked perfect as a pairing. We complimented each other’s weaknesses and strengths, and we both thought we’d found our missing half.

We moved in together within a few months and a couple of years later we got married, since it was legal in the state of California, but it was a relatively private ceremony. We didn’t invite most of her family or mine, but Valentina came up to give me away without me asking her to, which was nice.

Fast forward a bit to May of last year, when Jenny and I were starting to go stir-crazy sitting at home, unable to work, unable to go places, unable to do anything. I’d taken to sneaking out of the house at night and going and gardening the public park that was only a few blocks away from the apartment, just because I needed to be doing something with my hands, and it was going to drive me crazy if I didn’t. I kept my distance from everyone, I wore a mask the whole time and, honestly, I never ran into anyone else the entire time I was out there.

When I was walking to and from the parks, I’d wonder about the houses where I didn’t see any lights, but I tried not to think about those with especially grown over lawns, cars that hadn’t moved in weeks or even months. That was the problem, though – there was so much decay and abandonment I saw all around us, on the walk.      

            By the time we were seeing the end of summer, the dark and vacant looking houses were more and more commonplace, and we were starting to get more and more worried, especially since my sister Yolanda’s boyfriend, Zeke, died in the hospital in August, which made the rest of my sisters, their partners, and my mom extremely vigilant.

            From that point on, we basically did everything we could to lock ourselves in the house and not talk to or see anyone. We had groceries delivered but left them sitting outside for half the day before we went and picked them up, then washed them all down thoroughly before bringing them into the house. I even started wearing a mask just taking our trash out to the garbage, despite the fact that I never saw any other souls out for walks.

            I think that was the part that creeped me out the most. No one else was doing late night walks. I didn’t see cars on the street. And more and more houses were appearing dark and looking abandoned. I started to see houses had been cleared out, with X’s painted on the doors with symbols around them, which I didn’t really understand at the time, but have come to learn usually indicated whether the person inside was dead or had been relocated.

             And then, a little way into September, there was a knock at our door, and I looked out the peephole to see a black woman dressed in a hazmat suit. “Katie Rodriguez? I’m Dr. Jennifer Jefferson, but you can just call me JJ if that’s easier. I’m here on behalf of the Air Force, and I’m here to talk to you about how to get through this disaster. Can I come in?”

            I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of her, but Jenny nudged me and told me to let her in, so I did. She entered our place carrying a box about the size of a fishing tackle box with her. “Uh, sure, I guess,” I told her. “What’s this all about?”

            “So I have it on file that you’re married to a Jenny Peters? I’m guessing that’s you?”

            “That’s me,” Jenny said. “You didn’t answer my wife’s question.”

            “First, before we go any further, I want you each to take one of these swabs and rub it on the inside of your cheek for a good five seconds.”

            We followed instructions, and she took each of the swabs and put them into the box she was carrying with her into little cylindrical slots before opening the side of the box, revealing a touchpad, as she input some instructions.

            “What’s that?” I asked her.

            “That’ll tell me if either of you’ve got DuoHalo.”

            “Which is?”

            “There’s two major viruses out there killing people right now, Covid and DuoHalo. Covid’s getting all the attention, but DuoHalo’s doing the most damage, without people even really talking much about it.” The machine chirped in a happy series of tones and the Doctor let out a deep sigh of relief, as she pulled her hazmat mask off and set it down on our dining room table next to her testing box. “And you’re both clear of both. Thank God. Can I get a cup of coffee or something, while I explain to you what your options are?”

            “Sure, I’ll get one,” Jenny said. “We’ve got a pot on that we made about an hour ago.”

            “Cool. Great. Awesome. Okay, ladies, so let me ask the first and most important question – are you lesbians or bisexuals?”

            I remember realizing at that moment that my life had truly taken a turn for the surreal. “Why are you asking? Does that matter?”

            “I said it was the most important question, and I meant it.”

            “Well, Jenny—” I started before Jenny jumped in and started talking over me.

            “We’re both bisexuals,” Jenny said as I shot her a curious look.

            That wasn’t exactly true. I’d understood Jenny was bisexual and she liked having some dick in her life, but as I’ve told you before, Andy, guys didn’t do anything for me, and I wasn’t sure why Jenny was lying about it.

            “That’s for the best, then,” JJ said to us. “So, we have a vaccine for DuoHalo, one that’ll give you nearly total immunity from it, but it’s a little… shall we say unconventional. Here, read the pamphlet and when you’ve finished it and got all your questions in mind, I’ll answer them.”

            She gave us each a copy of this pamphlet entitled “Surviving DuoHalo” that covered sort of the insaneness that is the Quaranteam serum, and how it would pair us to a man for not only his but our own survival. We wouldn’t have to be married to that man, but we would be engaging with him sexually, and on a regular basis. In doing so, we would get protection from DuoHalo.

            Now because we were a married couple, we’d been given a specific version of the pamphlet, detailing we could have a choice – to be emotional partners or to be employees. If we wanted to be emotional partners, they would try and find a pairing for us that would meet our emotional needs. Our other option was to enter the employ of someone of high standing, where we would work for them.

            Right away, that seemed like a good option for me and Jenny. The billionaire I’d been working for up in Hillsborough Hills had died back in June, and he’d left me a good severance package, that money wasn’t going to last us forever, though, and it didn’t seem like people were going to be staying in high end hotels for a while either, so Jenny’s job cooking had basically been on the backburner as well.

            “What kind of parameters can we set on the kind of person we’d be working for, if we were to take the employment option?”

            “It’s basically the exact same process as for finding you regular partners, but there’s some extra parameters it gets run against. And then there’s a more advanced contract that both you and the person you’ll be paired with have to sign. We want to make sure you won’t be taken advantage of, that you being in their employment isn’t detrimental to you, or to them. So, y’know, you can’t just claim you’re doing the job part of the job when you aren’t, if you’re being paid a salary for that. That part’s still a contract, and can be reviewed by an independent arbiter, if there’s conflict. But it also means they can’t just stop providing you with what you need to stay alive, even if the work part changes. Hopefully it’s just a few dozen pages of paperwork that prevents him from ripping you off, you from ripping him off and both of you from withholding sexual contact to the detriment of each other.”

            “Can we insist we stay together this way?” Jenny asked, as she handed JJ a cup of coffee.

            “Yep, you sure can,” JJ replied. “That’s one of the benefits that a lot of people take from this, the chance to remain with their partners all day, and to not have to wait for the Oracle program to pair them together with an emotional partner, which can be a lot more complicated.”

            “How so?”

            JJ blew across the top of her coffee to cool it off. “Well, the emotional pairing portion of the Oracle system can be loads lower for professional pairings, mostly because there’s loads of things it can throw out, and it has a far lower threshold. Who cares about things like cultural tastes or argument styles when it’s purely a professional relationship and you’re not expected to fall in love with the guy, right? So the match percentages are generally a lot lower, but that’s because it’s mostly just making sure there aren’t any sexual tics that’ll get in the way. It assumes you’re not going to be spending a whole lot of time in chit chat.”

            “That’s smart,” I told her. “It’s a good idea to establish a sort of baseline of emotional detachment between a staff and their employer. Would we have to move?”

            “Are you against it?” she asked before taking a long drink from her coffee. “God, that’s good stuff. Way better than the shit on the base.”

            I glanced out the window, thinking about the park I’d spent the last several months nurturing, and as much as I loved what I had built there, I had too many haunted memories of all the buildings around us, knowing how many of them must’ve had dead people in them. “I think we’d like to move, but not far,” I told her. “We like the Bay area, but it might be time to find a new place in the Bay area.”

            “That’s an easy ask,” she said to me. “There’s a little community being put together up around San Ramon that’s going to be getting a lot of people moving into it. I could run you by their incoming profile templates if you want. It would mean you’d be living on-site in someone else’s mansion, so, downside, you wouldn’t have your own place, per se, but upside, you’d be living in a mansion, right?”

            “I think we could make that work,” my wife said to her. “How soon would we be moved?”

            “It would depend on finding you two a good pairing,” JJ said. “But obviously you’re well and healthy. Let’s see. It’s September 9th, so I’m guessing we could probably have you imprinted and relocated before the end of the month, if that works.”

            “Sounds good.”

            “Great,” she said, as she tapped a button on her box and two little tickertape pieces of paper slid out of the machine’s printer slot, long narrow strips with a URL and a very long ID and password beneath it. “That’s each of your links to the Oracle test. It’s going to seem like a lot, believe me, I know. I keep telling them they should have hover-text that explains what a lot of the philias and phobias are, but they say it’s still a week or two out. My suggestion is just have Merriam-Webster open in a second window, and any time you don’t know a word, go look it up. And, above all else, be honest. The more you lie, the more you’re going to have problems with your partner’s expectations and your reality not lining up. Plus, y’know, nobody’s judging you. If your thing is dressing in a furry costume while having a dildo shoved into each of your holes, there’ll be someone out there who, even if they aren’t into that kind of thing, won’t be against it either, and they can make it work.”

            “How much of our stuff should we bring?”

            “Probably not more than a suitcase or two,” she told us. “After you’re settled in and imprinted, you’ll probably be able to come back here and get anything else you’ve left behind and bring it to your new location.”

            “And how soon will—”

            “If you do the test tonight, hell, you could have someone coming by to pick you up as soon as one or two days from now at the soonest, and probably within a week or two at the latest.”

            “Sounds great, Dr. Jefferson,” Jenny said to her. “We’ll spend the evening filling these out and we’ll hopefully see some people here not too long after that.”

            “Cool,” JJ replied. “Then I wish you ladies the best and remember – read all the paperwork before you sign it, especially if you’re going the employment route. If you have changes you need made, write them in red ink and initial them, and be sure to tell the officer in charge of your enrollment.” She grabbed her hazmat suit hat, pulled it back into place, closed up her box and picked it up. “Good luck, ladies, and take care of yourselves out there. It’s a weird world, and only getting weirder by the day.”

                                                    *

            “On September 24th, we were picked up by an Air Force truck and brought to New Eden, where all the paperwork was waiting for us, as well as some options for us to look through,” Katie said to them. “Jenny and I were given the option of joining Mister Haunton, Doctor McKenna or yourself, but, ah, your friend Phil recommended that if we wanted the least amount of friction that you would be the easiest to deal with. He… well, he said a nice thing about you that I didn’t realize was quite so nice when he said it.”

            Andy grinned. “Which was what, exactly?”

            “He said, ‘he’s completely unaccustomed to being wealthy, so you won’t have any bad habits to break him of.’ I remember thinking how odd a thing it was at the time, but then we read the one page they’d provided to us about you, it became clear you weren’t the kind of person who thought money made him better than everyone else, and we decided to trust Phil, because, well…”

            “Because everyone trusts Phil,” Fi said with a laugh. “That’s his superpower. He’s got an easy breezy charm about him, so how could he have anything but the best in mind for everyone?” She turned to look over at Andy. “What’s this employment agreement you signed? I don’t remember hearing about it earlier.”

            “Oh, it’s in the stack of papers you have to sign along with the wedding license application, as well as all the stuff tied to my will and so on,” Andy laughed. “You know, the giant pile you keep avoiding?”

            “But this one sounds like it’s actually important?”

            “It’s a codified document that prevents us from being dicks to our staff and prevents our staff from not doing their jobs and still expecting payments,” Andy told her. “It’s about forty pages of legalese telling you all that.”

            “So, that’s my story,” Katie said, “as boring as it is. I should get back to the lawn, though, otherwise I’m going to get behind schedule.”

            “And you’re still feeling good about the other thing?” Andy asked, perhaps a touch nervously.

            “Yes, Mr. Rook, I’m still very much in favor of you fucking me regularly,” Katie said with a laugh. “As long as my wife’s present.”

            “What if one of his wives wanted to be present?” Fi asked her.

            “Well,” Katie said with a roguish smirk as she tugged on the cable to restart the riding lawn mower. “I think we can probably set down some guidelines on how that can happen. With my wife’s permission, naturally. Sir. Ma’am. Now if you’ll excuse me. This lawn ain’t gonna mow itself.”