Ethan reasoned that he should have felt exhausted after what he'd been through, along with the impressive lack of sleep he'd had, but he couldn't remember the last time he'd been this invigorated. It was as if the Gemivax had given him several shots of strong coffee and torn away the grass allergies he'd been struggling with since moving to Taymont. It would have been nice to have felt slightly less wired though.
He had asked Dr. Armstrong to come by and check on what were now apparently 'his girls,' and the blonde woman had given them a clean bill of health. It was clear that this was barely any more obvious to her than it was to him and it was similarly clear she didn't wish to be in the room any longer than absolutely needed, eyes evasively pressed downwards whenever something didn't require her dedicated attention. He couldn't blame her, as he attempted to shrug off his own disquiet about the power dynamics in play now it was obvious how real everything actually was.
Blasting clear some of the mental fuzz with a second shower of the day Ethan fetched his laptop and brought it back up to the suite. He was able to find the irony in the fact that the one day he could be reasonably forgiven for sleeping off work without question was instead the day he needed it as an outlet for his energy. Apologetically, he did his best to divide his duties between the few remaining producers that weren't involved, aware that their lives were getting that much harder while his was getting more interesting. There was an email from Lukas too, welcoming him to what was being called Project Upstart, a name which The Pole claimed not to like but that Nia had pulled rank to insist on for some reason he hadn't puzzled out yet.
They'd been busy already. Apparently Theresa May's coalition government Taymont's Scottish and London based counterparts both working on exactly how to break the news of DuoHalo's severity to the public once the US came clean. That left Project Upstart specifically to work with Nia (or was it for Nia, since she was very much in charge) and Averna to explain and promote the Gemivax vaccine. Almost all the work so far was preliminary however, attempting to understand the scope of what they were dealing with and identify what a potential messaging strategy might look like, while Lukas was doing his best to start planning exactly what resources they might need to pull things off.
The most disheartening thing was seeing Rhys Barclay's email copied in alongside his own. He'd skipped over the implications of Lukas saying there were meant to be three 'Teams' involved in this, and it seemed that Rhys had been drafted in for the 3rd. Ethan couldn't stand the man, a journalist from one of the worst pre-pandemic tabloids with every bit of the smarm and lack of morality that would suggest. He didn't want to dwell on wondering who was unlucky enough to be getting stuck with him.
Ethan was in the middle of brainstorming several ideas of his own, and creating a collaborative spreadsheet for he and Lukas to start scrum managing everything from, when the notification for a video call jumped up in the bottom corner of his monitor. Not for the first time he wondered why the hell the person making it wasn't asleep.
Aoife Ryan's face appeared up on screen, its expression somewhere between irritated and concerned. She could have just messaged him, but they'd fallen into the habit of snatching video calls for the sake of seeing a friendly face, even if it was only for five or ten minutes at a time. "Hey Ballbag," the slight roughness of her Glaswegian accent reassuringly went for an insult before anything else. "You better be ok?"
The Scottish woman was holed up in what she'd dubbed her 'Command Centre' in Taymont Hall's basement, wearing a beanie that was attempting to wrangle a spill of long forest green hair. The hat was always a telltale sign she hadn't had the time to actually look after her hair, or herself, in the last few days and was becoming an increasingly frequent fixture of her wardrobe. Her webcam shot's background was filled by metal racks of broadcast hardware, cables and the small, ever-blinking server towers that they were apparently all working from, while the foreground contained a collection of empty Red Bull and Monster energy cans which he seriously hoped weren't all from today littered the foreground.
Cynical and sarcastic, Aoife had found herself getting a field promotion to become their head broadcast engineer relatively early on, and as she put it her "not so sunny disposition" was the only thing keeping Palisade's bootstrap setup from completely falling apart. She was also the closest thing Ethan had to a best friend at the Hall. What had started out with sharing Spotify recommendations for obscure electronic rock had swiftly turned into a mutual project to preserve each other's sanity. And her down to earth lack of bullshit was much more of his speed socially than what Aoife proclaimed were the "toffs and cokeheads" that made up much of the media and political landscape. Right now, however, Ethan couldn't tell if it was the harshness of the lighting from her monitors or if she was simply just exhausted, but her round features looked drawn, even in spite of the emo-adjacent makeup she often used to try and paper over things.
"You're seriously asking me that," he responded, making sure his call was still set up to hide his background so she couldn't see he was in a different room than normal. He could do without some of those questions right now. "When was the last time you slept?"
She yawned, bunching her knees up in front of her on her much too large computer chair. "Power nap an hour ago? Maybe? I've got a camp bed down here now," she said, gesturing broadly in a direction behind her. "...And hey, fuck you anyway, I'm not the one handing off all my work. I swear, if you've tested positive I'm going to come up there and kill you before the DuoHalo does."
"Aoife, I checked this morning, like every morning. I'm clean," he protested firmly to reassure her.
"Aye, right, so what, you finally wanked yourself too stupid to work? You are good right?"
He looked back over his own shoulder, in the direction of where Evie and Nia looked as if they were sleeping, now tucked under expensive linen. They'd stopped saying 'imprinting' a few minutes after passing out, but whatever the Gemivax was doing to them since then could still have them down for the count for a few more hours according to Dr Armstrong. Most of the ball of tension he'd been carrying around before the vaccine had disappeared, though it had been replaced by something he couldn't quite put his finger on. Gnawing responsibility? Anxiety that he was going to let them down, perhaps?
Was he good? He couldn't tell for sure. But if he wasn't then why did looking at them put a goofy smile on his face despite his brain telling him how weird that was.
"You know, I think I'm going to have to get back to you with an answer on that." He composed himself before turning back to the laptop. "I'm not sick. It's just been a hell of a day and I'm still trying to catch up to what's going on. Sorry if I had you worried."
There was sympathetic care on the other end of the screen. "Need me to play psychoanalyst for you?"
Ethan shook his head. Not that he wasn't sorely tempted, he really did need someone to offload to and help keep him grounded while he attempted to parse any of this. "Not yet anyway. Lukas has pulled me for some secret government thing and I'm pretty sure I'm not allowed to be sharing yet."
He felt more guilty than he expected not immediately bringing her into the loop. This was way too big to keep from someone who trusted him like Aoife did. But then, he needed Nia to trust him too, and there were all too many moving parts for him to try and keep track of. Not to mention that getting her on the project suddenly had a big 'imprinting' sized caveat to it. He promised himself he would find a way to not leave her in the dark, it just might have to wait.
He saw her about to push further and quickly changed the subject to head it off. "Speaking of which, have you got any of the smaller cameras not being used right now?"
"Only like a dozen? How many do you need?"
"Just one please. If you can send one up to my room you'll be my favourite person on site."
She scoffed "That's it? Who else is even in the running for that particularly shitty accolade?"
It was hard not to allow himself a smile at that question, his profound lack of poker face something he was fully aware of. "I might need to get back to you on that too."
"Riiiiight. Well, since you asked nicely I'll have one brought up when we get a chance. It might be a little while though, I'm only getting a chance to call while I push some new updates to our network. You know the bullshit we were dealing with last night? Sounds like security think there might have been more of those conspiracy weirdos in the direction of Chapelfell Top trying to screw with the broadcast tower. So yours truly has to tighten things up so we can continue masterminding the end of the fucking world, or population control or whatever it is they think we're meant to be doing."
"We don't have good enough uniforms to be world ending evil minions," he said, suddenly worried that her throwaway line about population control might start feeling uncomfortably close to the mark. Also uncomfortable was the fact that while they'd had people trying to get close to what they were doing before an attempt to interfere with one of their towers was an escalation and he certainly didn't trust Palisade to have bothered hiring security that hadn't just been guarding the local Tesco pre-pandemic.
Aoife extended her arms in response to show off the oversized hoodie she was wearing with some video game character he didn't recognise fading on the front. "I know! I'm going to need some black leather instead of this if that's the direction we're going."
He laughed, pleased that she could at least still make things feel uncomplicated. "If I see any hats with skulls on them showing up, you'll be the first to know. Anyway, I'm fine. Have someone else bring me the camera and get yourself to bed."
"You, Ethan Knight, are not the boss of me," she gloated, pointedly opening another can of energy drink before closing the call.
*****
It had been dark for hours by the time either of the women stirred, rain peppering the window. Ethan had perched himself back in one of the leather chairs to work, only illuminating the room with a single desk lamp, as if anything else would somehow bother them. Fatigue was finally catching back up to him following the events of the morning, but it didn't feel quite right to join them in the bed as they were, but then neither did heading back to his own room.
The sound of movement on the bed pulled his attention away from working withEvie sitting up in bed as she attempted to orientate herself. Nude in the long soft shadows being cast by the lamp, half covered by bed sheets, she looked halfway towards something out of a classical painting, and he was reminded of just how painfully beautiful he found her. She noticed him looking at her, and the look she gave him as she remembered where she was made his heart leap.
"What time is it?"
"A little before eleven."
