He looked round. For a miracle he was on his own. Janice was out of the office, dragged down to one of the server farms to supervise installation of some new piece of kit—he vaguely remembered hearing mention of the bank’s acquisition of a D-Wave quantum annealer. Dick and Evan had gone along to rubberneck. Mhari and Oscar were in a meeting, and John had left early to attend a summit conference in a pub. It was a rare and peculiar experience to be alone in the Scrum’s offices during working hours. Fuck it, he thought tiredly, then pushed himself back in his chair, seeking the focal point at the exact center of the cluster of five monitors on swivel-arms that overhung his desktop. Trading had closed a couple of hours ago: he badly needed a break. Do I have time for half an hour in EVE Online—
He reached out to touch his mouse and stared into the off-piste depths of My Little Pony affiliate marketing futures, just at the moment that one of the stuck Möbius gears in his mind’s eye clicked forward a notch.
• • •
HIATUS.
Consciousness crashed back into Alex’s head like the shards of a broken stable door banging to the ground behind a fleeing horse. Personality congealed out of nothing, in the midst of a monstrous chittering buzzing like a swarm of bees assembling themselves into larger and more complex units, grabbing hold of each other, reintegrating his scattered thoughts in the aftermath of—what?
Alex opened his eyes and tried to make sense of the grainy black-and-white shapes around him. The side of his cheek was hurting; the small of his back ached. He breathed out. Inhaled again, and color flooded into his vision. He was slumped across his desk, and the sharp edges in his face were the keys of his keyboard. He was half out of his chair: Glad I didn’t fall—
His arms felt like limp noodles. He tensed, then braced himself and pushed upright. For a moment the world spun around his head; then he realized that he was, in fact, moving: his chair was spinning frictionlessly around on the axis of its gas strut. Nausea racked his stomach as he dragged a foot along the anti-static carpet, slowing the gyration. I must have blacked out, he reasoned. In his head he watched as Möbius gear-trains shimmered and rotated through a five-dimensional planetary cycle, mysterious and ineffable. It made perfect sense, in a manner he couldn’t quite bring himself to articulate. That’s it! he realized triumphantly, and grabbed his keyboard to freeze his insight in code before the moment slipped away.
Fifteen minutes passed. Or it might have been an hour, or three. Alex saved a new snapshot of the project to the common code repository and leaned back, dizzy and still slightly nauseous. “What happened?” he asked aloud, then looked at the screen. Icy panic flooded through his guts.
I lost consciousness! a corner of his mind gibbered. I had a mini-stroke! Just like aunt Alicia! His great-aunt had undergone a series of transient ischemic attacks, then ended up in hospital just in time for the big one. In conjunction with too many gruesome public information ads, her experience had instilled in Alex a deep dread of cerebrovascular accidents. He fully expected to die shuddering on the floor of a dirty toilet cubicle, paralyzed on one side, if he so much as drew breath in a room where one of his colleagues had been honking the Honduran high-grade. Now the electric-pink elephant of hypochondria sat on his chest, force-ventilating him until he felt as if he was about to black out: I’ve got to get to hospital!
He staggered woozily to his feet, clinging to the back of his chair. After a moment, he let it go. It spun lazily around and he wobbled, but kept his balance. Hospital! he whimpered. His employers would view it as a sign of weakness if they knew he needed medical help, but visions of grue danced through his mind’s eye: struck down in his prime by a malignant brain tumor, stroked out at his desk in an epic case of City karoshi, slain by a—Möbius gear-train sigil blurring in and out of three dimensions as it rotated through a fourth and fifth: flame-like fractals, Cantor’s dust burning in infinity behind them like malignant fire-rimmed eyes—
Through the airlock corridor he stumbled, grabbed his wallet and keys and bicycle helmet from the locker in the hallway outside the Faraday-caged security door. Keyswipe-elevator-basement-car-park strobed past his shocky vision, still fixed on an interior vista of numinous dread. He threaded his way betwixt Bentley and Range Rover to the bike rack in the corner, tucked next to the fire riser inlet by the garage door leading to the exit ramp. Should I be riding if I’m feeling like this? No, but it’s faster than waiting for—
He fastened his helmet strap under his chin with shaking fingers, then clambered astride his steel steed and pedaled unsteadily towards the ramp. Heave and up, heave again and round the bend, a sharp-edged line of daylight advancing across the shadowed concrete towards him.
Pain scraped razor-edges across his knuckles. A moment later, it hit his face. Alex squeezed his eyes shut and gasped at the magnesium-flare brilliance flooding over him in place of daylight, forgot to keep his feet on the pedals and staggered, falling sideways. He landed heavily, rolling. Car crash, explosion, terrorists flooded through his mind, then a moment later he was back in shadow, halfway down the ramp, limp and enervated as a doll with its strings cut.
• • •
THIS TIME, WHAT AWAKENED HIM FROM THE BLACKOUT WAS THE mouth-watering aroma of roast pork flooding his nostrils. The pain was ghastly, sickening. He tried to open his eyes, then to move. Something sharp-edged and hard entangled his legs—the frame of his bike, a Cannondale hybrid that had cost him half his first month’s wages. He pushed himself up on his hands and fought back nausea. The backs of his wrists and fingers felt as if they were on fire. His face . . . Must be a bomb, he thought, shocked completely out of rationality. His helmet rim had shielded his eyes from that terrible heat-flash: otherwise he’d be blind. There’ll be other survivors. They’ll need help. He grabbed the frame of the bike one-handed and pushed it away, then shoved himself to his feet.
He sniffed. The smell was coming from nearby. He tried to lick his lips and nearly bit his tongue with the effort of holding back a scream. Abandoning his bike, he stumbled towards the fire door leading back to the basement elevator lobby. For some reason it wouldn’t open at first. Key card, he realized fuzzily. He’d put it in his jacket pocket. He tugged at the door handle in increasing frustration, afraid to push his burning hands up against fabric: push against the wall with one hand, pull with the other. Something gave way, and the door opened.
He zoned out in the elevator on the way up to the eighth floor. His next moment of lucidity came in the cool tiled sepulcher of the bathroom. Avoiding the stalls—for some reason they were always terrible, no matter how recently the cleaners had been round—he lurched towards the row of sinks and the wall-wide mirror. His face hurt, a constant pounding burn: whenever he flexed a muscle a shivery spike of agony lanced through the skin above it. His hands were less painful.
He opened up a cold tap, forced himself to wait until the stream ran cool, then shoved his hands under the water. The bitter stinging began to subside after a few seconds. He peered closely. The backs of both hands were crimson and sore, as if severely sunburned or scalded. Tiny blisters were forming under the skin. He glanced up, risking a look at his face in the mirror.
His face—
I can’t see my face. But he couldn’t see the row of toilet stall doors behind him, either: there was something in the way, something fuzzy that skittered around the edges of his perception like a bead of water on a hot stove top. Drugs? Chemical weapons?
The rest room door opened as somebody entered. Wide pin-stripes and an even wider wide-boy manner: it was one of the commodities team, known to Alex only by sight (swaggering) and by attitude (expansively annoying). “Wotcher, cock. Spent too long on the sun bed?”
Alex spun round, blood in his eye. “Fucking get lost,” he snarled, pain momentarily goading him until he forgot to be afraid: “No, wait. Can you see me in the mirror?”
The smirking chimp was taken aback. “Hey, no need to get personal
! You been hitting the whacky backy or something? Of course I can see—”
Möbius gears turned in his mind’s eye, their teeth meshing at the center of a beautiful and terrible symbol engraved in his vision, the projection into threespace of an instrument of power that he somehow knew was axisymmetric in seven dimensions. Alex opened his mouth and the words came with a deep assurance he’d never known before, from somewhere inside him that he hadn’t known existed:
“I told you to get lost. Do it.”
Chimp-Smirker’s smile froze. Glassy-eyed, he turned on the heel of one quarter-brogue and marched stiff-legged out of the rest room.
Alex turned back to the mirror. “I can’t believe I just did that,” he told the whirling blind spot where his reflection should be. “Someone must have spiked my—” He looked at his hands again. The redness had faded and the pain was trickling away. And his face: he raised a finger and gingerly touched the tip of his nose. It merely ached. “Psychosomatic. That’s it,” he mumbled to himself. Focussing his inner eye on the swirling gear-mesh at the heart of the evil mandala: “Fuck. Someone spiked my coffee. Trying to screw me over, make me lose my shit at work, lose my job, too. Who? The fuck. Go home and call in sick tomorrow. Work out who’s got it in for me later. Fuck.”
Was it just his imagination working overtime, or was he feeling oddly thirsty—for something thicker and heavier than water?
A tiny freaked-out voice gibbering in the corner of his mind (the same corner of his mind that nudged him to hide behind the sofa while watching monster movies on TV as a child) prompted him to check his smartphone for that day’s sunset time before he moved. And so, he waited out the remaining quarter-hour until full darkness, shivering in the least-filthy toilet stall, telling himself that even though it couldn’t possibly be true—Where were his fangs? How did he sign up for the opera cape and the widow’s peak?—it wouldn’t do to risk another case of psychosomatic sunburn and mirror-blindness.
• • •
GETTING HOME SAFELY GAVE ALEX MORE TROUBLE THAN HE might have anticipated, even taking into account his newly acquired stepping-on-the-cracks-in-the-pavement aversion to daylight. When he tried to take the lift down to the parking level it stopped at the lobby and he was politely directed elsewhere by uniformed security. “I’m sorry, sir, there’s been some sort of attempted forced entry. It’s probably just those bloody hippies from Occupy, but we can’t take any chances.”
“But my bike’s—”
“If you want they can call a car for you at Reception, sir. You can collect your bike in the morning. Right now we’re in lockdown, just in case one of them made it into the building.”
His head spinning, Alex made his way instead to the underground atrium level, and out through the door into the shopping center. Sunlight didn’t filter down this far; you could live like a mole. He stumbled towards the DLR station, hoping he still had enough credit on his Oyster card.
The platforms on the DLR were airy glassed-over tubes, raised well above ground level. As he rode the escalator towards his homebound ride, for a few terrifying seconds he thought he’d made a mistake and that it was still daytime: everything looked preternaturally bright, the shadows diffuse and lacking in concealment. But it didn’t burn, and as he calmed down he realized it was the ochre London overcast, lit from beneath by a million lights. I must be photosensitive, he realized. A migraine? That would explain the visual distortions in the mirror. Of course; and there was mild nausea, too. But he’d occasionally suffered from stress-related migraines before, and this felt different.
Alex’s current home was a spare bedroom in an old and damp-smelling maisonette owned by a pleasant middle-aged couple (a nurse and a police support officer). They still thought he was a counter clerk, because he’d bottled out of telling them precisely what kind of bank he worked for, or in what capacity. It wasn’t much of a home: it was more of an ellipsis between student squalor and the penthouse off Mayfair that he planned to take out a subsidized mortgage on the moment his first annual bonus came in. In the meantime, it allowed him to save up frantically in case his bonus didn’t come in and he ended up having to look for another job while picking up his burden of student debt again (the golden handshake not being due to vest fully until he’d put in two whole years).
He was about to turn the corner onto his street when a knot of deeply intertwingled thoughts brought him up sharply. Someone spiked my drinks led to I’m hallucinating, which by induction allowed him to derive I don’t want Sam or Valerie to think I’m a user. Knotted around it like a venomous snake was another strange loop of concepts: But if I’m not hallucinating I really shouldn’t be around them. Because: vampire. Right? Alex quite liked his landlords, at least to the extent of not wanting them violently dead: the imminent prospect of sprouting fangs and ripping their throats out was profoundly, mortifyingly embarrassing. Nor could he risk them bursting into his room and opening the curtains to check whether he was sleeping through the afternoon or needed urgent medical help. I need a hotel, he realized.
There was a cheap Travelodge across the bridge from Poplar station. Alex headed for it, diverting on the way to pick up a carrier bag of essentials from a late-night supermarket. To his disappointment, the dazed-looking hotel receptionist didn’t spare him a second glance. She barely looked at him as she took his credit card, billed him for two nights, and droned through the here-is-your-room-card spiel. (On his way over he’d obsessively concocted a cover story concerning a lost checked bag, a mugger, and a rainy night in Paris—entirely for nothing, as it transpired.) “Thanks,” he mumbled, and made a dash for the lift, trying not to think about the way the arteries in her throat throbbed so seductively.
The hotel room was exactly what he’d expected: a minimal salaryman/family on a budget dormitory, with the basic fittings and no extras. First he hung the Do Not Disturb sign out, then for good measure he reinforced it with an improvised door wedge—a free newspaper he’d grabbed on the way in. The curtains gave him some cause for concern, but he’d thought to buy a roll of duct tape and a pair of scissors. Wobbling and unsteady, he knelt on the dresser to tape around the gaps. They’re going to think I’m mad, he thought, and tittered to himself. Locked in a safe space with a bag of munchies and a bathroom, he ought to be okay—as long as he didn’t wig out further before sunset tomorrow. Have I lost it already? he wondered.
It was barely ten o’clock. The question of what he was going to do for the next twenty-two hours was only just beginning to sink in. He lay on the bed fully clothed, and stared at the bone-white ceiling until dragons and Möbius gears began to uncoil in the corner of his vision. If I’m not nuts already I’m going to be nuts by the time I . . .
He snatched up his phone. The face recognition unlock worked and he could see himself in the phone camera’s display: that ought to tell him something if he wasn’t so overwrought. He dialed a work contact. As he’d expected, it rang through to voice mail. Good. “Uh, Mhari? It’s Alex. Listen, I’m not well. Uh, actually, spouting at both ends. Really, it’s a rotavirus or something. I’ll try to make it in tomorrow morning, but if I don’t, it’s because I’m pebble-dashing the—uh oh!” He forced a nauseated gurgle (which came disturbingly easily) and killed the call. Ass: covered. Now to sleep, and see if he could see himself in the bathroom mirror in the morning or something.
Sleep, of course, didn’t come easy, but there were movies on demand.
Lots of movies.
Movies about Lesbian Vampire Hunters and Blood-Sucking Fiends.
Movies with lots of gore and blood. Blood which, on screen, didn’t make him feel faint and dizzy the way the sight of even a trivial graze did in real life.
Fascinating.
• • •
A SLEEPLESS BUT INTERESTING—NOT TO MENTION AMUSING AND educational—night later, Alex prepared to wait out the day in a state of numb boredom. Sleep hadn’t come, and time had not restored his ab
ility to see his own reflection: shaving had been unexpectedly hazardous. In a spirit of masochism, he stuck a pinkie through a gap in the duct tape around lunchtime; the resulting blisters took half an hour to subside. By noon he was reconciled to the horrible truth. Face it: I don’t need sleep. Daylight burns. I can’t see myself in the mirror, I yanked the lock right out of the basement door and I distinctly remember bending my bike frame when I grabbed it. He raised a finger to his mouth, ran it around the front of his upper jaw. Is that my imagination, or . . . ? No, it was imagination, at least for now. No fangs, thank God. Fangs for small mercies, ha ha.
There’s no such thing as vampires.
There’s no such thing as vampires.
There’s no such thing as—
Research.
Alex spent much of the day with his smartphone, doing what research he could: mainly reading the Wikipedia and TVTropes articles on vampires, but also verifying that the camera could see him, but a left-for-right mirror flip turned his image into a blind-spot distortion. And that he could pluck falling objects out of the air ridiculously fast, on video. Some calculations in Wolfram Alpha confirmed that his reflexes had sped up to such an extent that they were not merely fast but biomechanically implausible, and while he couldn’t see his own image, he could certainly see the hotel toiletries he was juggling. By the time his battery was down to 10 percent he knew even less than he had when he started: except that whatever had happened to him was real, or his pocket computer was in on the conspiracy to gaslight him. Also, despite eating all his munchies and drinking copiously from the bathroom sink, the enervating sensation of thirst wouldn’t go away.
“What was I doing?” Alex asked the tiles in the bathroom. Introspection revealed a frustrating shortage of black-gowned Elvira wannabes slurping on his carotid artery; obviously there was something missing from the common lore that it takes a vampire to make a vampire. “I was trying to visualize the phase transition in—” He stopped dead, Möbius gears turning in his mind’s eye. “Then I passed out and the weird visuals began. Hmm. I wonder if it’s just me?”
Rhesus Chart (9780698140288) Page 5
