Blood Type: An Anthology of Vampire SF on the Cutting Edge

by Watts, Peter

  "After a department head who retired last year. I swear she actually took it as a compliment."

  The view was off-white and all curves: not so much a room as a pod, the hollowed-out interior of an egg from some world where birds grew big as the Edmonton Spire. A single molded stool, a giant's golf tee extruded from the floor. The vampire sat with her back to the camera—cropped black hair, lean as a whippet, ankles to wrists to collar clad in a one-piece smartweave coverall that sent her vitals to a stack of graphs scrolling to the left of the main window. Her hands rested on a lip of plastic that curved smoothly from the wall; it formed a kind of membranous desktop flickering with circular test patterns.

  "You live?" Alexy called. On the wall, Gregor tapped his earbud and flashed an A-OK.

  No angles, Janna realized. No straight lines, no sharp edges, nothing that might, from any point of view, happen to intersect just so at ninety degrees. "She's not on antiEuclideans?"

  Alexey shook his head. "Drugs fuck with the pattern-matching. We need her head clear."

  Evolution wasn't just blind, Janna reflected. It was also dumb as shit. How natural selection could ever promote an aversion to right angles, of all things…

  Of course, natural selection never promoted anything; it just weeded out the bad stuff. It hadn't had any beef with the Glitch until people had invented geometry—no right angles in nature and all th—

  "What about horizons?" she asked, struck by a sudden thought.

  Alexey looked up from a bit of fine-tuning. "Mmm?"

  "Vertical tree trunk against a flat horizon. Wouldn't that—?"

  He gave her a look. "Horizons aren't real."

  "Sure they are."

  "They're zero-dimensional boundaries. There's no thickness to them, they're just a—hypothetical interface between different parts of the viewfield. Glitch needs a nice solid line to get its teeth into."

  "Okay, but—"

  "Let me stop you right there." He held up his hand, started counting on his fingers: "Trees with perfectly vertical trunks and perfectly horizontal branches. Cliff faces with perpendicular fracture lines. Big stalks of savannah grass snapped in the middle just so. Anything else?"

  She thought. "That'll do for starters."

  "Ten others, at least. But none of them really make the cut, you know? The angles have to be really close to ninety, and they have to be right up in their faces, and something has to keep your vamp from just looking in the other direction when he starts to feel twitchy. And even if one of them did freeze up now and then back in the Pleistocene, that's a pretty small selection cost next to all the perks that come along with the Glitch."

  "But—"

  "Look, you can argue hypotheticals all you want. Here in the real world we deal in data. And if that's what you're interested in, all you gotta do is look" —he jerked a thumb at the wall—"Right. There."

  Valerie's display wasn't showing test patterns any more. It showed heartbeats and frantic EEGs, streams of alphanumerics flowing too fast for mortal eyes to capture. A landscape of numbers, fluid and ephemeral; digital quicksilver. The vampire's fingers blurred across that interface like hummingbird wings.

  "What is it?" Janna whispered.

  "That," Alexey said with a trace of pride, "is a rogue algo."

  "What, you mean from the stock market?"

  He nodded. "That's what's paying for our degrees." He grinned at her. "Or did you think NSERC really gave a shit about alternative splicing in protocadherins?"

  "What's she doing with it?"

  "She's hunting the fucker. Gonna bring it down, too. Twenty bucks says she nails it in five minutes or less."

  "But it's an algo!" No flesh-and-blood was fast enough to take on one of those nasty little programs. It had been decades since mere meatsacks had even pretended to control the economy.

  And yet, up in one corner of the display, part of that luminous torrent had just frozen. A block of hex, as far as Janna could see. It glowed, inert, surrounded by seething chaos: a piece of lightning speared through the heart.

  More fingers in frantic motion; more spell-casting. Another block of code dropped from the fast lane and quivered on the wall. That one had connections; its fall felled others. Cause and effect flashed across the paint like cracks spiderwebbing through glass; a myriad collateral subroutines went from lightspeed to zero in no seconds, crystallized in mid-step.

  "...aaaaand done." Alexey announced. "Two minutes thirty-five seconds. Pay up."

  "I didn’t bet." Janna shook her head, dazed at the sight of a petrified forest where breakneck jungle had seethed a moment before. From the far end of the feed, Gregor thumbs-upped the camera.

  Valerie sat still as stone, facing the wall.

  Janna eyed the little cross hanging around Gregor's neck. She fingered the one hanging around her own. "These aren't worth shit."

  "Eh?" Alexey was still grinning his face off.

  "You saw the way she moved. You saw those—I mean, her motor nerves must be thick as fucking squid axons."

  He nodded. "Thicker. So?"

  Janna held up her cross. "So she could rip your throat out before you had a chance to even think about using this."

  "Which is why we use this as well." He held up his baby blue TARDIS.

  "A keychain?"

  "Janna, Janna." Alexey shook his head in mock disappointment. "You think even a luddite lab like this has any use for keys? This is a transmitter."

  "What's it transmit?"

  "A radio pulse. To the chip embedded in Valerie's motor cortex." He tossed the little device, caught it. "Glitch-on-demand. I push this button and Valerie's brain lights up bright enough to make grand mal look like a facial tic."

  Still the vampire didn't move. I haven't even seen her face, Janna realized.

  "Would it kill her?" she asked at last.

  "Are you kidding? You know how much it costs to build one of those things?" Alexey shook his head. "This just—fries her a little. Not what you'd call a pleasant experience, though. She's a smart girl. She behaves."

  Janna looked at him. He looked back: "What?"

  "I don't—I mean, I guess I don't know how I feel about—"

  He sighed, jerked his chin to the door and the unseen graffiti on the other side. "You sure you're not with—"

  "I'd sign up to come here if I was?"

  "You never know. Undercover animal-rights tewwowist, perhaps." He offered up a brief smile to show he didn't mean it, but it was gone in a flash. "I get it, though. The whole reason we brought 'em back was because they're smart, and if they're smart that makes 'em human, and if they're human that makes 'em slaves and we're a bunch of asshole plantation owners from the twentieth century." He shrugged. "Easy to forget what they did to us, back when the shoe was on the other foot. And they look so human. From a distance, anyway."

  "Count your blessings. If they looked like kittens you'd never get them past the ethics board."

  This time the smile lasted. "Anyway, of course you're gonna have little old ladies standing at your front door waving protest animé in your face. That's just human nature. But you know what I've noticed?"

  "Tell me."

  He leaned in close, as if confiding a dark secret. "No one who advocates for vampires has ever actually met one."

  ~

  That was the next thing they rectified. "If you're gonna do a degree on her, you gotta meet her," Gregor said cheerfully, guiding Janna towards the womb door.

  "No, that's okay." Janna leaned back, resisting. "We can do it tomorrow. I haven’t even unp—"

  "No time like the present." He herded her firmly but gently, hand cupping her elbow.

  "I don't want to put you guys behind schedule."

  "Physio lab won't be ready for another ten minutes anyway. Seriously, we do this every day. If Valerie tries anything—"

  "TARDIS of Tetany." She shuddered. "Alex told me."

  "Then you know there's nothing to worry about." He opened the door, pushed her through, closed
it behind her.

  Janna's ears popped. She had a chance for one last coherent thought—

  —I'm sealed in—

  —before the weight of her predicament settled onto her like a mountain.

  She was in a great bloodless heart, a white plastic ventricle that should have comfortably held six. It felt claustrophobic with two. The vampire sat in profile, motionless as graveyard statuary, hands resting on a membranous surface webbed across the ovoid space like a semilunar valve.

  She looked almost human, if you discounted the corpse-pallor (Peripheral vasoconstriction, Janna remembered. They only pinked up when they were hunting). The jaw a bit too lupine, perhaps, in deference to a set of teeth more extensive than most might consider normal. The angular planes of the face—cheekbone, eye socket, supraorbital ridge under that jet-black buzz-cut—just a little outside the comfort zone of your average prey animal. The allometry of the limbs, the torso—lean almost unto starvation, a wiry macramé of bone and muscle and sinew that the coverall didn't quite conceal.

  The creature turned. It smiled, a rictus of flesh drawn back across shark's teeth. Valerie stood—smooth, hydraulic—and swept one theatrical hand across the vacated stool. "Sit. Please."

  Janna blinked. She sounds like me...

  "Th—that's okay," she managed, standing on knees that suddenly, humiliatingly, knocked like castanets. Not that it mattered; even standing, the vampire loomed over her by a good twenty-five centimeters.

  "You're Janna," she said.

  Janna averted her eyes.

  It was as if someone had put the Uncanny Valley on steroids. Those eyes didn't belong to anything living; they blinked and glistened and saccaded precisely to specs, but something was—missing. As if some alien, some slick AI had decided to play a game of Human but hadn’t quite been able to pull it off.

  No wonder they don't record her face. No wonder they don't look in those eyes...

  Gregor. Alexey. You're getting off on this, aren't you?

  "I'm sorry things don’t work out," Valerie said softly.

  Janna blinked. "Don't—"

  "With Bola."

  They told her. Those assholes, they—

  "They don't know," the vampire said gently.

  Of course they didn't. She'd only met them this morning.

  "How do you?" Janna managed. Look at her, just—look at her she told herself, and couldn't.

  The vampire shifted at the corner of her eye. "How do you know when Looseleaf is hungry?"

  She knows I have a cat? She knows his fucking name?

  "So you study me," she said, still speaking in Janna's perfect, stolen voice.

  Janna gulped and nodded. She won't touch me, she won't… Gregor's on the kill switch, she knows he's on the kill switch…

  "What part?"

  Prey forced itself to stand a little taller, did its best to summon something like defiance. "You don't know? You can't just read me?"

  Valerie shrugged. There was something frightening even in that simple gesture of indifference, in the inhuman precision of its execution. "Academic research is less visceral." Subtle emphasis on that last word. "Fewer cues. Tell me."

  "I'm working on PCDHX," Janna blurted.

  Valerie cocked her head—a curiously bird-like gesture—and stared.

  "You know, like, the gene that codes for gamma-protocadherins, and how it doesn't work in your—"

  "How to fix it," Valerie said.

  "How to fix it," Janna echoed helplessly. "Yes."

  Valerie watched her like a praying mantis. "So we can synthesize it ourselves," she said at last, the ghost of something like a smile haunting the back of her voice. "Metabolically."

  "Y—yes..."

  "So we don't have to eat you any more."

  "You—you don’t have to eat us anyway. There are s-s-supplements."

  Alexey was right. We're not the monsters, not next to this.

  "Kibble." Valerie almost whispered the word.

  The brain chips, the crosses, the cages. It's not oppression, it's not slavery. No matter what they say.

  "Still you're nice to try," the vampire allowed. "To help us all just get along."

  It's self-defense.

  "Th-thank you," Janna stammered, hating the craven coward in her own skin.

  "Maybe afterward," Valerie mused, "We let you live."

  And it's not nearly enough...

  ~

  "She said we."

  Thinking: you asshole. You sadistic motherfucker. Did it get you off, watching the new kid piss her pants like that?

  Gregor spared a glance from the feed. "What?"

  Don't lose it. He wants you to lose it. Don't give him the satisfaction.

  He stood at her side, riding the kill switch from behind the safety of three walls, a stairwell, and a dozen meters of fiberop. Together they watched Alexey down in Physio, putting Valerie through her paces on the treadmill. The monster was almost unrecognizable under the nest of electrodes bristling from her skull, behind the breathing mask across her face. So little left exposed in the way of distinguishing features.

  Thank you, Jesus. For small mercies.

  "Maybe afterward we let you live." Janna remembered. "That's what she said. Like they were deciding who to put up against the wall after the revolution."

  It was a simple ground-truthing run; they weren't pushing Valerie anywhere near her limits. Still, there was something inhuman about the way the vampire loped along on the device, some sense of joints subtly out of place. Something almost serpentine about the way she surged in place.

  "She was just having some fun with you. She's a bit of a sadist that way." And you'd know, Janna reflected as Gregor added: "Can't really blame her, all things considered. Her ancestors probably played with their food all the time."

  "Very fucking funny."

  He grinned. "Really, I wouldn’t worry. She's never been violent, never threatened anyone, never been anything but cooperative. Not that she has a choice, mind you."

  "There are other vampires on campus, though."

  "Three. So?"

  "She said we," Janna repeated.

  "I know. I was watching."

  "She knew things. Details about my personal life. She just, just read them off me somehow."

  "They're smarter than us. That's why we Jurassic'd them back in the first place."

  "So how do you know they haven't figured out a way to just walk out of their cages whenever they feel like it?"

  "Maybe because they’re all still here?"

  "If they're so much smarter—"

  "I'm way smarter than an anaconda, but it could still kill me in a second if I happened to be trapped down a well with my hands tied behind my back. We have Valerie down a very deep well."

  "What about the others?"

  "Them too."

  "No, I mean, what if they were working together?"

  "Okay, first thing, it's kinda hard to cooperate with someone when your territorial instincts drive you to attack them on sight. Second thing, they don't even know about each other."

  "You sure about that?"

  "I've—okay, fine," he said grudgingly. "They probably do know. Probably smell it on us, or something. But so what?"

  "So if she knows the others are out there, she probably knows when each of them gets fed and when each of them goes onto the treadmill and when each of them takes a shit because she reads it off of us, okay? She can see it in heartbeats and sweaty armpits and—Jesus, Gregor, she outruns algos, she can see it in our eyes!"

  "Janna. So what? Even if they wanted to plan the great escape, how are they gonna communicate? It's not like Ghandi can leave a note on the treadmill in the morning and expect Valerie to read it in the afternoon. There's no domain overlap for just that reason; separate quarters, separate labs, separate floors for each vamp. They might as well be in different facilities."

  "There's us, okay? We overlap."

  "You think she's sticking post-it notes on our butts and we just
haven't noticed?"

  "What if she doesn't have to, okay? What if she doesn't have to see the territory to draw the map? Maybe they don't have to put their heads together to draw up a plan. Maybe they all know what to do and when to do it because they've all independently derived the same damn equation from the same damn data."

  And maybe, afterward, they let me live.

  Gregor listened until she ran out of words. Finally he took a breath. "Okay, look. She gave you a good scare. That was kind of the point—"

  "No shit."

  "—to get you in there right off the top so you could see exactly what we're dealing with. Nip any incipient animal-rights shit right in the bud. Obviously it worked. It worked a little too well, you know what I mean?"

  "But—"

  "It worked too well," he said, talking over her, "because you are now so freaked that you can't see the obvious hole in your own argument, which is: if Valerie was planning a revolution, why would she tell you? You think something smart enough to outrun an algo is going to just slip up like that? Or is it more likely that she knew this was your first day, that you might be especially impressionable on that account, and she decided to have a little fun with you?"

  It made so much sense, here in the sunny twilit realm of Mission Control: only back in the bright shadowless glare of Valerie's cage had everything seemed so dark and scary.

  "Unless of course," Gregor turned back to the display—"her master plan hinges on wasting five minutes of my time at exactly three forty—wait a second, what's—"

  Valerie wasn't running with the disquieting grace of a few minutes before. Her feet dragged now, tangled and tripped over each other as the belt hooked and grabbed and pushed them back along the track. In fact she wasn't really running at all; she just dangled there, hanging from the fiberop wrapped around her neck while the treadmill played with her feet. Now that Janna looked more closely, that didn't even really look much like Valerie—at least, those parts visible under the skullcap and the resp mask and the—

  "Fuck." The blood drained from Gregor's face. He tapped his earbud. "Alex? Alex, where the fuck—"

  The body twitched and jerked. Dark glistening loops that weren't telemetry cables dangled against the coverall.