QT:UK - Chapter 8

5th October 2020

Alex sat on the bathroom tiles crying, the voices on the other side of the door so small and remote that they’d stopped making sense. Her hands wouldn’t stop shaking. Her heart raced so hard it hurt. And every breath burned like hell, forcing her to work at every shallow, snatching gasp.

She’d had panic attacks enough times before and thought she knew what anxiety was like, but the wave that had come over her within moments of receiving the vaccine made those seem tiny by magnitudes. This almost felt physical. Something she could reach out and touch. A beast in black and carmine with jaws large enough to fit around her chest, trying to savage her into the ground.

It would be a lie to say that she hadn’t had her misgivings before the injection. The blonde doctor, Eleanor, at least seemed nice. But every doubt and off vibe she had about Rhys had become more cacophonous with every moment in which the serum worked its way through her body. The sheer fucking wrongness of everything had wormed it’s way into her skull, until the only thing she could think to do was run. Knowing the bathroom at least offered a door she could lock, that was where Alex had made her break, listening to the impulse to grab the doctor’s laptop as she’d gone. If what she was hoping to find on the device was reassurance, what she’d gotten was the opposite and it now lay in the corner, smashed against the wall. Trashed, like everything else in the room, as she’d struggled to find any sort of outlet for what she was feeling.

But there wasn’t one. No matter how much she screamed and cried and broke and lashed out, her heart pounded faster, the run spun harder and the panic built further. With her red hair drenched with sweat, Alex curled up on the floor, and prayed whatever this nightmare was would just fucking kill her already.

******

“Aaah for fucks sake!”

Aoife swore as she was jolted from her half-thoughts and the autopilot she’d been working on by a small, brief flash and the faintest plume of electrical smoke. Black scorches marred the circuit board in front of her, and it didn’t take a genius to immediately realise that she’d managed to short it past the point of saving. If she was less worn out she might have had to fight the urge to throw her soldering iron across the room, but as it was she simply set it down, before slumping her beanie clad head onto the workbench to give a despairing whine.

The digital clock on the wall read 00:57, but time felt a little arbitrary in her basement workshop, beneath fluorescent tube lights that did their straining best to keep the space from slipping into complete darkness. The repair job on the sound mixing desk was meant to be a quick one, something she could knock out easily rather than taking on one of the more daunting pieces of satellite equipment Nat had left her with. Something she could have done before midnight to justify a few snatched hours with her eyes closed on the camp bed in the corner of the room. But she was long past the point where her exhaustion was purely physical, and even the easy jobs were taking her twice as long. And that was without stupid lapses in concentration leading to stray gestures frying the device she was trying to fix.

It crossed her mind that maybe she didn’t have much left to give.

“I can’t keep fucking doing this.”

Despite the statement Aoife made herself move, as if forcing herself to keep going was the only thing stopping the last few threads holding her together from finally coming apart. She was forced to pick her way past several obstructing coils of outdoor cable, ordered as a back-up following the vandalism of the uplink, and reached the sets of shelves her predecessor had mounted to meticulously arrange all the documentation and manuals they might need. She knew there was a handbook for the sound desks there, which, even if it didn’t offer a solution, would at least give her the part number to order a replacement.

Aoife hated how much of a ghost of herself she felt right now, carrying around feelings that had been building for a while until they’d started to get past the point where she could keep ignoring them. Across the room the blue light of her own PC monitor remained illuminated at her desk with a couple of basic diagnostics of some faulty camera drives running. They weren’t the drives that kept wrestling with her attention however.

It was almost 72 hours since she’d dumped the contents of the encrypted drive for ‘Project Upstart’. Stealing something like this definitely wasn’t like her. Not the her she saw herself as anyway. Nor was sitting on it, almost obsessively refusing to delete the data despite the fact she seemed no closer to working out a password. But if there was even a glimmer of an answer to how trapped she was starting to feel, Aoife couldn’t let it go, no matter how sick it all made her feel.

At least she was talking to Ethan again. Even if noticing how stubbornly raw her feelings had ended up becoming was another sign of how poorly she was coping. He was the one good thing in her life right now, but her reaction to him missing a movie night wasn’t something she liked. She didn’t want to build him up into something he couldn’t be or to put all her needs on him. But then she wasn’t sure what else she was left with.

Finding herself standing in front of one set of shelves without having noticed the last few steps towards it, Aoife realised she’d spaced out entirely for a moment, and gave her own face a soft slap. “Come on you fucking numpty. Focus.”

She spotted the faded volume she was looking for, eventually, on the top shelf, half buried beneath a stack of folders and documentation that had been stashed away months ago, waiting hopefully for a point where someone might actually find the time to file them properly. Little chance of that happening. The hard part was straining her short frame up to get it down, something she only half succeeded in, retrieving the manual with an accompanying avalanche of papers and another loud string of curses. Aoife took a moment where she fought down the urge to simply give up for the day, finally stooping down to start dejectedly collecting things back up, before a glimpse at one caused her to stop.

The single photocopied sheet was a mixture of printed arial font and annotations in the careful hand writing of Tom Warrick, the genial  Welshman who had been the NEBC’s head producer at Taymont Hall. Guiltily, Aoife realised it had been weeks since she’d thought about him. As far as she was aware Tom still was officially in charge, but she’d not heard from him since he’d become another of the dozens of their staff who’d been rushed to hospital. She liked him, but at some point managing the concern for every single person they were no longer getting news about had become another task. One she didn’t have the bandwidth to grapple with. And so that had got buried, unflatteringly, along with other luxuries like sleep and washing her hair.

It wasn’t the thought of Tom himself that caught Aoife off guard however but the contents of the paper itself. It dated back a couple of months, and the point at which the fourth of Aoife’s immediate superiors had also taken ill and left her, overwhelmed but determined as the most senior engineer on staff. Her rapid promotion had come with several unneeded challenges though, one of which being the delay in getting the access and clearance she needed to even start doing some of the jobs being asked of her. Tom’s solution had been to simply make her a copy of door codes and his own top level access credentials, tucked away and forgotten once Aoife’s own permissions had finally come through a few weeks later.

And there, jotted down near the bottom, were several strings of characters under the heading ‘site to site encryption keys.’

Too good to be true? Maybe. But everything else about the systems they’d been given to work with at Taymont and by Palisade Services had been equally haphazard and inadequate. Why would their cyber security cut any less corners? Aoife’s pulse quickened and she snatched up the paper, retaining just enough presence of mind to avoid tripping over the cables as she rushed back to the glow of her computer.

The first key was a bust, deflating expectations as she checked and re-entered the code, carefully watching the capitalisation of each of the random seeming characters, but with no more luck. The second and third were the same, and she felt a twist in her guts, chiding herself for the foolish feeling that she might have made progress. Cynicism set in, and she was slower as she moved to the fourth key on the list, expecting the same result as she tapped the return key…

And watched as a progress bar lit up the pixels, with the names of newly decrypted files flickering past faster than she could read them.

“Get tae fuck…” she murmured to herself, disbelieving and unblinking.

The green haired woman hesitated for a moment as the computer finished the task, a simple generic pass key all it had taken to spring the contents of the drive open onto a new window. Whatever lines she had crossed in getting this far, there was definitely no turning back or bottling things up again the moment she started to look at what was inside. Right now however better judgement was no competition for burnout and bloody minded curiosity and her finger, almost unthinkingly, clicked the mouse onto the first file.

What Aoife found left her feeling very much awake, exhaustion replaced by a choking rush of adrenaline, cold and sickly, that left her cursor trembling as she spent the next few hours navigating from one report to the next. It didn’t become clear to her why the bleak detail of DuoHalo was being passed around on a locked drive, kept from the  public, but her mind struggled to really grasp onto that question for long enough to care. Reports from London and Scotland quickly began to blur together instead, dispatches from around the country causing the ground to drop out from underneath her and spiral away with death counts, statistics. She begged herself to look away from footage of ventilators and morgues, spent, bloodied PPE and crying relatives. And she knew that if this was the measured face journalists were putting to things the personal reality had to be so much worse.

She finally pulled herself away when her guts rebelled, and she grabbed the rubbish bin from beneath her desk to vomit into.

******

The clock had ticked over into the earliest hours of Sunday morning by the time Jess stirred from her imprinting.  It was several hours since Nia had headed to Alex’s place to help with whatever was going on, and while he was getting updates from his partner it still felt like his idea of exactly what was going on was distant and incomplete. Instead his mind had been left to poke at not just that, but at thoughts of what he was going to say to Aoife, and the nagging uncertainty of how he felt about things with Nia.

Ethan knew that there was a potential level of emotional dishonesty from himself here, that he had told the algorithm he had no attachments, only to reveal three partners in that he might have feelings for someone else. And Nia had surprised him with how supportive she seemed to be at him doing whatever he needed with Aoife to make things right. Yet the more he thought about it the more he couldn’t tell if the non-disclosure of Nia’s status in the algorithm bothered him, or if he simply was trying to find his footing on ground that suddenly felt uncertain. He knew he’d need to make whatever thoughts he had clear to Nia, once he had them straight, but right now Jess needed that to wait. And he kept reiterating in his head that he was going to find a way to make this work. For everyone.

As Jess had stirred, her dreamy contentment had been quickly replaced by worry as Ethan had let her know that there were issues with her sister. Ethan knew from his previous experiences with imprinting that the petite redhead was likely waking up with a head full of serum driven feelings and urges she was having to quickly get to grips with. Jess dealt with things admirably however, even if as they climbed into her tiny Kia to head across town the burden on her face showed through while she fidgeted in her seat. Wisely she let Ethan drive, and he did his best to explain what he knew as they rushed through empty streets.

Alex McNamara only lived a couple of miles away from her younger sister, in an old Victorian townhouse near the centre of Nottingham that had been converted into several ‘affordable’ flats. Ethan recognised Nia’s car as one among several pulled up directly onto the kerb outside, while the front door had been propped open for them. The pair slipped inside, making their way up an ageing stairwell, paint peeling, and up to the 2nd floor, where Rhys could already be heard doing his best to restrain his displeasure through another open door.

It was cold as they entered the narrow hallway into Alex’s place, a draft blowing in from somewhere that century old heating pipes were failing to cancel out. They were met by Dr Armstrong, the blonde woman sat on the dated carpet beside a locked door, into what Ethan had to assume was the bathroom, an open doctor’s bag resting beside her. Armstrong smiled on seeing them, the expression worn with weary relief, and she pressed herself gently against the door, calling reassuringly to the other side.

“Alex? Your sister’s here. We’re going to fix this, you just need to hold on a little longer for me, ok?”

Ethan struggled to make out the strained, mumbled reply from the other side, as Jess hurried to join Armstrong.

Alex McNamara had, as far as Ethan could tell, been given the vaccine a little after her younger sister had already imprinted on him. According to what Nia had told him it was normal for the body to experience a spike in several stress hormones after receiving Gemivax, normally unnoticed amidst the other acute phase effects of the serum. However, she had also explained that rarely, these spikes could be pronounced enough to induce significant symptoms, from arrhythmias to severe anxiety and distress. Alex was evidently one of the 1 in 10,000 unlucky enough to have experienced the mother of all panic attacks, and had spent the hours since locked in her bathroom refusing to come out.

There were a couple of dull, agitated bangs on the other side of the door. This time Ethan was able to hear the tearful words that came after.

“Tell her this is all wrong…” Alex sounded strung out, exhausted by hysteria. “I need it to stop. I can’t do this…”

Jess knelt beside the door, and Ethan watched how concern was etched roughly onto her body language as she spoke back, doing her best to placate the unseen sister on the other side. And as she did Armstrong took the opportunity to move, rising with a stretch of stiff limbs to speak with Ethan in hushed tones.

“I’m really worried about her. She’s been in there for hours and won’t even let me check her vitals. I don’t like the idea of what being in that state for such a long period of time is going to be doing to her.”

Ethan nodded, he could hear Nia and Rhys bickering from down the hallway and the warm glow of the living room, and wanted to at least be clued in on the discussion he was about to walk into the middle of. “What state is she in exactly? Nia told me a little but I’m not exactly familiar with this sort of thing.”

“From what Averna are telling me? The vaccine’s triggered a release of catecholamines and vasopressin that…” Armstrong paused, giving a small, tired sigh as she caught the look of Ethan’s face and realised the terms meant nothing to him with his tv producer background. “They’re hormones broadly associated with stress. Meaning we might as well have locked her in there with a wild animal for the last 7 hours given how her body is likely to be responding physiologically. And psychologically…”

Armstrong’s statement was cut off by another short series of bangs from inside the bathroom, accompanied by a fraught cry of frustration.

“Why is no-one listening to me!”

Kneeling there in the dimly lit hallway, Jess looked helpless as her big sister gave fatigued shouts from behind the locked door. The young redhead glanced up at Ethan, grappling hard with the churn of her own emotions and serum induced sensations, and his emotions wrenched. He met her gaze, and something almost viscerally protective kicked in in the back of his head, the bond they now shared grabbing hold of him and demanding he make this ok for her.

“We’re going to help her, I promise Jess.” He was surprised at how calm and soothing his voice managed to be, despite feeling totally out of his depth. “Just keep talking to her.”

The young artist bit her lip and nodded back. Her own voice wavered softly as she spoke. “How long has she been like this?”

Armstrong gave another sigh, deeper this time. “She’s been in there since we vaccinated her. And given how long ago that was, that's about to become its own set of problems.”

Ethan had seen first hand how intense the need of Farah had been after even a short delay between vaccination and priming. But he’d also been told that once that time began to stretch much further than 8-12 hours the level of distress it inflicted on the woman began to become unmanageable. Apparently the version of the serum the US produced took significantly longer for that particular issue to arise, but then according to Nia most things about Gemivax ran hotter and faster than its American counterpart. And presumably the fact that no-one had told him what would happen if any of that occurred in conjunction with an adverse reaction like Alex’s meant they were in uncharted territory. Worryingly the look on Armstrong’s face made it clear the doctor felt almost as out of her depth as he did.

“I work in public health,” the blonde woman protested. “This is past what I was briefed to deal with. She calmed down a bit after I slipped a diazepam under the door, but I’m not happy giving her anything more until I can tell what her body is doing. The solution is to get her imprinted but, well, I assume Nia told you the issue we also have there?”

“Yeah, she did.”

Even if Nia hadn’t, the 30 unread messages Jess had received from her sister while she imprinted would have clued them in, even if they weren’t destined to be read until the younger McNamara woke up. Text after text, increasingly frantic.

‘The algorithm is wrong. I can’t do this.’

‘Delphi shouldn’t have matched me like this. Something isn’t right.’

‘They aren’t listening to me!’

Whatever had caused her initial misgivings, Alex’s agitation had borne out as a suspicion that the Delphi algorithm had mismatched her with Rhys and Team Barclay. Suspicions that had become convictions. And convictions that had evidently led to her snatching up Armstrong’s laptop, Delphi access and all, as she’d made a break towards the bathroom. If pushing ahead with getting Alex imprinted was the obvious solution, it wasn’t entirely clear how they were meant to proceed when it was also such a large part of the problem.

Ethan stepped towards where Jess sat with her ear pressed up against the door. Her own distress at the situation was obvious, and he stooped in to give her a reassuring kiss on the forehead. But he knew she didn’t need gestures, she needed people to make this right for Alex. “I’m going to talk with Nia. Shout if you need me, ok?”

She nodded again, and he left her with Armstrong, wandering the short distance towards the living room where the tense sound of Nia and Rhys’ voices had been present since they arrived.

“I want to know how the fuck this happened…no, thats not fucking good enough.” Nia sat in an ageing leather armchair, one hand holding her phone while the fingers of the rapped characteristically on the arm. Obviously she was speaking to someone else from Averna and Ethan was just glad he wasn’t on the receiving end of whatever was causing her displeasure.

The building may have been dated, but Alex had done a good job of making the space feel homey, with powder blue walls, vintage furniture and more books than could be confined to the single large case covering one wall.  It was also mercifully spacious, providing Rhys with room to pace back and forth without ever straying too close to Nia, who’s face matched the anger in her voice. Ethan was used to her swearing in the bedroom, but rarely outside of it, and he realised he’d never seen her fighting quite so hard to maintain her veneer of poise.

“This was meant to be bulletproof, how am I meant to be selling this to the entire fucking country when I can’t even trust that…” Nia had continued to argue with whoever was on the other end of the call, but paused as she noticed Ethan. It was as if his presence alone went some way to placating her and she softened. “No…I need to go. I’ve got a girl locked in a bathroom here that needs helping. Just get me answers.”

Nia hung up the phone, only for Rhys to immediately speak up instead before anything could pass between her and Ethan. Even though the journalist’s frustration was clear, he seemed set on making sure everyone knew it, temper showing even as he tried to rein in his volume. “This is bullshit Nia.”

“Do I look like I’m not aware of that?”

“You told us that the algorithm wasn’t capable of issues like this.”

“I know,” Nia said. She tried to make her voice firm, but there was an unusual, apologetic waver as she spoke. And her body language was unlike anything Ethan had seen from her before, tense and guilty. Doubtful.

“You told us that…”

“I know.” Nia did her best to cut off another wave of indignation from Rhys, but her protest felt even weaker than the first. “Just…Let me fix this.”

Silence hung in the air for a single long beat, as Rhys relented momentarily and Nia massaged her temple, her mind seemingly searching for some relief that it wasn’t able to find. The atmosphere continued to feel pulled taut, and Ethan spoke carefully, uncertain as to quite what had caused it.

“What’s going on?”

“Turns out Screaming Beauty in there was right,” Rhys said bitterly, gesturing back towards the corridor while at least reining some of his indignation.

Ethan had to presume that Rhys was referring to Alex, but barely felt closer to actually getting the answer he wanted. He looked at Nia, and watched her give a long exhale as she tried to find her poise and only half succeeded.

“After her reaction Alex became insistent that Delphi’s results for her and Team Barclay had to be spurious,” his partner explained. “So we decided to check them again to try and reassure her. It turns out that she was right. We’ve run her directly against Rhys five times and her initial match was,” she searched for the word she wanted. “Overstated.”

The wheels spun in Ethan’s mind for a second as he caught the implication there, only for Rhys to spell it out for him anyway.

“What our dear leader means is that my compatibility with Alex is 34 fucking percent. Not the 91 the original Delphi report suggested. And if she hadn’t had a reaction and lost her mind we were all about to blindly go along with it.”

Nia remained silent and Ethan studied her closely. Plainly she hated this, every drawn out second of the situation. And it was clear from the lack of denial or clarification that Rhys was telling the truth. But then the obvious, sickening, question was how Delphi had got the matching so badly wrong?

“You know if I’m going to ruin a woman’s life I’d at least like her to know what she’s signing up for,” Rhys continued, imposing himself on the silence with what seemed to amount to concern for Alex. Ethan however just wished he’d shut up, and give his own mind a chance to catch up to what he’d just learnt.

Instead he heard himself speaking out loud, thoughts left to play out in the open. “How the fuck does something like that happen?”

“That’s one of several things I’m trying to work out,” Nia said, her reply laced with quietly wounded anger.

Once again a quiet pause crept back into the room, causing Rhys to lose patience as he glanced between the pair of them. Apparently realising nothing was moving fast with him there, he began to head back towards the hallway, brusquely moving past Ethan as he did so. “You know what, I’m going for a smoke. And to find somewhere to fucking piss since the only bathroom’s still occupied, for some reason.”

Rhys leaving didn’t remove as much tension from the room as Ethan had hoped however, left alone with Nia and the self-conscious strain of her emotions. He watched her, unsure which way those feelings were likely to tip. There was one question, however, he needed to know the answer to, no matter what she was feeling.

“Are any of the other matches, you know, wrong?”

The shake of her head Nia gave was firm and immediate.

“No. I’ve been in contact with Delphi’s engineers all night,” she said gesturing to where she had set both her phone and tablet on a walnut brown coffee table. “I’ve had them triple check every other allocation on Project Upstart and they assure me that all the other data is correct. That’s one thing we can relax about.”

“Then how?”

“Assuming they’re telling me the truth and not covering their own arses?”Anger crept back into her voice, at other people’s failings that had left her shaken and accountable. “It seems as if someone’s interfered with the system. Alex wasn’t the intended match for Team Barclay. Whoever did this deleted the details of the original match, then replaced them with the profile of another woman already in the database to cover their tracks. In this case Alex. She was just an unfortunate consequence of trying to spoof the system.”

Ethan wasn’t sure what was worse, what he was hearing, or that such malfeasance felt like such an entirely predictable human consequence of using a system like Delphi. Yet not so predictable that it had been stopped from happening.

“So if she hadn’t had a reaction and freaked out,” he asked, trailing off rather than voice the consequence that she and Rhys would have been stuck together.

The anger in Nia’s voice remained stark as she continued for him. “Or if she hadn’t grabbed Armstrong’s laptop to check Oracle herself and confirm her suspicions. Or any number of things. I’m sure she doesn’t feel like it now, but a lot of things had to fall right for her to be this lucky.”

Ethan moved to sit on the living room’s couch as she talked, the short distance between Nia’s seat and his own feeling not enough for one part of him and much too far for another. He glanced back towards the door. It wasn’t possible to see directly down the corridor from where he found himself, but an old wood framed mirror hung on one wall gave him a view of where Jess and Armstrong remained by the bathroom door. Seeing Jess trying to soothe her sister, he wasn’t sure he could bring himself to feel like Alex had been particularly lucky either.

Nia suddenly sounded tired as she continued. “And no, I don’t know what that means for whoever was meant to be matched to Rhys, or why she would have been deleted. Whoever did this clearly had other designs and the means to tamper with the system, which shouldn’t have been possible. I have several more calls I need to make first thing in the morning. And I will be asking Evie to escalate things on the government’s side too.”

“You don’t want me telling you how bad this is right now, do you?” Ethan meant it as a joke, but the weariness in his own voice made it sound much more accusing than he’d have liked.

Nia managed a weak smile and did her best to quip back. “I think I could live without it honestly.”

“One thing at a time then. What do we do to help Alex?”

There was a long sigh, and the sound of a tap dripping somewhere in the kitchen as Nia took her time to try and focus her thoughts at his prompting. “Armstrong was particularly clear that it’s going to be dangerous to keep her unpaired for much longer. We’ve got people checking to see if there’s anyone already on the database that’s a particularly good match but the best we have currently are a doctor in Northern Ireland and a naval officer somewhere off the coast of fucking Scotland.”

“Can I be honest? Sitting and waiting on Delphi doesn’t feel particularly great at the minute.”

“No it doesn’t…” The heavy implication in Nia’s tone led Ethan’s eyes to meet hers, and he was surprised by the guilt he found there. And not just about the events they were in the middle of. He hadn’t meant Aoife, but she certainly did.

The sound of more banging from the bathroom cut through Ethan’s attempts to find a response, and he looked back towards the mirror. The reflection of Jess seemed very small, toiling through the hurt of her own helplessness. She was doing her best, but it wasn’t clear how much it was helping and dimly, he thought he could hear Alex crying. He couldn’t allow himself to leave either of them like this. But if Averna weren’t going to offer timely answers, then what?

The longer he sat there the more it felt like he was avoiding a question that was inevitable.

“What about us?”

Nia clearly knew the question was coming and her expression softened. “Delphi will have flagged Jess being paired with you already and excluded you from the search. It doesn’t know how to factor something like that when considering team dynamics."

Giving a momentary nod, he paused to consider. “But we could make it compare her against each of us manually, right?”

“Ethan…”

With another glance cast at the mirror, Ethan cut across the gentle protest of Nia’s realism, not entirely sure if he was trying to convince her or himself. “We don’t exactly have a huge number of options here. Can we just make sure we aren’t missing one? Please.”

Slowly Nia uncrossed her legs as she leant forward and collected the tablet she’d left resting on the coffee table. Neither of them spoke as careful fingers tapped away at the screen, and she used her Delphi access to run the request. Ethan watched her and how she briefly looked off into the distance for a moment after reading the result, her expression not something he could read easily. Nor was the meaning behind the subdued but affectionate smile she gave him as she turned the screen so he could see it.

What was clearer was the result, displayed in bold letters beneath a detailed statistical breakdown. Overall compatibility, 88.5%

It was Ethan’s turn to need a moment, pulling apart the implications that suddenly found themselves playing out in front of him. He realised a large part of him had expected, and hoped, the result would take the burden away from him. But with such a high result, he’d left himself unable to feel anything other than responsible for however things were about to play out. And he already knew he wasn’t going to be able to walk away if there was no other solution to help Alex, no matter how little he knew about her.

He stood, pacing for a moment, before turning back to Nia. “Ok, now what about your compatibility?”

“What about it?”

"We’re only halfway done, she needs to be a match for you too.”

Pointedly Nia powered off the tablet, setting it back down on the table. If the gesture wasn’t decisive enough, the bluntness of her voice as she spoke certainly was. “No. She doesn’t.”

Ethan looked back at her with confusion. He had seen the certainty with which Nia conducted herself in business when her mind had been made up, but this was different. She was attempting to bring the same resolve to bear, but it was as much for her own benefit as it was for his, and he found himself searching for her reasons.

“If this is the option we are actually considering,” Nia said, more than a hint of quiet emotion showing through despite her efforts, “exactly how low would my compatibility with her have to be before it becomes a deal breaker? Before I’m the reason we leave her how she is? Please Ethan, don’t ask me to be the one to put a number on that.”

For one of the first times in the short span since Ethan had met her, Nia looked vulnerable. He had become so used to thinking of her as an assured presence that it had been easy to overlook how she might feel with something like this. She blamed herself for Averna failing Alex, and the girl’s plight really bothered her.

“What about you being put first,” he asked.

It was Nia’s turn to look confused. “What do you mean?”

“With the algorithm making sure that you’re getting what you want.”

“Is that what you really think this has been about,” as she allowed her guard to drop long enough for the hurt to show plainly on her face, voice straining slightly. “I accepted being made the primary for the algorithm when I was asked, but only  because of how important it is to get Project Upstart and the professional compatibility right. It was made clear that if I was going to lead I needed the right people around me. And I agreed with that. But it was never about just giving me what I want.”

Nia stressed the sentence with enough intensity to not leave Ethan in any doubt that she meant it, and he felt a small pang of his own guilt to accompany the apparent heft of her own. He glanced away, and she stood, moving close to him, placing a hand on his cheek to draw his eyes back to the soulful brown of her own.

“This isn’t the lifestyle I’d have ever chosen if it was just about what I wanted. I’ve checked every single one of our matches so far to make sure they’re at least as compatible with you as they are with me. I didn’t tell you sooner because I thought if that was the case then why did it even matter? I would never have asked you to be with someone that was wrong for you. I just…”

She tailed off with a contrite sigh and left the last part unspoken, but Ethan knew what she meant as plainly as if she had said it.

‘I didn’t consider what it would mean if you found you had feelings I hadn’t accounted for.’

“You know you could have just told me,” he said, somewhere between a protest and reassurance.

“Have you ever heard the phrase ‘bad news doesn’t get better with age,’” the dark skinned woman asked in an uncharacteristic near-mumble. She’d been scared, he realised. They’d barely known each other for a week and Nia wasn’t someone who opened up easily. It wasn’t hard to believe that some things might come much harder to her than others. But algorithm or not, neither of them had a roadmap for this, no matter how hard he felt pulled towards her.

Nia looked past him, towards the mirror and the view of the bathroom, before speaking again.  “This is your decision. It’s you she’ll be pairing with, not me.”

But it still wasn’t just his decision, he thought. Given he was already paired with Alex’s sister, I struggled to see any way he could do something Jess wasn’t going to be comfortable with.

“The problem is Jess. Alex is her sister, I can’t just…”

Almost as soon as Ethan began to voice that particular wrinkle however, a light knock came on the open door to the room, the redheaded artist waiting at the weathered frame as if summoned by the mention of her name. She looked stretched thin, fidgety and agitated, the serum doing its best to wrest her attention from the fraught matter of her older sister.

“Sorry, it was a little hard not to overhear some of what you were talking about.”

Ethan watched her, like she was being mentally pulled to be in two places at once and couldn’t make her attention settle. His concern for her was immediate. “Are you ok?”

“Not really,” she managed. “But the hardest part is Alex being in there like this, I can deal with the rest for now, mostly.

Jess gave a small shiver. In their rush to get over to Alex’s flat she’d dressed hurriedly, simply throwing a thin chequered shirt on, over a t-shirt with a cute paw-print design, barely enough for the late night chill of the Victorian building. Ethan fetched a throw blanket from where it was decoratively draped over the couch he’d been sitting upon, and was met with a shy smile as he drew it around her shoulders.

“You heard what we’re considering then,” Ethan said. “You know that if you have any issues with this-”

Once again Jess cut him off in a rushed blather. “No, I can’t leave her like this and I’d rather share you than anything else that might happen. I know it’s not like I really know you but, well, when we were arranging this she was always talking about how cute you were and how nice you seemed. And she joked that if I didn’t join up to Upstart then she’d have to take you instead. If she hadn’t kept telling me how lucky I was I don’t know if I’d have been brave enough to go through with things.”

It was hard not to feel a little embarrassed by the endorsement. And Ethan had become so used to hearing about attachment in terms of algorithms and percentages that he had to stifle his own goofy smile as he listened to the cute woman sing his praises so earnestly. Even so, he wanted to do everything he could to make sure she didn’t feel pressured.

“You know we’ll find another way if we have to, right?”

“I know.”

He went to demur again, but Nia spoke with reassuring exasperation before he could. “Ethan, does she really look like she’s about to change her mind to you?”

It was obvious that Jess wasn’t going to.

Ethan relented, and in the moment his expression lightened, Jess craned up to kiss him, the gesture full of what love and appreciation she could manage. He had to admit to himself that this was all foolhardy at best. But then was it really that much more foolhardy than the rest of what he’d been doing for the last ten days, and he was still waiting for that to truly come unstuck. Or perhaps it already had and he was pretending not to notice. Regardless, the pleading in Jess’ eyes and the touch of her lips on his own managed to be no small incentive had he needed anything more than wanting to help Alex.

Sharing a final, wordless glance with Nia and seeing the warmth of her pride in him, Ethan wandered the short distance back towards the bathroom. Armstrong remained at her post, doing her best to do what she could to observe the woman locked away behind the dated wooden door, and moved to give Ethan space as he arrived, shifting aside some of the medical equipment that had ended up scattered and unused about the floor.

“Alex?”

He eased himself down to sit with his back against the door, deciding to at least try and make himself comfortable. It was only as he noticed the rushed sounds of Alex’s breathing coming from beyond that he realised how stretched his own nerves were, knowing that whatever he said next had consequences for not just him, but for the woman on the other side. He could hear her, right there, but she didn’t speak, and he was glad for the chance to find the tone he wanted.

“My name’s Ethan. Jess was telling me I’ve got you to thank for meeting her.”

He tried to keep things casual, unpressured, but for several seconds there was no reply, and he wondered if he’d picked the right approach. It was only as he was about to open his mouth to try again that she answered.

“No-one’s listening to me. This is all so wrong.” Alex’s voice was deeper than Jess’ and it cracked as she spoke, scraped thin by exhaustion and stress, unable to get her thoughts straight or enough air in her lungs to say everything in one breath. She sounded broken, and he instantly hated that he’d left Jess to talk to her sister like this.

He did his best to stay relaxed for her as he continued. “Yeah, I’ve been told how badly this got fucked up. But I’m not going to try and make you do anything you don’t want, including opening this door. You don’t feel safe, I get that. And nothings going to happen with Rhys, he’s gone.”

Again there was no response, prompting Ethan to try and find anything he could to start to break through.

”I’d love to lock myself in a bathroom every time he’s talking too. You may be freaking out, but that part’s just common sense.”

The joke was rewarded with a small, effort laden chuckle. It was almost brief enough to miss, but gave Ethan hope as to just how much of her head she was still holding above water.

“You must be feeling pretty rough right now.”

“I feel like my heart’s about to explode. My head hurts. And…” Alex tailed off, before making Ethan jump by slamming a fist against the door as she struggled to ride things out. “Fuuuuck. I want it to stop!”

“Did Jess tell you the only way we’re going to fix that?”

Her voice hitched even harder.  “I can’t do that. I can’t. I…” Again whatever she wanted to say became too much of a struggle to get out, and a frustrated sob replaced it. Just down the corridor Armstrong hovered, her agitation building with Alex’s protest and she caught Ethan’s eye as if to say that can’t wasn’t an option. She wanted him to hurry, but he ignored her, letting silence settle for a moment before gently prompting Alex again.

“It’s ok. I’m listening.”

“Any time I think about…that,” she continued eventually, as Ethan let her work through each hesitation and broken sentence. “Of anyone coming near me. Because of what an algorithm says…I start to freak out again. None of this makes any sense. How am I meant to…It’s like the worlds gone fucking crazy and I’m the only one who can see it.”

“I think it probably has, that’s one part I can’t change.” Again Alex didn’t immediately respond, and Ethan found himself wishing he could see her face and know if his candour was paying off or just making things worse. “I’ve been doing this for ten days now and I keep waiting for any of this to make sense. But it won’t. It sometimes feels like it’s about to and then I catch myself and realise how insane everything is. If the world feels like it’s gone crazy, you’re not alone.”

“I can’t fucking deal with that. I don’t want to have to…I just want…”

He said nothing as she tailed off this time, leaving her with the space to work out what she wanted to say without feeling like she couldn’t.

“I feel so fucking powerless.”

The reports from the other broadcast teams came to mind, and Ethan sighed. “Join the club. I don’t think any of us feel terribly in control of what’s happening to us right now. I’m just trying to keep in mind the things I can influence and focus on those. And that helps, not entirely, but it does help. I can’t come up with better answers or get rid of the pandemic, but I can still focus on the little things that actually matter. You know, try and make sure I’m happy and so are the people who matter to me.”

Everything suddenly felt very still as he finished the thought, the sound of the breathing less frayed. There was another long pause, and when she didn’t speak, he had to check she was ok.

“Alex?”

“Keep talking. Please.” The reply was quieter than she’d been, but felt more at ease.

“Well, when I first got the vaccine, in my head I compared it to feeling like I was stuck on the edge of this cliff. And I knew there was something right behind me, chasing me if I didn’t jump. I could either just let it catch me, or I could at least take that leap and see where I ended up. It wasn’t much of a choice, and I don’t know if I’ve seen what’s at the bottom yet, but the view is definitely a lot better than whatever was coming for me.”

Ethan realised he’d fixed his gaze for the last few minutes on the point where the wall met the ceiling as he and Jess talked, only focusing on what he could hear behind him. That last thought however prompted a cast glance to the end of the still hallway, where Jess sat on the floor, knees tucked up to her chest. She smiled at the words, and he hoped they were comforting her sister just as readily.

“I don’t know if I can.”

“Maybe you can’t. But that’s the choice we’re all being given right now. At some point you’re going to have to decide if you’re brave enough to jump or if you want to stay in that bathroom and wait for whatever we’re being chased by. And no-one, not Jess or me, can make that call for you.”

“It’s not that simple. Who would I pair with?” Alex asked the question Ethan had been waiting for, hoping that by the time she did he would know how to answer it. He still hadn’t made his mind up until he heard the words coming out of his own mouth.

“Jess wants it to be me. If you want to.” He knew he wasn’t going to get another shot at the suggestion, and the silence that drew out after he said it crept across his skin uncomfortably, worried he’d burned her trust and left her thinking he was leading her on. “Please tell me I’m not that bad of an option?”

“No.” The word came from beyond the door, delicate and thoughtful, and Ethan knew they were almost there.

“This is the part where you tell me we know nothing about each other and how fucking crazy this is. Because that’s how I feel too, about all of this. If you want us to keep looking for someone else, or you just want to stay in there and wait, I understand. But it’d be a lot easier to work out if this feels right or not with the door open so you can see me.”

A minute passed, and then another, and Ethan waited, head resting back against the wood, unwilling to push her. Alex was either going to jump or not, but he couldn’t do it for her, only wait and see if she wanted him to hold her hand as they went together. Another minute, and his heart began to sink a little further with each passing beat, doing his best not to look in the direction of Jess and whatever upset waited there with her. It was only as he was finally about to stand that he heard movement, and the click of the door being unlatched.

Armstrong immediately began moving towards the bathroom, eager to check on Alex, but Ethan waved her away, unwilling to spoil the trust he’d managed to build by rushing her. Instead he slowly eased open the door just enough to slip inside, and closed it behind him.

The tiny bathroom was a wreck, ravaged by increments every time Alex’s agitation had built too far for her to keep it under check. Armstrong’s laptop lay in fragments in the corner, plastic and circuitry scattered beside the toilet along with the shards of glass from a picture frame that had previously hung on the wall. Anything that could be thrown had been, adding to the disarray, including the remains of a potted fern which had found itself smashed into the bathtub and left alongside torn strips of curtain.

But as bad as the bathroom looked, Alex looked worse, the attractive young woman Ethan had seen in photos peeled back to the barest shadow of herself. The redhead had shuffled away from the door and sat balled up with her back to the bath and at some point she’d undressed. Although most of her clothing evidently had been torn away rather than simply removed, judging by the state of what was left, strewn about the room. From beneath heavy brows she flickered her eyes up at him briefly, scared and red from tears that had left a blur of dark makeup running down her cheeks, before glancing away, doing her best to wrap herself inwards with her arms.

She was taller than her sister by a couple of inches, her figure curvier, with considerably more heft to her chest than Jess had, but with similar puffy pink nipples that Ethan did his best not to let his attention slip towards as he fetched a towel to drape over her shoulders. Their complexions likewise would have matched, but what colour should have touched Alex’s already pale skin had drained away entirely with perspiration clinging to her in clammy beads. At her neck, her pulse was still pounding away hard enough that Ethan could see the rise and fall of each beat and as he sat next to her, he felt her trembling as she leant up against him.

“Remind me not to get on your bad side. I’m sure whatever the pot plant did it deserved what was coming to it.” Ethan noted, trying to make light of the state he found things in.

Alex managed to smile, shoulders rising briefly in a soundless little laugh that punctuated her anxious attempts at breathing.

“You’re in charge here,” he continued, leaning his own back against the tub as he eased an arm around her. “You want to talk, we can do that. You want to sit quietly, want me to go back out and let you lock the door again, you just need to say. You’ve had enough being out of control for one day.”

She shifted next to him, rubbing her thighs together, prompting Ethan to glance and check she was ok. He knew that the vaccine would begin to drive any woman who didn’t pair up to distraction after several hours, but even so the impressive wetness that was smeared across her crotch surprised him and made him realise just how badly the serum was pulling her in two contradictory directions.

“I want to sit and talk. But…” she tailed off, closing her eyes from effort.

“But?”

“It’s already really hard to not just jump on you.”

Her eyes remained closed, and she lingered against him like that for a while, folded up in the towel. It wasn’t peaceful, her body was still working much too hard for that, but he was still able to find an odd tenderness to it he was reluctant to deprive her of before she wanted to break it herself.

Eventually Alex spoke again, asking, “why are you doing this?”

It wasn’t something he’d actually stopped to ask himself, not so bluntly, and he had to stop and look for the answer for himself as well as her. “I suppose, I couldn’t just leave you like this. No matter what comes of it, if the only other option was to let you struggle, it’s not exactly much of a choice.”

His answer was met by a slow nod and a happy curl of the lips that showed through the tension. It was short lived however as Alex’s legs fidgeted again, unable to keep still as the spikes of arousal rolled in waves above the other side effects of the serum. A hand dipped between her legs, and she groaned, unsuccessfully trying to tame the sensation with her fingers.

“Fuck it,” she whimpered between resignation and acceptance. “I can’t do this anymore. Just make it stop.”

Ethan looked around, wishing for better for her than to go through things in the ruined chaos of the bathroom. He started to ask if she’d rather find a bed but only got as far as, “do you want to go to,” before Alex grabbed at him clumsily.

“Here’s fine, please.”

The situation didn’t lend itself to Ethan getting hard easily, even as he fumbled his way out of the dark chinos he’d been wearing. Neither was the unflattering state Alex found herself in, despite how beautiful her round features and perfect curves would have been to him normally. Even so his own libido felt constantly on a hair trigger, never quite sated now matter how many times he spent himself and it only took a few strokes for the serum to stir his body past any reservations.

Despite everything she’d been through, Ethan still wanted Alex to feel wanted, warm and cared for, and found himself doing what he could to push aside debris strewn on the floor, and to lay another towel out across the tiles. He was careful as he placed his arms around her, kissing her as he lay her down, and the way she returned it felt like a plea.

Ethan knew the moment his cock pressed between Alex’s lips she was going to come. Gently spreading her legs, he eased inside her and watched her eyes roll, supporting her as she arched her back. Alex gasped, pulsing hot around his length, and let go with a long released sigh. And as he did he felt her body stagger and then steady itself, as if half the pressure it had been labouring beneath had been blown away at a touch. Slowly, he rolled his hips against her, letting her savour the moment with a couple of thrusts in time to her shudders as her breathing eased.

Leaning in without withdrawing himself from her, he kissed her again.

“You look like you needed that.”

Alex laughed. Not the struggling chuckles he’d got from her before, but something free and effortless sound. She was still struggling, but the relief was palpable. “God yes.”

In an instant, she looked human again, half way back to the woman he’d expected to be joining them at Taymont. But it was still hours since she’d been vaccinated, and what release she’d suddenly found from the adverse reaction quickly left more space for the horny demands of the Gemivax to press their way into. Demandingly, finding her body her own again, she began to press her own hips back against his, urging intensity, deeper and harder than he’d been going. Her hand found the back of his head, and she pulled him down to her to try and claim his lips herself.

The redhead knew what she wanted, slow and firm and full, but her body was still too tired and unsteady to really take it herself. She tried to paw at him, gripping an arse cheek, leaning into him as best she could, firm nipples pushed against his chest.

“Please, I still can’t think straight. It’s not enough.” She murmured weakly through the haze. “I need this so fucking badly…”

Doing his best to oblige her, Ethan pulled her arms away, firmly pressing her back against the floor. He took a pale leg, and lifted the thigh over his shoulder, giving a better angle as he pinned her into the ground with each long, assuring thrust. His tempo was considered, not the rough and frantic action that there’d been with some of his other partners. Her mind had spent the last few hours racing, and he slowed things back to a crawl, filling her senses to the brim with each stroke. He stroked his hand up her leg, reached down and teased his thumb across her clit as they fucked. He worshipped her and forced her body and thoughts to match his pace.

By the end, Alex simply let herself go, surrendering to the feeling of him claiming her. Everything stopped racing and struggling. Her mind stretched out languid in the sensation of the serum, dripping like honey through her thoughts. Ethan wanted her to feel safe and needed and so he fucked her until there was nothing else left.

“Please.”

She begged him between thrusts, tits bouncing, body straining, unable to take any more.

“Please Ethan.”

Her voice dropped low, filled with so much lust and need that it barely came at all, trembling past lips so exhausted that it was almost all they could manage to whisper. He felt her coming a second time, and tipped over the edge himself. Her cunt shuddered, filled past brimming by his orgasm, holding her at her peak with every eager spurt.

“Pleaseeee.”

She gave a small gush, the sheer overwhelming pleasure causing her body to squirt across the towel and the bathroom tiles. And she kept begging him as she did, pleading for true release right up to the point where her mind slipped away into the imprint, one repeated word replaced by another.

Ethan took his time, cleaning first himself up, and then Alex. Not just the consequences of their fucking, but also taking his time to find a damp cloth and wipe away the streaked eyeliner and cold sweat that still covered her. He relented when Armstrong came to check her over, but only for what was urgent, insisting on carrying Alex carefully back through to her bed before allowing the doctor to properly fuss.

It was pushing 3am by the time he finally stepped out of Alex’s bedroom and the fatigue caught up with him. What he was met with however was the enthused press of Jess’ lips, as she leant up, arms around his shoulders. Her worry had disappeared, replaced by gratitude she was all too eager to show him. But even through it Ethan could recognise the insistent post-imprinting arousal that his other partners had also woken up with, her rewritten body desperate to indulge itself. She was still trying not to say anything, to not make this about her. But then today was meant to be about her, and she’d lost that chance for the attention she needed in the middle of all this too.

He could hear Nia back in the living room, still arguing with someone on the phone as she tried to do what she could to make things right. His body desperately wanted sleep, but he wasn’t going to be able to allow himself any yet. Looking back at Jess he pushed aside the exhaustion spoke, slipping his hand into hers.

“Come on, you better show me where the spare bedroom is.”