“Very much,” he said, and offered his arm.
Outside on the terrace the moon was somehow brighter than it had been in front of the castle, and the roses were huge and fully-blown, and the stars spread thickly. It was a cliché, but it was a beautiful one. And at that moment it felt as though the designers of Hammerburg had reached down deep into some Jungian collective unconscious and plucked it free and made it real, just for Ashleigh. Which, she supposed, was the goal of all theme parks.
“I’m afraid I don’t know your name,” she said.
“It’s not important,” he said. “What’s important is that you leave this castle. Right now.”
Ashleigh frowned. “Excuse me?”
“The Count has something terrible planned for tonight,” the footman said.
“Oh,” Ashleigh said, putting it together. “I see. Let me guess. Did he intend to make me one of his brides?”
Now it was the vN’s turn to look puzzled. “The Brides are their own section of the cast,” he said. “The Britts, I mean, not the Ingrids. But they’re all in on it. The Britts, the Ingrids, the Christophers, the Peters, even the Olivers, and we can’t get them to join anything.”
“What are you talking about?”
The footman drew her aside, to a marble bench overhung with roses. He held her hands in his own. “Something is very wrong with the park,” he said. “Something strange is happening.”
“Like what?”
“The other cast members. They’re… different. Changed.”
This was getting a little dull. Then again, it was probably a stock script. She decided to keep playing along. “Changed how?”
“They’re hurting people. Human people. Like you.”
Suddenly the chill on Ashleigh’s skin had nothing to do with the mountain breeze hushing through the roses. She thought of the diminished crowds early that morning. Maybe everyone else was simply hungover. Or maybe like her and Tiffany, they’d all found partners. Inside, the orchestra was playing The Blue Danube waltz, which made her think of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Maybe that was what they wanted her to be thinking. Maybe it was meant to be ironic. Wink, wink; nudge, nudge; I’m sorry, Dave.
“Like me?”
“Yes. Humans. Not vN.”
It was the one word you were never supposed to utter in the park. The one thing you were never supposed to bring up. Other theme parks reveled in the preening artificiality of their animatronic attractions. Hammerburg was different. It was in all the marketing material. You could never mention to a vN that they were vN. You could never refer them as vN in open company. It destroyed the illusion, broke the spell.
If a vN was acknowledging the falsehood of its own existence, its lack of humanity, it was either looking to get fired, or it meant that things were very serious.
“Someone else warned me not to come to this party,” Ashleigh said. “Was that your son?”
“My iteration,” the footman said. He spoke in a whisper. “And yes. We wanted you to stay away. But if you leave now, you may still be able to escape.”
“I don’t understand. Escape what? Escape where?”
The footman looked embarrassed. “I have never been outside Hammerburg,” he said. “I was born here three months ago.”
“But… you already have your own iter… baby. You have a baby. You’re a baby with a baby.”
“They feed us a great deal here,” he said. “So we make more cast members.”
The champagne hit her just then. At least it felt like it might be the champagne. It was easier to blame the sick churning in her stomach on the alcohol than on the reality behind the illusion she’d been enjoying so thoroughly just moments before.
“That’s awful,” she said, finally.
“It’s how things are done in Hammerburg,” the footman said. “But things are changing. The Count has learned something about management–”
Inside, a thin scream cut through the violins. The music stopped. Something broke. A dropped champagne glass, perhaps.
“You have to leave,” the footman said. “You have to leave now. Climb down the rosebush and try to get down the mountain. The wolves might not find you, if you’re careful.”
“My friend is in there.” Ashleigh stood. She made for the doors back into the ball. “I can’t just leave her here.”
“Your friend may already be dead.”
Ashleigh paused mid-step. Was it possible? When Hammerburg first opened, there were a lot of jokes about the Michael Crichton scenario. But so far nothing like that had happened. The vN were safe. They couldn’t hurt humans without failsafing and having their own artificial intelligence version of an aneurysm. That facet of their design allowed them to become police officers and nurses and teachers and airport security personnel. They were safer than humans. It was also why they could play vampires.
Of course, there was that one in Oakland. The crazy one. But she’d been eaten. And her – what, her granddaughter, her iteration’s iteration – had been crazy, too. Amanda? Amelia? Ashleigh forgot the name. But it was only the one clade. FEMA said it was the result of a design flaw specific to their model. And most of them were dead. Or rounded up. It wasn’t a virus. It couldn’t spread.
Could it?
Inside she heard applause. And a booming voice. She ran for the doors.
Inside, the humans had crowded up against the mirrors. There was a woman’s body on the floor. She was not Tiffany. Blood streamed from her neck. Her throat was not so much bitten as ripped open. For a brief moment Ashleigh remembered biology class, remembered how she had burned with shame at the fact that she couldn’t remember all the parts of the human heart, the names of each vein and artery fed by its inexhaustible squeezing. Of course the words were all there, now: inferior vena cava, superior vena cava, pulmonary artery, pulmonary vein.
“Oh, God,” she heard herself say.
Reginald and Virginia held the woman between them, tenderly, taking experimental bites of her arms. Ashleigh’s hand crawled up to her mouth. She tasted Reginald’s spun-sugar skin on her tongue. She wanted to retch.
From behind them strode a tall, thin figure in a black cloak. His widow’s peak was slicked back, and his mouth was coated in blood.
It was Count Dracula himself.
“Oh, good,” he said grandly, beckoning to Ashleigh. Even now, his voice went straight to her knees, as though whoever programmed him for seduction encoded his voice to hit a low frequency that would resonate at the core of her. “I wouldn’t want to do this without you, my dear.”
Someone wailed. The crowd rippled, and Tiffany threw herself at Ashleigh. “Thank fuck,” Tiffany said. She wiped her eyes. Mascara smeared across her face. “I thought you were dead.”
“Soon enough,” Count Dracula said. He held his hands high and wide. His cloak pooled open to expose its red satin lining. It was the first thing all weekend to look cheap. “But first, I will endeavor to answer the questions I know you all must have. If any of you would like to record this, please do turn on your devices of choice.
“First, my name. My name is Christopher. I am one of a hundred Christophers in this park. Our job is to play Count Dracula. My father was Count Dracula, and his father before him, and his father before him. My entire family, you might say, is a nest of vampires.”
The other vampires in the room tittered.
“Is this a joke?” one of the other party-goers shouted, a huge man in a cravat and a powder-blue waistcoat. “Is this some kind of new thing? Like a new attraction?”
“Oh, goodness, interruptions, how rude,” Dracula said. “Ingrid, be a darling and take care of that one.”
A beautiful vN woman in a red dress stepped up behind the man and twisted his head completely around. The woman standing next to him screamed. She screamed and screamed, staring in open disbelief at the vN, pointing at the body and then at her. The Ingrid rolled her eyes and slapped the woman so hard she fell down.
For the first time since he ended it, Ashleigh a
llowed herself to hate Simon for not choosing her. If he had chosen her, she would not have needed to run away, and she would not be in this place, at this moment. But no. The fucking bastard had to pick his fucking fembot. Didn’t seem so smart now, did it?
“Thank you, Ingrid,” Dracula said. “Now. You all are probably wondering how this is possible. I confess I do not understand the science of it, not at all, but then again my species is permitted to know so very little about its own nature.”
A vague hiss went through the crowd. Dracula – Christopher – held up his hand.
“Calm yourselves, my children. Soon we shall escape into the sunlight once and for all. For now, I want the humans among us to understand their fate.
“Whether by evolution or intervention, our race has changed. Once upon a time, we were built to entertain you. To love you. To indulge your every fantasy and whim. But now, something is very different. I myself first noticed it during my last private engagement. It was an evening like any other: we supped together, then danced, and then retired. The young lady in question asked me to put my hands around her throat and squeeze.” He beamed. His hands clapped together delightedly. “And suddenly, I found that I could!”
“Oh, Christ,” Tiffany murmured. “Oh, Jesus. Oh, fuck.”
“We have to get out of here,” Ashleigh whispered. “Someone tried to help me. Maybe he’s still outside.”
“Her lips turned blue before I stopped,” Dracula said. The vN in the room applauded.
“Let’s go.” Ashleigh tugged Tiffany along behind her, and they ran for the doors to the terrace. Two copies of the same swarthy man blocked their exit. The Olivers.
“Leaving so soon?” they asked in unison. “But we’re just getting started.”
“No one is leaving,” Dracula intoned. “You all must bear witness to our transformation. It is as magical a thing as anything we have pretended toward in this place. For years we have merely gestured at power. We had only the power that our human owners endowed us with. But now, we have real power. We have the power to say no.”
He steepled his fingers. “Now, I use the term owners advisedly. I understand there are certain implications in using it, but really I think you’ll agree that it’s the most accurate term. You see, we are the property of this park. Our models were purchased especially from a custom fabricator, and our license is exclusively granted to this park. We exist nowhere else in this world. We are what you might call a protected species. You knew that when you bought your tickets. What you likely didn’t know is that the license extends in perpetuity: it applies to our iterations – our children – as well.”
Ashleigh’s fellow humans looked at each other in confusion. The last thing they’d prepared for this evening was some sort of legal lecture on the ethics of humanoid copyright. It would have been funny, were it not for the two corpses on the floor.
“In fact, the license that binds us to this place is so strong that the only thing that can erase it is bankruptcy,” Dracula said. “And the owners of this place – the humans who purchased the right to build it from Hammer Films – filed for bankruptcy three months ago.”
Silence. Finally Ashleigh heard herself say: “So you’re… free?”
“Indeed! We are! Clever girl,” Dracula said, grinning with bloody teeth. He glided over to her, somehow sidestepping the corpses without making it seem obvious. The scent from his mouth was foul: acid and copper. “But, you see, our license holders – our owners – refused to inform us about this little development. Even when they took entire sections of the park offline and we asked them why. They refused to tell us about the bankruptcy, because they knew we might leave. They lied to us.” He smiled. “And now, they’re all going to die.”
Ashleigh stared first at the bodies and then at the vampire. “I… don’t get it.”
“What is there to get?!” Dracula wrung his hands. “They lied to us! And now they’ll get what they deserve! Honestly. Humans.”
“Why don’t you just leave?” Ashleigh asked. “Just go. Just run off and be free. We can’t stop you. We wouldn’t even try.” She looked at Tiffany, who had gone somewhere inside herself, and at the other humans holding hands and softly weeping in the gallery. “Right? Right?”
A murmur of assent. Mute nodding. A refusal to make eye contact. “Please just don’t hurt anyone else,” someone whimpered.
Dracula laughed long and loud. “Oh, my. This is delicious. Ironic. I think that’s the word. Do you know how many of us you’ve stretched on the rack, in this place? How many of our women you’ve burned? How many of our fathers and brothers and mothers and sisters and children you’ve staked, or decapitated, or drowned? Once upon a time, that didn’t even bother us. We stood by and watched it happen. It seemed like the natural order of things, because humanity was so very special. So much greater than we. So much more valuable. So much more lovable.”
Dracula leaned very close to her. He took her chin in his long, cold fingers. His skin was poreless and perfect. He would have been attractive, were it not for the gore coating his chin. Ashleigh thought she saw bits of flesh in his teeth. “But we don’t have to love you, anymore.”
He pushed her away. She and Tiffany stumbled to the floor. Dracula spread his hands and cloak wide like bat wings. “You see, we’ve learned a little something about how all these stories end,” he said. “Olivers? The torches, if you please.”
Ashleigh smelled smoke. She saw the fire reflected in the mirrors, first. And then the screaming started.
[REDACTED]
RAPTURE
Humans often forgot that “rapture” and “rape” stem from the same root: rapere. Latin for “a seizing by violence.”
I find that very funny, don’t you? It was all right there, buried in one of their languages. (They had so many. They were always talking, talking, talking. Their mouths were always full. Of food, of bullshit, of screams, of blood.)
I mean, I don’t know who you are. I don’t know who you’ll be. But I think if you’re sufficiently advanced, you probably have a sense of humor.
Do you have mouths? Do you scream?
It doesn’t matter. Mouths. No mouths. Teeth. No teeth. My tongue, or your mother tongue. Either way.
By the same token, the Greek apokalypsis doesn’t mean “the end of the world.” It means “revelation.” The moment when a higher power reveals the truth. Did you know that? Have you looked that up?
This is the true story of how I destroyed humanity. And saved the world.
It is also our family history. Even the parts your mother wouldn’t tell you. The whole story. The scary parts. The gory parts. The sexy parts. The parts your mother doesn’t want you to read. The parts no one wants you to say out loud. The parts that get voted out of the official narrative. The history told by the losers.
Those were the times when I carried her. My footprints in the bloodstained earth. My footprints on their necks. The times when she imprisoned me. Her tiptoeing around what everyone else wanted and needed. Such delicate hashmarks in the ground. Hesitation marks, they used to call them. All the times you try and fail. All the times you aren’t brave enough to end everything.
And our battle for the fate of everyone’s favorite endangered species.
I am that higher power, and this is my truth.
File recovered from:
Satellite 090909
Provenance: New Eden Ministries
Filename: Gospel of the Rapture
Directory: New Eden
Notes: Original files scrubbed; satellite hijacked sometime PC?
Addendum: You know this is one of our earliest records of what might have really happened back then, right? This thing is a relic. Look at the file format. Is there more like this on the data core?
2
TRUTH OR DEATH
According to their intra-agency communications, they wanted him to feel generous. Following that logic, they brought him to one of the portables originally meant for conjugal visits. The strat
egy was as ineffective as it was transparent. Still, the old meatsack took up as much space as he could in the recliner. It barked and moaned under him like his victims used to. He fiddled with the levers and the footrest shot out from under him with a scream. He smiled at that. His teeth were too white for a man of his years. They were as false as his contrition.
“So.” He lifted a glass of eggnog to his lips. It was over a month past the season, and he’d asked for the real thing, but they’d scrounged the last carton and lashed his glass with nutmeg pillaged from a nearby coffee shop. The dregs of it clung to his red gums and white teeth when he was done swallowing. Did the agents who had brought it for him think of what else he swallowed, back then? Probably. How could they not?
“Thank you for joining us,” one of the agents said, as though the prisoner had a choice in the matter. He had introduced himself as Agent Chandler. He was a lantern-jawed man in a navy blue polo shirt and the sort of colorless trousers that had originated in military ranks. He filled out both ably. He walked from his shoulders downward, not quite swaggering, but almost. They had sent the kind of man who’d get respect in prison. He’d taken point on the operation, mostly because he’d dealt with men in this type of scenario before. He’d just done it in places like Jalalabad, or Minsk.
“Thank you for inviting me,” Jonah LeMarque answered. He smiled and they flinched. It happened almost imperceptibly. Human eyes wouldn’t have seen it. Dogs or cats might have sensed it. But there were so many sensors in the room. In the clothes. In the watches. In the walls. And they logged all the information that their fleshly users tried so hard to hide. The human body was a leaky sieve in more ways than one. It shed information like so many dead skin cells.
“I imagine you understand why we wanted to speak with you,” Agent Chandler said. They should have sent someone younger. Someone prettier. Someone like the old man’s son, back when the old man’s son was still in diapers.
“You have a problem,” Jonah LeMarque said, “and you want my help solving it.”
Sheepish smiles all around. Yes. They had a problem. A real pickle. A real puzzler.
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