Something shifted inside of Ophelia. Reginald watched her hard expression soften for the first time since he’d first met her under the ice in Antarctica. He could tell it was killing her to drop her sense of superiority, but she seemed to have realized that she was no longer entirely superior… and that maybe she’d never actually been in control.
“That’s why we need your help,” she said. She swallowed at the last word, seeming to have forced it out.
Reginald let himself smirk. “Okay. You want help? Here’s my advice: bunker in. Get the people you care about and dig yourself a hole. Because this is what I’ve been talking about from the beginning, and you never listened.”
Timken looked over. “The apocalypse again.”
“Yes. Again.” He rolled his eyes, shaking his head. “You fucking people,” he said. “Ever since my first year, vampires have been coming to me and asking me to tell them what to do. People acted like I was oracle even before I’d heard of the vampire codex. But if I’m this big, perfect computer mind — which is the way people act when I’m asked for help — then why don’t you listen to what that big computer mind tells you? I told you forty years ago that this was coming.”
Timken’s composure broke. He’d finally had enough civility. He stood.
“Yes, Reginald! Forty years ago! And it never happened! We built a whole society in that time! We were right, not you!”
“You were right? But isn’t that the biggest assumption of all?” Reginald stood to match the president, then waved his arms theatrically overhead as if beckoning toward the heavens. “If you were right, where are the angels? Why haven’t they returned to pat you on the back and tell you that you done good?”
Timken chuckled humorlessly. “I think with angels, no news is good news.”
Reginald shook his head and said nothing. His eyes rolled toward the projection at the front of the room, then toward Timken.
“This is not the apocalypse!” Timken yelled. Then he composed himself, smoothing his hair. “This is just one lunatic, who’s…”
“Who’s managed to put together a string of events across the entire planet and coordinated a group of people who supposedly have no access to technology, no power, no food…”
“Isolated incidents!”
“SIXTEEN INCIDENTS!” Reginald boomed. He wasn’t used to anger, and even after nearly eighty years on the planet, he certainly wasn’t used to squaring off in a verbal fight. It had always been his way to demure and let the other person win, but he’d had enough. The stupidity here was too thick. They’d either listen or let them go home. There was no third choice.
Timken looked over at Ophelia, who hadn’t moved. She gave a small shrug. Timken returned to his chair but didn’t sit, standing over it with his hands on the table like a vulture.
“Fine. Let’s say you’re right.”
“The codex is right.”
“Whatever. So why has it taken so long?”
“Maybe they had to swell their numbers. Maybe they needed time to develop their weapons. Or maybe they just needed time to get pissed off enough. To find time to believe.”
Timken sat. When he spoke, he sounded defeated.
“Okay, Reginald. Humans are going to rise up. They’re on a holy mission. Whatever. So what do we do?”
“Nothing. In the words of some angels I once knew, ‘You’re fucked.'"
“Oh, that’s helpful,” said Charles, who’d been surprisingly quiet throughout the whole briefing. Reginald had almost forgotten he was there, still covered in white drywall dust.
“Look,” said Reginald. “I don’t know what you expect from me. You threatened me to get me here, so I’m here. But if I give you advice, I think we all know you aren’t going to take it. So… just tell me what you want to do and I’ll tell you to go ahead and do it. We can all pretend this worked out the way we wanted.” He looked into Timken’s eyes. “So just tell me, Mr. President: what do you want me to do?”
Timken looked at Reginald, then plucked an invisible piece of dust from his lapel. “Lafontaine made one demand at the end of the video,” he said. “Help us meet that demand as best you can, and you can go.”
Reginald sighed. “What does he want?”
Timken once again exchanged a glance with the general. “He wants to meet,” he said.
FATASS
“PUT IT THERE.”
“IT DOESN’T fit.”
“Turn it, fatass.”
Reginald, deep down inside his own mind, put his mental hands on his fat mental hips and stared at the nonexistent teenager in front of him, kneeling beside the imaginary puzzle. He wondered what it said about his self esteem that even in the privacy of his own mind, he was insulting himself.
“Don’t call me ‘fatass,’” said Reginald’s mental projection of Reginald.
“Don’t blame me, fatass,” said Reginald’s mental projection of Maurice. “I’m not actually here.”
It was true. Maurice wasn’t actually there any more than the gigantic floor puzzle in front of them was there. “Maurice” was just Reginald’s way of projecting his maker’s blood memories into a visual that made sense while he was inside his own headspace. “Maurice” had all of the real Maurice’s memories, quirks, and tendencies, but everything he did these days was really just another facet of Reginald. It was tempting to pretend that Maurice was still here and alive in a way, but down that road was madness. When Reginald had first discovered the ability to bloodwalk (which the angel Balestro had given him for a reason Reginald still didn’t understand), Reginald remembered being entranced with the idea of becoming lost down here, walking through the vampire family tree forever, putting his various ancestors on like so many gloves. But the family tree within him was just like the codex, which Reginald had currently chosen to represent as a floor puzzle: it was just an archive, and nothing more. Pretending a life could be lived in it would have been as close to death as a vampire could get without disintegrating into ash.
“Well, then stop insulting me, Reginald,” said Reginald.
Maurice (who wasn’t actually Maurice, Reginald reminded himself) was still down on his hands and knees, studying the puzzle. He turned his head toward Reginald. Reginald knelt beside him, then took a piece of the puzzle in his hands. He turned it one way, then another. Eventually he slipped it into place. At the same moment, he felt a tiny jolt inside of his real mind as another little thing, unseen and distant, somehow made sense. The sensation felt good, and being with “Maurice” again felt good as well. It made him forget why he’d neglected the puzzle and his blood memories in the first place. But then he remembered why — and remembered what circumstances had set him to work on it again now — and some of the pleasure faded back away.
In the way you can recognize the picture on a puzzle before it’s finished, Reginald had known the codex’s broad strokes since he’d first begun to piece it together forty years ago. It foretold the human revolution, but didn’t dwell much on the vampire revolution other than to say that the latter had made the former possible. He could read a few other things from the in-progress puzzle as well — most notably that humans, not vampires, were considered by the angels to be the stronger species. The humans had always had the power to eradicate the world’s vampires, but they hadn’t realized it until they’d been forced to realize it by the decimation of their population — which had forced them to evolve, and made them desperate enough to strike.
But because Reginald had let the puzzle lay fallow for so long, there were vast areas of it that were still unsolved — foggy places where Reginald could only guess at the gaps in his knowledge. He couldn’t tell where the codex’s prophecies ended, for instance. But sometimes it almost looked as if the human revolution was the final event the puzzle predicted, and that filled Reginald with dread. The codex was the pre-told history of vampirekind. If it ended with the human revolution, what did that say about their chances of surviving?
“Maurice?” said Reginald. He knew that
Maurice wasn’t really there and that he was just talking to himself, but talking to oneself had its uses.
“Yes, Reginald.”
“If this is all inevitable —” He gestured out across the vast puzzle, which in Reginald’s mind’s eye stretched to the horizon. “— then why am I bothering to help Timken? Should we just run?”
“If you run,” said Maurice, slotting another piece into the puzzle, “then they’ll kill you.”
“We’re all doomed anyway. Or so the codex says.”
“That’s not what the codex says.”
“So the codex implies, then,” said Reginald.
Mental Maurice turned to look at him again. “Since when were you a slave to rules?”
Reginald thought about it — a thought within his current state of thought. It was true. Reginald wasn’t a punk rocker or a rebel, but he’d never considered societal norms to have much merit. Human rules said that people were more or less equal and should be treated as equals, but everyone had always mocked Reginald for being fat. Vampire rules said that inferior vampires shouldn’t be allowed to live, and he’d lived despite being considered inferior. But even that was a set of nested dolls, because he wasn’t inferior, despite being considered inferior. The way in which people kept asking him for advice (before ignoring it because they, who were clearly not inferior, knew better) proved that he was considered superior at least some of the time. So what did all those rules really mean in the end?
“But this is all, like, predestined,” said Reginald.
“More or less. But look at how there’s always been wiggle room. You remember what I said, right? About how angels don’t understand free will?”
“Then how could any of this have been predestined, if there’s all this free will?”
“That’s not what I said, fatass,” said Maurice.
Reginald wondered if the stickiness of his current predicament was the reason he was so intent on insulting himself through Maurice, but ultimately it didn’t matter. He and Mental Maurice had had this discussion over and over and over again, Reginald versus Reginald, trying to riddle out one of the greatest philosophical riddles of all time: was it possible to have both choice and destiny? Could one system incorporate the other?
Reginald just shook his head. He plucked another piece of information from the memory of a vampire who’d lived and died four millennia earlier, then set it next to a casual interaction that Maurice himself had observed just fifty years ago. The two pieces fit and leant meaning to each other. Reginald felt a small realization, then kept working.
“It’s interesting,” said Reginald.
Maurice just looked over. Because he was Maurice’s memories animated by Reginald’s thought processes, he already knew what Reginald found interesting. But to keep the back and forth going, he said, “What is?”
“We aren’t actually immortal.”
Maurice smiled. It was the real Maurice smiling. Reginald could feel the difference. Maurice’s blood ran through Reginald’s veins, and vampire blood had a sort of consciousness of its own. He’d never talk to Maurice for real again, but this was the sort of thing that Maurice would have agreed with, and found clever.
“It is interesting, isn’t it?” said Maurice.
“Why do you think we always end up dying in the end?”
Maurice shrugged. “As the great sage Chuck Palahniuk once said, ‘On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.’ Nothing lives forever. Immortality is about potential, not reality. There are one-celled organisms that can live forever, but their immortality assumes that the people watching out for them give them everything they need to keep living, and that they don’t eventually just get bored and throw those organisms into the incinerator. We have the biological potential to live forever, but literally doing so is impossible.”
“Why?”
“Because forever is forever. It’s never over, so nobody can ever get there. The best you can do is ‘immortal… so far.’”
“Very philosophical,” said Reginald.
Maurice looked back to the puzzle and resumed sorting pieces. “Besides, the odds just aren’t in immortality’s favor. Not as it exists for vampires, anyway. It’s pretty unlikely that you’d ever just wake up one day and walk into a sharp stake, but it’s possible, right? So if it’s possible, it’ll eventually happen in the true sense of forever, given infinite chances. Same with being attacked by a random crazy person, or being decapitated in an accident. What happens when the sun one day swells and its corona burns Earth to a cinder? What then? Or what if you simply decide one day that you’ve had enough of living, and walk out into the sun?”
Reginald looked at the Maurice who wasn’t really Maurice, realizing all at once how much he missed him.
“Had you had enough of living, Maurice?” he asked.
Maurice gave him a tight-lipped frown. Reginald knew what the expression meant: that Maurice was just an echo, and that he couldn’t actually answer the question in the here and now.
“Just make a guess,” said Reginald.
“I’d lived for over two thousand years, Reginald,” Maurice’s memories told him. “I doubt I actually wanted to die, but the fact that I did isn’t a tragedy. Claude didn’t end a life that wouldn’t, one day, have ended anyway.”
“So because we all die in the end, nothing is worthwhile,” said Reginald.
Maurice shook his head — a gesture that was totally and completely Maurice. “Don’t be such a nihilist, fatass,” he said.
Reginald looked at the vast puzzle, then nodded to Maurice. Maurice nodded back. The exchange of nods declared that progress on the codex’s assembly had been made, so Reginald let the fog dissipate and withdrew from his headspace. A moment later he resurfaced in his room in the USVC building, where Nikki was sitting beside him, clicking away on her laptop. He sat up and looked at the screen. She was perusing Fangbook, checking in on her various groups.
“You’re awake,” she said.
“I wasn’t asleep.”
“Were you working on the codex?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Was it rusty? Did you have a hard time getting back in?”
“Not at all. It actually felt good to put my mental hands back to work. Comfortable, even.”
Her eyes softened. “Was Maurice still there?”
Reginald sighed. “I don’t think its healthy for either of us to think of him as if he were a person,” he said. Then he caught his slip and corrected himself: “… to think of it as if it were a person.”
He rolled to the side and cupped Nikki’s calf with his hand. She was wearing the robe provided by the building’s domestic housekeeping staff, just like maid service in a hotel. The robe was unsexy, but Nikki made it work.
“Did you figure out what’s up with Timken?” she asked.
Reginald consulted what he’d seen in his head: the slightly-more-assembled codex and the emotional readings he’d gotten from Timken during the meeting. Timken, like Claude, had seemed to know that he should keep his mental shutters up around the Chosen One, but Reginald had still gotten the flavor of his thoughts — enough to proceed and not run off screaming, anyway.
“He’s being honest with us. Timken isn’t a problem. Claude is the problem, and if he’s smart, he’ll stay away.”
“Like Walker,” said Nikki. They’d already laughed about Walker’s absence in the meeting. Nikki had said she resented his not being there. She wanted to knee him in the testicles. Reginald had assured her that it still hurt a vampire man when his boys got crushed.
“The thing about Timken is that he’s always believed he’s doing the right thing,” said Reginald. “That’s what’s so terrible about him. It’s almost hard to hate him because he’s always trying; he just tries in such horrible ways. He’s like a Boy Scout in spirit, but he doesn’t realize he’s looking at life through a melted piece of glass.”
“Mmm.”
“So, fine,” said Reginald with a
sigh. “We’ll help them set up their meeting with Lafontaine. Try to keep Timken from being killed. And if…”
Nikki raised her eyebrows at him.
“Hey, I don’t want Timken killed. Not now.”
Nikki raised her eyebrows further.
“The cows have left the barn, my darling. Humanity got a pole up the ass already. All that would happen if Timken died now would be Walker, Claude, or Charles stepping in. It’s time we talk about the least of all assholes.”
“Wow,” said Nikki. “You’re right. How terrible.”
“Hey,” said Reginald, rolling onto his back, “that’s politics for you.”
There was a knock on the door. Reginald answered it while Nikki closed her laptop and set it aside. He found Ophelia in the hallway, with Brian already dressed and ready beside her. Brian nodded, apparently to let Reginald know that everything appeared to be more or less under control. It was a ludicrous gesture, but it was totally Brian. He was assuring Reginald that it would be okay to listen to Ophelia, because he could take her down if she got ornery. It was true, but it was stupid.
Fat Vampire 6: Survival of the Fattest Page 7
