No accident.
She hasn’t threatened you, she hasn’t raised a hand. She’s just—sitting there. Waiting.
Not in her hab. Not kept at bay by bright lights, no matter what comforting lies Moore had recited.
Brüks kept his eyes on the bulkhead. He swore he could feel the baring of her teeth.
She’s just another failed hominoid. That’s all she is. Without our drugs she couldn’t even handle a few right angles without going into convulsions. Just another one of nature’s fuckups, just another extinct monster ten thousand years dead.
And brought back to life. And chillingly, completely at home in the future. More at home than Daniel Brüks had ever felt.
She wouldn’t even be alive if it weren’t for us. If we roaches hadn’t scraped up all those leftover genes and spliced them back together again. She had her day. She’s nothing to be afraid of. Don’t be such a fucking coward.
“Coming?”
With effort he looked down, managed to fix his gaze on the edge of the hatch behind her, kept her eyes in that great comforting wash of low resolution that made up 95 percent of the human visual field. He even managed to answer, after a fashion: “I, um…”
His hands stayed locked on the ladder.
“Suit yourself,” Valerie said, and disappeared into the Commons.
Motion through the grille: the pixilated mosaic that was Rakshi Sengupta, returning from some place farther forward. The lav in the attic, perhaps. Brüks found it perfectly understandable that Sengupta might choose to leave for a piss at the same moment Valerie happened to be passing through.
She fell into eclipse behind the mirrorball. Brüks heard the sound of buckles and plugs clicking into place, a grunt that might have passed for a greeting: “Thought you were headed for Commons.”
He swam into the northern hemisphere. Sengupta was pulling a ConSensus glove over her left hand: middle finger, ring, index, little, thumb. Her hair stood out from her head, crackling faintly with static electricity.
“Valerie got there first,” he said.
“Room for two down there.” Right glove: middle, ring, index…
“There really isn’t.”
She still refused to look at him, of course. But the smile was encouraging.
“Nasty cunt doesn’t even use the galley.” Sengupta’s tone was conspiratorial. “Only comes out of her hab to scare us.”
“How’d she even end up here?” Brüks wondered.
Sengupta did something with her eyes, a little jiggle that said command interface. “There. Now we’ll see her coming.” Her elbows moved out from her body and back in, a precise stubby wingbeat. Brüks couldn’t tell whether it was interface or OCD. “Anyhow why ask me?”
“I thought you’d know.”
“You were there I just fished you all out of the atmosphere.”
“No, I mean—where’s she even from? Vampires are supposed to live in comfy little compounds where they fight algos and solve Big Problems and don’t threaten anybody. It’s not like anyone would be stupid enough to let them off the leash. So how does Valerie show up in the desert with a pack of zombies and an army aerostat?”
“Smart little monsters,” Sengupta said, too loud. (Brüks stole a nervous glance through the perforated deck.) “I’d start making crosses if I were you.”
“No good. They’ve got those drug pumps in their heads. AntiEuclideans.”
“Things change, baseline. Adapt or die.” Sengupta’s head bobbed like a bird’s. “I don’t know where she comes from. I’m working on it, though. Don’t trust her at all don’t like the way she moves.”
Neither do I, Brüks thought.
“Maybe her friends can tell us,” Sengupta said.
“What friends?”
“The ones she got away from, I’ve been looking and—hey you’re a big-time biologist right? You go to conferences and all?”
“One or two, maybe. I’m not that big-time.” Mostly he just virtualized; his grants weren’t big enough to let him jet his actual biomass around the planet.
Besides, these days most of his colleagues weren’t all that happy to see him anyway.
“Shoulda gone to this one,” Sengupta bit her lip and summoned a video archive onto the wall. It was a standard floatcam view of a typical meeting hall in a typical conference: she’d muted the sound but the sight was more than familiar. Seated rows of senior faculty decked out in thermochrome and conjoined flesh-sculpture; grad students dressed down in ties and blazers of dumbest synth. A little corral off to one side where a few dozen teleops stood like giant stick insects or chess pieces on treads, rented mechanical shells for the ghosts of those who couldn’t afford the airfare.
The speaker of the hour stood behind the usual podium. The usual flatscreen stretched out behind him; the usual corporate hologram spun lazily above it all, reminding the assembled of where they were and whose generous sponsorship had made it all possible:
“Not really my thing,” Brüks admitted. “I’m more into—”
“There!” Sengupta crowed, and froze the feed.
At first he couldn’t see what she was getting at. The man at the podium, petrified in midmotion, gestured at a matrix of head shots looming behind him on the screen. Just another one of those eye-glazing group dioramas that infested academic presentations the world over: I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all those wonderful folks who assisted in this research because there’s no fucking way I’ll ever give them actual coauthorship.
Then Brüks’s eyes focused, and his gut clenched a little.
Not collaborators, he saw: subjects.
He could tick off the telltales in his head, one by one: the pallor, the facial allometry, the angles of cheekbone and mandible. The eyes: Jesus Christ, those eyes. An image filtered through three generations, a picture of a picture of a picture, fractions of faces degraded down to a few dark pixels and they still sent cold tendrils up his spine.
All these things he could itemize, given time. But the brainstem chill shrank his balls endless milliseconds before his gray matter could have ever told him why.
The Uncanny Valley on steroids, he thought.
For the first time he noticed the text glowing on the front of the podium, the thumbnailed intel of a talk already in progress: Paglino, R. J., Harvard—Evidence of Heuristic Image Processing in the Vampire Retina.
Sengupta drummed her fingers, fed the roach a clue: “Second row third column.”
Valerie’s face. Oh yes.
“They make ’em hard to track,” she complained. “Keep changing ID codes move them around. All proprietary information and filing errors and can’t let the vampire liberation front know where the kennels are but I got her now I got her now I got the first piece of the puzzle.”
Valerie the vampire. Valerie the lab rat. Valerie the desert demon, mistress of the undead, scorched-earth army of one. Rakshi Sengupta had her.
“Good luck,” Brüks said.
But the pilot had already brought up another window, a list of names and affiliations. Authors and attendees, it looked like. Some were flagged. Brüks squinted at the list, scanned it for whatever commonality might bind those highlighted names together.