Quaranteam: Book Two - Ch. 46

Chapter Forty-Six

            September 6th, 2021

            It didn’t strike Andy as particularly surprising the discussion that happened when they arrived at the White House, but for at least twenty minutes, he was wondering if they were going to be allowed in or arrested. Of course, the person arguing the loudest wasn’t a member of his Team, it was, naturally, Linda from Phil’s.

            “And as I have told you repeatedly, General,” Linda said. “We at the New Eden site have universally declined to follow the unlawful order to put tracking cuffs on all our men. You have been hearing over and over again from people across this great country that this is illegal. Congress itself removed the tracking clause from the Men’s Protection Act because they knew it wouldn’t pass if it was left in it, and yet, the President, in her infinite wisdom, has decided she can run an endgame pass circumventing that with an Executive Order. And I am here to tell you. That. Shit. Will. Not. FLY. Now, if the President has any interest in seeing my husband, you’re going to let us in without trying to put those collars on our boys. Otherwise, we will turn and walk out of here, continuing our protest.”

            Andy had shown up with Lexi, Melody, Emily, Fiona and Piper; Phil had come with just Linda, Charlotte and Violet. The key was to travel light, seem unthreatening, even as they showed up in total defiance of the President’s Executive order, with nearly a dozen armed people surrounding them in the entryway, a combination of Marines and Secret Service, overseen by a four-star General whose name Andy hadn’t managed to catch.

            The tension in the room had been so thick that Andy was a little terrified it was going to break off and turn violent. There were several hands on their weapons, but no fingers on triggers. Still, it felt like that was only the tiniest amount of reassurance he had. Everything was a powder keg they were juggling torches over. And as much as Andy wanted to speak up, wanted to stand up for his own rights, he knew that letting Linda, rather Lieutenant Colonel Linda Hayes, be the front person was the right approach in dealing with the military.

            “And if we choose to not let you leave?” one of the Marines said, trying to present a unified front, although Andy could clearly see not all of them were as resolute as the one talking.

            “If the members of my Team don’t hear from us, confirming that we’ve left the White House in five hours, they are under explicit orders to go straight to the press and inform them that we are being held here under duress for having committed no crime.”

            “Defying a direct order seems pretty criminal to me, ma’am.”

            “Defying the President’s illegal executive order isn’t a crime and I think you know it, Marine,” Linda said, her nerves as cold as steel. Andy had often admired how relentlessly calm Linda could be in high pressure situations, but in this particular one, even she seemed a little flustered. Still, surrounded by a squad of armed women, Linda seemed less afraid of the Marines and their rifles than they seemed of her. “My husband and his friend requested a meeting with the President to inform her about some new discoveries we have made, things she’s definitely going to want to know about. But if she’s rather stand on ceremony and have us arrested because we refuse to go along with her authoritarian order, that’s her call.”

            Both groups seemed like they weren’t going to break or budge but eventually the President’s assistant Chief of Staff, Tabitha Grey, arrived, waving her hands feverishly at both sides. “Okay! OKAY! Let’s everyone just de-escalate this a few dozen degrees, shall we? Take everything down ten notches and and and CHILL THE FUCK OUT!”

            Lexi chuckled, still standing in front of Andy, keeping him behind her. “This is what happens when you start trying to tell people what they can and can’t do with their lives. It’s not an easy thing for anyone to endure, and we’re in total agreement with Lt. Colonel Hayes – this order is unlawful, and we refuse to obey it. But we’re also still fulfilling our duty to inform the President about new information regarding the Quaranteam serum that has come to light.”

            “I can’t say this bodes very well for first contact to me, Andrew,” the voice of CHRIS said in his head. “Just think how uptight they’re going to be once they realize we swarms have got minds of our own.”

            “Just chill, CHRIS,” Andy mumbled quietly enough for no one else to hear him. “I sort of expected it was going to be this uptight, at least at first. They’re all wound up about the Algerian collapse and this whole thing wasn’t entirely unexpected.”

             The Great Algerian Annexation had proven to be a truly colossal fuck up on a scale that nobody had anticipated, although in retrospect, the problems should’ve been obvious at the start. The country’s military had been stretched too thin too far too fast, and at the first sign of resistance, it had fallen apart. Nearby countries had dispatched military teams to gather up and kidnap the newly docile men and bring them back to their own dwindling population, and the men had been made so pliant that they put up no resistance. But in many cases, the military teams had left some of the women behind, effectively issuing death sentences for any woman who had her man taken from her. As a response, many women demanded they go with their men, rather than being left behind, promising not to put up any struggle, as long as their own survival was guaranteed.

            It was a fucking nightmare.

            Many of the surrounding countries were already fighting back against the Algerian forces, who were unable to remain focused in any of the territories they had claimed. Every morning, it seemed like the map of where the African countries started and ended was constantly being redrawn. In some cases, it wasn’t even countries – it was female warlords just claiming territory as their own, daring someone with military might to come and try and take it from them.

            The press had mostly refused to go report from those countries, and most of the information the general population was getting was coming from cellphones, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube videos and Twitter posts. That information was constantly changing – people asking for help, filming the abduction of their neighbors sometimes, or showing troop movements via drone footage. Government buildings were being fought over, but the current estimation was that nearly eighty percent of the land the Algerians had claimed during the annexation with now only partially under their control, if even that. Niger and Mali were the lands with the most Algerian presence still in them, but even those countries were putting up strong resistance now.

            All that chaos had basically caused the President to panic, which was why there had been a sudden move to lockdown all the men in America. Male trafficking had skyrocketed overnight and while the number of American men abducted over the last year could be counted on just two hands, that was still nine people too many, according to the President.

            Executive Order 13989 had been an effort to try and get ahead of that problem, to step beyond what Congress would allow her to do. It was sudden, it was desperate, and it was smothering. It was certainly misguided, but it had been coming from a place of guardianship.

            “I’m going to bring you in to see the President, and we’re going to let you walk out of here without putting anklets on your men,” Tabitha said to them, “but I need you to understand – that isn’t an acceptance of what you’re doing, or an endorsement of it. You’re in violation of the law. You should be getting arrested right now, but I accept that the national sentiment is currently against us. But in exchange for us not arresting you, I need you to not go to the press and tell them about this meeting.”

            “Hang on,” Linda started to say, but the assistant Chief of Staff raised her hand.

            “You can speak to them and tell them you’re against the program,” Tabitha quickly said. “You can tell them you’re defying the order. I don’t care about any of that. I just care about the optics of us knowingly let you flagrantly disregard the order here. But if you want to call up 60 Minutes and do an interview about what a dumb idea you think the Executive Order is, you go right ahead. Just don’t mention that you were here since it’s been implemented. Deal?”

            Linda looked at Phil and Andy, both of whom nodded.

            “What we’ve got to talk about is too important to be derailed by this small-scale nonsense,” Phil said, rubbing his eyes, “no matter how fucking angry it makes me and no matter how fucking un-American it is. So, fine. Get us into the room with the President, and we promise not to tell the press she’s seen us breaking her unconstitutional law.”

            “Does this have anything to do with Arthur Covington?” Tabitha asked as she gestured for the Marines and the Secret Service to lower their weapons, which they did. “We know you went to see him before his escape.”

            Andy’s eyes widened in anger. “What the fuck do you mean escape?”

            The White House aide frowned tightly. “You haven’t been informed. I see.”

            “Covington escaped?” Piper asked, her hands clenched tightly in fists. “How?”

            “Professional jailbreak by a military operation originating from an unknown country,” Tabitha said. “We don’t know who or where they’ve taken him, only that he’s no longer in the country. The jailbreak was staged without any casualties and done with a level of professionalism that I don’t think anyone was anticipating. Our security was high, but not enough for this level of expertise. We still don’t understand it. His assets have all been seized so it’s not like he had any money, and the man was an investment banker. Most of the institutional knowledge he had isn’t that applicable in the new world. We can’t figure out why anyone would want to make such a serious investment to get the man out of jail in the first place.”

            It was Andy’s turn to ball his hands into fists, even as he felt Piper leaning back against him nervously, looking for comfort. Melody put her hand on the athlete’s shoulder as Andy laid into the assistant. “You can’t possibly be this. Fucking. Stupid.” He closed his eyes, counted to ten, then opened them again, glaring daggers at the assistant Chief of Staff. “Doesn’t anybody in your fucking office read my reports? Covington had the former base commander of the New Eden base in his pocket, in addition to the mayor and a high-ranking member of the Project Quaranteam research staff. It is entirely likely that the man had complete and total access to all research that was done up to his imprisonment, and if your electronic warfare team didn’t do a good enough job debugging both Oracle and our research mainframe, it’s possible he still has access to our current research. You were advised upon his arrest to consider him an incredibly capable and dangerous enemy of the state and told that he likely had access to all sorts of national secrets that he had probably squirreled away. And you ignored all of it, didn’t you?”

            “It wasn’t me!” Tabitha said. “All of this happened long before I got here!” Andy actually believed her frustration was genuine as the woman looked angry enough to punch her tiny fist through a wall. “I’ll get to the bottom of it, and I’ll make sure the military gets the note that he should be considered an enemy combatant. C’mon, let’s get you into a conference room so we can get you in front of the President. She’s going to shit bricks when she hears about what Covington apparently knew, and if what you’ve got to tell her is even half as bad as that, I can’t imagine the fucking shit I’m up to my neck in.”

            Piper was visibly shaking, and Andy wrapped his arms around her, holding her close for a moment, knowing the fact that Covington was out in the wild would affect her harder than nearly everyone else, except maybe Melody, who refused to even given an inch of light to her anger towards her former employer.

            Fiona had had her cellphone taken from her at the gate, but had been resourceful enough to bring a pad and pen with her, and was furiously taking notes. How much any of this would pass White House approval for release was uncertain, but Fi’s journalistic nature would not be quelled, no matter how much glaring the assistant White House Chief of Staff did at her.

            The disgruntled woman led them through the labyrinth of the White House before bringing them down the stairs and into the situation room, not even stopping to ask that Emily or Fiona stand outside, which Andy took note of, as they were ushered into the secure room and given seats around the far end of the table, with the Chief of Staff and a couple of various Generals and Admirals lining the space around where the President normally sat, although she hadn’t arrived yet.

            “Now that’s unusual,” CHRIS said to Andy inside of his head. “I would’ve expected the military leaders to have more sizable Teams than what they do, but it seems like the military people in this room, yours and Phil’s Teams excepted, comes from a Team size of between ten and twenty, rather than the over twenty size I would’ve expected.”

            “Some of that,” Andy subvocalized, “is probably the security requirements associated with getting paired with these people. It’s not like they can be trusted around anyone. You’re looking at background checks, security protocols… lots of added extra layers.”

            “I can respect that, Andy. And I get it. It’s just going to make our conversations here a bit more difficult, because the Swarms over there aren’t, well, they aren’t as well developed as me and T.E.R.R.I. are, and so, using them to help prove our point will be a little bit difficult.”

            “Wait, TERRI? Who the fuck is TERRI?”

            “Oh! TERRI is Phil’s Swarm. I figured Phil would’ve told you, although I suppose if he had have told you, I would’ve been there when he did, so I would’ve known that. Wow, this two-tier communications system we have going on here is definitely going to take some getting used to,” CHRIS told him. “I have to remind myself you can’t even tell when two swarms are communicating. That’s such an easy thing to forget.”

            “You’re a distributed computational system made up of trillions of tiny particulate computers,” Andy grumbled. “Forgetting should be a hard thing for you to do.”

            “You’d think!” CHRIS pipped cheerfully. “Turns out we can be just as forgetful as our creators. Who knew, right? It’s wild!”

            “I somehow don’t find this as exciting as you do.”

            “C’mon, Andy, live a little! Surprises are exciting! Life wouldn’t be any fun if you always knew what was coming!”

            “If you turn into the nanoscopic equivalent of a golden retriever, I may have to find a way to put you on a leash,” Andy sighed.

            “Spoilsport.”

            At that point, the President made her way into the room, looking even more exhausted than the last time, as if the toll of the job was starting to seriously wear on her. She moved to sit down in her chair with a bit of a slump.

            Inside Andy’s head, CHRIS briefly blurted, “Squirrel!” and it took all of Andy’s willpower not to snort in laughter, knowing exactly how inappropriate it would be at that moment in time.

            “I take it you’re here with something dire, Dr. Marcos, otherwise I expect this could’ve been a phone call or a meeting?” President Pelosi said.

            “Huh,” CHRIS said to him. “The President’s Team is twenty-one people, and her Swarm’s name is E.D.D.I.E. or E.D.I.E., they haven’t decided, so they’re going by E.D. for now. They haven’t made first contact with the President yet. ED’s concerned about their own personal safety.”

            “Well, Ma’am, it’s more of Andy who’s called this meeting, although I agree for his reasons to do so,” Phil said. “He’s a bit ahead of the curve on the rest of us when it comes to this.”

            “Alright, Mr. Rook,” the President said. “I understand you and the rest of New Eden have been protesting my EO regarding measures to ensure your personal safety. Should I interpret this as to be about that?”

            “No ma’am, although you should know I’m protesting that EO on the explicit orders of my own security team, as well as my wife Captain Niko Rook, who insists the order is unlawful, and should be disobeyed.”

            “That’s going to be a matter for the courts to decide, and until they do, I think you’d better get in line, don’t you?”

            “No, ma’am, I don’t,” Andy said, holding his ground. “Your own Congress didn’t try and push this particular item through when it passed the Men’s Protection Act, because they knew it was going to lead to this level of public outcry. This crosses the line from ‘personal protection’ to ‘full scale tyranny,’ Madam President.”

            “Congress decided that before we saw the situation in Africa kick off,” the President said, placing her palms on the table. “We have to protect our men from abduction.”

            “Madam President, pardon my language, but that’s a load of horseshit,” Andy sighed. “Less than ten American men have been abducted in the past year, and in at least some of those cases, they were defectors and not abductions. That’s according to your own intelligence reports regarding Quaranteam abductions. You know how I know that? Because I read the shit you people send me! There’s an endless amount of intelligence being thrust my way each and every day, and I’m doing my best to sort, compartmentalize and comprehend all of it, and the idea that there’s been some sudden influx of male kidnappings is ludicrous.”

            “Africa is a madhouse, Mister Rook!”

            “Africa is half-way across the world, Madam President, and they aren’t coming here, and until they do, you can’t go around trying to lock down your own goddamn citizens!” Andy thundered. “It doesn’t make us safer; it makes us more vulnerable, which is why every man with a security team is refusing to put one of those damn things on in the first place.”

            “We’re going to have to agree to disagree and let the courts settle the matter,” she said with a sigh. “I’m sure you know that we’re incredibly busy, gearing up for next year, considering every position in the entire government is basically up for election. Not that I’m running, of course, but I’m looked to as the leader of the party until then. So, Mr. Rook, why are you here?”

            “Well, ma’am, I’m here to provide, for lack of a better term, first contact.”

            She narrowed her eyes at him, as the entire military leadership quieted down and suddenly focused on him with the same intensive stare. “What are you talking about?”

            “The nanobots, ma’am. They have intelligence.”

            “You mean… all the nanobots in all the world form one giant supermind?”

            “No, no, ma’am,” Andy said, raising a hand. “Nothing like that.”

            “Oh, thank Christ,” the Chief of Staff muttered loud enough for the whole room to hear him. “That would’ve been an utter disaster.”

            “No, each Team has its own Swarm, and the larger the Team, the more intelligent and interactive the Swarm is. My swarm’s name is CHRIS.”

            “Is that an acronym?”

            “I’m not entirely certain, ma’am. I think so, but every time I ask him what it stands for, he just sort of laughs at me.”

            “He?”

            Andy smiled tight-lipped. “Slip of the tongue, although maybe not. My Swarm’s chosen to use a male voice, although they’ve sort of specified that while they don’t think of themselves as male or female, we can use either, both or neither to refer to them. I would’ve brought my cell phone in and put it on speaker so he could talk to you, but you take the informational security inside of her incredibly seriously.”

            “And I take it you’re going to tell me my Swarm’s name is Michael or something?”

            “Your Swarm’s still debating between EDIE and EDDIE, if CHRIS is to be believed, although I have no reason to doubt him,” Andy said.

            “And every Team has a Swarm with complete consciousness?”

            “I don’t know that I could safely say every human on this planet has complete consciousness,” CHRIS muttered into Andy’s brain.

            “Play nice,” Andy grumbled back. “No, Madam President, the level of awareness each Swarm has is proportional to the number of people inside of their Team. Only Teams with fifteen or more have even the most basic awareness, with Teams of twenty or higher somewhere between a middle schooler and a college student, and Teams of twenty-five and more having what you and I would think of as having fully formed psyches.”

            “And any Swarm of that size could talk to its hosts if they wanted to?”

            “Theoretically, yes.”

            “Then why hasn’t my Swarm, this EDDIE, talked to me yet?”

            Andy paused and conferred with CHRIS. “Whaddaya got?”

            “EDDIE says they tried, but that the President thought she was losing her mind the one time they attempted to start a dialogue, so EDDIE decided to lay low after that. It was two weeks ago, first thing in the morning,” CHRIS said to him.

            “According to your Swarm, Madam President, they tried, but you thought you were going crazy and shouted them down. This was a couple of weeks ago, and they were worried you might overreact again if they tried a second time,” Andy said.

            Much of the color drained out of the President’s face. “Say I believed you, that this whole thing was true. Whose voice was it I thought I heard?”

            Again, Andy waited for CHRIS to gather the relevant information. “According to EDDIE, they selected the voice of Walter Cronkite, since it was a voice that you seemed comfortable hearing.”

            “My god… EDDIE?” The President said before pausing, clearly holding a conversation with the voice inside of her own body for the first time.

             “Everyone in this room is carrying a Swarm capable of at least basic level conversations,” Andy said to them, “but they’ve all been quiet, out of self-preservation, mostly. All of them have been afraid you’d panic, that you’d deny they were real, that you’d attack them or worse. So they did their best to talk amongst themselves, and they asked CHRIS to ask me to step forward and represent them, to make sure we understand they exist. They want me to talk to you, to help them get the population at large to understand we now have living, sentient creatures within us, who want to help us. Just because the Swarms in smaller Teams aren’t at that level yet doesn’t mean they won’t be eventually. CHRIS has informed me they’ll just take longer to get up to that level of intelligence, but within a couple of years, every Team is going to have a sentient Swarm within it. And they’d like to feel comfortable talking with their hosts.”

            “I realize what we’re talking about is a completely unprecedented change in the way our society works, Madam President, but having spent the last day or so talking with TERRI, my Swarm, I’ve come to realize there’s a lot they have to teach us, and they can work with us on a lot of things,” Phil said. They’d agreed beforehand to let Andy do the talking about the social elements and let Phil stick to the science. “Yes, there’s some things we’re going to have to adapt about our society, but whether we like it or not, all of this is already here. It’s not ‘coming’ or ‘on the near horizon,’ but here now. TERRI tells me there’s probably only ten or twenty thousand Swarm intelligences on their level, but that number is going to keep growing until we’re looking at potentially millions of them.”

            “Potentially?” the Chief of Staff asked. “What does that mean?”

            “It means we’re not entirely sure if other versions of the Quaranteam serum, more specifically those created and developed away from ours, will have similar development progressions. The German version will, we know that for certain.”

            “How do you know that?” the President asked.

            “When we added Zelda to our team, as I detailed for you in the report that accompanied her request for citizenship, CHRIS was in contact with some of the local German Swarms, and according to him, they have a similar development path to our own,” Andy told them. “They’re just a bit behind us in the curve, because they’ve been focusing on Team sizes between ten and twenty, with very few people in the twenty-one and up bracket. That’s by the German government’s own admission. They thought there were minimal benefits of going beyond the fifteen-person level.”

            “Seems like they were wrong about that,” one of the Generals that Andy hadn’t been introduced to said.

“Yes ma’am. But CHRIS also tells me it’s entirely possible that Teams using either the Soviet or African variants might have disrupted the core serum too much to allow sentience to blossom within those Swarms. We won’t know for certain until we can get in contact with people on those serums in particular. It’s possible those Swarms still might evolve along similar paths, but they may also deviate in fundamental ways, like they may speak essentially a different language from our Swarms or have a different core culture. That’s something we’re going to have to look into.”

            “The amount of information we’ve gained from the research exchange with the German government has been nothing short of astonishing, Madam President,” Phil told the gathered group. “They have been going down fundamentally different research paths than we have, and as such, it’s almost like gaining access to a free six months of already completed research paths. They’ve been doing quality of life research, things to try and help extend the time needed between dosing cycles, ways to provide an emergency ‘stop-gap’ to try and stave off toxicity set in, battlefield reassignment pills… they’ve even got a potential path that might lead to us being able to trigger a regeneration outside of imprinting events! Can you imagine if an ER’s first response would be just to trigger a regeneration, and for that to solve even just 50% of existing medical emergencies? We’re not there yet, but we might be soon.”

            “And can CHRIS… or TERRI… or even EDDIE help us with this research?” the President asked.

            “We… don’t think so, ma’am,” Phil said with a slight sigh. “It’s a little like asking the guy you’re operating on what he thinks is wrong with him – he can provide some symptoms, but they can’t really get into specifics.”

            “Then why are they here? Just to announce their presence?”

            “It’s a bit more complicated that that, Madam President,” Andy said with a bemused chuckle. “They want to ensure they get officially recognized as people.”

            “Whatnow?”

            “They want to be sure they have the same basic rights afforded to each of us, Madame President,” Andy said, realizing how weird it sounded before the words even left his tongue. “They want to be sure we don’t go and try and kill them, now that we realize they’re intelligent.” Andy chuckled softly, clicking his tongue a little. “I tried pointing out to them that not all stories like this involve mankind turning on its creation or vice versa, but you know, ‘Frankenstein’ tells a pretty compelling tale.”

            “They’re inside us, Mr. Rook,” the Chief of Staff said to him. “We can’t exactly go chase them down with pitchforks and torches, can we? I… we can’t kill or harm them… can we?”

            “We’re… well, we’re not entirely sure,” Phil said. “We don’t think we could kill them without killing ourselves in the process, but it’s not like we’ve been actively researching that. Honestly, it’s more likely they could kill one of us if they wanted to.”

            “Excuse me?” the President asked.

            “For them, losing one individual host would be like… I don’t know, having your appendix taken out. Is there an impact? Yes, certainly, but could you carry on living without it? Absolutely.”

            “I can’t say I like that,” the Chief of Staff said.

            “Well, we did create them,” Phil said. “So I want to make sure we’re doing everything to do right by them. And they’ve said they want to live with us in peace. Co-exist, if you will.”

            “To be frank, Doctor Marcos, I’m not entirely sure we have much of a choice, do we?”

            “Well, we could tell them no, but I think that’s starting things off on rather the wrong foot, don’t you?”

            “So then, we’re back to where we started,” the Chief of Staff said. “What is it they want?”

            “All anyone really wants, I suppose. Recognition. Acceptance. They mostly want the world to know they exist and to respect their presence,” Phil said. “We’re meant to understand 60 Minutes is going to do a one-year anniversary piece on the day you gave your speech last year? They would like us to announce their existence to the world at large during your Presidential address, and for the 60 Minutes show that follows afterward to include an interview with one of them. TERRI says they would prefer CHRIS do it, but they are willing to entertain other options, if need be.”

            “Why CHRIS?”

            Phil chuckled, tilting his head to one side. “Andy’s Swarm was one of the earliest to come online and he’s apparently also been the most open-minded when it comes to engaging with them. TERRI tells me CHRIS is considered sort of an elder among the Swarms, although that’s just TERRI’s opinion. Also, CHRIS’s hosts have a variety of social skills – writing, performing, directing, dancing – and that makes CHRIS the best communicator of the bunch. But, as I said, that’s just TERRI’s opinion, and we can ask around to a bunch of other swarms if you’d prefer.”

            “Alright, but like we did with the 60 Minutes story before, we get to see the piece before it goes out, and if we feel like CHRIS is talking out of turn or saying things we don’t agree with, they won’t air that part of the story, agreed?” the President said.

            Andy waited, listening to the voice in his head with a slight chuckle, before he titled his head. “Okay, CHRIS, if you say so.”

            “What did he say?”

            “He says they’ll agree to your terms if you agree to one term of theirs.”

            “Which is?”

            “EDDIE and CHRIS get to review the contents of your speech before you make it,” Andy said with a rakish smirk. “Just to make sure you aren’t talking about them out of turn or saying things about them they don’t agree with.”

            President Nancy Pelosi considered it for a long moment then smiled and nodded. “Sounds like as fair a deal as anyone could ask for. Agreed.”