Quaranteam: Phil's Tale - Ch. 17 (Patreon)

Chapter 17

November 5th, 2020

The last few days had been something of an utter panic, as he and Miguel had been working to identify any additional paths into the system while starting to knock down every override path they could find. They’d wanted to be able to track down where the requests were coming from, but at this point, both of them were simply too worried that too many people sneaking in the back door, and they just wanted to make sure more women weren’t getting sent where they weren’t supposed to.

They weren’t entirely sure what they needed to do, but clearly they had to figure out how to prove who was setting the system this way. The coding had been done cleverly enough that it could’ve been passed off as a glitch, so despite the fact that they had a list of all the people who’d been affected by the forced misassignment, they weren’t sure how to approach it. Shutting it all the way down wasn’t an option, so they were just going to have to keep tabs on it, and couldn’t tell anyone about their concerns until they had solid proof.

Without proof, Phil had argued, they were just going to look like people chasing ghosts in the machine, people who had cracked under the strain of the stress they were under.

He didn’t realize exactly how much that was about to be tested.

It was just a little past one in the afternoon when Linda came rushing into Phil’s office looking like she’d seen a ghost. “Phil, honey, you know how I made you put that can of emergency deodorant in your desk drawer?” she said to him, approaching his desk.

“Yeeees?” he said, drawing the word out suspiciously.

“I’m going to need you to spray as much of that on beneath your arms as you can without looking like you’re fumigating, and I’m going to need you to do that right fucking now,” she told him, and the way she said it meant he already had the can out before she hit the word ‘arms.’

“What’s going on?” he asked as he finished flooding his armpits with scent to hide the fact that he hadn’t had time to shower last night or this morning.

“POTUS is here.”

Three words, all of which he understood, but somehow didn’t logically connect inside of his brain, because there was no way the President of The United States had just decided to ‘swing by’ New Eden on a whim, and if there had been a plan, somebody sure as fuck should have told him about it. “That doesn’t… I don’t… what are you talking about?”

“The President, Phil, she’s fucking here. And you have a briefing to give in like ten to fifteen minutes, so you need to get ready for that.”

“Ready for what?” Phil asked her. “Briefing on what?”

“I don’t know, so I guess you better be ready for anything!”

Phil grumbled, but sure enough, a few minutes later, a couple of women in black suits came to escort him down the hallway towards one of the meeting rooms, Linda in accompaniment, although she’d been required to leave her service weapons outside of the room. When he saw her disarming, Phil took a moment to stop and disarm as well – ever since someone had tried to kidnap him, there had been no time he’d been near people where he hadn’t been carrying at least one firearm. But the Secret Service apparently hadn’t thought to consider that, and he could see both agents mentally kicking themselves when he did. They wouldn’t be making that mistake again.

As they let him into the room, the first thing he saw was President Pelosi sitting at the head of the table, from which she immediately stood up, and the small cabal of people around her also stood up with her, as she moved towards him, offering her hand to shake.

“Dr. Marcos, I understand we’ve got you to thank for keeping humanity alive,” the President said to him as he shook her hand.

“Me and at least a dozen other key personnel on this site, Madam President,” Phil said, glancing quickly around the room to see who he recognized, finding a mix of both friendly and adversarial faces. On the positive side, both Bill McKenna and Miguel Cunningham were in the room, which meant there were science authorities there to back him up. But, unfortunately, for every friendly face, there were faces he had absolutely no desire to see, including General Fielder, James Haunton and Arthur Covington the 4th. There were also two women Phil didn’t recognize at all, whom had seats on either side of the President, so it seemed likely they were from her staff.

“What we’re here for, Dr. Marcos, is to get a sort of baseline understanding of how the serum works, what you can and can’t get it to do, what we need to worry about and where you think you might be able to take it in the near future. Dr. Cunningham is going to explain the Oracle system for us after you’re done.”

Phil nodded. This at least made sense. He’d expected there to be a call like this at some point, having explained things a number of times to a number of different people, but he supposed the President wanted to see the team that had delivered this for herself, and so that he would be stuck in a room answering questions until she had no more questions. “What level of detail do you want me to get into, Madame President?”

“So let’s start with a top-down simplified description of what this wonder serum of yours is and how it does what it does, and when I want to drill down, we’ll drill down. Is that acceptable?”

“I serve at the pleasure of the President,” Phil said respectfully. “Alright, so let’s start from the beginning. In 2017, Doctor McKenna and I accidentally invented what we call the Root Serum. It’s a formula that’s designed to compile a variety of smaller systems together and unify them into a single concoction that can be used for all sorts of things. At the end of 2018, the Air Force brought in another scientist, Dr. Adam McCallister, who had been working in the field of bio-cellular regeneration.”

“This is the Dr. McCallister who was abducted by the Russians?” the President asked.

“It is.” He waited to see if she had a follow up question, but when she didn’t, he continued. “Project Impulse, the initial attempts to combine our Root Serum, with Doctor McCallister’s bio-regenerative serum, were mostly unsuccessful, up until early this year, when we were tasked with trying to pivot the serum into a vaccine for DuoHalo and/or Covid. At some point not long after that, we stumbled into what we call the Quaranteam serum. Thanks to the notes Adam left behind for me to find, I was able to understand at least some of what he’d done to help us develop the serum, but I have to be honest, Madame President, I don’t think that any one single person on the planet knows everything about how this serum works. Not Bill, not McCallister and not me. Regardless of that, we have a working serum and we know the rules.”

“Let’s go over how this serum works and then we can delve into the rules, Dr. Marcos.”

“Sure,” he said. “So when we inject a woman with the Quaranteam serum, it immediately begins processing to graft itself with her DNA. Attempting to inject a man with an unencoded version of the serum will result it in finding his Y chromosome, and then immediately attacking his organs, killing him within a matter of minutes.”

“Is there a way to remove that?”

“If there is, we have yet to find it, Madame President,” Phil sighed. “And believe me, we’ve been looking.”

“Alright, continue.”

“When a woman’s got the serum injected into her initially, the first minute or two is spent with the serum making sure every molecule of it has her DNA grafted onto it, and then it starts reproducing. You see, the serum is comprised of nanobots, each of which has only a handful of set tasks. Once it’s hit critical level of reproduction, it starts stimulating the host sexually, in order to complete the final part of its set up. Upon having soft tissue come into contact with male semen, typically precum, it triggers what we call the ‘priming’ orgasm. This is designed to keep the host engaged and enthusiastic to complete the process. From that tiny bit of precum, the serum strips out the male partner’s DNA and encodes that into every droplet of the serum flooding through her body. When her partner orgasms inside of her – be that orally, vaginally or anally – the amount of semen triggers the imprinting phase, locking that DNA in, binding that woman to that man. The woman will pass out for about twelve to sixteen hours and at the start, says the word ‘imprinting,’ which is a reminder that that woman and that man are now intrinsically linked. There is also a chance that either partner, or both, can go into a regenerative state, which was what the serum was originally intended for. There’s about a 10% chance each time an imprinting happens for either partner to regenerate, so obviously men are mostly going to have a regenerative cycle in their lifetime, while women are significantly less likely to. If a regeneration is triggered, it’s got about a forty percent chance to trigger a minor regeneration, a forty percent chance to trigger a mid-level regeneration, and a twenty percent chance to trigger a major regeneration. The minor and mid-level regenerations are fairly easy to mistake for one another without a doctor’s opinion, so that data point’s a little floaty, but there you go.”

“What’s the difference between the three?”

“A minor regeneration is things like… fixing your eyesight or fixing a recurring cramp you might normally get. A mid-level regeneration can include things like curing some minor chronic ailments, curing arthritis or tendonitis, healing off minor scarring or male pattern baldness.”

“And a major regeneration?”

“Well, here’s the thing, Madame President… at that level of regeneration, we’re not entirely sure what the limit is. We’ve seen vasectomies reversed, we’ve seen limbs regrown, we’ve seen major tissue or organ damage either repaired or replaced, we’ve seen long term illnesses completely disappear. If a major regeneration gets triggered… well, the serum can damn near beat anything, as far as we can tell.”

“Can you be a bit more specific with examples about that upper end?”

Phil let out an appreciative whistle then nodded. “Sure. In reports that we’ve been able to investigate and verify, we’ve had a soldier who’d lost both of his legs have them regrown over the course of a few days, we’ve had someone with terminal cancer come out completely cancer free on the other side, we’ve had testicles reattach themselves, we’ve got multiple reports of kidneys either being repaired or regrowing, we’ve seen both dementia and Alzheimer’s reversed, we had someone regrow a lung, we’ve seen multiple sclerosis cured, we’ve seen AIDS/HIV disappear and, in the one case that tripped us out the most, we had someone who’d been both deaf and blind since birth gain complete and total use of both senses.”

“Now I’m a little bothered I didn’t get a regeneration cycle,” the President joked with him. “Now explain to me in terms that even a child could understand how the serum works between imprinted people to give both men and women immunity to DuoHalo.”

“Alright, let me see how much I can simplify it down,” Phil said, thinking it over for a moment. “Right. Got it. When the Quaranteam serum sets up shop in a woman, it takes over a portion of her lymph nodes. There it begins generating more serum nanobots, designed to hunt viruses and biological intruders in the bloodstream. But the system is designed to be working not only for its host, but for the partner it’s linked to, who can’t generate their own. When the woman’s system is getting close to capacity, it starts pushing her sexual need to copulate with—”

“We’re all adults here, Dr. Marcos.”

“Yes, Madame President,” he chuckled. “So when the woman’s system is getting close to capacity, it starts making her feel the need to fuck. That typically happens around eight to twelve days from the last time she fucked her partner. The serum nanobots are basically functioning like white blood cells on steroids, fighting most diseases or infections they come across. Now the nanobots don’t recognize all viruses, but they do a pretty remarkable job of getting most of them, which is probably why you haven’t noticed having a flu or a cold since you were given the serum.”

“Are you saying that you’ve defeated the common cold, Dr.?”

“For a time,” Phil said. “But it’s constantly evolving, so I imagine within a few years, it’ll be back in some form or another. The serum’s getting a lot of them, though. Anyway, back to how the nanobots function. When a woman fucks her partner, she sends a large portion of the nanobots, somewhere between sixty and seventy percent, into her partner’s bloodstream. Now, let me divert for just a second to tell you how the nanobots work inside of her male partner.”

“It’s different?”

“Night and day, Madame President,” Phil told her. “So the nanobots don’t touch the male lymph nodes at all. In fact, they don’t set up any kind of permanent home. What they do is pass through his bloodstream, searching for diseases, but they can only do this for about a week before they run out of fuel and fall inert. Just before they fall inert, however, they direct themselves through the blood stream and deposit their inert carcasses into the testicles, where they’re intermingled with male sperm. Even while they’re inert, they still have the encodings of both partners. Now, to return to where we just were, when a man and one of his imprinted partners are fucking, she’s sending a constant stream of new nanobots into his body, and when he ejaculates, he sends back a giant collection of inactive nanobots back into her system, which cools off her sexual need. Her body then starts reactivating those nanobots, putting them back into active service.”

“What if those nanobots aren’t from her but one of the man’s other partners?” she asked, making him smile, because it meant she was paying attention.

“Excellent question, Madame President,” he replied. “What the existing nanobots do is study it, reactivate it and incorporate its strengths into all the other nanobots it produces. This is why we say larger Teams are more resilient to DuoHalo, because they’re, well, they’re more resilient to all diseases, as far as we can tell.  Take, for example, my partner Linda here. She’s got nanobots in her blood that her own body has produced, but from my partners Audrey, Tamika, Yuko, Violet, Valerie, Winnie, Bella and Paloma. My newest partner, Ingrid, hasn’t been part of the Team long enough for a full cycle, but within two or three renewal sessions, she’ll probably have been exposed to the nanobots of all my various partners. It is, at this point, something we could even use as a unique family identifier, like a sort of collective unit DNA.”

“Is there a cap to the point where the benefits become negligible?”

“We’re not entirely sure, but as of late, we’ve got a theoretical gains cap somewhere between the twenty-five-to-thirty to one range, something obviously far beyond what we want to recommend.”

“What do you want to recommend?” she asked him.

“Between twelve-to-fifteen will get you in the ninety-eight-to-ninety-nine percentile in terms of resistance to diseases, so I think the national minimum you want should be somewhere between four and six? As for upper cap, I hope that it’s a self-solving problem, but if you feel the need to cap it, I would cap it at thirty, because anything past that, the benefit is almost nothing, and the pressure to deliver… let’s just say I can imagine a bunch of men saying thirty women dependent on having sex every ten days sounds great in the theoretical, but after a few months of that, any man’s going to be begging to tap out.”

“Are the nanobots ever going to completely die?”

Phil had to offer a shrug. “We’re not entirely sure, Madame President. You see, the work that Dr. McCallister did involved a lot of the nanobots work, and based on the notes he left behind, he wasn’t entirely sure what the serum would be doing in five to ten years’ time, and I think anyone who tells you they know what that looks like is probably lying to you. My guess is that the nanobots probably have a life cycle that spans several decades, but time will tell.”

“And you said that you’re expecting the children of those with the serum running in their veins to be immune to DuoHalo?”

“Immune to, well, many diseases, actually,” he said. “Of course, that’s existing diseases only, and I’m sure that new diseases will spring up that the kids won’t have immunity to, but yes, they’ll be completely impervious to DuoHalo, as far as we can tell. I can’t guarantee that 100% but call me ninety-to-ninety-five percent certain.”

“That’s a number I like to hear, Doctor. Now tell me about what happens if a someone comes into contact with a person other than one they’re imprinted onto.”

“Unless it’s under very specific circumstances, Madame President, very little. You could shake hands with any man on the planet, and as long as he doesn’t have any of his semen on his hand, you’d be fine. Saliva, sweat, none of these fluids carry any inherent risks.”

“Blood?”

“It doesn’t seem that way, but I can’t make any guarantees of that. We’ve seen some bad reactions, but thankfully, running blood through a basic extracorporeal blood purification device or EBP will remove the nanobots from the blood and make it safe for use in other people. Our current theory is that when nanobot-infused blood is exposed outside of the body, the nanobots die off almost immediately.”

“That’s not true in semen, though?”

“No ma’am. Male semen is, as far as we can tell, the core of what Dr. McCallister’s lock and key system was built around, and as such, once a woman is imprinted on a man, she cannot come into contact with any other man’s semen, otherwise it will have an acidic effect on her flesh.”

“How acidic?”

Phil frowned and turned on the screen behind him before connecting to it with his phone, showing an image a woman with what almost looked like a cigar burn on her forearm. “That’s from a single droplet. The wound will heal up and won’t scar, but that’s for just a small amount. You can imagine what something much more sizable in somewhere much more sensitive would do.”

“You’re basically telling me that women cheating around with another man other than the one she’s imprinted to is going to have her belly torn open?”

“I’m telling you that’s a distinct possibility, and why we are warning everyone so much about this during the pairing process.”

“And if several women are imprinted on a single man, and that man dies, what then Dr. Marcos?”

“This is another thing we found in Dr. McCallister’s notes but it’s called ‘the dead man’s switchback.’ After a man dies, we have a small window of about 24 hours although you might be able to stretch that to 48 in dire circumstances, to harvest his necrotized, decomposing sperm from his testicles. You can mix that with a standard Quaranteam dose and then inject any of that dead man’s partners with it, and it will send a forcible ‘reset’ code to that woman’s nanobots, sending her back into a state where she needs to be imprinted, although this is… it’s dicey science, Madame President. The woman will be in a near feral state from the moment she receives the dead man’s switchback until she’s reimprinted, so it’s vitally important to have the new person the woman’s going to be reimprinted onto on hand at that exact moment. We’ve sent directions about the ‘dead man’s switchback’ to every major hospital in the United States who’s even vaguely close to where we’ve deployed the serum.”

“What happens if you can’t get the dead man’s testicles? If they’ve been damaged or destroyed?”

“Then our recommendation at this point is euthanasia for all the women partnered with that man within the next few days.”

“That’s a little extreme, isn’t it, Doctor?”

Phil sighed, shaking his head. “I truly wish that it wasn’t, Madame President, but right now, if a woman’s imprinting partner isn’t around to relieve the buildup, at around the sixteen-day mark, the nanobots begin consuming muscle and organ flesh in order to replicate themselves. It’s more painful and bloody than someone who’s dying of radiation exposure. The longer you keep them alive, the worse the pain is going to get.”

“That’s… not optimal.”

“No, Madame President, we agree. And we’re still looking for some alternative solutions. We just don’t have any yet.”

“And once a woman’s partnered with a man, there’s no way to change that partnering?”

“We do not currently have one, Madame President, no. We’re hoping to find something, but I’ve got a dozen things all marked Top Priority on my desk right now, and only so much time in the day. I was under the impression that finding some way to get immunity to our gay citizens was the top of that.”

“You’ve got a lot of things, all of which have to fight for that position, Dr. Marcos, but I won’t dare tell you how to distribute your time, or which things you might find solutions for faster or slower. I’m just trying to get answers so when I have to go in front of the nation on television in a few weeks or so and tell the American people how we’re getting through this what they need to know in order to survive. In your initial report, you said that DuoHalo was 100% fatal to anyone between the ages of 11 and 17?”

“Both ends of the spectrum are a little wobbly, but yes, that’s about right. We’ve lost a percentage of 18-year-olds but only marginally more than we’ve seen in the age cohorts above that. And we’ve seen some 11-year-olds who seem to be 100% immune to the symptoms of DuoHalo, but our theory for those is that they were exposed to the virus when they were 10, early on in the pandemic, and developed an immunity to it. My friend Andy’s nephew is like that. But yes, 12-17 is 100% completely fatal.”

“And those who were below that age and exposed to it?”

“They can still be carriers of the virus, but even as they grow up, it seems like that built up immunity to the virus remains, so, yes, while we lost about 24 million kids between the ages of 12 and 17, we have about 48 million younger than that perfectly healthy and alive, all of whom will grow up not having to worry about DuoHalo as a problem.”

“I guess that’s a start.” She looked over to Dr. Cunningham. “Now, let’s go through how this Oracle system of yours works, explained to me in the same simplistic level of detail, so we can make sure we’re on the same page for a starting point.”

Phil moved to sit down as Miguel stood up and moved to the end of the table, where Phil had been presenting. “Go get’em, Miguel,” Phil said as Miguel moved past him.

“Yes, well, thank you, Dr. Marcos,” Miguel said, looking down before looking up. “The Oracle system is an intensely complicated set of algorithms designed to minimize friction between household members and maximize Team stability and cohesiveness.” He chuckled, realizing exactly how complicated he’d started off. “At the core, it’s like a dating profile. You fill in what you like, what you don’t, and Oracle runs that against all the other applicants. So if you decide you like using food stuffs during sex, and that is your biggest turn on, you rate that as a ten. And Oracle gives a weight to that answer. It lets you set a bunch of things that you simply will not do, and gives those a negative weight, or, more commonly, removes any candidates with those things as possible matches from yours. When we started, we were able to deliver extremely exact responses, making sure that we were giving men women that were as close to perfect for them, and vice versa, as we possibly could, because we needed to establish the credibility of the system. This means the first two or three pairings are extremely high, almost always in the upper nineties in terms of compatibility.”

“And as Teams grow larger? As you add additional people into the system beyond the first?”

Miguel frowned a little. “Yes, well, that’s where we start to get into problems. At the beginning, when a Team is just being formed, we establish one person as the central pillar that everyone is being balanced around. Typically this is the male in the relationship, but obviously for high-level prominent female politicians such as yourself, we established them as the central pillar. The first four or five partners into any Team, we’ve got very high marks in terms of compatibility, something in the 90-95% percent compatibility scores, but each time you add a partner into a Team, the algorithm has a harder time making sure what’s going to work and what isn’t. Once you’re above ten people, it’s basically just doing its best to ensure that there aren’t any dealbreaker conflicts, and beyond that, it can give you its estimate of what it thinks your match percentage is, but that’s got a pretty large margin of error, like twenty to thirty percent.”

“But we aren’t forcing anyone together?”

“No, Madame President,” Miguel told her. “We’re always presenting both partners with the option of refusing any pairing.”

“We’ve also been working to improve our systems as we go,” Phil added. “At one point early on, we discovered that we weren’t screening out men with a history of domestic violence, so Miguel and I revisited that system and limited those men’s options to women who, pardon my language, could easily kick the shit out of them. Those men kept trying to turn the women away, but eventually it was pointed out it was this or death, and they’ve kept their tempers in check since then.”

“How far do you want us to take this, Madame President?” Miguel asked. “If we encounter especially recalcitrant men who refuse to take any partners, do we want to force them?”

“We need to hope self-preservation is enough, but if these men are going to refuse any women sent to them, there is only so much we can do, and I’m afraid in this new world we’re building, there may not be space for those who aren’t willing to help themselves,” the President said. “We will do our absolute best to keep all of our American men alive, but I suspect we’re going to get some men who insist the rules don’t apply to them. Dr. Marcos, how deep into the throes of DuoHalo can your Quaranteam serum pull someone back from?”

Phil shrugged. “We haven’t tested extreme cases, but I would wager as long as they’re capable of ejaculation, we stand good odds of being able to pull them back from almost from the brink of death.”

“How soon after injection can a woman be imprinted?”

“Nearly immediately?” Phil said. “We’ve typically been waiting at least a few hours to check and make sure that the woman aren’t having allergic reactions or underlying health conditions exposed by the injection, but within just a couple of minutes of injection, you could imprint someone if you had to. Why?”

“We’ll stock hospitals then with difficult to match women, and when a man gets wheeled into the emergency room, a few days away from DuoHalo killing them, begging for a chance to get the serum, we can pair them with whoever’s around and those men and women will just have to live with it. We can call it Project: Last Exit. Make a note of that.”

One of the women sitting next to the President nodded her head and typed it up dutifully in her laptop, as the President turned back to Phil.

“Dr. Marcos, while I’ve got you here, I’ve got a question I want to ask you. Since I’ve been imprinted to Paul, my husband, and he’s been paired with additional women, I’ve noticed that our tempers are … how do I put this? We don’t get angry as easily anymore. Is that a result of the serum?”

“Yes and no, Madame President. When humans have sex, they naturally release endorphins, which improve moods and increase happiness. So that part’s all nature. But yes, there is an aspect of the serum which we haven’t really explored yet in enough detail, simply because we haven’t had time. The serum turns a Team into a biologically bonded unit, so as a cohesive unit, the tendency to escalate and overinflate problems has been toned down, to keep all partners in a mood needed to keep the system running smoothly. We call it the social smoothing effect. You’re still entirely capable of getting into fights, having shouting matches, but the level of problem needed to reach those heights, well, let’s just say the bar to reach that level is about four or five times what it used to be. And that’s only with members of your own Team, I’m sorry to say, so don’t go thinking it’ll help you get Congress in line any faster.”

She smiled a bit, nodding at him. “Is there any reason we aren’t educating our populace about this social smoothing effect?”

Phil chuckled, nodding. “Have you heard of the Pink Elephant Paradox, Madame President?”

“Is that where you tell someone not to think of a pink elephant, knowing it’s going to be the only thing they can think of for the next moment or two?”

“Exactly. Drawing attention to the effect is only going to make people more distrustful of taking the serum, and there’s no real benefit to knowing your mood is being chemically altered by the serum that’s doing everything it can to keep you alive. People can ascribe their getting along with their partners to… whatever they want to. A lot of people think since they’ve met their new partners through the Oracle program that they just weren’t sexually satisfied before. Others, typically those who were in long-term relationships that their Teams were built onto, think they’re looking at their new life with survivor’s guilt, and are doing their best to stay positive. Whatever the reasons people think they’re getting along with their partners, Madame President, we’re fine with that. Years down the line, maybe we’ll eventually mention this known effect to the general public, but for the time being, I don’t see any benefit, do you?”

“No, Dr. Marcos, I suppose not.” She stood from the table, and everyone else immediately stood with her. “I appreciate you all coming down and taking the time to meet with me today. Dr. Marcos, this card has a phone number that is a direct line to Anna here, my bodywoman, and if you have anything I should be aware of, I want you to call me any time day or night. Now if you’ll excuse me, Secret Service would like to get me back on Air Force One and headed back to D.C. before word gets out that we’re here.”

“Madame President” everyone said collectively as she, her two aides and her four Secret Service agents headed out the door, followed by General Fielder.

Just as Phil was about to head out, Covington stepped right up to him, blocking his path. “I said hello to Dr. Varma when I arrived and asked her how she was doing with Mister Rook, so you can imagine my surprise when she informed me that she’d chosen to be paired up with you, Dr. Marcos,” the older man said. “I imagine you’ve had quite the time explaining that to the General.”

“You might think you’re hot shit around here, Mister Covington, but you’d do well to remember nobody’s above the law, and maybe it’s not a wise idea to fuck with the man who’s saving all of humanity.”

Covington scoffed. “McCallister did all the real heavy lifting, Dr. Marcos. You said so yourself in your presentation.”

“That isn’t what I said.”

“It doesn’t matter. You stay clear of me and mine, and we won’t have a problem.” Covington turned and walked away from him, stopping at the door to look back one final time. “You don’t want a problem with me, Dr. Marcos, I assure you.” Then he stepped out of the door.

Linda immediately took Phil’s hand in her own, squeezing it as rage bubbled up in Phil’s face. “You okay, baby?”

“I’m going to burn that man to the fucking ground, Linda.”

“You and me both, baby…”