The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

November 20th, 2020

“Good evening, America,” President Pelosi said to them live through the television. The speech was being broadcast from the Oval Office, and while Pelosi hadn’t looked in good health for a long time, she looked particularly weary at this moment, as if the cost of living and leading through the crisis was aging her another year every month. “We, your leaders, have done our best to shield you from the disaster that has been happening all around us for months now, but today I come to you with the truth and a beacon of hope, something that will let us endure and survive.”

“Shit,” Andy muttered beneath his breath. “She’s really gonna say it.”

“Many of you have seen news stories talking about both the Covid pandemic and this new, far deadlier virus, which scientists are calling DuoHalo. We have advised everyone remain secluded and in isolation as much as they are able to endure, but despite our best efforts, losses in America have been incomprehensibly and irreparably high. We have done our best to work with the news outlets to do what we can to prevent a panic, but make no mistake, the situation is as bleak as it has ever been in our country’s history. As of today, November 20th, we here in America have suffered fatalities totaling almost 85% of our male population, and 15% of our female population.

“In addition to this, we have lost an entire generation, a very specific subslice of our population. While we are still working to understand this data, it seems as though almost everyone between the ages of twelve and seventeen in the United States, both male and female alike, now lays dead, felled by this horrific disease. It seems that those who have yet to hit puberty are spared from the most deadly effects of the virus, and while they will undoubtedly have long-term health complications, we expect very few fatalities in this age range, even as they age further, as their bodies will already have built enough resistance to the virus to not be fatal, one bright spot in this extremely dark data.

“Our prisons are now mostly empty buildings, with nearly every incarcerated male in America dead, as DuoHalo ripped through them faster than anyone could respond, neither inmate nor guard spared from the plague as it shredded through their hallways.

“This virus is also blind to race, and the numbers of dead are mostly consistent across all ethnicities. It spares only us women, and instead forces us to watch helplessly as the men of our country—our fathers and husbands and brothers and sons—are quickly struck dead before us, far too sudden and in too large of numbers for us to grieve individually, as the list of fallen grows ever longer.

“All of this means that over 160 million Americans have died in the span of less than a year. It is harrowing and it is bleak, but we do have a way through, unorthodox but viable.

“In working to develop a vaccine or a cure for DuoHalo, our scientists discovered a stopgap solution that has unfortunately turned into a lifeline, so that we do not lose what few remaining men we have here in the United States. The medical treatment our scientists have developed is lethal when given directly to men, but when given to women, the treatment can be passed on to men through sexual contact. Essentially, we have made a sexually transmitted vaccine. It was certainly not what we had hoped for, but it is what we have available to us. And, more importantly, we know that it works, not some of the time, but all of the time. With 100% certainty. Even someone who has been infected with DuoHalo can make a complete recovery if they are given the treatment fast enough. Among those who have taken the treatment, we have not had any deaths do to DuoHalo. This will allow our country to live on, but a number of changes are being made, rewriting some of our fundamental laws of society, for a time, at least.

“A few months ago, we briefly had hopes that we had created a different version of the vaccine that would function as a stand-alone, and would be able to be injected into both men and women, but it turned out that this version had such a short duration of efficacy that it wasn’t worth further exploring, as it would have required weekly injections to every man and woman. Beyond that, each time the vaccine’s resistance to the DuoHalo virus would diminish, until eight or nine weeks later the vaccine would be completely useless, providing no resistance to DuoHalo at all. We are still working with that version, attempting to solve its problems, but they seem, at this point, perhaps too great for our scientists to conquer in the needed timeframe, so we are moving forward with the less orthodox solution, and making some strong changes to help our society weather the new world we find ourselves in, whatever it takes.”

Andy remembered Phil talking about it around the time his brother had died, but when he’d followed up on it, Phil had simply said that it was looking like the findings had been ‘overly optimistic,’ and that if anything changed, he’d let Andy know. The fact that Phil had never brought it up again had told Andy that it hadn’t worked out, and he hadn’t wanted to bring up the sore spot to his friend.

“Starting immediately, marriage for men of age is becoming compulsory. There will be a grace period, of course, as we work over the next few months to ensure that every eligible male of age is paired up with not one but multiple wives. Shared marriages are no longer illegal; they are, in fact, mandatory. Those precious few men we as a nation have remaining need new mental and emotional support systems, as we expect survivor syndrome to hit hard. Polyamory will not necessarily remain the lay of the land for generations to come, but for next twenty years or so, it will certainly be so, and a single man may have as many wives as he feels comfortable with. We expect the number to vary from four upwards, but in some rare cases may even include dozens. It will be mandatory for a man to have at least four wives, and partners will be repeatedly sent to surviving men to insure this. This one-to-many ratio is for the ensured prolonged health of our few remaining men, as the more female partners a man has, the stronger his immunity to DuoHalo will be. I assure you, my fellow Americans, that we are going to great lengths to ensure that both men and women are paired up in only positive ways, and that they are in relationships that will survive the test of time. I myself am sharing my husband Richard with five other women, and while I will be the first to admit, it has presented all sorts of new challenges, we are doing our best to make it work in our home, much like all of you will have to learn to do yourselves. For those relationships that do fail, we are also working on solutions to solve those problems once we have weathered the darkest part of the storm and are on the other side.

“We do not take these forced pairings lightly, because they involve a bonding process, an imprinting of women onto men, which means that women who engage in sexual activity with men other than their bonded partner risk severe injury, even death. They can, however, engage in sexual contact with other women without consequence, as long as they do not come in contact with semen from anyone other than their bonded partner. When women are first given the treatment at one of our facilities, they will be given a briefing on what is required of them in this new world of ours. I advise that each and every woman take what you hear in this briefing deadly seriously, as your very life depends on you following the few rules presented to you.

“We have already begun rolling this treatment out across the United States, and as of right now, nearly 50% of the surviving male population has at least the first of their partners sharing a house with them, providing some basic resistance to the virus. There are other effects—both positive and negative—that can sometimes come with the serum, which our scientists who discovered it are calling the Quaranteam serum, but those vary too much to go into any detail tonight, and more will be detailed over the months to come. Most will be discussed in length with the women when they are initially given the Quaranteam serum on site.

“This change in the family unit is going to bring with it a change in the landscape of the American population. With the deaths of so many male Americans, so many properties are untended, unpopulated. Because of this, I have drafted and Congress, what remains of it anyway, has passed The Great American Redistribution Project, which will relocate and house all of the remaining, surviving men in America in homes and residences designed to accommodate the new, unorthodox family units. This means we have built new villages with larger sized homes, but also reclaimed and renovated large scale tower buildings in more urban areas, knocking down walls and doors, turning a floor of apartments into a single-level dwelling for one family, or Team as they’ve been referred to by some of our scientists. While apartment towers once had hundreds of families living in them, they now hold only dozens. This will also be true for more suburban neighborhoods, where larger homes are being constructed on lots that used to hold as many as four homes.

“We have done all of this as quickly and quietly as we can, going so far as to enlist all available contractors and construction workers, giving them priority access to the Quaranteam process in order to get them working on altering existing structures as well as building new ones. Many of the men out there watching this tonight are inevitably in their new homes already, trying to adjust to all the changes they’ve gone through over recent months, and the rest of you should expect to be relocated within a matter of months as you are quickly partnered up. I urge that you make these new communities into homes, to make them your own. Take the time to get to know your new neighbors.

“With eminent domain, we will be restructuring the communities of America, and have done our best to ensure that America continues to be the great melting pot that we know and love. Part of the problem of this country for the last decade has been the self-segregation that we Americans have tragically been engaging in. We have chosen to isolate ourselves away from our neighbors, or, more commonly, have worked to enshroud ourselves in neighborhoods that only reflect our own experiences. We cannot be afforded this narrow worldview any more, and so in the relocation process, we have worked to blend Americans with walks of life they might not have interacted with regularly. Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative, white, black, Latino, Asian, Native and every other walk of life in between. No man nor woman can continue to be an island, oblivious to the rest of America. We simply cannot afford that level of isolation or ignorance of each other any longer. Learn from your neighbors. Learn to love them. Make sure your Team is intermingling with the other Teams around you. These are our new villages. We must embrace each other, not fear them. It will be a challenge looking at these people with impartial eyes, but I ask you not to judge lest ye be judged yourself.

“We are working to find a solution for those Americans who are LGBTQ+ and are unable or unwilling to partner in a binary male/female relationship, but as of yet, we do not have any solution beyond the one we are working with, so we must ask you to continue to isolate as best you can, until we have a working solution for you. I assure you, this is of the utmost importance to us, and we will not stop until we have something to protect you from this insidious virus. Do everything you can to keep yourself away from other people and to remain isolated and safe from exposure to DuoHalo, as this disease has already killed far too many of us.

“Those of you who are imprinted and paired with a partner or partners, you can freely move about the world again, as long as you are following the regimen required to keep your immunity strong. Keep your partners close and regularly strengthen your immunity together. You can travel, you can return to work, you can visit family... you can do all the things you once did. You are safe once more, and it’s important that you reconnect with your loved ones and family members, as long as they are also imprinted and paired. If they are not, you should not visit them until they are paired, for their safety more than your own. We are working to get all of America imprinted and paired, but this is the largest medical action in our great nation’s history, and it will take time, so we ask for your patience.

“We as Americans are certainly not suffering alone in this regard. The world at large is suffering with us in this moment of unprecedented crisis, and many nations are far worse off than we are. Other countries have only thousands of men remaining. Others still even less. We have unconfirmed reports that some nations might be down to only a handful of male survivors at this time. It is even possible that a few nations may have no men in them whatsoever anymore. Over three billion men have been killed by this horrible plague, and it will not stop until all men are dead or protected. As such, we are sharing our treatment with as many of these other nations as we are able, to ensure not only our own survival, but the survival of the species.

“In exchange for our help, some nations will be sending some of their citizens to join our great nation, and I expect all Americans to welcome these new women to our shores with open arms. This is only the beginning of many major changes across this little blue orb we call Earth, and I will do my best to keep everyone appraised of all the steps we are taking along the way towards recovery as best as I am able, but so much is happening so fast that details may occasionally be lost along the way. There is talk that we may move to formalize some relationships and that the number of states in our great union might go up by a sizable amount in a very short time, but all of this is still in talks. To ensure the survival of their nations, many are offering land, resources, and even people. I intend to do whatever I can to ensure the prosperity of this great nation of ours, and I will always put our vaccine needs above those of other countries, but when it comes to excess vaccine, we will take care of our allies first and foremost, and those who can offer us the best deal will come next.”

Andy was a little surprised how ruthless President Pelosi sounded, but in many ways the high end leadership of both political parties in the United States weren’t all the different from one another—there was always a sense of ‘what have you done for me lately?’ and while the left made sure to protect things like women’s rights and minority rights, they were still far closer to the right than most of the Democratic Party voters would have liked. She’d openly admitted that the excess vaccine was basically for sale to the nation that would provide the United States the best deal. There was something about that which left a bitter taste in Andy’s mouth, and he hoped it wouldn’t come back to bite the country in the ass at some point.

“As only the second person to hold this distinguished office who was never elected to either the office of the presidency or the vice presidency, I recognize how unusual this situation is, but for the time being, I am America’s wartime president in the war against DuoHalo. We have had to appoint so many people that it might feel like the citizens of our country no longer have their representation chosen by them, a concern I hear and would like to address. All officeholders in our governments will have their tenures extended by two years, and in the fall of 2022, once the country has stabilized once more, we will hold a new round of elections for all offices. Senators, representatives, governors, mayors—from top to bottom, we will build a new foundation of government, one that I suspect will be much more representative of how our population looks now, with many, many more women holding office. As for me, I will not seek reelection for the Presidency, nor will I return to my place as Speaker of the House of Representatives. These past few months have felt like a thousand lifetimes to me, and after I have helped establish the bedrock for this new phase of our country, I will retire to allow other candidates to represent you in this great office.

“One last bit of sunlight I can offer you in these dark times is that early reports are that children from two people who both have the Quaranteam serum running through their veins will likely be completely immune to DuoHalo, and will not need to be bonded to anyone to endure it moving forward. This data is extremely early, but extremely promising as well. We are studying to see if there is a way to reverse engineer this immunity back to either parent, but as of yet, our scientists have made little to no progress on that front. Still, the birth rates and survival rates should be completely normal, which means that although we will have lost a few generations, we are going to survive, both as a nation and as a species.

“But know that we are currently a nation without most of our men, and we need to kickstart the process of rebuilding the male population as best as we are able if we are to weather this storm and come out on the other side of it, so we will be working to construct a system to encourage people to have multiple children, a brief return to the giant family sizes of old, something the temporary mandated polyamory should aid in. Tax benefits will be extended, education will be offered free of charge and to every child born within the next two years, the United States government will give them an acre of land to call their very own, or to sell and profit from, once they have reached the age of 18.

“Make no mistake about this—our old way of life is buried beneath the bodies of all our fallen men, and we must build a new one with what few male survivors we have been able to protect. And protect them we must, as they are now one of the most scarce and precious resources our planet has. Those of you who have not yet been imprinted or had partners imprinted on you, you must participate in this process as quickly and willingly as possible, and until you have at least one partner you must continue to self-isolate at all costs, as not just your survival, but the survival of our species as a whole could depend on it. Current estimates are that we will have every surviving male in America paired up with at least four partners by the end of March, but anything we can do to speed that effort up, we will, and I aim to have all our men protected as soon as possible.

“In working with the people over at 60 Minutes, we have put together an hour long special which will cover some of the new laws, talk about the history of the virus and the Quaranteam serum, and interview some people living under the new system already. I realize this is an overwhelming amount of tragedy and strife to introduce you to all at once, but I think in watching the special, you will begin to see the seeds of hope taking root and giving birth to this new phase of our great nation.

“The changes to the fabric of our society are immense, and the legacy of it will last for lifetimes to come, but we will not surrender. We will not simply die quietly in the night. The women of this great nation have always been willing to fight just as hard as the men, and now it is our turn to be called forward, to stand up and deliver protection to those in need, our vulnerable men. We will fight to survive with every last breath, and the American spirit, while dampened, can never be extinguished. We will stand tall together and beat this challenge, as we have so many others, together.

“God bless you, and God bless America.”

The room was dead silent for what felt like an eternity before Sarah spoke first. “Okay Phil, you’re deep in the know about all of this. Which is more likely to become a US state, Canada or Mexico?” she asked, trying to lighten the mood a little.

“Let’s just say I don’t feel comfortable calling either of those as ‘likely’ or ‘unlikely,’ Sarah,” Phil said, shaking his head, while Andy put the television on mute, the talking head pundits already started to try and dissect the President’s speech. They had about five minutes before the 60 Minutes special was set to come on, and Andy didn’t even care what the people over at CNN were saying about what they’d just heard. “The next few months are make-or-break for us as a species. I think America’s going to come through it in one fashion or another. Same for most of the former G8, although Russia and Canada are both in a lot more trouble than the rest of us. China was a goddamn mess at the start, but I think they’ve gotten deadly serious with their quarantines now, so maybe they’ll do alright in the long run. We don’t really know—they’ve gone into some kind of communications blackout, last I’d heard. We’d sent them messages about the Quaranteam serum, but nobody had called us back about it.”

“That sounds rather disturbing,” Aisling said.

“Agreed,” Linda responded. “But there’s only so much we can do about it right now. We’re already strained to the breaking point worrying about the state of our own country. We’ll reach out to them again soon.”

“You were joking about your reply regarding Mexico and Canada, yes, Phil?” Emily asked. “Or is it truly so dire?”

“We might end up taking some of their land,” Phil said. “But completely absorbing another country? I don’t think that’s likely, buuuuut... at this point, I don’t think we can rule anything out. When the President said all options are on the table, she meant it.”

“Thank god Conner’s as young as he is,” Andy said. “That means he’s under age for exposure to DuoHalo, and he’ll have built up antibodies by the time he’s in the danger zone. After Matty’s death, Conner and his mom are being paired up with someone local, but she’s going to do her best to keep me in the kid’s life. It’s gonna be rough for him, though, always going to school for the rest of his life without a class above him.”

“God, I hadn’t even thought about that,” Fiona said to him. “Can you imagine how strange college would’ve been with no classes above us?”

“Colleges are going to be empty for a while,” Hannah said. “Our class is going to be the last class for a while. That’s gonna be hella weird, Stanford’s not going to have a class coming in after ours for several years. Wonder what they’re all gonna do.”

“They’ve got several years to think about it, what with all the people your age,” Phil replied. “I think they’re even talking about college being paid for by the government for everyone who’s eighteen to twenty-four. Maybe even pay for secondary education for older people who want to go back to school, just to keep the colleges from collapsing during the gap. Turns out college professors are, by nature, extremely paranoid and almost all of them quarantined like their lives depended on it, which they didn’t know it really did.”

On the screen, the large ticking stopwatch appeared with the 60 Minutes logo framing it as Andy turned it off mute. Phil tapped Andy on the shoulder and gestured to the back of the room, as Andy stood up, making his way back as Katie Couric started talking to the room.

“Don’t worry about her,” Phil whispered to him. “We’ve got like ten minutes before it’s going to get to anything we give a shit about. The first ten minutes are just her talking to experts about what sorts of changes the serum causes, shit we all know way better than they do. I need to talk to you for a minute, but I need everyone to basically think we’re around so nobody notices this going on and thinks anything weird’s happening.”

Andy tilted his head a little. “Phil, what the fuck are you talking about?”

“You were right before, about Gregor,” he said. “Don’t look upset, no reason to panic. There’s something strange going on at his house, and we’ve got a team heading onto the grounds right now. And it’s not alone in happening there. We’re going to try and figure out what’s going on while everyone’s basically at home watching the presidential address and the 60 Minutes special. That’s being handled by some people from the base. An actual infil unit. I just got a text saying they’re starting to move onto the Vikovic estate, so try and keep an eye on me for the next hour, in case I give you a signal to come back here, okay?”

“Any idea what’s—”

“I have literally told you everything I know right now, Andy, and that’s probably more than I should’ve but, in for a penny, in for a pound.”

“Are you two fucking done gossiping?” Sarah said, having come over to them, grabbing Andy by the wrist. “I think they’re just about to start showing the base.”

“Yeah yeah,” Phil said. “Just boys and boy shit. Nothing all that interesting.”

“You know when you say that, Phil, it makes me totally not fucking believe you and shit,” Sarah giggled, pulling Andy back to his spot in the middle of the couch, surrounded by women pressing closely to him. “C’mon, before Niko appears!”

On the screen, Katie Couric was talking over a shot of the van driving up onto the base, which Andy had never seen before. The base had been this hypothetical thing that everyone talked about, which Niko regularly went to work at, but that Andy had never actually seen. On first impression, it looked... much smaller than he’d expected.

“The majority of the base we’re about to approach in Northern California is actually underground,” Katie’s voice said in narration over the image the van pulling up to a small building. “And we’re about to meet a woman who’s going to play an integral part of our story.”

As soon as Niko, dressed in her actual uniform, walked out of the building on the screen before them, the entire room cheered, as Niko nestled in hard against him, blushing deeply. “Oh fuck,” Niko grumbled. “I’m their goddamn hero figure. Fuck fuck fuck fuck!”

Emily reached over and grabbed one of Niko’s hands, squeezing it softly within her own. “It’ll be fine, dear, I’m certain of it. Just relax.”

“This is 2nd Lieutenant Niko Kimiko Redwolf, although she’s told us she’s planning on adding her new partner’s last name to her own after their wedding next year,” the voice over continued. “For our stay in New Eden, she basically became our tour guide, answering lots of questions that randomly sprung to mind along the way, both as we toured the facility where the Quaranteam serum is being made, and some of the earliest recipients of that serum, seeing how their new life was treating them several months in. We found her honesty refreshing, her personality charming and her optimism infectious.”

“So you’re partnered up with someone here in New Eden?” Katie asked her on camera.

“That’s correct, ma’am,” Niko said. “I was in one of the earliest waves of people to get paired up with a man. I wasn’t my partner’s first, but his third, as he just happened to get lucky and fall towards the front of the queue. I was given my injections on July 4th and then introduced to my fiancé, Andy, a day or two later.”

“We’ll meet the rest of her family later,” the voiceover said. “But they all seemed a happy cohesive unit, despite their relative newness to each other, and their wildly different walks of life.”

“How was your experience, going through all of this?” Katie said, as they strolled along the side of the building. “Were you scared, knowing what was coming?”

“Knowing all the things that were going to happen, well, it helped,” Niko said to her. “Since I’d been around the base for a while at that point, I had a good idea of what I was in for once I finally got my injections. We were pretty light in the amount of information we gave to people up front, just because we didn’t have that much information ourselves, but we’ve gotten a lot better at relaying everything women need to know when they’re going through the treatment.”

“Were you at all apprehensive about having a government developed computer program pick a sexual partner for you that you knew you were going to be with for likely the rest of your life?”

“Not at all, I trust the government in all things,” Niko said, matter of factly. A moment later she burst out into a fit of giggles. “Oh my god, you really will believe anything I’ll tell you. I’m going to have to be more careful with such awesome powers at my disposal. Of course I was apprehensive about it, Katie! C’mon! This is a government that less than a decade ago had problems building a damn website. My confidence level wasn’t exactly high, although the questionnaire certainly made me feel a little bit better, considering how exhaustively comprehensive it was. They knew more about what I liked in the sack than I did.”

The video cut to a shot a computer screen with some of the questions from the questionnaire on it, the list of questions scrolling every now and again. “The questionnaire she’s talking about,” Katie’s narration continued, “is the one that all men and women are being asked to take, in order to find their ideal matches. According to the creator of the system, which has been dubbed The Oracle, their success rate is in excess of 99%.”

A man Andy had never seen before popped up on screen, sitting in an interview chair. He was a Puerto Rican man in his early fifties, portly but also remarkable sharply dressed, as if he knew the importance of this moment, and wasn’t going to give anyone a chance to dismiss him. “This is Miguel Cunningham, the designer of The Oracle,” the narrator said. “And he said he understood the monumental importance of the task that was being laid out in front of him.”

“What they were asking of me,” Cunningham said in a calm, measured, soft-spoken voice, “it was more than I could even comprehend. I understood how to do it, but I also knew that there were going to be ramifications of any slight mistakes I made along the way, so I made sure I wasn’t developing the program alone, but also in tandem with five women and four other men, so that we could be sure our questionnaire would cover every aspect of human psychosexual behavior, and in non-judgmental fashion.”

“It’s quite the sizable test,” Katie said to the man. “It took me almost two hours when I had to take it myself.”

“Yes, I know many people have referred to it as overly redundant and unbearably long,” he said with a slight chuckle, “but that’s a by-product of how important it was for us to reduce human error in the process. Everything is basically asked at least twice, with more extreme and unusual things actually presented three or four times with different wording before being considered confirmed. The test isn’t the same for anyone, because the system is learning as it keeps intaking data. And some people in the early stages tried lying to the test, because of concerns how they might be perceived or judged, but it’s important that your audience understand, humans rarely review this data, and in lying on the test, the only people you are hurting are yourself and your partners. No one will judge you for anything you place on this test. In fact, you may find it rather liberating to know that whatever particular kinks you have placed on your test will be matched by at least some of your partners.”

The video cut back to Niko and Katie walking alongside the building. “Were you upset about having to share your male partner—”

“Andy,” Niko interrupted, clearly wanting to establish his name.

“Yes, were you upset about having to share Andy with other women?”

“I don’t know that ‘upset’ is the right word, but I certainly wasn’t over the moon about the idea, even if I understood the reasoning behind it,” Niko admitted. “But, I’m also bisexual, and I knew that Andy was likely to be paired up with mostly bisexual women. The idea of having both men and women as both sexual and emotional partners, that definitely held a strong appeal.”

“When you say emotional partners—”

“My best friend in the whole world is Andy’s first partner, Aisling,” Niko said on the screen, as the Niko next to him tried to crawl entirely underneath the blanket.

Aisling giggled and leaned over to whisper, “Thanks babes.”

“Fuck off,” Niko giggled. “I didn’t mean it! I hate all of you, forever and ever!”

“She’s the person I look forward to talking to the most, and I feel like I can trust her with anything and everything in my life,” Niko continued from their television. “But the best part about our Team is that all of the women who have come into our lives have integrated remarkably well, considering not all of them were brought in through the Oracle program.”

“If they weren’t all brought in through the Oracle program—”

“Well, they all get vetted by the Oracle before they arrive,” Niko corrected.

“If they aren’t all chosen that way, then how were they chosen?”

“Some were recommendations or referrals by people already in the family. Some were older connections that were revived in the face of this new disaster and people paired up that way. Some times, people just asked if they could be put with someone, and as long as Oracle didn’t see any major conflicts and both parties agreed to it, the pairings just happen.”

“What’s your mom think about all of this?” Katie asked her. “Is she upset that you have to share your partner with so many other women?”

“Mom’s just glad I’m happy and that I’ve found a place I feel comfortable calling home,” Niko said to her. “She’s more getting used to her own changes, having been single since my dad died sixteen years ago, but I’m glad she’s got a Team of her own again.”

“You may be asking, where did this Quaranteam serum come from,” Katie’s narration continued as they showed b-roll footage of the inside of the lab, where women whose faces were hidden, were getting their injections. “There are two key players in the development of this serum. The first is Doctor Phillip Marcos, who developed what’s called the Root Serum with a number of other Air Force researchers here in this lab.”

There was a loud cheer in the room as the image of Phil appeared before them, in what Andy could only assume had to be Phil’s office, because of the giant Ryu statue just behind him in the distance. Andy also recognized the heavy metal box next to it, not as some top secret piece of Air Force equipment, but as the case that Phil carried his fighting stick in for when he played fighting games.

“Oh shut the fuck up,” Phil said from within the room to the cheers, holding out his middle fingers to all the people, even though he was smiling when he did it. “Listen up, maybe you’ll learn something, ya bunch of filthy savages.”

“How did you come across the Root Serum, Dr. Marcos?” Katie asked the version of him on screen.

“We were actually working on ways to accelerate the power of stun gas, and to inoculate our soldiers so they would be completely unaffected by the gas, when we stumbled across what we call the Root Serum, which is a formula that seems to accelerate and enhance nearly anything it’s paired with,” TV Phil said. “There are obviously millions of possible applications for the Root Serum, but just around the time we were starting to test the boundaries of what the Root Serum was capable of, DuoHalo appeared in the world.”

Andy felt Phil’s hand on his shoulder again, and he slipped out of his seat, sliding Emily over to give Niko someone to cuddle against during his absence, as the two of them stepped towards the back of the room.

“Don’t worry,” Phil told him, “The next five minutes is literally them talking with me and a couple of others about how nobody knows where DuoHalo comes from. So much wasted airtime just theorizing when nobody knows shit.” He shook his head.

Andy frowned a little bit. “What now, Phil?”

“I just got a text message from the team that was invading Vikovic’s house to find out what’s going on, and I gotta tell you, Andy, I don’t like it one bit.”

“Why’s that?”

“Nobody’s there,” Phil whispered intensely. “The whole fucking place is emptied out. No sign of Gregor, his wife, his partners, his staff, nobody.”

“They didn’t just vanish, Phil,” Andy said to him quietly. “They had to go somewhere.”

“I know, I know,” Phil sighed. “Jesus, this is fucked. This is so super fucked. Maybe the team’ll find something that’ll give them some idea of what the fuck happened.”

“Was the word CROATOAN written on a wall anywhere?” Andy said with a grin.

“At least you’ve got your fucking sense of humor about you,” Phil grumbled. “I think I’m getting ready to shit bricks. C’mon, let’s get back. I don’t want to draw too much attention to us.”

The two men slipped back to their seats, Niko and Emily making room for Andy to slide back onto the couch. “What’s going on, Andy?” Niko whispered to him.

“As soon as I know, I’ll tell you,” he whispered back.

“You and Phillip and your secrets,” Emily whispered to him with a giggle. “Boys and their need for mystery.”

“I wish that’s what this was, Em.”

“Should I be concerned?” she asked.

“Ask again later.”

On the screen before them, a new familiar face popped up sitting in interview with Katie Couric, Asha’s mom, Dr. Charlotte Varma, who was currently holding Phil’s hand just across the room. “So Dr. Varma, tell us, is the Quaranteam serum really as strong a protection against the DuoHalo virus as the President would like us to believe?”

“Oh my, yes,” Charlotte answered, her voice still tinged with that French accent. “Even moreso, if you are able to believe that. In addition to providing complete protection from the more devastating and fatal effects of DuoHalo, the Quaranteam serum can also offer a number of other health improvements some of the time. It’s reliant upon the number of partners a man has, but given a sufficient pool of partners, the benefits can be quite remarkable. I only wish my first husband had stayed safe long enough to take it.”

The video moved back to b-roll footage of the base itself, being careful only to show the long process of making the Quaranteam serum from a distance, and only showing specific parts of it. “Dr. Varma’s husband Dev was among the earliest casualties to the DuoHalo epidemic in the United States. Since his death, she has been paired up with Dr. Marcos, and her daughter, Asha, shares her partner with a face you might recognize.”

An image of the majority of the Rook Team popped up for just a moment, as Katie’s voice said. “We’ll be back in just a few moments with the story of how this obscure fiction writer ended up with such an impressive household. 60 Minutes continues, after this.”

“I cannot believe we still have fucking advertising in the middle of a fucking newsreport about the end of the fucking world!” Sarah shouted, making the whole room bust up laughing.

“You ready for your time in the spotlight, Mr. Rook?” Fiona asked him with a wide grin. She’d always taken great amusement in watching him squirm, so he didn’t suspect this would be any different. “It’s fun seeing you trying to downplay your own importance to the press.”

“Does Andrew have a history of this, Fi?” Emily asked her.

She nodded in return. “He wrote a play in college—”

“CO-wrote,” he corrected.

“He wrote most of a play in college and let his classmate write a scene or two, and when the school paper came to interview him about it, I swear he tried to give all the credit away as much as he could, trying to make it sound like he’d done exactly half the work.”

“As opposed to the reporter, who wanted to make it sound like the other writer didn’t lift a finger,” Andy chuckled.

“She was right and you know it,” Fiona said smugly, rolling her eyes.

“Was she you?” Sarah asked with a laugh.

“I plea the fifth, y—”

“She absolutely was,” Andy cackled. “Tommy was apoplectic that his contribution got diminished to ‘writing a couple of scenes,’ but the people in the press generally get the last word on these sorts of things.”

“Tommy was a little braggart who still dined out on that play’s success for the rest of the school year, even with getting called out in the paper,” Fiona sniffed. “So he’s lucky you’re as generous as you are, Andy.”

The ads were wrapping up, and the sound of the ticking stopwatch brought everyone’s focus back to the screen again, which was showing footage of them driving up towards Rook Manor, something Andy hadn’t even realized they’d been filming.

“While he hasn’t lived in this home very long, Andy Rook turned out to be a pivotal figure in our story, as someone who was introduced to the system at a very early point in the pandemic’s development, because it many ways, he and his new family, or Team as they’re being called, were on the front lines for just about all of it.”

“Hey Ms. Couric,” Andy heard himself say on the television, as he greeted her at his front door, more footage he hadn’t realized they’d been filming. “Welcome to my home.”

“As it turns out, just six months ago, Andy was sharing a two-bedroom condominium with his friend Eric Yang,” Katie’s voice narrated to them, as footage of Andy giving Katie a tour of the mansion played on the screen. “By sheer chance, their place was one of the areas selected at random for one of the very first round of pairings, in San Jose, California, only about an hour away from the base itself. Andy told me of how small and homey the old place was as he walked me through the new home the government had relocated him to at the beginning of September.”

The image cut to show Andy and Katie standing out in the back yard, overlooking the huge amount of space available, as well as the pool and the pool house.

“He moved from Ohio to California in 2005 to work as a tech writer, but also lives a second life as a well-regarded, if slightly underperforming, sci-fi/fantasy writer under the name Blake Conrad. This detail is germane to our conversation, because it’s how Andy got where he was.”

They cut to a shot of him in the large ballroom, but it was cropped so that he was the only one in frame, even though it was clear there were other people around him. “The guy who came to come and test us, Dave he said his name was, it turned out he was a fan of my Druid Gunslinger series, and the next book in the series had been delayed because of the pandemic. Of course I had a bunch of advance copies just sitting taking up space in the condo, so I gave the guy a signed copy of ‘High Noon At Stonehenge’ because, shit, someone ought to be reading the damn thing, and Dave was risking his life with all of this pandemic stuff. As a result, he told Eric and I that we were being classified as Level 5s, which really only mattered for the first few months, I guess, but that’s apparently when we needed it the most, as it’s what got us here.”

Cut to a shot of a man in military uniform the chyron identified as ‘Major General Fielder, Head of Quaranteam Project’ keeping as expressionless as possible. “Early on, during the most dire stages of the pandemic, we were told to implement a priority system, handed down to us by the President’s office, with men being categorized somewhere between level 1 and level 5, with level 5s being the most critical members of society. This system was only in place until mid-September, when our casualty rates were identified as being catastrophic, and we moved into triage mode, where basically every surviving man was being considered a level 5 from that point onward, as there were so few of them remaining.”

The video cut back to Andy, this time sitting in his writing room. “Aisling arrived first, and she was an absolute godsend,” Andy said. “Like someone had picked my brain for what I thought a perfect woman would be like. She was smart, she was witty, she was playful, she was fun, she had a great sense of humor—”

“She’s gorgeous,” Katie added, helpfully.

“Oh absolutely she’s gorgeous,” Andy laughed. “I was sort of worried that she wouldn’t be into me, because on a scale of one to ten, she’s at least a twenty, and I’m a six on my best days.”

The video cut to a one-on-one interview between Aisling and Katie that he hadn’t seen any of before. “Andy probably told you he thinks I’m out of his league, didn’t he?” she laughed, that Irish brogue tinging every word. “What a git. Andy’s self-confidence was one’a the first things I started working on as soon as I got here, because I knew it needed proppin’ up.”

From there, it cut back to a wider shot, showing Aisling with Niko on one side of her and Andy on the other before cutting to Katie, in an exchange Andy very much remembered.

“Let me ask you Aisling,” Katie said. “Was Andy the sort of man you dreamed about ending up with when you entered into the process?”

“At first, my head was a little clouded, because the process when it started wasn’t as refined as it is now, so when I met Andy, my mind was a little fogged up with lust, but he ticked all the boxes of what I wanted out of a man,” Aisling replied, but this time, Andy noticed that she was squeezing his hand in the shot. He’d forgotten about that at the time. “He didn’t look exactly like I expected him to, but yeah, within a couple of days, I knew I loved him pretty hard. Still do.”

“Would he have been the kind of person you would’ve gravitated to in a bar?”

“I would’ve thought he was cute, but I was horrible at dating, and only had a couple’a boyfriends before him, so I’m a bad judge of character for that sort of question.”

The video cut back to Andy in his writing room, his Russian blue Muninn sitting on his lap, purring. “After Aisling, Lauren showed up almost immediately after, and then like two or three weeks later, Niko showed up, and I figured that was going to be the end of it. The little two-bedroom condo we were living in was already starting to feel very cramped, what with seven of us living in it.”

“Seven of you?”

“Me, Ash, Lauren and Niko in my bedroom, Eric and Eric’s partners Lily and Jenny in his.”

“Weren’t they arriving in equal numbers for you and Eric?” Katie asked.

“At that point, Eric had put down on the questionnaire that he wasn’t interested in polyamory, and Jenny joined him and Lily just because she was Lily’s close friend. Anyway, with seven people sharing like 1100 square feet, I thought they wouldn’t change us any further. Little did I know, it was all just getting started.”

Again, it cut away and started panning slowly over all the individual faces of everyone on Team Rook who was in the ballroom for Katie’s interview last week. “While Andy may have thought it was going to stop at four, the current count for Team Rook stands at 21 people, a few of whom aren’t pictured here because they were still in the middle of the imprinting process when we arrived. It seems like quite a large number of women, but it also includes a couple of faces you may be surprised to see,” the narration said, just as the camera stopped its panning to show Andy in the left portion of the panel with Emily in the center and Sarah in the right. “We’ll be back to tell you their story, after this.”

The show cut back to the ticking stopwatch clock before going to ads again, as Sarah laughed. “They need an entire commercial break to edit out all my fucking swearing,” she giggled, making the entire room of gathered friends and family laugh with her.

“I’m so not looking forward to this, Andrew,” Emily said to him nervously. “It’s one thing to have a relationship, it is quite another to put it out on front street.”

Niko sat up and leaned across him, cupping Emily’s cheek, pulling her forward as the two kissed right in front of him, tender and soft, just for a moment. “Fuck’em if they can’t handle it, Em,” Niko told the willowy Brit, who blushed and smiled, nodding in response.

“Yes. Well. Quite right.”

“I see the advertisers are already ahead of the curve on all this,” Phil called over to him. “Diapers, baby formula, moving services... it’s like everybody needed to get up and make sure we knew they’d lived through the disaster and were ready to sell us stuff they know we’re going to need soon.”

“You guys really gonna push on everyone having kids, Phil?” Jenna asked him. She’d always been pretty adamantly anti-kid, but since she’d gotten paired up with Dale, she’d been starting to soften on that stance a little.

“Don’t look at me, Jenna,” Phil said. “The government knows we need to bring our population back up and quick, so they’re gonna do anything they can to make it as appealing to as many people as possible. It’s a giant uphill battle, telling every woman you know it’s time to get pregnant.”

“Lie back and think of England,” Emily joked.

“Close enough,” Linda replied.

“Speaking of which, how soon are you going to try for it, Em?” Violet asked her.

“I want to get the movie based on Andy’s book up and running first, but after filming of that is done, then perhaps I’ll consider it,” she said with a soft smile. “How about your household?”

“Found out this morning I’m pregnant,” Linda said. “Who the hell knows how that happened...”

“Well, Linda, when a man and woman love each other very much—” Phil started.

“You finish that sentence and I’ll have you sleeping on the couch for a month,” Linda said, making Phil fall silent, although that grin plastered across his face spoke volumes.

There were so many people in the room that conversations were happening in little pockets all over the place, but as soon as the commercials began to wrap up, and the image of the ticking stopwatch reappeared on the screen, the room fell silent once more.

On the screen before them, a shot of Emily, Sarah and Katie Couric in a room together, Katie sitting across from each other. “You may recognize both of these two women,” Katie said in narration, “but may also be surprised to see them together. They have a very interesting story to tell, one that started well before the pandemic set in.”

“So the two of you are both part of Team Rook?” Katie said.

“We are, but we were actually together before we arrived here,” Emily said. “Together together.”

“We’ve very privately been a couple in Hollywood for, oh, around the last two years,” Sarah added. “In a full, committed relationship.”

“You’re not even swearing,” Andy whispered to her.

“It’s really fucking hard,” Sarah grumbled, cracking her knuckles nervously.

“You may be familiar with both of these actresses separately,” the narration said as the video cut to footage of Sarah in ‘Ballerina Badasses.’ “Sarah Washington won the hearts of many in the quirky art house meets action film series ‘Ballerina Badasses,’ where she alternated between high-precision dance and dark, murderous comedy, but we first came to know her from her star-making turn in ‘Airway Mishaps,’ where she was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar.”

The screen jumped again, and a much younger version of Emily popped to life. “Emily Stevens, on the other hand, is likely better known to younger members of our audience, who grew up watching her as Dahlia Hairtrigger in ‘The Dagger Academy’ movies, based on the worldwide best-selling children’s books by E.F. Winston, which remain some of the most profitable movies of all times. Since that franchise ended in 2014, however, she has had trouble securing another breakout role.”

“We were both, like, visiting a set where a mutual friend of ours was shooting a movie, and the two of us totally hit it off right from the start,” Sarah said. “And dinner after the day’s shooting turned into drinks, drinks turned into dancing, and before either of us knew it, we found ourselves together. In a relationship.”

“Why keep it quiet?” Katie asked.

“As open and positive as Hollywood likes to present itself as,” Emily said, “the idea of two bisexual women still seemed to take people aback. I was already having trouble following up ‘Dagger Academy,’ and Sarah also found herself somewhat trapped in the ‘Ballerina Badasses’ shadows, so we decided that once we had new large-scale projects to be promoting, then we would disclose our relationship publicly.”

“It’s not like we’re all that different from loads of other Hollywood couples,” Sarah added. “Straight, bi, gay and anywhere in-between, actors loathe the idea of talking about our relationships instead of our work. There are loads and loads and loads of actors in relationships in Hollywood that they’re not talking about publicly because they want to keep some parts of their lives to themselves, and who can blame them, am I right?”

“And yet you’re willing to talk about it now, here, today,” Katie said to them.

“Well, I think it’s important that everyone know that the Oracle process is looking out for them and their interests, and is willing to protect existing relationships as long as they’re disclosed in advance,” Emily said, which made Andy frown a little bit, knowing damn well that they hadn’t disclosed their relationship before they arrived, and that the Oracle system hadn’t had anything to do with their arrival in his household.

“Andy Rook’s ‘Druid Gunslinger’ books weren’t massive successes, but they were cult hits,” the voiceover said, panning over a handful of the covers of the most recent books in the series. “But as it turned out, Andy’s nom de plume of Blake Conrad had at least one very famous fan, so famous that they attended one of his panels at the 2019 OmegaCon, just to get a chance to talk to him,” the narration said as it cut back to large group shot for a moment before cutting to a panel room that Andy remembered only vaguely. “We were able to track down this footage, which served as the first ‘meeting’ of Sarah Washington and Andy Rook. That’s Washington in the Chewbacca costume and Emily Stevens in the Greedo costume next to her.”

“Do you ever imagine actors playing any of the parts you’ve written in the Druid Gunslinger books, and if so, who do you see playing the various parts?” Sarah as Chewbacca asked him on-screen, the room crowded with a couple thousand of his fans. “Not just the protagonist, but all those strong female characters in all your stories.”

“Oh my god,” Sarah said, burying her face in her hands, unable to look at the screen. “They found the fucking footage. I wish I was fucking dead. I fucking wish I was dead, and I super fucking wish Katie Fucking Couric was dead.”

“Sure, I think a lot of writers typically write with actors in mind for our characters,” Andy said on screen, his voice a little muffled as the microphone attempted to project his words to the gathered audience of a few thousand. “I know I certainly do it. No one’ll ever see them, but I usually have a ‘cast list’ of actors who I’m imaging for each part in my books. I’ve been pretty vocal for a long time that if I could have anyone I want play the Gunslinger himself, I’d get Christian Kane from the show ‘Leverage’ to come and do it, but you’re asking about some of the other parts, so let me see here... well I’ve been pretty partial to the idea of Olivia Munn playing Dr. Erika Shirow, and I don’t know if you ever saw a film called ‘Airway Mishaps’ but there was this remarkable, charming actress named Sarah Washington in it, and I’ve always thought she’d make an excellent Layla Heartseye, the Barbarian Queen. She’s got confidence and swagger while still sort of having a playful attitude, but you can also still imagine her beating the shit out of someone while making fun of them with a giant grin plastered on her face, something I think we can all agree on that Layla needs.” The audience cheered in response to his comment, as he smiled out at them. It even made modern Andy smile a little.

Sarah in the Chewbacca costume seemed to be visibly vibrating with excitement, giving a quick, blurted “Thank you!” before grabbing Emily by the hand and almost fleeing from the convention meeting room.

The video cut back to Emily and Sarah sitting across from Katie Couric, as Katie said to them, “So you both asked to be assigned to Andy Rook, when you found out about that option?”

Emily and Sarah had warned him about this in advance, so he knew it was coming. As part of the ongoing investigation into how Covington and his friends had been able to bypass the Oracle system, Emily and Sarah would stick to the story that they’d asked to join Andy themselves, and omit all conversation about the poker game.

“We were quarantining together, so when the lovely people from the Air Force came to administer the tests to us, I asked, on Sarah’s behalf, if it was possible for us to request someone specific to be with, and put forth Andrew’s name, to send our names to him for his consideration,” Emily said, clearly more comfortable towing the party line than Sarah was. “Andrew accepted, although he certainly seemed a little starstruck that two Hollywood actors would choose him personally seemingly out of nowhere, but after we arrived, we told him about Sarah’s love for his writing, and all’s well that ends well.”

On screen, the image switched back to the group shot, showing Andy surrounded by all the women, clearly spare footage from when Katie’s team were getting the microphones all set up, as Team Rook was involved in a variety of conversations, little pockets of people talking, while the narration continued.

“Team Rook relocated from the small condo it had been living in before to their new home where we caught up with them in New Eden in September, when it became clear that the number of partners a man needed to have was escalating quickly.”

Cut to Phil in his office, leaning back in his chair. “Obviously there’s a minimum viable number and a recommended number, but as it stands the minimum viable number is three, to avoid any fatal effects from DuoHalo. The recommended number, however, is twelve, to provide as much immunity to DuoHalo as possible. At eighteen or more partners, a man has a 99.9825% immunity to the DuoHalo virus, but obviously that can be a big ask for many people, and I have to admit, even as a man who likes a lot of sex, that much sex in a week can be more than a little exhausting,” Phil laughed, Linda squeezing his shoulder. “Even with the enhancements we’re getting as a byproduct of the Quaranteam serum, we’re still only human after all.”

“What sort of enhancements?” Katie asked him.

“Men and women affected by the Quaranteam serum typically have increased circulation, decreased refractory periods, increased sexual fluid production and increased stamina, along with slightly increased appetites,” Phil told them. “Our bodies are now working at an elevated rate.”

“When Andy Rook, Aisling Blake, Lauren White and Niko Redwolf left the condo in San Jose to move into this mansion in New Eden,” the narration said, showing the outside of Rook Manor, a panning wide shot to establish the size and scale of the house, “they didn’t really know what to expect, and it came as quite the shock to Andy that the mansion already had staff, who expected to regularly engage with him sexually in some rather surprising ways.”

“So, Andy,” Katie said to him on screen, cutting back to their group interview. “Explain to me the difference between family and staff, and how you decide that.”

When he put his hands up on screen, everyone in the room gathered to watch laughed a little, a reaction which put Andy more at ease. “First and foremost, I do not decide that. When the military came and relocated us from our little condo and brought us here to New Eden, the house also came with three members of staff attached with it, all of whom I was told had been selected to mesh with me, and whose boxes I would tick as well.”

“That was the three of you in the back, Nicolette, Jenny and Kate, yes?”

“We had all been told a bit about Andy before he arrived,” Nicolette replied to Katie on screen, “and his answers to the questionnaire implied that he would eventually be willing to play into our tastes.”

“Eventually?” Katie asked, a confused look on her face that Andy somehow suspected was probably genuine. He remembered this part of the interview, where it felt like Katie had wandered into a slice of life she fully hadn’t expected to encounter. Nicolette’s frankness often took a lot of people by surprise, and even Katie Couric wasn’t immune to that.

“Well, sure,” Nicolette giggled. “I know the first few times I called him Master, it rattled his cage a little bit, but he eventually realized I liked saying it, and nobody was making me do it. One of the things that we girls all figured out early on was that just because Andy was okay with something didn’t mean he had any real experience with it, so we would need to hand hold him a bit through it. So while Andy said he was okay with bondage and discipline stuff in his questionnaire, he didn’t have any real practical experience in it. So we’ve found ways to teach him about that kind of thing without it ever feeling like we were lecturing to him. He sort of set that expectation up front when he told us communication was everything, and he couldn’t have been more right.”

“And Kate? I hear that you and Jenny had a different experience,” Katie asked. He hadn’t noticed the look on her face at the time, but in retrospect, it seemed like Katie Couric had thought this might be a ‘gotcha’ moment.

“Damn, uh? Andy?” Kate (his Katie) asked him on screen. He was a little surprised they’d left this interchange in, but he supposed it just added to their credibility in the piece. It did make it extremely clear that they hadn’t really discussed any of this beforehand, and that he was willing to air all their laundry. “How real you want us to get here?”

“We’re not hiding anything, so fire away.”

“So, uh, Katie,” Kate coughed. The expression on her face, one he hadn’t really been able to see during the interview itself, was one of worry, as if she might be getting herself or Andy into trouble with what she was saying. “I’m actually a lesbian. Not a bisexual who mostly identifies as a lesbian, I mean straight up, hardcore, one hundred percent, unrepentant fully committed lesbian. And Jenny here is my wife, but she’s bisexual.”

“Hi!” Jenny waved, as unflappable as ever.

“When we signed up for this, we, ah, we were planning on hiding that from Andy, and I was simply going to fake it, and go along with the ruse, so that we could stay together, and we could still get the treatment, which, as you already know, takes both a female and a male component to work. So I, er, we lied, and claimed we were both bisexual.” The look on his Katie’s face made him worry that she might take all of this harshly, but he looked over across the room and saw her smiling from her seat, Jenny in her lap. She even waved over in Andy’s direction, as if to tell him it was all good. “Since we were married, wherever we went, we were going to go together, and we figured we could just keep up that lie as long as we needed and make it work.”

“And what happened?” Katie asked.

“I started talking to Andy,” Jenny said, part of the interview having been cut out. “And... and it all just came tumbling out, how we were a little unsure, how my Katie wasn’t really into men, and, I just felt like I had to tell him everything before we were committed to anything.”

“How did you react to that, Andy?”

“I could tell they were afraid that I was going to be angry, but I wasn’t,” the version of himself on television said calmly, in a way he desperately hoped didn’t come across as patronizingly. “Why would I be? I simply wanted to talk with them about how they wanted to handle it, because at that point, I knew a bit more about the physiological effects of the treatment than they did, so I wanted to prepare them for it, if they wanted to move forward.”

The shot cut to the one-on-one interview in his writing room again, as Katie asked him, “Would you really have been okay with Jenny and Kate leaving when you found out that Kate was a lesbian? Or were you just telling them that to make them feel better?”

“Of course I would’ve been okay with it, Katie,” Andy told her. “That’s part of the reason I make a point to talk to someone as much as I can before the whole imprinting thing, since that’s currently irreversible. The last thing I want, the last thing any man should want is women paired up with him that don’t want to be there. I want everyone who’s at all involved with me to know as much as they can about what they’re getting into before they get into it. I think that made Jenny and Kate feel a little bit more comfortable deciding to stay in the house.”

Again, the show returned back to the large group shot once more, as Katie continued interviewing his staff. “Do you still consider yourself a lesbian, Kate?” Katie asked.

“Absolutely. I don’t feel any sexual attraction to Andy whatsoever,” Kate replied. “Now, with that said, I can also admit that I have received biochemically induced orgasms from him regularly as part of the treatment process, and I don’t think that affects my sexual identity in any way. But Andy and I haven’t ever had direct sex. He’s offered, but he’s also never pressured. I might take him up on it some day, to see if the chemical and neurological changes the treatment have made to me might compensate for my lack of sexual attraction to him, but then again, I may not. That’s my decision, well, our decision, to make,” she said, taking Jenny’s hand in hers on screen, both women smiling confidently towards the camera. “And nobody’s going to tell me who and what I am. I get to decide that, and fuck anyone who says otherwise.”

“So if you haven’t had direct sex with him, how are you getting what you need from him to keep your treatment managed?”

“Well, to be frank about it, I don’t ever actually fuck Andy, but that doesn’t mean I don’t swallow his semen. I do that around once a week, either directly from him, or second hand from my wife. I consider sucking his cock just to be another task around the house that needs doing now and again. No offense, Andy.”

He laughed on screen, waving a hand in his air, as the room full of his friends and partners laughed with him. “None taken, but you already know that.”

From across the room, he heard Katie’s voice loudly say, “Monday: Prune the hedges. Tuesday: Mow the lawn. Wednesday: Suck the boss’s cock...” which made everyone in the room bust up laughing, especially with the workaday tone she’d had listing all the activities off.

“Andy’s partners range from 18 to 38, and they come all sorts of backgrounds and walks of life,” the narration said as the video panned across all of them in the wide shot. “They include women of multiple ethnicities and nationalities.”

The video cut back to Katie in the large room. “Do you remember what ages you put that you would be comfortable with?”

“The low end was set to 18,” Andy said on screen, “and I didn’t adjust it, and I set the high end to 35. I suspected no one younger than their mid twenties would be interested in me, so the low end didn’t really matter.”

“You can start to see how his mind works,” Hannah teased, as a chyron identified her as ‘Hannah Nakamura, 18,’ before fading away, “and how he just misses things sometimes.” All the girls in the room laughed and the camera cut away to an interview with just Hannah and Asha, something Andy hadn’t even realized that Katie’s crew had filmed.

“Does the age difference bother you two?” Katie asked them. “You’re both quite a bit younger than he is.”

“Nah,” Asha said with a giggle. Her chyron identified her as ‘Asha Varma, 18, daughter of Doctor Charlotte Varma,’ which Andy thought was a little bit unnecessary, but mentally conceded did tie them all together a bit more obviously. “Boys our age are bloody useless in the sack, an’ one thing Andy’s not is useless. I’m more satisfied with him than I’ve ever been with anyone. He’s willin’ to learn what a lady wants and he works very hard to make sure nobody’s unhappy with their seshes.”

“Andy was the first guy who made me feel like what I was getting out of it was important, more important than what he was getting out of it,” Hannah told Katie. “I sorta wanted to rush into it, wanted to get imprinted to him, wanted to get past the first time and just have it be like, NBD, but he made me stop and think about it, and the first time I was with him...” Hannah blew out a whistle, shaking her head. “Well, there’s boys and there’s men, and I don’t think I’d ever really been with a man before.”

“He’s much more generous with his physical affection than I thought an older man might be,” Asha said with a giggle, the two teenagers clearly trying to figure out how much they could get away with pushing the line. “And willing to put in the work. So I can’t say I have any complaints.”

“And if you put our ages together, then we’re basically his age exactly,” Hannah laughed.

“Is... is that something you do? The two of you playing together with him?”

“We haven’t done it yet,” Hannah said, “but we’re totes gonna. Andy’s not bothered by us playing with each other when he’s busy or not around, so group play, that’s just gonna be hella normal in the new world. Em and Sares are a couple, Lauren and Taylor are a couple. As long as we’re being safe and smart about it, this is just the new normal.”

The image froze on Hannah’s big smile in freeze from a moment before the stopwatch appeared again, signaling another commercial break, as Linda suddenly organized an impromptu toast in the room. “Let’s hear it for the new normal, women in charge and not bound by the old fucking ways of the Puritans!” she said, raising a half-full glass of champagne.

“To the new normal!” the whole room toasted.

As everyone was drinking, he took note that Phil and Eric had moved to the back of the room, so Andy took the moment to slip from the couch and head back to join them, where Phil looked like he was about to go out of his fucking mind.

“I just don’t understand how that’s fucking possible, Eric!” Phil whispered loudly at him.

“Well, it happened, and it happened about two weeks ago, and that’s all I know right now,” Eric said to him. “I shouldn’t even be telling you that, but at this point, fuck it, we’re all looking out for each other first and foremost.”

“What did I miss?” Andy asked.

“You’re not cleared for it,” Eric said to him.

“At this point you’re gonna give me that shit?” Andy laughed. “C’mon. Fellas. If you can’t trust me at this point, who can you trust?”

Eric looked at Phil, who nodded, then Eric nodded back at him, before Phil spoke. “You remember how I told you that we had a guy taken from us by the Russians?”

“Sure,” Andy said. “McArthur or something.”

“McCallister,” Phil corrected. “He was one of the most influential people in developing the Quaranteam serum, as much as I disliked the prick. He defected to the Russians in April, only a couple of weeks after we had the functioning prototype of the Quaranteam serum up and running.”

“They also tried to kidnap you too, Phil,” Eric added.

“Bah, minor shit,” Phil said. “Anyway, Eric’s reporting that McCallister’s been taken from the Russians, by parties unknown, and that he’s no longer in Russia.”

Andy looked at the two men, entirely unsure what to make of the information, although it had worked up the other two quite a bit. “Is that good or bad?”

“Fuck, Andy, neither of us really know,” Eric said. “But the Russians should’ve had a fully functioning version of the Quaranteam serum for themselves by now, and yet the male fatality rate in Russia is way higher than expected. We think it was a manufacturing and distribution problem, but they’re looking at like 92-94% male fatality rates.”

“And Adam McCallister, who’s responsible for the imprinting part of the serum that he snuck in without any of us fucking noticing,” Phil hissed, “is in the possession of person or persons unknown, in an unknown location, doing who the fuck knows what?”

“He was extracted a couple of weeks ago, but I just heard from one of our field contacts about it, since the Russians have been trying to keep his kidnapping quiet,” Eric told them. “But even with their two week head start, the Russians don’t know shit about who’s got him or where he is.”

“Couldn’t they have done me the fucking courtesy of keeping their stolen supervillain under lock and key, instead of letting him go out on fucking strolls in the goddamn park?” Phil grumbled. “Anyway, keep this shit under your hat, gentlemen. Need to know, James Bond type stuff. The last thing we need is anyone freaking out about it.”

“Anyone else you mean,” Eric corrected.

“Yeah, well, I’m allowed to freak out,” Phil said as the three of them split and headed back towards their couches.

As Andy slid onto the couch, Niko leaned in to whisper to him, “Everything okay?”

“More shit for Phil to worry about,” he told her. “I’m sure you’ll hear about it soon enough, but it’s not immediate. No need to worry about it tonight.”

On screen, the stopwatch reappeared and began to tick once more. The video cut back to the shot of all of them in the group interview. “By show of hands, how many of you would say you identify as bisexual?” Katie asked them.

Aisling, Niko, Emily, Sarah, Lauren, Taylor, Sheridan, Tala, Hannah, Asha, Nicolette and Jenny raised their hands.

“So the rest you, with the exception of Kate, are straight?” That left just Piper and Jade.

“For now,” Piper said. “A couple of the girls who are still on their way are also strictly heterosexual. And our opinions on the matter might change given enough time. It’s never smart to rule something out completely.”

“Here’s another face you might recognize—Piper Brown, an Olympic gold medal winning volleyball player,” the narration said as the camera lingered on Piper for a moment, a chyron identifying her, her profession and her age for the audience. “Her journey to join Team Rook had a few bumps along the way.”

Andy tensed up, terrified they were about to witness a trainwreck, half-expecting a segment about Piper’s treatment at the hands of Covington to interrupt, but instead, the segment continued with something he fully remembered happening on the day of the interviews.

“Piper, you were actually supposed to have competed in the Olympics again by now. How does that feel, knowing that when it starts up again next year, the US basically doesn’t have almost any of their male athletes to compete?”

“At this point, it’s impossible for it to even make sense in my head any more, Katie,” Piper sighed. He could see that she was still trying to make sense of all her grief at that point in the interview, as it bubbled up again. “Most of the people I trained with have died over the last several months. A lot of my trainers died. I’ve lost colleagues, friends and family members. I don’t even know where to start mourning, because there’s so damn many people to mourn. I consider myself lucky that my sister’s husband took everything seriously, and completely refused to leave the house this year since the word of the plague got out.”

“It’s something we’ve talked about in here a bunch,” Andy said on screen. “And we sort of keep coming back to that famous Stalin quote. ‘A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic.’ It’s so many dead men that the mind can’t even make sense of it. It’s like 9/11, but if each of the Twin Towers was holding exclusively almost every man each of us knew and loved. My own brother died a few weeks back, and he was one of the kindest and most careful souls I know, but he ran out to help someone get their storm shutters up before a particularly bad thunderstorm rolled through, and a few weeks later, he was just gone, almost overnight. It happened so fast, I didn’t even hear about it until after he was already gone.”

A bit of the conversation had been removed in the edit, as the camera cut over to Emily, looking solemn. “Normally, when a friend or loved one dies, there is typically a funeral or a wake, a gathering of all that person’s surviving circle coming together, to celebrate their passing and remember them, but we have been denied that, and it has made all their passings that much harder to process, somehow transformed them all into seeming less real, because our normal emotional milestones haven’t happened along the way. We are adrift in our emotional morass.”

“That’s true,” Katie said to the group of them gathered in his little ballroom for the interview. “We, as Americans, haven’t had to confront all the deaths simply because we aren’t allowed to go out and do so, and that somehow makes it feel less concrete.”

“It hits you every day,” Jade said, “little by little. Lauren described it to me a few weeks ago as a slow motion car crash that we’re all stuck in, and nobody can get out of.”

The camera lingered on Jade for a moment, as the narration explained who she was. “Jade Dillon is the newest member of Team Rook. She’s a 26-year-old kindergarten teacher, as well as being a cheerleader for the San Francisco 49ers football team. When we went to interview Team Rook, she had just arrived only the previous day and their relationship hadn’t been cemented yet.”

“So, Jade, I understand you’re one of the newest arrivals here,” Katie said. “Have you gone through the imprinting process yet?”

“Not yet,” she said. “Tala and I arrived yesterday, but we wanted to wait a little bit, to spend some time with Andy and his family, to makes sure that we would be happy getting melted into their pot. I’m happy to say we’re both going to do it, but it’s the kind of commitment you gotta be certain of, you know?”

The video cut to a one-on-one interview Tala had done with Katie, something the journalist had told him was mostly just to set the context of the footage of her being imprinted for later. “So I understand you’ve agreed to let us film your face during the imprinting process,” Katie Couric told Tala on Andy’s giant screen. “Thank you very much for that. We feel like it’s important people see that moment, and I know what a huge ask it is to reveal something of yourself so private so publicly for all of eternity.”

“Nah, it’s not really that big a deal,” his Persian partner said with confident swagger up on screen. “It’s just sex, Katie.”

“How did you come to join Team Rook?”

“My friend Sheridan was assigned to him around Halloween, and when all the girls pitched their friends for consideration, Sheridan pitched me,” Tala said, miming a little curtsy. “We’ve been friends since high school, and I think Sheridan just wanted someone she knew she could always share a beer with. Plus, the dude’s chill and seems like a gas.”

“Have you seen someone being imprinted?” Katie asked.

Tala nodded with a sinful smile. “Another member of the house, Nicolette’s friend Whitney, who’s also going to be staff, arrived with me and Jade last night, and she wanted the entire house to see her getting imprinted, so we all got a front row seat to witness what it looks like and how it happens. It’s intense as hell, but you’ll see for yourselves soon enough, I guess.”

The video stayed lingering on Tala for a moment as the narrator set up the next section. “What you’re about to see was taken with the permission of both Tala and the rest of Team Rook. It is explicit without being overly so, but we felt it was important for everyone to see this moment.”

It cut from Tala sitting in the interview room to a tightly cropped freeze-frame closeup of Tala’s face, her collarbone touching the bottom of the frame, a moment that Andy remembered particularly well, knowing that just out of frame to her left or right was Sheridan or Jade, while Emily was working the camera, and Andy himself was beneath Tala as she was riding him.

Beneath the blanket, he suddenly felt three hands rubbing on or around his cock, one of which he identified as Emily’s immediately, the second he thought was Niko’s and the third, which was spending most of the time rubbing against his balls through his pants, he was certain had to be Sarah’s. He felt Emily’s fingertips unbuttoning the top of his slacks, unzipping them as he turned to look at her.

“We’re just playing a bit, Andrew,” she whispered to him, “but if you resist, I’m going to shove Sarah’s head down beneath this blanket and make her deepthroat your cock until you cum, so either go with the flow, or prepare for a much bigger scene.” She had a concealed smile on her face that he’d learned to recognize meant she wasn’t bluffing.

“This is what an imprinting orgasm looks like,” the narration said, as the footage unfroze.

The entire wallscreen was filming with Tala moaning for just a moment before erupting into her orgasm, as Andy knew he was just off screen orgasming inside of her, setting her down that biochemical pathway of interlocking her physiology to his own. The room was full of people cheering Tala on, Andy smiling a little as he saw her standing from her couch and bowing to the room of people applauding, relishing her moment instead of shrinking from it. He was trying to keep his own facial expression mostly blank, even as he felt three separate hands stroking his cock beneath the blanket, more than a little shocked the girls were doing something like this with so many people around.

The shot on the screen tipped as Tala was laid down onto her back on the bed, and her mouth began to slowly repeat, over and over again, “imprinting.”

As the camera lingered, and Tala continued to whisper the word, the audio faded down and the narration faded back up. “She’ll say that word for about five minutes or so, then be in a hibernation state for somewhere between twelve and twenty-four hours, at the end of which, she’ll wake up, paired with her new partner, Andy. This was the last thing we filmed that day, but felt it important to show you here, so that those of you worried that you might not enjoy the process of being imprinted can overcome that. Because the look of pleasure on Tala’s face here is genuine. It’s the strongest orgasm she’s ever had in her life, a sentiment I can echo from my own personal experience.”

The interviews they’d done had been spliced and shuffled all over the place, as the shot cut back to the full Team shot, as part of group discussion began to play that had been filmed very early during the interviews.

“So how many of you would say you’re in love with Andy now?” Katie asked the group, as the girls moved to tuck his cock away beneath the cover of the blanket, pulling his jeans back up. It seemed like the girls had mostly wanted to see if he’d let them get away with it. He figured there wasn’t any harm in letting them have their fun.

Andy took this time to realize how resolute many of his partners looked in that moment, as if they were practically daring Katie Couric to challenge them. Piper in particular looked quite assured in how strongly she had her hand up.

“So those of you who wouldn’t say you’re in love with him, how would you describe your relationship with him?”

“Deep respect and affection, but not at the love stage, not yet anyway,” Sheridan said, not letting the question linger even a second. Had she really answered that quickly in the room? Andy couldn’t remember.

All of his partners in shot nodded in agreement.

“Why do you say ‘not yet,’ Sheridan?”

“You have to keep in mind, Katie, a lot of us have only known Andy a few weeks right now,” she said, leaning forward just a little bit. It was true, November had been an insane month, with each day bringing with it a whole slew of new challenges. “We had to make probably the biggest choice of our lives, and we had to do it basically on a hunch. Our choices were to defer treatment and go on being afraid we were going to die, or take the treatment and get paired up with a man for the indefinite future. That’s a hell of a gamble to ask of anyone.”

“Who’s unhappy with the decision they made, raise your hand,” Katie said, only to get no hands raised in response. He could see a little bit of hidden surprise on Katie Couric’s face in the shot before the camera panned over his entire Team once more, not a single hand in the air. “Everyone’s happy being paired with Andy, maybe for the rest of your lives?”

“Look, Ms. Couric,” Hannah said, the teenager almost seeming slightly patronizing to Katie Couric, as if the older women simply didn’t get it. “You’re going to find every one of us girls has a different story, a unique story, and each one of us came to where we are now on an entirely different path, m’kay? But we’ll all tell you the same thing—Andy’s treated us with an immense amount of respect and affection, and he’s made sure that nobody’s doing anything they aren’t comfortable with. Shit, he’s even done stuff he’s been a little uncomfortable with because it’s made us feel more comfortable, and how many women can say that about their partner? So while a bunch of us aren’t in love with him, yet, we all admire and respect how much he’s gone out of his way to make sure we feel like we’re part of a goddamn family, a good goddamn family.”

“Do you want to continue to grow the family, Andy?”

“If you ask him,” Em said quickly, Andy catching the slight smirk on his own face on the screen, “he wanted to stop growing it a while ago.” Everyone in the room laughed at that, mirroring the girls’ reactions in the recording. “But at this point, I think we’re all doing what we can to stick together, and a lot of us girls wanted to protect our friends, to keep them safe, so we took turns presenting them all to Andy, trying to convince him to bring them into our home and into our family.”

“Everyone had someone they wanted to pitch?” Katie said, smiling at Andy. “That must have been overwhelming.”

“Not everyone wanted to pitch someone, but almost everyone,” he laughed on camera. Andy could recognize, watching himself up there on the big screen, exactly how nervous he’d been in that interview, terrified he’d say something wrong or awkward and it would be the only moment they’d use from the entire thing. He hadn’t, of course, but the tension in that moment was plain as day on his face. Normally, he liked to think he handled press better, but that day had brought with it a lot of tension, and in looking back, there were definite moments when the stress showed through.

“Amen brother!” Phil shouted in the room, and everyone at the party had a good chuckle before Andy continued on screen.

“It was a lot of names and faces that were presented all at once. I said upfront, though, that I wasn’t going to bring everyone on, and that there was only so much of me to go around. In the end, I think we mostly made it work to everyone’s satisfaction.”

“So how many more people are coming?”

“Well, we have three people who are in the imprinting process right now, and two more people arriving tomorrow, and if I have any say in the matter, that will absolutely, positively, definitively be the limit of women I can handle in my life.” It was fun being able to look at all the girls around him, each and everyone one of them looking like the cat that ate the canary, as if what he was saying was a small child trying to make a declarative statement that he expected all the adults in the room to adhere to.

“And how much say do you actually have in that matter, Andy?”

“Very little!” Emily joked, giving everyone both on camera and off a chance have another laugh at his expense, not that he really minded that much. The women in his life were looking out for him, so he couldn’t fault them for that. And it was a funny comment.

“It would take a super compelling case for us to add, like, anyone else to the family past that,” Sarah said, “but I think it’s totally for the best that we never say never. Sometimes exceptions have to be made.”

“Like I told you yesterday, Katie,” Niko said, “I think if Andy had total control of the matter, he would’ve probably put a hard limit in after myself, Ash and Lauren were in his life. He told me multiple times early on that he barely felt like he deserved one amazing woman, and at that point, he already had three, so it’s been a growth process.”

The show cut back to the interview with just Sarah and Emily. “You’ve been with Andy for a little over two weeks now, ladies,” Katie said to them. “Any complaints?”

“Only one,” Sarah said with a broad grin. “We didn’t get here fast enough.”

The camera lingered on a freeze-frame of both of the girls laughing before cutting to the ticking stopwatch once more then jumped over to commercials once more.

Piper shook his shoulder with a smile, crouching down behind the couch to put her chin on his shoulder. “Looks like they’re going to gloss over the whole Covington thing, which, I guess is okay, because it means the folks at 60 Minutes feel the government’s doing enough to seriously address the issue, so I guess that’ll have to be enough.”

“The episode’s not over yet,” Ash said to her with a laugh. “We’re not even two thirds of the way through.”

“Well, I heard Phil and Linda talking, and Phil said the last twenty minutes are about another family entirely.”

“Oh yeah?” Sarah asked. “Where at?”

“Someplace called San Jose Heights,” Piper replied. “Should be an interesting watch, at least.”

“Must be one of the towers down in downtown San Jose,” Andy said. “I’d love to see what the renovations look like for one of those places.”

“Then we shan’t turn the television off once we’re off the air,” Emily said.

“Hey Tala, you still doing okay with everyone having seen that?” Andy called over to her, since she was several seats away.

“Totes good, my dude,” Tala said with a laugh. “My mother went a bit mental in our WhatsApp chat, but I think I’ve talked her down off the ledge. That’s why I’ve sort of been hunched over my phone for the last bit, making sure she and Dad aren’t disowning me.”

“Your dad watched it?”

Tala giggled, shaking her head. “Nah, the minute he realized what he was about to see, Mom said he went into the kitchen so he didn’t have to see it. They’ll get over it. It’s, like, the smallest thing ever in this crazy new world we live in. Don’t even stress.”

“Looks like the commercials are almost done,” Sarah said.

“I’m just going to lay here on top of all your laps,” Piper said, hopping over the couch before sprawling out on top of the blanket, stretching across the laps of himself, Ash, Niko and Emily, giggling ferociously the entire time as she got settled. Andy leaned over a little bit, his hands lifting her head up so he could press a kiss to her lips, making her smile a bit more. “Thanks. I kinda needed that. I feel much better being closer to you.”

“Whatever you need, you know I’m here for.”

“I know,” Piper said, just a little shyly, her hand reaching down to squeeze his calf. “Love you.”

“Love you too.”

The ticking stopwatch appeared on the screen again, as the conversations in the room fell silent before the show cut back to the group shot of all of them in the room, Katie Couric readying her next question. “How many people do sleep in bed with you on any given night, Andy?” she asked.

“There’s always at least five of us in the bed,” he answered. “Myself, Ash, Niko, Emily and Sarah. But sometimes more people want to cram in, and we never say no.”

“What’s the most the bed’s ever held for a night?”

“Everyone who isn’t staff, I think, but last week, so before some people had arrived, so, what, 11?” Andy almost wanted to laugh at the sort of deer-in-the-headlights his face had on it on the screen before him, as if even he couldn’t believe the number he was saying.

“When we found out Andy’s brother died, we all crawled into bed with him and just wrapped our arms around him, as we all shared a good cry, then fell asleep holding one another, but that’s extremely uncommon,” Emily said. The weariness on her face in that moment hadn’t been apparent to him then, but it was very visible to him now. The loss of so many of their friends and family had hit each of them several dozen times over the last few months, but in that moment, he could see Emily was considering the scale of her own losses. He’d held her while she cried plenty of times since then, just as he had every other woman in the house, and just as they had him. Grief came and went in regular waves, no stranger to their daily lives now.

“Five or six would definitely be the average,” Ash said. Of course, that had been the number at the time, which had now basically elevated to eight to ten, as Fiona and Moira had joined the contingency of people who never wanted to be away from his bed. Piper had also come around to wanting to be in the main bed most of the time, so Tala had even been examining what would be needed to reinforce the bed even more than it already was.

“So the four of you would say you’re closer to Andy than the rest of the women in the house?”

“Well, we’re all his fiancées, so we’d better be, Katie!” Sarah laughed. “He asked Ash first, and then Niko asked him before he could even get the words out to her, so once he freakin’ told us, me and Em, we both demanded he propose to us as well immediately.”

The camera pulled back to a wide shot, showing all of Team Rook in between questions, them just talking among themselves with the audio off, as the narration continued. “We’ve actually been given an update that the number of fiancés that Andy Rook has risen to six with one more proposal happening right now, as he watches this very show, which we assume will be gladly accepted.”

Someone in the room had pushed pause on their DVR, so they would be able to catch up in the next commercial break, as the lights came up and Andy looked around the room before he felt a hand on his cheek tipping his face downward to let his eyes meet Piper’s as the entire room fell silent, nearly everyone having gotten up from their couches to come and close ranks around Andy’s couch.

“I didn’t want to rush you, Andy,” Piper said with a nervous smile on her lips, “but the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to take the full plunge. You’re my white knight who rode to my rescue, and I’ve never been so scared to ask anyone anything in my entire life, but will you also marry me along with these other amazing women?”

Andy felt himself tearing up a little as he smiled. “All you ever had to do was ask, Piper. Of course I’ll marry you, you goof.”

She grabbed his head with both hands and leaned up to kiss him as hard as she could, trying to hide the fact that she was also crying before they parted lips, the two of them both laughing a little as the room was cheering them so loudly Andy’s hearing protection app on his Apple Watch gave him a little warning that the volume level was excessive. As Andy looked around, he felt all his other fiancées piling in for one giant hug, him and Piper being slightly squished in the middle of it. Piper started giggling frantically, shoving one hand straight up into the air, miming waving a flag in surrender. “Need! Air!”

When everyone pulled back, Andy could see that all of his other fiancées were both smiling and crying as well, each of them wanting to congratulate Piper personally, as Andy leaned in to ask Piper a question. “How’d you let 60 Minutes know?”

“I had Phil tell them when they called to ask about who needed to see the show in advance to sign off on it,” she told him.

“Oh, so Phil knew you were going to propose?”

“I figured it was okay if one person knew,” she grinned. “I didn’t tell anyone else. That’s why all the shock. And you know that Phil knows literally everything before you do.”

“It okay if I unpause it?” Phil called over, waving the remote in his hand, revealing it was him who had stopped the live playback. “Or you want a few more minutes to savor the moment?”

“Just push fucking play again, Phil!” Sarah cackled at him, as the image on the screen started to move once more, although the tone had changed a great deal as Katie Couric’s voice over narration made clear.

“For those of you who are sensitive to graphic depictions of violence, you may wish to look away for the next few minutes, as an image we are going to show you in a moment is particularly disturbing, but we feel the importance of everyone seeing it outweighs our concerns about exposing you to this difficult and brutal image.”

“I take it you’ve heard about the fatality that New Eden had last week?” Katie asked the group of them.

Everyone in the group shot nodded. “It was horrible, hearing about someone dying from something so easily preventable,” Hannah said, sorrow written plain on the teenager’s face. “Like, they totes warned us about that ish before we left the base, so why the hell would someone chance it?”

“They did warn you?” Katie asked, as if she wanted to confirm that they hadn’t been neglectful over at the base.

“VERY thoroughly,” Emily insisted, horror in her voice. “They told us multiple times, again and again and again, that if we took in semen from any man other than the one we were paired up with, it would be toxic, if not fatal. They even showed us a recording of a woman who’d already been imprinted getting semen from a man she wasn’t paired up with on her skin, and the large, violent rash that immediately broke out. I am told they show that footage to everyone, to drive the point home. Seeing that sort of instantaneous reaction should’ve been enough to discourage anyone from testing those boundaries.”

“They’re talking on base about showing some of the autopsy photos from the fatality to the people who are getting the treatment now,” Niko said, “to make sure everyone understands how serious it is not to dally outside your family.”

The screen froze on Niko’s face, as the narration came over. “Those of you who do not wish to be exposed to this image, turn away now.” On the screen, an image of the late Veronica appeared, with the entirety of her throat eaten away like it had been splashed with acid, the image gruesome enough to show that even a portion of her spinal cord had been eroded through, her head almost entirely detached from her torso. “This was the result of the woman performing oral sex on a man other than the one she was imprinted onto.” The horrible vision lingered there for a moment before cutting back to a shot of Katie Couric, as her voice on narration said, “It is now safe to look at your television again.”

“Have any of you ever been tempted?” she asked the group of them gathered for the interview.

“I think we all value our lives too much for that,” Sarah joked, although Andy could see the expression on her face was still reflecting that she was thinking about Veronica’s death in that moment.

“And love Andy far too much for that,” Ash said.

“Definitely,” Emily agreed. “Why would anyone task such a pointless risk?”

“Did any of you know the woman who died, or the man she partook from that killed her?” Katie asked them.

“I met her briefly,” Andy said, “but I wouldn’t say I knew her. And none of us ever even met the man accused of doing it to her.”

“Major Peters told us yesterday he’s currently imprisoned at the base, pending local law enforcement being able to take custody of him. They’re going to charge him with murder, they were telling us.”

The video cut to an image of a man in an orange jumpsuit, sitting in a cell, with slipper shoes, clearly under suicide watch. Andy had never seen the man before that moment, and he looked almost haunted, his skin ashen, his face gaunt, the vision of what he’d done clearly still replaying itself constantly behind his eyes. Other than how pale and thin he was, the man looked perfectly normal, although his brown hair did seem like it was in need of a haircut.

“Brian Morrison, the man in question, is scheduled to go to trial in February for the murder of Veronica DeLaCruz,” the voiceover said. “We offered him a chance to speak with us regarding what lead him to his actions, but he declined via his attorney.”

Again, it cut away and returned to a close up of Andy in the ballroom, looking pained and frustrated. He remembered in that moment thinking how he felt like people were only thinking of the act itself, and not the greater ramifications and long-term consequences.

“The problem,” Andy sighed, “is that the man, whoever he is, already has multiple women paired up with him, which means that whatever they do to him is going to affect those women as well, even if it’s just that they have to come to a prison for their weekly intake. Those women are already tied to him. I’m sure they’re looking into some way to remove the binding and reimprint a woman onto a new person, but there’s only so many problems they can solve at once.”

The footage cut back to the shot of Brian Morrison in the prison cell, as the narration talked once more. “Mister Rook is entirely correct. At the time of his arrest, Brian Morrison had been paired up with five women, each of whom has to come by once a week, to reinforce both his immunity and their own. While there is a method to reassign a woman if the woman’s partner is dead, Mister Morrison is still entitled to a fair trial, in addition to the appeals process, meaning that these five women are unable to move far away from him, until some other solution is found. That level of being attached to someone bothers some women, but not the women of Team Rook.”

Jump back to the shot of Katie interviewing the large group of them. “Does it bother any of you that your health is tied to Andy’s?” Katie asked.

“Bother is the wrong word,” Sheridan said, annoyance in her tone of voice. He knew why—the entire group of them had felt like Katie Couric had been fishing for cracks in their feelings for one another, something she could use to prove that the system was too flawed to go nationwide. She hadn’t found one, but she’d tried several times to get them to imply there might be some reason for panic. “Concern is the right word. We’re very protective of Andy, because he knows our lives are all fully dependent on his for the time being, and that if he dies, we all probably die with him. So, sure, we’re concerned, but I think all of us feel comfortable in knowing that Andy’s got our best interests at heart, and is keeping that all in mind.”

It cut again, this time back to Andy’s one-on-one interview with Katie. “Do you feel any pressure, knowing how dependent these women are on you, on you staying healthy and safe?”

“God yes,” Andy said with a heavy sigh. “I wake up each and every morning hoping to be as good a man as I can be, to earn this weird existence that I have, surrounded by brilliant and beautiful women, knowing that their health depends on mine. If it was just one person, it would be an incredible weight, but you’re talking about loads of them, and if something happens to me, if I slip and fall and die, I may accidentally be condemning all these women to die with me. You’re goddamn right that puts pressure on me, each and every day. But at this point, we’re all survivors and we’re all going to do it together. That’s what they’ve all had to remind me at some point or another, and what I’ve had to remind them of as well. Whatever else happens to us, we have each other. We’re a family, a Team, and that means when one of us falls, there are a bunch of us to help carry them until they’re ready to stand again. So we’ll take care of each other, love each other, and keep moving forward, over and over. Together.”

Again, the video freeze framed, Andy’s soft smiling face holding as the voice over continued. “In all our time spent with Team Rook, we found each and every one of them was extremely happy in their new homes, and they have grown into a very tight family unit. When we return, we will introduce you to another family that’s living in downtown San Jose, and show you one of the other ways a Team can thrive in the new world.” The image of the ticking stopwatch popped back up before cutting to commercial.

During the commercial break, Jenna and her family and Ari and his family both announced that they couldn’t really hang around for poker tonight, but appreciated the chance to get caught up, and the Team photos that had been taken on their arrival. Under other circumstances, Andy might’ve been worried that something he’d said in the 60 Minutes interviews had bothered them, but he knew both Ari and Jenna well enough to know they were always the first ones to leave a party, and that this many people was just a bit taxing on them. Ari had always suffered from mild social anxiety, and this was a ton of people for him to be around. Jenna, by contrast, just liked making sure she was always the first to leave any given party. He’d never been sure quite why. By the time they came back from commercial, the room’s population had shrunk by approximately one-third, with Teams Rook, Marcos, Yang and Baker still hanging around.

When the ticking stopwatch reappeared on the screen, everyone rushed back to the couches, Andy finding himself with Piper and Emily on one side of him, Fiona and Moira on the other, as Asha jumped headfirst to splay herself across all their laps with a ferocious laugh.

On screen, the shot cut to a tall building in downtown San Jose that Andy had seen plenty of times that was originally called The 88. “While this building used to hold 197 units, over the past month, it’s been rebranded as San Jose Heights Alpha, the first of several highrise condo buildings in downtown San Jose that have been retrofitted into functioning as new villages for a collection of Teams.”

The footage turned into a split screen, the left side saying ‘before’ and the right side saying ‘after’ as it cut through the same space, with the right side having less walls and hallways, and more open spaces. “Instead of 197 units, this building now houses 20 Teams, each with their own floor. Some are built to a completely open layout, but most have some combination of larger spaces and self contained apartment-style units, to help let the Teams have the level of daily interaction they feel comfortable with. Today, we’re going to introduce you to Team Oro, and its patriarch, Chief Diego Oro of the California Highway Patrol.”

A Latin man in his early fifties appeared on screen, although the sprawling view of downtown San Jose behind him distracted from everyone looking at him, most likely from one of the highest floors of the building, the windows letting tons of light pour in on the man. Diego reminded Andy immediately of Edward James Olmos when he was younger, a thick graying mustache on top of his upper lip, his hair slicked back, dressed in his formal command officer uniform, his hands folded in his lap, as Katie across from him. Andy wondered if they’d filmed this before or after her visit to New Eden, suspecting it was probably after.

“Chief Oro, thank you for agreeing to sit down with us and tell us your story,” Katie said to him, as the man’s face took on a slightly pained expression.

“Not just my story, Ms. Couric, but the story of so many men just like me,” he said. “Those of us who have suffered immeasurable amounts of loss, only to be reborn into this new world. We have gone through quite the dramatic upheaval this year.”

“Now Chief Oro, I understand you were married before the DuoHalo pandemic.”

“Yes, Maribel and I have been married for twenty-eight years as of December 3rd,” the Chief told her. “We have...” He paused, closed his eyes and drew in a calming breath, then started again. “We had three children, two boys, Alejandro and Javier, and one girl, Gloria.”

“Are any of them still with us?” Katie asked cautiously.

“Gloria is,” Diego said to her. “She’s partnered up with her boyfriend James up in New York, where they both go to university. My two boys died within the first few months of the epidemic, only a few days apart. They were both peace officers, Alejandro with the San Jose Police Department and Javier with the US Marshal Service. As unhappy as I am to speak ill of the dead, our previous President did not take into account the severity and insidiousness of this virus, and that lack of care is responsible for the death of over a hundred million Americans, including my two boys, who should still be with us today.” The Chief was clearly doing his best to remain stoic, but the grief shone heavily on the man’s face, mixed with no small amount of anger.

“After they died, I take it you became much more strict about your quarantine?”

Diego nodded solemnly. “Neither I nor Maribel ever left the house after that without wearing a full hazmat suit, which I can tell you certainly earned us some foul looks from people at the supermarket, but neither of us came down with DuoHalo, and now we’re both inoculated from it, along with all our other partners.”

“How many partners do you have, Chief Oro?”

“Twelve,” he said with a sigh. “The government has asked if it could possibly assign me a few more, but I have drawn a hard line at that. Even with the medical rejuvenation that the Quaranteam serum has given my body, it’s still quite a lot of sex to be having for a man of my age.”

“Why relocate here, to San Jose Heights Alpha, instead of remaining at your own home?”

“There are simply too many people in my new family, sorry, in my Team—it’s still taking some getting used to, calling it that—in my Team for our old house to reasonably sustain. Also, in leaving that old home, we could a bit better leave the parts of our lives that were lost to the disease behind us. My previous house, everywhere I looked I saw the ghosts of my boys.”

“I understand your partners have declined to be interviewed for our piece,” Katie asked him.

“They asked that they not speak to you, and what kind of man would I be if I made them do something they didn’t want to?” he said with a kindly smile. “Maribel is still grieving the loss of our boys and the rest of them, well, they feel like the want some privacy in this new world, but I was meant to understand you were more interested in the actual home itself more than me and my Team.”

“You have to admit, the living situation is quite a change.”

“Sure is,” he said proudly. “Wanna get a tour?”

The show cut from the framed interview to a slow panning tour of what the floor looked like. Some of the condos were basically the same as they had been before the pandemic, with small changes like people’s names replacing where the number of the unit had once been, as well as the door to the condo having shifted from a front door to feeling like a more normal internal door, without the heavy bolt lock. Others, however, had removed not only the front door but the entire section of wall which faced into the center of the building, making it feel less like a separate unit and more like an alcove. Many of the units had their kitchen sections stripped out and converted into an additional bedroom. “You can see that changes to the core structure range from small to large, with many kitchens having been traded out for nurseries, something Chief Oro says he knows will see use, despite his reticence to become a new father at his age,” the narration said, as Diego and Katie peeked into one of the converted spaces, a crib already having been set up inside of it.

They returned to the interview framing, as Katie continued. “I understand at least one of your new partners is already pregnant,” she asked him.

“Two of them are, the first of which was Maribel, which I have to admit came as quite a shock to the two us,” he replied, a fatherly smirk on his face.

“Why was that?”

“Well, about a decade ago, Ms. Couric, I had a vasectomy, which is supposed to be both permanent and 99% effective, and had been during the entire decade before my Maribel was given the Quaranteam serum,” he chuckled quietly. “We were told that there might be some minor health improvements as part of the treatment, but I would say my balls reattaching themselves might be more than a minor change, wouldn’t you?”

“Did you inform the doctors who gave Maribel the serum that this had happened to you?”

“I did,” he said, that smile not dwindling one bit.

“And what was their response?”

“’Oh, yeah, well, that can happen sometimes. I guess we should’ve told you in advance.’ Typical government undersell, but they also stressed that it was important we be having new children, and that there would be sizable government support for any children we had over the next ten years,” he said. “When I started to get a sense of how toxic DuoHalo was, and started tempering my expectations for the people I knew and worked with, and started thinking about what we were going to look like moving forward, because I knew my workplace was going to change a great deal.”

The show cut to Diego and Katie walking through what looked like a regional office of the California Highway Patrol, many of the desks with a box on top of them, personal things put away, ready to be sent off to next of kin. “Chief Oro wasn’t underestimating. With only about 7% of Chips officers being women, and the 85% male fatality rate for DuoHalo, the Patrol’s workforce had dropped from eight thousand to just under one thousand. Had quarantine restrictions been severe and immediate at the onset of this pandemic, he says the numbers of slain men would have been much less, but also that we as a planet are well past the point of ‘could have’ and ‘should have.’ This is our new reality.”

It cut back once more to Chief Oro, his back to the San Jose skyline. “What do you have to say to those who just want to give up, Chief, who feel like the losses are too much for them to bear?”

“I would tell them that we need them now more than ever, and that everything is being done to make their upcoming lives as pleasant and enjoyable as possible, to contrast the incalculable amount of damage all these deaths have done to our modern psyche. We’re Americans, and no matter what other countries are going to do, we are not going to lay down and give up. That’s not who we are. That’s not how we’re built. This could’ve been an extinction event for the human species, but we’re going to fight, we’re going to survive, and to do that, we’re going to need each and every one of you.”

The image froze on Chief Oro pointing directly at the camera, holding there for a long moment before the ticking came on, then cut to Katie Couric sitting in the 60 Minutes studios, looking at the camera, ready to make her closing thesis.

“The world we find ourselves in now is so radically different than the one we lived in that I don’t think any of us could’ve possibly imagined just one year ago where we would find ourselves today,” Katie said to the camera. “Most of the men we knew are gone, and that emptiness is going to live with us for the rest of our lives, but as Chief Oro said, we’re going to survive. And I want to leave you with this quote from Andy Rook, which I think is good advice for all of us. I’m Katie Couric for 60 Minutes. Good night, and good luck.”

The video jumped back to the shot of Andy alone in his writing room, playing just the tail end of his segment. “Take care of each other, love each other, and keep moving forward, over and over. Together.”

As the stopwatch ticked towards the end of the 60 minutes allotted, the credits scrolled by, and the room sort of let out a collective sigh of relief, everyone standing up, stretching a little bit, as Xander was the first to speak. “Great show, everybody,” he said, which provoked a handful of laughs in response, one person throwing a pillow at him.

“Think we’re gonna hear anything about this special?” Andy asked Eric.

“Heh. Guess we’ll see,” Eric responded.

“Suppose so.” He looked around the room with a smile. “C’mon everyone, there’s loads of great food waiting in the ballroom, as well as the card table, so let’s get some food and play some goddamn poker!” There was a slight cheer from the room as everyone started heading towards the impromptu buffet they’d set up.

Once they got into the ballroom, all his fiancés suddenly swarmed Piper, ready to gossip with her and induct her in their little sewing circle, the girls still laughing and gossiping, hugging and kissing, as Piper looked a little overwhelmed, but also extremely overjoyed, as Aisling held her left hand and Emily held her right, Niko flicking her fingers in his direction with a playful shooing motion, as if to say ‘the girls are having girl time, go do boy things,’ so Andy glanced over at Eric, who was already setting down the poker table top on one of the big tables, pulling up a chair, as were Phil and Xander, even as he saw Piper’s friend Brooke rushing over to hug her

“Two per Team only for this table, and no pairing up to cheat!” Eric said, taking out the deck of cards, starting to shuffle it up. “And I’m not playing tonight, I’m just dealing, so nobody needs to get up and move around. Jacks or better, deuces are wild and the blinds start at one and two dollars.”

They were old hands at having their poker night up and running quickly, but rather than stick to strict Texas Hold’em, they liked to mix it up regularly. Hell, within an hour or so, they might be playing Seven Card Stud HiLo, and an hour after that, who the hell knows what variation they might have moved on to.

“Well, hell,” Lily said, “then I guess a bitch is gonna have to do all the legwork for the Team, as always.” She sat down directly opposed from Eric, grinning at him, as the room laughed. “You’ve played enough against these boys that you really should be better at reading their tells.”

“It’s not that I’m bad at reading their tells, Lil,” Eric said, dealing out six cards to determine seating order. “It’s just that they’re better at reading mine. Besides, now you can prove your vaunted card skills against the table master. Who’s your second, Rook?”

“I am,” Maya said, moving forward to stand alongside him, leaning in to grab a seating card. “I heard you schlubs had a regular poker game going, so it’ll be nice to play cards again with people who at least marginally know what they’re doing, and not movie stars who aren’t sure if there’s a difference between a diamond and a heart. Let the girls do their girlie shit; we’ve got poker to play.”

“And yours, Big Daddy Phil?”

“It’s me,” Phil’s partner Yuko said as she reached in to take her card. She was one of the shortest girls in the house, a few inches below five foot tall, in her early twenties, slight and slender and as sassy and sarcastic as they came. Her voice still had strong traces of her Japanese accent, but her English was impeccable. “He always plays so loose that you need someone to be tight at the table.” There was a chuckle from the girls, although all the men politely refused to acknowledge the double entendre. Yuko scowled. “I accidentally said something dirty again, didn’t I?”

“It’s fine,” Xander’s partner Madison said, stepping in to draw her own card for seating. As the singer in a metal band, Madison was boisterous and rowdy, so it looked like they were getting quite the cantankerous bunch for poker tonight. She didn’t look much like she belonged in a metal band on first glance, although her choice of clothing did have a little rough around the edges look to it. But when they’d first met, Andy had commented how he wouldn’t have guessed she was a musician if she hadn’t told him, to which she’d responded that he looked ‘too sinister’ to be a writer. They’d continued to get along wonderfully, and Andy was nothing but happy that her and Xander seemed to be exceptionally happy with each other. “That just means you’re right at home with the rest of us. Buncha sleazebag dirtball girls and guys at this here table.”

Xander laughed as he grabbed his own card. “Is it always like this? I remember poker nights back in college as mostly quiet affairs, where we were all decompressing from exams and shit.”

“You’re not in college any more, Xanderman,” Phil told him, grabbing one of the last two cards, sliding the other across to Andy. “As De La Soul say, ‘stakes is high.’ Besides, after the poker game Andy had to play, no game of cards is ever going to be stressful for him again.”

Based on the cards, everyone took their seats, and nobody had drawn a seating next to their partner, meaning the game was live, with everyone tossing Eric $40 in cash as their buy-in, and Eric sliding the correct amount of chips back across the table to each of them. Buy-ins were usually $40, although from time to time they’d gone as high as $100. It was just a friendly game, though, and everyone was very loose with their play.

Nobody had told Maya or Yuko that, however, and every so often, the two of them would get hilariously intense with one another, having a staredown like it was millions of dollars on the line, not just a couple of $20s. All the men at the table watched in fascination, because this was the first real meeting of these two women, and they were already determined to take the measure of each other.

“What’s the max bet?” Yuko asked Eric without looking at him, keeping her eyes fixated on Maya, the only other person still left in the hand.

“Half the pot,” Eric replied.

“Then I bet that,” the small Japanese girl said with a ferocious grin.

Maya, by contrast, seemed almost expressionless, tapping her fingertips on top of her five cards, as if she was considering folding. Then in the slightest of motions, she nodded. “Call.” She counted out the chips she needed to make the pot right, then flipped over her hand. “Boat, Jacks over sevens.”

“You got it,” Yuko said, pushing her cards towards Eric before Maya tapped the table, chuckling as she shook her head, like Yuko was trying to pull a fast one on her.

“I paid to see those cards, so you’re gonna show’em to us, Eric,” Maya said, voice dripping with swagger and confidence.

“That’s far,” Eric said before flipping over the five cards Yuko had been about to muck. “Looks like a busted straight and a busted flush to me.”

Maya waggled a finger in Yuko’s direction. “You had to be bluffing sooner or later.”

Yuko attempted to look stern and mean for as long as she could, but then broke down into giggles. “Okay fine! Yes, I got caught with my hand in the nookie jar.”

“I think you meant ‘the cookie j—’” Phil started to correct.

“You heard what I said!” Yuko shouted at him with a deranged laugh, like a tiny schoolgirl tyrant, rolling her eyes at him, which set the entire table off into fits of mirth so loud that many of the other tables were looking over, trying to determine what the hell they’d missed.

For the next couple of hours or so, it was nice for everything to feel easy and comfortable, some semblance of normalcy returning, even if there were loads and loads of new people intermingled with all of it.

It was the first day Andy thought of the place he was in and the people around him...

...as home.

New family, old friends and new, new home, he thought to himself.

Then Muninn hopped up onto his lap, peeking his head over onto the poker table.

Same old cats.

Andy’s phone beeped on the poker table, so he picked it up and grinned from ear to ear, shaking his head with a huge laugh.

“What’s up?” Eric asked him, starting to deal out the next hand.

“Dave sent me a message, asking if he can get his hands on the next Druid Gunslinger book before it comes out,” he chuckled. “He says he’s sure he can think of something to match his gift from last time.”

Eric clenched his fist in front of his mouth, trying to stop from laughing. “Tell him he can see it in advance, but tell him maybe we don’t need another gift of this level,” he said in between gasps for air. “One was more than enough.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m telling him,” Andy said, typing into his phone. When he looked up, he saw Linda on approach, her face looking a little ashen, as she moved to tap Phil on the shoulder.

“What’s up?” Phil said to her.

“I need you to come and watch something, and I need you to do it right now,” she said, the tone of her voice immediately sending chills down Andy’s spine. “Hell, I may need a bunch of you to come and watch this. It’s about Gregor. And Jacobson. And Covington.”

“Are we worried about clearance level?” Phil said, squinting a little.

“Phil. Baby. I literally am incapable of giving less of a shit about that right now,” Linda responded, none of the Captain’s usual confidence or swagger present in her demeanor. “You need to see this, and I mean. Right. Fucking. NOW.”

Phil stood up, gesturing for the table to follow him, as Piper looked over, calling to them. “What’s going on?”

“Piper, you especially better come watch this,” Linda said. “I need to know everything about who the fuck we’re dealing with here.”

The entire room stopped what they were doing and moved back down into the living room, as Whitney helped Linda set it up so she could broadcast the video from her phone onto Andy’s giant projection wall, and as soon as the video file started to roll, Andy understood Linda’s expression.

It looked as though the video had been shot on someone’s camera phone, and it was framed in what Andy would’ve guessed was Covington Manor, based on how Arthur Covington the 4th was framed in the center of the shot, bound to his chair, his hands yanked forward by ropes around his wrists that seemed like they must have been attached to the far legs of the table. Behind Covington, Andy saw a variety of unfamiliar faces, although judging from some of the reactions around him, other people knew exactly who some of them were.

As soon as the group popped up on screen, Linda froze it. “Piper, who am I looking at?”

Piper drew in a deep breath then let it out. “Well, the Korean woman is Melody Park, Covington’s body guard. The woman to her right is Layla Greene. She came in with me. The women directly to Covington’s left—”

“—is Rachel DeMarco. We know that much from the video,” Linda said. “And the woman to Rachel’s left?”

“That’s Hope DeMarco, Rachel’s half-sister,” Piper said. “She’s an utter bitch.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Linda grumbled. “Anyone know who the blonde older woman in the back is?”

“I do,” Sarah said. “That’s Katarina Vikovic, Gregor’s wife. I met her in my brief time over at their place. She seemed rather quiet and reserved, but also very stoic. Very Russian.”

“What the hell is this, Linda?” Phil said.

“Just watch, but if anyone’s squeamish, you may want to close your eyes and just listen,” Linda said, with a sigh. “This gets ugly at the drop of a hat.”

She tapped her phone and the video started to play again, as Rachel leaned forward, adjusting the camera a little bit, making sure it had everything framed the way she wanted it to. And then she started to speak.

“This message is being sent to the people in charge of the Quaranteam Project and the generals at the Air Force first, but if progress is not made before the end of the year, we will send this to every major press outlet we can find. While we understand that we are not indicative of all the various houses of New Eden, we, the women of Houses Covington, Vikovic and Jacobson, are not going to suffer the abuses being put forth on us by the horrible men who run our houses any longer. The men we have been paired with are not good men. They are animals, savages and criminals. This man, in particular, is responsible for the murder of Veronica DeLa Cruz, and the people in charge of New Eden law enforcement just looked the other way because Brian Morrison confessed to it, but what Brian didn’t say was that he was doing it to placate this man, Arthur Fucking Covington the Fourth, who stood over them both, and watched while it happened. He watched as Morrison’s semen ate through her esophagus and drowned on her own blood. He. Fucking. Watched!”

“Oh shit,” Andy muttered to himself, suddenly feeling Piper pressed up hard against his right side, and Aisling desperately clinging to his left. He put his arms around them, trying to be as reassuring as he could, but didn’t like the look of where this was heading.

“The sorts of abuses that Misters Jacobson and Vikovic are nowhere near as severe,” Rachel continued, “but they are still far beyond the pale of what we or any other reasonable women should be expected to endure. And we aren’t going to stand for it any more.”

“You have to help me,” Covington started to say, before Hope shoved a ball gag into his mouth, latching it closed on the back of his head. It had more than its share of bite marks on it, but Andy suspected it was the first time Covington was the bearer of it.

“We are offering you a solution,” Rachel said. “Once you find a way to rebind us to other people, you will do so immediately and without reservation. There will also be no consequences for any of our actions between here and there, because we are done being the playthings of these cruel and awful men.”

Rachel leaned forward, staring into the camera, and as she did, Andy could see it looked like her nose was bruised or maybe even broken, and had happened recently, maybe the straw that broke the camel’s back.

“We need semen from these men, but that doesn’t mean we need anything else from them. We are more than willing to hurt them and wound them over and over again, just in case you’re entertaining thoughts about rescuing them by force or military intervention. None of us want to die, but we’ve decided to a woman that we’d rather all die together than let these horrific villains loom over our lives for even a single second longer. There is a lot of pain we can inflict on these men that won’t kill them.” Rachel laughed a little bit bitterly. “Shit, the damage we do to them might even be regenerated when you give them new partners to replace us after we’re gone. I will tell you, though, that we’d better see some fucking good faith efforts on your part and soon, otherwise we’re going to start sending pieces of these men to you, pieces they don’t need to provide us cum. I know, General Fielder. You’ve seen me on the base for months now, and you’ve always said you were surprised how much I’ve kept my opinions on everything to myself. Well, consider this my fucking resignation, and a reminder of just how far we’re willing to go if we’re backed into a corner.”

Rachel leaned back, stepped out of frame and then came back with an ax, the kind people used to chop firewood, setting it on the table near Covington’s arms, as the man began to panic, struggling against the ropes.

“The longest argument we had about all of this was who got to do this one thing, but in the end, it sort of always had to be me, didn’t it? He always asked the worst of me, and I was always too scared to tell him no. Up until now.”

Hope moved to tie a tourniquet around Covington’s right forearm, and to the left of him, Melody set a blowtorch down, making sure to test it.

“We’re not fucking around here, General.”

With almost no warning, Rachel lifted the ax up into the air and brought it down onto the table, severing Covington’s right hand from his arm with a sickly wet sound that made everyone in the room cringe, many of the women looking away as soon as they saw the ax get lifted. Covington was screaming into the ball gag before he passed out in shock, blood spraying all across the table, but somehow missing the camera lens on the phone.

Melody brought the blowtorch over and cauterized the wound with fire, doing her best to scar it up, even as Hope pulled the tourniquet tighter on it.

“We’ll take care of the wound, but he’s going to have to learn how to do everything left handed from now on,” Rachel said. “Try and attack Covington Manor where we’re all holed up, and we’ll keep sending bodyparts over the gate at you. His, Jake’s, Gregor’s... there’s lots of bits we can continually chop off without losing access to their balls. We can even kill one of them and reassign the rest of us to one of the others until we get what we want, but I think we’ve made our point clear, haven’t we? We’re not fucking around, General, and whether it was intentional or not, we’re done being under the bootheel of these shitbags. Find a way to get us out of this mess, otherwise I’m happy to keep making Waldorf salad out of poor little Artie here. We will expect an update from you within forty-eight hours time, and it had better be to our liking, because we’ve got very little to lose here. If we don’t get what we want, we’ll burn the whole fucking system down. We’ve got a copy of this recording on a dead woman’s switch that if we don’t hit snooze on once a day will upload itself to every major media outlet we can think of. Got it? Not. Fucking. Around. This is Rachel DeMarco and the rest of the New Daughters of the Revolution, signing off.”

The room was silent for a moment, with Linda taking the video down, nobody sure where to even start.

“I know I should feel sorry for him,” Piper said, “but fuck him. I’m glad they’re getting out from under him.”

“So what’s the play, Phil?” Andy asked him.

Phil shook his head. “This... this is way above my paygrade.”

“I think the team invading Vikovic’s home for the health and wellness check set them off a little early,” Linda told them. “They wanted to wait a little bit more until they’d stocked up more supplies, but the team’s looked at Covington Manor, and they say they don’t even want to risk it. I can’t say I blame them. If it were my call, I’d say we just give’em what they want.”

“Shit!” Phil said. “Fielder doesn’t know we have what they want.” He’d kept the discovery of Eve Merriweather and her reassignment solution secret from the base, but it seemed like that was going to have to change and quick.

“Oh shit,” Linda said as Phil was pulling his phone out of his pocket.

“I’m calling him, I’m calling him,” Phil said, the phone only ringing once before Fielder picked up. “General! Thank God you picked up. Yes, I’ve seen the video. Now, I need you to listen to me closely, alright?” Phil walked away from the group, carrying on his conversation with the General in very intense tones, even as he moved into the back yard.

“Good for them, I say,” Emily said to the room, and most of the women nodded in agreement, as did all of the men. “Well, there’s nothing we can do about it now. Shall we return back to the other room and carry on with our evening?”

Andy hoped that the storm in New Eden would just be a brief blip, but somehow he suspected the aftershocks of what they’d just witnessed were going to be felt for years to come.

He wasn’t wrong.