“Silence, minion!” Mhari turns her nose up with turbocharged hauteur and places one hand on her hip, theatrically poised, as she faces down Evan. “There will be no whining among the pigs!”
“Vampires.”
“Goats, chickens, whatever.” She waves it off. Alex stares at her, enthralled. They had to duct-tape Mhari to her Aeron and lecture her for six hours straight before she could wrap her head around just enough of the Core Theorem (as he and Evan had named it) to open her inner eyes to whatever they were all seeing in the visualizer, but eventually she got it. Vampirism becomes her. Her skin is paler and clearer than before, her hair more golden-blonde, as if some personal contrast slider has been turned up; and the city slicker uniform of sharp jacket, black dress, and heels goes well with the territory. The effect of turning post-human on the boy-pigs isn’t quite as obvious—they already had the self-aware swagger of the masters of the universe, apart from Alex—but the change has bestowed an odd desmodontid magnetism on the Scrum Mistress, and Alex is an iron filing trapped in her field.
“We need to try the blood thing. I’m dying for a drink,” says Dick. It’s true: every last one of them has become aware of an unpleasantly intimate thirst since the change, a thirst unslaked by water or champagne. Denial isn’t an option.
“Where are our fangs?” Evan deadpans compulsively.
“Who the fuck knows? Maybe they don’t come out until we hunt.” Dick hunches around his stomach as if he’s in pain.
“Teeth don’t grow overnight,” Evan says, more thoughtfully; “maybe we ought to book a dental X-ray?”
“We could corner one of the cleaners,” suggests Janice. The Scrum’s sysadmin got with the program immediately, and now she’s even scarier than ever: her hair spikier, her trouser-suits sharper. Alex half-expects her to whip out a red and black armband and announce that backsliders will be shot. “Use the hypnosis thing. Even if it doesn’t work, how are they going to identify us? We all look the same to them—pasty-skinned Anglos in suits.”
“Have they found Mr. White yet?” Alex had coughed to telling the smirking chimp in the bathroom to get lost during the daily stand-up meeting. (That was when the sprint on vampirism had been proposed and unanimously actioned as an emergency spike.) Oscar’s discreet digging had subsequently revealed that one Barry White from the Rare Earth Futures desk had not returned to work since the evening of the confrontation; according to the police he was last seen booking a one-way flight to Mataveri airport on Easter Island.
“Not so far.” Mhari wrinkles her nose. “That’s a loose end we’ll have to tie up. What were you thinking, Alex?”
“I was thinking I had sunburn and someone had slipped me some acid.”
Mhari turns away dismissively, focusses on Janice instead, eyes gleaming. “The cleaners are a bad idea, Janice. We might—have you ever watched Buffy?—end up tearing them limb from limb. Or losing control and killing them. Cleaners have team leaders and contract management. Families, even. It could get messy, unless we know exactly what we’re doing. I think we need to deal with this in a businesslike way. Oscar . . . ?”
Until now, Oscar has been sitting in his office at the far end of the boardroom, door flung wide so he can watch from afar. It’s a pose he has: one ankle crossed over the other knee, brooding in his super-villain’s swivel chair (a horribly expensive luxury item modeled after a Blofeldian excess from one of the earlier Bond movies). Now he stands.
Forty-ish, bald and skinny and intensely animated, Oscar is both the Scrum’s leader and their interface to the institution they are embedded in. They all know it, and as soon as he steps forward they all look towards him. “Okay, people. Here’s what I’m hearing: we have a huge opportunity, but it doesn’t mesh with our deliverables list. And it certainly doesn’t play to any of the user stories I’m seeing here.” He looks at Mhari. “It comes with certain costs attached, the stomach ache and sunburn. But it also comes with some remarkable value-proposition increments”—Mhari had sold him on it the instant she regurgitated Alex’s get lost anecdote—“and I think it constitutes a net benefit that we should add to our core skills matrix for all personnel.” Everyone nods, glassy-eyed, unable to look away. Oscar in full flow was charismatic even before they sat him down in front of Alex’s tracer bullet demo and turned him into one of them. Now he’s positively mesmerizing, able to turn the driest of spreadsheet statements into a Shakespearean soliloquy.
“We need to explore the envelope of this new capability immediately, then determine how to apply it to our core production targets. We need to learn what it takes to deal with the stomach ache. We need to explore ways and means of minimizing daylight exposure. We need to identify the existential threats we face and develop procedures that maximize our chances of surviving them. You’ve all seen the movies: you know what happens to the unprepared, the unfit? We are not going to be unfit. We are going to confront this challenge and surmount it together.
“For my part, I’m going to feed a stall warning up the pipeline and tap-dance around it to give you a one-week window of opportunity. I repeat: regular work is cancelled for one week, and I’ll do whatever it takes to cover for you while you get to grips with our new toolkit. Unless anyone wants more than that one-week extension?” (Nobody nods.) “Good. So right now you’re going to sit down and we’re going to brainstorm the stories we’re going to generate tasks from for the one-week sprint on vampirism. On this theme, you are the customers and your work is going to define our deliverables. The definition of done for this sprint is: we will know what hurts us, we will know what helps us, we will know what we can do that we couldn’t do before, and we will know what extra things we can do when we go back to business.”
He grins, toothily. Is it Alex’s imagination, or are Oscar’s canines longer than they were yesterday?
“Note that I didn’t say ‘back to business as usual.’ Because I don’t think we’re going to be playing the same game again. We just got a power-up, people. And once we find out how big it is, we’ll be in a better position to know how high we can raise our game . . .”
• • •
MIDNIGHT IN THE SPRINT PLANNING MEETING. ALL THE PIGS and most of the hens are present, standing around the table (to keep things moving). They’ve barricaded the door to the suite to keep the cleaners out, ordered in a pile of pizzas (for though the stomach ache is ubiquitous and insatiable, the old mammalian metabolism still demands food), and Mhari is keeping track on the whiteboard.
“Okay, what else?” she demands, brandishing a red marker.
“Sunlight, threat, or menace?”
“Thank you, Evan.” She swings to the board, writes SUNLIGHT and circles it in yellow. After a moment she adds rays. “Well?”
“I got burned,” says Alex, “but only my hands and face.”
“Protective clothing,” mumbles Dick. His suit probably qualifies as such, at least if it’s his virginity he’s trying to protect—it came from a charity shop, a coarse green tweed pig farmer’s number that is more effective dissident garb in this environment than any amount of tie-dye and patchouli oil. “Hey, what about latex face paint, like in Mission: Impossible?”
Mhari adds two linked circles to the board: PROTECTIVE CLOTHING and LATEX MASKS.
“Hats,” offers Janice. “Becca gave me a lovely new trilby . . .”
HATS goes on the board.
“Keep it moving, people,” Mhari says briskly. Alex’s attention wanders. He notices she’s wearing opaque black leggings under her dress.
“Shouldn’t we move the office down a few levels?” he asks. “And further away from the exterior?” The Scrum’s office is already shielded in the heart of the bank’s building, well away from any possible exposure to laser microphones or long-lens cameras.
“I’ll action that with Oscar, but that’s not strictly a user story,” she reminds him. “Stories, people!”
“Blood: animal or human?” offers Evan.
“Good one. Does it have to be fresh from the artery, or can it be stored?” This from John.
“I saw this film once,” Alex stumbles momentarily; “in it, the vampire had taken over a local hospital—it was set in the mid-west—and was using the blood bank . . .”
“Jolly good!” BLOOD BANK and FRESHLY SQUEEZED BULL went on the board. “Next?”
“Mind control.” Janice took her turn. “We need to explore it. Can we all do it? How do we do it? What are the limits? What if the target is resisting?”
“Excellent points, one and all.” Mhari turns to the board and scribbles: HYPNOSIS, RESISTANCE, LIMITS. After a moment she scrubs out HYPNOSIS and writes in BRAINWASHING instead. “Anything else?”
Alex rubs his jawline. It itches. “The mirror thing. How does it apply to cameras? Because if—”
“Nonsense, Alex!” Janice is nodding along with Mhari. “We already know that one.”
“But—”
“Because I had to use FaceTime on my fucking iPad to do my makeup this morning. It can’t fool cameras, or I’d be a real mess.”
Janice holds up a cautionary finger: “Unless you swap the image right-for-left. Is that what you were wondering?”
“No, but—” Alex stares at Janice, then at Mhari. “It’s a mental effect! Whatever stops us seeing our reflections, it’s in us, not in the mirror or the camera.”
“Huh.” Mhari sounds skeptical, but turns back to the board anyway and adds: FACE BLINDNESS. “Anything else?”
“Garlic.”
“Coffins!”
“Holy water.”
“Anyone got a crucifix? Or going to holy communion?”
“Wait up, if you believe in the strict trans-substantiation, then if the host and wine turns into the body and blood of Christ, does that mean it could fix the stomach upset? Or would it set fire to us?”
“Dude, consecrated ground. Also: holy water!”
(Mhari doesn’t interrupt the flow, but writes JESUS STUFF on the board.)
“But what if someone invites you in?”
“I can settle that one,” says Janice. “The thing about needing an explicit invitation? Is nonsense.” She sounds a little too smug, to Alex’s ears.
(LET THE RIGHT ONE IN goes up on the board. RIGHT ONE is then struck out and replaced by WRONG ’UN.)
“Stakes,” says John. He is greeted by stony, unwelcoming silence. “Did I say something wrong?”
“There is an obvious joke,” Mhari says tightly. “You’re all thinking it, so you can pat yourselves on the back and keep it to yourselves. But in current company if you say it aloud I will have to make a determination whether it constitutes workplace harassment and/or discrimination against persons-of-hemophagia. Am I clear?”
Alex bites his lip. The moment passes; nobody utters the words stakeholder management in any context, tasteless or otherwise. But he’s managed to make his lip bleed, and the trickle oozing onto his tongue tastes like, no, it smells like, no, it reminds him of . . .
Mhari is saying something about teams and assigning a sprint backlog and prepping a new burndown chart and who takes on what roles. Alex shivers imperceptibly, and tries to shut the memory of his first orgasm back in whatever dusty memory box it crept out of: this is no time to be distracted. “John, Dick, you’re on BRAINWASHING: go find a bar and practice your pickup lines. Janice and Evan, you’re taking BLOOD BANK. Those are tonight’s tasks. Tomorrow Janice can return the samples while Evan and Alex tackle the JESUS STUFF items. If you need support I’ll pitch in. I’m going to take PROTECTIVE CLOTHING and LATEX MASKS but I’ve got some shopping for equipment to do first, so we can work on it tomorrow; I’ll need one of you boys. And Dick and Alex can team on FRESHLY SQUEEZED BULL. Okay, on to phase two: let’s start drawing up our work units . . .”
• • •
A PAIR OF VAMPIRES WITH CLIPBOARDS WALK INTO THE ACUTE Receiving Unit at a busy London teaching hospital, shortly after eight o’clock at night.
One is male and one is female. They’re both smartly dressed, with badges on lanyards around their necks. Everything about them screams outsourced private sector management, except it’s nine in the evening and there is no way that consultants from Accenture or PwC would be seen dead working this late amidst the vomit and screams of the unwashed sick plebs.
The male discreetly elbows his companion (pin-striped trouser suit, short spiky hair with racy violet highlights) and whispers, “We should have come as doctors. All it takes is a stethoscope, how hard can it be?”
“Don’t be fucking stupid,” she hisses at him. “What if somebody asked us to fix someone?”
“We could tell them they feel better? They’d believe it.” (It was true: to everybody’s astonishment, they’d sent John and Dick to test it. John, because he fancied himself as a pickup artist, and Dick because he was clearly a hopeless case, the twenty-something programmer most likely to still be a virgin. But Dick had scored with his first attempt. Despite his pig farmer’s suit, questionable personal hygiene, bulging, watery hyperthyroidal eyes, and the miasma of squalid dissipation that trailed around behind him at all times, he’d slouched into a high-end club and squelched out again after half an hour; wearing the stunned, toad-like grin of a first-time winner in life’s lottery, sandwiched between a pair of mistrustful anorexic blondes who clung to his arms possessively and glared daggers at one another across his prematurely thinning pate. John, aghast, had stuck around only long enough to obtain photographic evidence of the coup, then chickened out of his own chicken run and went home to commune with a bottle of limoncello instead, depressed by the ease with which Dick had devalued his expertise with the ladies.)
“Yes, but that wouldn’t be—” Janice shuts up as a harried-looking bloke in blue scrubs marches briskly towards them.
“You can’t wait here, you’re blocking the—” he begins, then stops as Janice stares into his eyes.
“Health and Safety Inspectorate spot-check. We’re here to verify that your unit is following approved hazardous waste disposal procedures during non-core business hours,” she informs him.
“But you—”
“Believe it,” she emphasizes.
The A&E nurse blinks a couple of times as he assimilates this new information. “You need to go and talk to janitorial services, then. Not here, this is the triage and control post. You’re in the way, we have ambulances—”
“Which way?”
“There.” Their unwitting informant points along the corridor, past curtained-off bays and an empty stretcher. “Turn left past the crash cart, through the double doors, third on your right.”
“Thanks. Forget we were here.” Janice hauls Evan along behind her, hurrying to clear the area lest a real emergency blow in, trailing too many medics and relatives and police officers to subdue by force of will alone.
“Now what?” mutters Evan.
“We ask more questions. Let’s see, we’re looking for the blood transfusion duty registrar. They’ll be on-call and the internal phone book will take us to them. They’ll know where the blood components are stored; probably a special refrigerator in a hematology lab, but there’ll be supplies close to A&E.”
“Where did you figure that out from? Did you work in a hospital before—”
“I used Google. Duh.”
Badges, clipboards, and self-confidence will get you past the human gatekeepers in a hospital, but they won’t help you with the combination locks on the doors. But if you have a vampire’s talent for convincing people that they want to help you, you can move around relatively easily: just wait for someone to come along, then get them to invite you in. Over the next twenty minutes Evan and Janice inveigle themselves into the hematology lab, and corner the duty hematology technician: forty-ish, maternal-looking, and very surprised to see them standing in t
he doorway to the lab office.
“We’re here to do a spot-check on the blood fridge,” Janice announces forbiddingly. Evan, standing behind her, holds his clipboard before him like a weapon. “We are auditing supply levels and expiration compliance throughout the primary care trust, and we’ve been tasked with making spot-checks on hematology services to monitor wastage. Where’s your supply manifest? We need to do a stocktake against it.”
The tech looks surprised. “Can I see your ID, please?” she asks. “Nobody told me to expect—”
“Here’s my ID,” Janice says, holding the faked-up laminated badge. “You will recognize this as valid. There’s no need to confirm it with management. Everything is in order.”
“Yeah, baby.” Evan leers over her shoulder.
“Supplies.” The technician shakes her head. “What do you mean?”
“Plasma. Platelets. Whole blood to hand for transfusion.”
The technician frowns. “Whole blood? Someone’s misinformed you. There’s a single unit of screened O negative blood in the blood fridge by Theatre One, strictly for emergencies, and about six units of various types in the Resuscitation Ward on A&E, but we don’t handle bulk supplies here; we handle immunohematology testing and order in supplies from the blood bank on a per-patient basis, as needed. And if they don’t have enough, there’s a blue light taxi service from the nearest NHSBT center. We don’t just keep units of whole blood hanging around unused! The stuff’s too valuable, and it has a short shelf life—”
“You’re telling me you run a fractional reserve blood bank?”
“What?” The technician is perplexed by Janice’s incredulity. “But you can’t possibly imagine that—”
“Leave her,” Evan suggests.
The hematologist shakes her head and blinks at them, leaning away. “Let me see your badges again. Who did you say you were from?”
The mind control thing clearly isn’t working too well. Janice sighs, leans nose to nose with the woman, and slams the full force of her willpower into her: “Get a syringe and draw a sample from your left arm. I am a vampire and I vant to suck your blood.”
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