Quaranteam: Selected Servicing - Ch. 4 (alphas)

Part Four - “It’s Simple And It’s Mine”

January 4th, 2021

            The next morning, Fiona found Andy of course half-watching more updates about the Brian Morrison trial. Much of what was going on with it was troubling at best. The 24-news cycle was arguing about what constituted as ‘knowing’ what his semen was capable of. A lot of the debate centered around whether or not he could’ve been compelled into action, how complicit Arthur Covington was in the matter, and why Covington and Morrison weren’t being tried together.

            (At least for the last one, Fiona could understand the reasoning. Covington’s list of crimes was a lot longer and more involved, with the word ‘conspiracy’ attached to many of the entries.)

            Andy was also scribbling notes and plucking away at a keyboard, trying to write his way through a particularly troublesome section that seemed to be frustrating him while the cats had set up base camp on the other side of the sofa from him. He also had a yellow legal pad that he’d been scrawling various thoughts on. He had the volume off on the television, but had closed captioning on, so he could look up and read subtitles of what was going on when he wanted to get a glimpse of the trial. The little Bluetooth JBL speaker next to him was currently playing a deep cut from Buffalo Tom, “Anything That Way” off their “Big Red Letter Day” album. There was already an empty bottle of Orange Vanilla Coke next to him, meaning he’d been up for at least an hour or so, which surprised Fi.

            Morning Andy was rarely good Andy.

            It had been the one thing that took the most getting used to for new partners, Andy’s unusual sleep schedule. He strenuously avoided mornings unless there were things that simply had to be done in that window.

            But Fi had known Andy longer than anyone else in the house, and she remembered that when Andy had been particularly stressed about things, he would often wake up several times over the course of the night and go walking around, hoping it would clear his head. He would spend odd hours of the night doing homework or research, just because he was up, and it would take his mind off whatever was perplexing him.

            “You really that worked up about the Morrison trial, baby?” Fiona asked him.

            “It’s the repercussions that I’m mostly worried about,” Andy said, looking up from his writing, petting Muninn, who was curled up right next to him. Huginn was on the far side of the couch, sprawled out in the tiny sliver of the morning sunlight that penetrated that deep into the room. “Every man alive is now, technically, a chemical weapon, albeit with an incredibly short shelf-life. How do we make sense of that? Did you know I spent a good twenty minutes this morning researching how long male cum is effectively viable as an acid for women who aren’t imprinted on them?”

            “How long is that period?”

            “It depends highly on heat and humidity. Under a very dry and hot condition? Five to ten minutes, tops. But under hot and humid conditions? Up to a day. It’s madness.”

            “You’re worried about the day-to-day ethics of it?”

            “Mostly, although I’m also worried about the endless amount of cop procedural shows that are going to use the line, ‘But you’re the murder weapon!’ and are going to think they’re being original,” he said with a soft laugh. “We’re going to have years of that shit on TV before it becomes considered a trope.”

            “Only you could be thinking about such a thing at a time like this,” Fiona said, slumping down on the couch next to him, putting her arm around him. “You know you should be focusing on how this is going to require Congress to start putting legislature together, don’t you?”

            “I’m a damn writer, Fi, not Winston Churchill,” he grumbled. “I never wanted to spend all my days thinking about policy and bills and continuing resolutions and this, this, this bullshit bureaucracy I’m fucking tangled up in.”

            “It’s the people who least want power that most deserve it, Andy,” Fiona said, leaning in to kiss him on the cheek. “That’s why so many people trust you with it. You fucking hate having it. You’d rather anyone else ever have it.”

            “Let’s not go that far,” Andy said, smiling for the first time since she’d arrived. “I can think of a very long list of people I’d rather not have any control over people. But here we are, and that’s how it goes.”

            “So how many law concepts and program suggestions have you got in your notes already over all of this?”

            Andy let out another one of those long ponderous sighs that Fiona hated hearing from him, simply because it meant he’d been at this a while and saw no immediate end to it. “Twenty-seven. A lot of it I’m sure there’s already laws in development for, but some of this… it feels like it shouldn’t have to be written down, but if it isn’t, people are just going to ignore convention. That’s the way politics has been moving for the last few years, y’know? ‘If you didn’t specifically say I can’t do something, and just assumed I wouldn’t do it because nobody else tried to do it, then I’m gonna do it.’ That’s the entirety of their game plan. The phrase ‘don’t lock men up and throw away the key’ feels like it should be obvious, and yet, they’re back to talking about whether or not men need to be lo-jacked again.”

            “How many times are they going to keep coming back to this idea?”

            “Until they think it’s going to get passed,” Andy said. “I think they feel like they have the right to know where all men are going to be at all times, now that there’s so few of us.”

            “Just use your cellphones for that, like a respectable deep state,” Fiona huffed.

            “Right? You already have all these tools for tracking us at your disposal – stop asking us to make it easier for you.”

            “Are they trying to argue that Morrison didn’t do it?”

            “No, only that he didn’t know the extent of the damage it would do,” Andy replied. “They’re not contesting the fact that he knew it would be harmful to her, only that he thought the damage they were talking about had been played up. They’ve really been hammering home hard that he was doing these actions under duress anyway. I think they’re hoping to get it knocked down to ‘involuntary manslaughter,’ at worst, or, at best, that he wasn’t culpable for anything he did, since his life was being threatened.”

            “Yeah, ‘under duress’ is what his defense team is arguing at the start, that he was forced to do it, and as such, can’t be held accountable for the consequences of those actions. You think it’ll hold up?” Fiona asked him.

            “It’s his best, worst option, and if they can get some of the NDR to testify that he was at gunpoint when it happened, that may be enough for a jury to have some sympathy for him,” Andy said. “But they all have complete immunity for any and all known and unknown criminal actions they may have taken from their arrival in New Eden until their liberation from their first Teams, which I have to admit is quite the big blanket coverall.”

            “Wait, everything?”

            “Yep,” Andy said with a soft shake of his head. “Even if one of them had committed murder during the time they arrived at New Eden, they’ve got total immunity from it. I assume to protect them from the shit they did under Covington’s thumb. Melody apparently didn’t get caught up in the truly rank shit, or so she tells me.”

            “You believe her?”

            “We’ll get to her for your little project in time, Fi, but yeah, I do,” Andy said. “She’s got a good heart, despite her past, and I think she’s working very hard to try and be open and vulnerable with me. I think she’s been honest about the horrible shit she talked herself into doing, only to regret it all later. It’s a good start for her, considering how closed off she is, or maybe was. And when you start to dig into checkered pasts, damn, she’s got a goodie.”

            “We’ll get there,” Fiona said with a smile. “But I was thinking we stick to the plan and talk to them mostly in order of arrival, which would make Jenny next, yeah?”

            “Sure, and she’s easy enough to find where she is in the mornings – she’s making batch breakfast,” Andy said. “Shall we head down to the kitchen?”

            “You don’t need to keep an eye on the trial as it unfolds?”

            “It’s going to be going on for weeks, Fi. If I miss something, I’ll catch it when they circle back.” Andy stood up and folded his laptop closed, sending it into sleep mode. Muninn looked up at his master with annoyance, stretching out and putting a paw on top of Andy’s laptop, as if encouraging him to stay a while longer, the tomcat’s belly completely exposed, begging for a rub, so Andy gave his cat a good scritching on the stomach before leaving him to head for the kitchen with Fiona.

             Inside of the kitchen, Jenny had everything down to a system, with several different things on the stove, in the oven, resting on the table or waiting in the fridge. It looked nothing so much as a mad science experiment, or the cooking equivalent of a dozen spinning plates. There was a giant sheet of paper on the side of the fridge that tracked all the things various members of the house did and didn’t like in a massive spreadsheet, which allowed her to serve several people at once while making sure other people didn’t touch certain dishes.

            Before his regeneration, Andy had been allergic to strawberries, and while that allergy wasn’t present in his body after the regen, he still strongly disliked the flavor of strawberry. Sense memory was a strange thing, and in his conscious mind, he knew that he could eat strawberries just fine now, but his sense of taste still rejected them completely out of hand. The weight of all the memories was stronger than his body’s curiosity.

            He’d glanced at Jenny’s system before, and while he understood it, he couldn’t imagine the amount of effort it required to keep all those names and requirements clear in her mind at all times. There were sections of it that were color coded, and that made sense, as some of the members of his team grouped well together. The athletes – Piper, Jade and Sheridan – all had diets specifically tailored to their workout regimens, tracking calorie count for them, although Andy also noted that some of them had been adjusted in pencil, he suspected, because their managed caloric intakes had needed adjustment.

            Next to Andy’s name, the expected caloric intake was simply a question mark with a few lines drawn underneath it.

            He didn’t blame Jenny for that.

            He’d learned to just eat whenever he felt hungry.

            “Ah!” Jenny said with a smile as she spotted them coming into her domain. “Here, sir, I want you to try this.” She grabbed a small plate off the counter and held it up to him. On it was a croissant with what looked like ham, egg and cheese in the middle, although Andy realized it must’ve been a few kinds of cheese, based on the various shades.

            Andy took a bite out of it and realized he was right – there were multiple types of cheese, with some kind of sauce overlaying it. “That’s delicious. Is that gruyere mixed with cheddar?”

            “And Monterey jack,” Jenny said. “Plus there’s a hollandaise sauce on top. It’s certainly a little rich for a lot of us, but for you? Eat up.”

            He laughed a bit, as he moved to sit down on one of the stools off to the side. “We were wondering if we could talk to you this morning about your background, Jenny,” Andy said. “We can even volunteer to be helping hands around the kitchen while you’re talking, if that’ll offset the slowdown talking to us might cause.” He started to lift the top off one of the pots only for Jenny to smack the back of his hand with a spoon.

            “There’ll be none of that, Master Rook, thank you very much,” Jenny politely scolded. “You don’t see me wandering into your office, grabbing your laptop and battering off a few thousand words, do you?”

            “To be honest, it might make my days easier, Jenny,” Andy laughed.

            “I have noticed rather a lack of food descriptives in your writing, Master Rook,” Jenny said to him, “and while I have tried not to take it personally, if it’s for lack of inspiration—”

            “Let me save you the trouble right there, Jenny,” Andy said, shaking his head with a wry look of amusement. “It has nothing to do with you or your cooking skills. In fact, if you look at the most recent book, ‘The Fatal Solstice’, you’ll notice there’s a very lovely banquet scene inspired by your cooking. Before that, however, I was more than a little leery because there’s another writer who’s quite famous in my subsection of the bookstores, and he is infamous for taking pages upon pages to describe food in endless detail. And frankly, I just found myself getting extremely bored reading those pages and wanted to move on to something else, so I resolved to not write any of those kinds of sequences in my books. But I think enough time has passed and I’ve established my own sort of narrative voice that I’ll be happy to get away with including some food passages here and there, although certainly not to the extent that old Georgie does.”

            “That sounds only fair,” she said, with a slight sigh. “Now, I suppose you’re expecting me to unload a long and complicated backstory for you, hm?”

            “I’m expecting you to tell us the story of how you got from where you started to here,” Fiona said. “Nothing more, nothing less. And if there’s parts you don’t feel comfortable about me putting down, just tell me and I won’t.”

            “Oh no, my life story’s surprisingly conflict light,” she said.

                                                    *

            I was born Jennifer Claire Peters to Donnie and Anne Peters in Cleveland, Ohio, which I realize means that Master Andy and I come from similar backgrounds. Lots of people like to think of Cleveland as Podunk, but it’s one of the top fifty largest metropolitan areas inside the US, so most of my time growing up, I wasn’t all that different from anyone else in the area.

            My Dad ran an investment firm, and my Mom owned and cooked at a small little neighborhood restaurant called ‘Breezy.’ I had three older sisters, Keegan, Winona and Ashleigh, all of whom made it through the pandemic okay and are paired up back in Ohio, using their husbands as starting points for their templates. There’s about a four-year difference between me and Ashleigh, meaning when I was starting high school, Ashleigh was a senior and well on her way to having her whole life figured out.

            In fact, that was the biggest difference between me and my sisters – by the time they were in high school, they had their lives pretty much planned out. Keegan met her husband when she was thirteen; Winona met hers when she was sixteen and Ashleigh met hers on first day of her senior year, which meant I tended to get overlooked a bit, since I didn’t have it all mapped out.

            By the time I turned thirteen, I only really knew three very important things about myself – I loved art, I loved food, and I loved both boys and girls.

            The statistics say Ohio has a slightly higher than average of LGBTQ+ citizens, about 6.5% compared to the national average of 5.2% but it didn’t necessarily feel that way growing up. Around the time I hit high school, I’d started to get the sense that there were some girls in my high school class who were checking me out more than they were guys on the football team.

            So while I did some fooling around with girls on the side, and sort of had a girlfriend for about half a year my junior year, I went to both my junior and senior prom with boys, and lost my virginity when I was sixteen to Will Ryder, who was cool at the time because he had a motorcycle, and I was young and naïve and fell for stupid shit like that.

            (God, I can’t believe I fell for that prick. Don’t put this in your book, but if I found out he died from DuoHalo, I don’t think I’d shed a single tear. He was the worst possible first fuck a girl could’ve ever had. I found out later that ‘deflowering virgins’ was his kink, and that he typically had a string of them lined up, so he could just keep hopping from one to another. He dumped me the day after he fucked me, but I refused to let it put me off men entirely.)

            In the last year of high school, I started spending a lot of time studying art, specifically painting and sculpture. I wasn’t that great of an artist myself, although my painting isn’t terrible if I do say so, but I loved introducing people to art. I decided to study preservation of art, especially since I’d started seeing so many wonderful pieces of art going unrecognized or uncared for by the public.

            I also knew that I desperately needed to get out of Ohio. It’s not that it’s a bad place but it clearly wasn’t for me. I hated the snow and ice in winter, and I hated the conservative politics, where everyone felt it was okay to tell you that you weren’t living your life the way they wanted you to, but how dare you tell them how they had to live their lives in return. I grew violently sick of the “all the rules for you and none for me” mindset of the conservative politicians of the state, and I decided to go somewhere sunny.

            My grades were good enough and I’d saved up all the money I’d made working at Mom’s restaurant for three years of summers and weekends, so I got into UCLA. Dad utterly freaked out about it, saying I was going to be bankrupt for the rest of my life, but I didn’t care. I packed up all my things and headed out to Los Angeles in my beat up little black Honda Civic Del Sol, which only had two seats in it and was the least practical thing I’d ever bought.

            I remember the summer drive out here, much like I’m sure you do, Master Andy. I remember thinking that I was going to stop all the interesting places and make a nice two-week tour out of it… and then once I got out into western Nebraska… it was absolutely nothing a billion miles in any direction, but much of the country was that way! Indiana, Illinois, Iowa… three boring states that might as well have been interchangeable. Sure, there’s the brief bit through Colorado that’s lovely, but after that you’re in Utah, and I don’t think anyone in their right mind wants to be in Utah.

             But mostly, I remember my first view of the Pacific Ocean.

            God, what a beautiful thing.

            It was big and endless, and I was in love from the very start.

            I drove straight to the ocean first, long before I headed to the UCLA campus, and as soon as I could, I dove straight into the ocean and let it swallow me up. I didn’t even put on a swimsuit, just dove straight in in my clothes. I wanted to feel just how small and insignificant I was, while still feeling warm and enveloped in the best possible way.

            Of course, a lifeguard came chasing after me, thinking I was trying to intentionally drown myself, but hey, I think it was worth it.

            Less than six hours later, I was showing up to my dorm in Hendrick Hall at UCLA where I met Alexis Coleman, my randomly assigned roommate. She said I should call her Lexi, and it wasn’t until much later that I found out that she’d been called ‘Alexis’ by everyone she knew and went to school with growing up, and changing her name to ‘Lexi’ had been a chance for her to sort of reinvent herself. You can ask her more about that when you get a chance to talk to her about her past.

            Me and Lexi became great friends. I think I made a pass at her just once early on, but she told me quite strenuously she wasn’t into girls, and I respected her on that. She was handy as a wing woman, whether or not I was looking at girls or boys while we were out. Both she and I did a lot of dating in college – her strictly boys, me a mix of each. We didn’t get reputations of being sluts, at least not that I heard, but we definitely left our share of bodies in our wake, certainly me much more than Lexi, simply because she was so laser focused on her studies, so half the time when we’d come back to the dorms, or eventually our apartment, I’d have someone on my arm, and Lexi would be mostly sober and going back to her studies.

            We lived together for all four years we both spent at UCLA, and both of us excelled in our departments. I actually came up with some very clever techniques that are still being used to strip dirt and grime from stonework without damaging the stone, and when we graduated, Lexi went to join the CIA, like she’d been recruited to do in her last few months at UCLA. I’ll let her tell you her own story there.

            I got an offer to come up and be a curator and caretaker at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, so in 2007, I moved up to the Bay Area and got an apartment in Vallejo. I couldn’t afford to live in the city, so I got a place on the north side of the bay, right by the Ferry terminal.

            For the first few years, I was happy, but I was also a bit overwhelmed. I wanted to try and explore my new home, but as it turned out, I wanted to prove myself to my office more first, and that meant working longer hours and taking on more responsibility.

            Turned out, doing all that was a very dumb move, because in 2009, when the recession was in full-swing, MoMA had to cut staff, and I got laid off. But, in a weird twist of fate, I’d been given a free semester of classes at the California Culinary Academy as part of our Christmas party the year before.

            And so, back to school I went.

            I was dating a boy named Geoffrey at that point, and as nice as he was, he also had this tendency to do heroin when he wasn’t feeling 100%. I learned early on that I don’t have tolerance for drug addicts, and so when I told him he could get clean or we could break up, I wasn’t entirely shocked that he picked the drugs over me, no matter how much it stung.

             To get loose from that, I focused entirely on becoming the best chef I possibly could, and like anything I set my mind to, I turned out to be very good at cooking, to the great delight of my mother, who reminded me I was a pretty good cook when I was growing up and helping in her kitchen. I had my strengths and my weaknesses – I’m terrible at patisserie, for example – but by 2011, I’d graduated and was ready to start looking for work as a chef.

            About a year later, I’d just broken up with a girl named Evelyn and needed to move my shit out of her apartment down in Redwood City when I stumbled into a Harry’s Hofbrau and met Katie, who’d just split from her girlfriend, and we hit it off. She moved from her table to join me at mine, and we ended up staying there until well past their 11 PM closing time and they kicked us out.

            Katie and I got married a couple of years later, just around the time I was ditching my job with a catering company that hadn’t been pulling in enough work to justify their staff, so I floated both resumes around – my chef’s resume and my art historian’s resume. Turns out the art world is still in the recession it’d been in since ’09.

            I ended up getting a job as a line cook at the SFO Airport Marriott in 2015 and by the time 2018 rolled around, I’d made my way up to head chef and was pulling in a respectable amount of money while Katie was maintaining all the greenery on an estate home.

            But naturally, when lockdown happened, we both got stuffed into our apartment and pushed up to our boiling point. As a way to let off steam, the hotel had me and a couple of people come in to make large meals that could be sent home to our coworkers, so everyone felt like we were clinging onto each other, but that was only for the first month, and then even that stopped.

                                                    *

            “By the time, we’d gotten to the summer, though, the hotel had extended us about as much furlough pay as they could and were talking about shutting down everything and rehiring when they got back up, although Katie was sneaking out in the middle of the night to tend to a local park,” Jenny said. “She thought I didn’t know, but I knew she was being careful, and that was the most important part. By early September, though, we were… well, we were both in danger of losing our shit. The isolation and separation were hitting us hard.

            “Then our salvation came.”

            “Katie said you were approached by the Air Force in the first few days of September,” Fiona said.

            “That’s right. Dr. Johnson came into our home and tested us, and once we tested clean, she walked us through our options. We did, of course, lie about Katie being bi-sexual, mostly because we’d heard a bit of gossip about how lesbians were getting ‘left behind’ by whatever cure the Air Force had figured out. It’s amazing the amount of gossipy conspiracy bullshit gets thrown around on Nextdoor when people think nobody’s really watching, but we’d seen a couple of posts of women having the Air Force showing up and asking if they were bisexuals or lesbians, and when they were given the answer ‘no cock for us, please, thank you,’ the Air Force would sigh and tell them to hold tight. It seemed like ridiculous gossip, but when they actually asked us that, I spoke for Katie, just to ensure we didn’t get put on the backburner with the rest of our sapphic sisters.”

            “Was that really happening?” Fiona asked Andy.

            He shrugged a little bit. “Not to my knowledge, but back then? I was about as far out of the loop as you could get,” he said. “I could ask Phil.”

            “Anyway,” Jenny continued. “When we got brought to New Eden, we were given our choice of four households to work for, and I remember asking the person who seemed like he was in charge, the person I now know as your good friend Dr. Phil Marcos, how to decide. He said that you were a friend of his, and that you were ‘not like most rich people.’ I remember asking what that meant and Dr. Marcos told me that if there ever came a day where you treated us poorly, he’d personally make our reassignment his number one project, but that he considered it ‘easy money,’ and ‘a bet he couldn’t lose.’ That kind of confidence is rather convincing, especially on someone else’s behalf. I think that was the bit that made us trust him. He wasn’t vouching for himself; he was vouching for someone else.”

            “That’s Phil for you,” Andy said, “and one of the reasons I’ve always looked up to the guy. He’s always doing his best to try and look after other people, make sure they’re doing okay.”

            “Yeah, well, you’re his safety net, Andy,” Fiona said to him. “You make sure he doesn’t get too far up his own ass. You refuse to kowtow to him when he gets cocky.”

            “They always say the people you need most when you get big are the people who remember you when you weren’t shit,” Andy grinned.

            “Anyway, Master Rook, Mistress, that’s me,” Jenny said, as a timer went off and she started dishing out from a massive frying pan of hashbrowns. “Not that gripping or exciting of a story, I know, but it’s nice, it’s simple and it’s mine, and it’s one I’m happy to have lived it for as long as I have, and I have the love of my life with me. So, what more could I ask for?”

            “When you put it like that…” Fi said.

            “Great. Wonderful. Now scootch. This room is about be swarming with half-awake, unmade up basic bitches who prefer eating in peace. Go on, go!”