The Chronicles of Old Guy (Volume 1) (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure)

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The Chronicles of Old Guy (Volume 1) (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure) Page 18

by Timothy J. Gawne


  King Stephan, with respect, we can have a polite conversation, and I will gladly tell you all that you want to know. Or you can continue to be an asshole, and I will leave here and figure out what I need to know on my own. Your call.

  King Stephan bowed his head. The woman called Svetlana spoke up. “You clod. I told you that this was a bad idea.”

  “But it was going so well!” replied King Stephan. “It’s been so long since we have had a real human being to play with. It’s not that I was going to hurt him for real or anything, but we haven’t had a chance like this for so many centuries!”

  Svetlana looked disgusted. “You and your role-playing.” She gestured around at the tackily-furnished room. “A throne room? A castle? Making empty threats? Do you have any idea how lame this all is?”

  King Stephan recovered his composure somewhat. “If you have any better ideas on how to pass the time, you are welcome to tell us. It’s not like you ever miss any of my parties now, do you?”

  At this time a micro-remote made it back to my main hull with a shed tissue sample from one of these people that I collected in the forest. I start an analysis. The stereo-isomers are Terran, but… Oh my. Oh my. This is… unexpected.

  Excuse me. I have taken the liberty of performing a biochemical analysis on the tissue of one of your compatriots lurking out in the woods. You are clearly of Terran origin – but you are not human. If I might ask, what exactly are you?

  King Stephan smiled broadly, and unmasked a set of perfect teeth with oversized, sharp canines. “Why, we are vampires, of course.”

  O.K. Sure. Of course, why wouldn’t I have ended up on a planet of the vampires? I seem to have done nearly everything else. I would have counted these people as borderline insane or at least far too much into role playing games for their mental health, but, the tissue analysis is suggestive. These are not just lunatic humans. These are something different.

  OK. You are vampires. That’s nice. Could you, perhaps, explain how you came to be, and why you are here all by yourself on this planet in the middle of nowhere?

  He is calming down, enough to start savoring his wine again. “Alright, why not. It would, I think, do no harm, and it could be amusing.” He gestured at Mondocat. “But could you perhaps tell your little pet to wait outside?”

  Sorry, it’s not exactly a pet, more of a camp-follower. I have limited influence over her. She has already had a full meal so is unlikely to attack unless you appear to threaten us. If she does attempt to eat you I promise to try and dissuade her, and if that fails, I promise to feel bad about it.

  King Stephan sighs. “Well that’s OK then. I suppose that I did bring this on myself. So, where to begin? The beginning sounds like a good place to start. Well, I was born the human being Stephan Rapovich on Earth in the year 1655 AD. The nothing son of a nothing family in a nothing village nowhere important. At the age of 25 I agreed to become infected with what we now know to be a virus, and was transformed into the being that you see before you.”

  There are legends of vampires, but no confirmed data. How did your kind avoid discovery?

  At this King Stephan laughed. “Because of the legends! There were so many legends, so many mixtures of truth and half-truths and fantasizes and lies. That vampires came from outer space, that they were condemned by God, that they were an elder parallel hominid species, that they could be repelled by garlic, that they could not cross water… any possible variant. It got to the point where even confronted with hard evidence a human would not believe in us, because we were absurd, the stuff of fairly tales and bad movies. Towards the end it did get tricky, but I am getting ahead of myself.”

  “The virus causes a transformation. It does not work in all humans, in fact, it does not work in most. Hardly one person in a hundred can make the change successfully. Most die – or become so deformed or deranged, that we kill them out of mercy. But for us fortunate few, there are gifts. The core of the transformation is energy. A human has strength, but that strength is lessened by the need to do many things: the need to stay warm, to repair tissue damage rapidly, to do physical work for long periods of time, to reproduce, to digest a variety of foodstuffs, to fight infections. The vampire transformation focuses everything on strength and speed. We give up the ability to digest normal foods, subsisting only on blood – but that allows much greater strength. Consider that a lion, which subsists on a pure-meat diet, has a small digestive system and powerful muscles. A gazelle, however, subsists on low-quality grasses, and consequently must carry around a heavy and complicated digestive system, and it is consequently less powerful. The vampire physiology simply takes this trade-off to its extreme.”

  “The virus does not create – it edits. We lose the ability to synthesize melanin, that makes us more sensitive to sunlight, but it is one less energy drain, one less complex metabolic pathway to support, one less thing to go wrong. We also stop growing hair – we all wear wigs and false eyelashes and eyebrows – you would be surprised at how much energy and protein growing hair takes. Even the junk DNA is edited out of our cells – did you know that birds, which need a high power-to-weight ratio, do much the same thing? With less metabolic demand, our supporting organs can also shrink, allowing for even more efficiency gains.”

  But where do you get your blood out here? I presume that you have no captive humans lurking in the basement?

  King Stephan chuckled and swirled his drink – which I now noticed was rather viscous for wine. “We have our faults, but the instant that we found substitutes for human blood we jumped at the chance. You noticed the pigs that infest this section of our planet? They were biologically engineered to produce type O-negative human blood for transfusions. They are also ideal for our purposes, hardy and fast-breeding. We can live on regular animal blood if we have to, but over a long period of time we tend to develop allergic reactions. We mix the blood with heparin to keep it from clotting, refined from the intestines of the same pigs, and that lets us savor it, as I am doing now.” Stephan took another sip. “Although I do confess, after all these millennia, the faint memory of real wine does still haunt me. We can still metabolize pure ethanol. This particular blood wine is about 6%, but real wine has too many complex compounds for us to digest. A small loss, I suppose, but I do miss it.”

  You do not miss drinking blood from a real human being?

  King Stephan made a face. “Oh please, what a stupid idea. Ask the humans if they miss the days when they had to survive by eating raw squirrel. No we do not miss drinking blood from human beings. It was not like the old novels or movies at all. First of all, back in the days when we had no alternatives, we mostly fed on humans that would not be missed. That meant that they were smelly and ugly and likely full of diseases and parasites – even our immune systems are not perfect. Also, there was a lot of screaming, they would bite and scratch, and likely pee and poop on themselves. Gashing the carotids was nasty, and could leave you wide open for a head-butt. We usually went for the wrists, much neater, but still, it’s gross gnawing away though someone’s flesh with your teeth trying to get a decent blood vessel. It was a lot messier than the old movies, there would be blood on everything. It was sticky and impossible to get out of your clothes in the days before phosphate detergents.”

  “Things got so much easier after the invention of anti-coagulants, and hypodermic needles. And then there were blood banks, and blood substitutes, and animals engineered to produce human blood types. Some of us claim that our investments in medical technology have saved more human lives than we ever took ourselves. I personally find that amusing.”

  Svetlana broke in. “Of course, there is the little matter of us not having fangs.”

  Stephan scowled at her. “You did not need to mention that.” He turned back to me. “The virus that turned us into vampires was not magic. Human teeth cannot regenerate, nor can any mere virus cause new teeth to appear. After about a century all of us lose our teeth, and we need to rely on dentures. Of course, we had them made
with big canines, I mean it’s part of the look, right? – but we don’t have the inbuilt machinery to suck blood. It’s kind of embarrassing. On the brighter side, we can make dentures with normal human teeth. That was handy when we had to mix with real humans, and it’s more comfortable. The human jaw was not built for fangs – we tend to bite ourselves by accident.”

  You don’t miss the humans?

  “I didn’t say that. We miss a lot about them, more and in different ways than we realized that we would when we left. Sometimes we would pretend to drink their blood directly, but we would only scratch them. It could be really good foreplay for kinky sex. That was fun.”

  Wait a minute: my analysis has determined that you cannot have children yourselves. Why then do you still have an interest in sex? Surely the virus would have edited that out of you?

  “An excellent question. That certainly did tend to happen. There were vampire variants with no interest in sex, nor art, nor conversation. Just pure malevolent blood lust.”

  And what became of these more, well, refined, vampires?

  “We killed them off. Partly because we found them to be repugnant. But also out of self-interest. A vampire that shares many of the interests and passions of normal humans can hide in society, with any awkward questions ridiculed as the product of watching too many bad science fiction movies. But a horde of crazed bloodthirsty monsters breaking down your front door is not something to finesse away. They would have attracted too much attention, and serious people might have started to wonder if perhaps less extreme vampire variants existed.”

  And what else happens when you turn into a vampire?

  “Well, let’s see. Our core body temperature drops, which cuts out the need for mechanisms that produce heat leaving more resources dedicated to strength and speed. It also makes us immune to most pathogens that would infect a human, although we do have to be careful of contracting fungal infections. Being cooler also makes our senses more acute due to less thermal noise. We can regenerate almost any injury, but very slowly, in line with our slow metabolisms. Sunlight, which causes damage that a normal human can repair almost as fast it is inflicted, gives us burns that we need weeks to recover from. Heat in general is a problem so we do a better when it is cool. Our synapses are refined and work at double normal human speed. Combine that with a larger relative muscle mass and none of the deadweight that a human carries around with them, and we have superhuman physical abilities. Of course, with a simplified biochemistry, there are none of the nasty side-products that human physiology keeps producing. We are effectively immortal.”

  And the pheromones?

  “Pheromones? Oh, that. Humans don’t have pheromones as such, but there are chemicals that can help to make a person more suggestive. We carry them in small vials. A vampires’ ability to control someone else is mostly a function of self-confidence, and the skill acquired from manipulating people for hundreds of years. But it doesn’t work on everyone or, apparently, on the personal representative of a cybertank,

  Hmm. This is all consistent with the tissue analyses that I have ongoing. But then why did you end up here?

  “Ah, now that is the story. We did so well for so long. Due to our longevity, we eventually rose to positions of power, mostly in the financial sectors. We lived lives of privilege and luxury. Life was good for us. We didn’t hunt humans, or kill them – well, hardly ever – we were no worse than any other human banker or chief executive officer of those eras.”

  No worse than? There are those who would claim bankers to be morally beneath vampires.

  “As you like. My point is that we were no worse than the rest of the human ruling class, and our being vampires caused no additional harm.

  Did you, by any chance, have anything to do with the creation of neo-liberal economics?

  “I am a soulless blood-sucking monster but I will not be insulted so.” King Stephan seemed to be genuinely angry. “This thing called ‘neo-liberal economics;’ it did not come from us. That was purely a human creation. No vampire could ever have dreamed up such an abomination.”

  Apologies.

  “Accepted. In any event, the humans continued to advance their technology, but that didn’t change anything because people were still the same. Then the humans started to advance themselves, and that was a problem.”

  Because you, being immortal, were static.

  “Indeed, you have grasped the problem. The humans, though still physically weaker and slower than we were, and enslaved by a social power structure that had us amongst the top, were improving themselves and we could not match them. It was only a matter of time before they surpassed us to the extent that we could not maintain control. A stupid man, with inherited wealth and position, may command men his better. A monkey cannot, at least not for long.”

  “We tried to suppress the bio-engineering of the humans, but it had gone too far. In particular, we vampires wanted to stop improvements in all humans. The human oligarchs wanted bio-engineering to continue but only for themselves. It resulted in a quiet civil war amongst the vampire and non-vampire elites. The human genome was changing enough that the virus no longer worked. We could not replenish our ranks, or offer immortality as a bribe, and the bioengineering that worked on humans was ineffective on us.”

  And what was your solution?

  He gestured around himself. “This. We left. Despite our strength and speed we are physically incapable of prolonged hard work, but the handy-bots offered the opportunity of a substitute for human servants. We commandeered several colony ships and headed out into the universe. I confess, that I was one of the main instigators of this effort. ‘What need have we of mere humans?’ I said. Let us found our own colony, and make our own future as ourselves. With the handy-bots to do the menial work, we could concentrate on more refined pursuits. We have amongst our number all manner of scholars, artists, scientists and engineers. We don’t need the humans.”

  And?

  “And it was a fiasco, for which I take full credit. We needed the humans more than we realized. It was not just their physical energy that we lacked lacked, but their emotional and intellectual vigor. Without them we stagnated, and we have been stuck here for longer than I care to recount. “

  The woman called Svetlana spoke up. “We should have taken some humans with us, of the old biological stock that could still turn into vampires, while there were still some left.”

  Stephan sighed. “Possibly you are correct. There was considerable debate about that. I felt that we should try living on our own, and in any event space on the colony ships was limited. Taking some humans would have meant leaving some of us behind.”

  It would seem that, in accepting the gifts of strength and immortality, you have cut yourself off from your native race. I believe that is what is called a ‘Faustian Bargain’.

  King Stephan snickered. “Faustian Bargain. The only redeeming two words of the entire corpus of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. I knew him, the arrogant snot. He is only remembered because the term ‘Faustian Bargain’ was so catchy. Still, I get your meaning. It pains me to use a term coined by Goethe, but I suppose that we did make a ‘Faustian Bargain’. And now we pay the price. But come, I have given you information; surely it is time for you to reciprocate? Tell us of yourself.”

  I am, as I said before, a representative of an Odin-class cybertank. My main hull lies many tens of kilometers from here, in the area of the xenos biome. This is just a remote-controlled android in the form of one whose memory I would honor. I was sent to this world to investigate ambiguous scout sightings. Really, that’s about it.

  “I knew of the cybertanks when we left. They were state-of-the art weapons that would save humanity from the threat of alien invasions, or so I was told. But they were not as personable as yourself. What happened?”

  You are referring to my predecessors, weapon systems of significant power but they were not self-aware. I was one of the first models to attain true sentience. We worked with the newly bio-engin
eered humans to beat back increasingly strong alien attacks, and eventually made peace. We were honored as loyal protectors and colleagues. But the humans kept improving themselves and eventually they left us. We don’t know how, or why. It still bothers us. So we formed our own civilization. Right now the human civilization is us, the cybertanks, their heirs.

  Stephan looked wistful. “Your story is so fantastic that it must be true. I had figured that the humans would have evolved into something beyond us, but I never imagined that they would be gone completely. Our root culture, our prey, our parents, our servants, we have outlived them all.”

  In some ways. As far as galactic civilization goes, I am legally a human being, and the human civilization continues. But then to an alien, we all look alike.”

  “Excuse me, you have me at a disadvantage. What, exactly, are you speaking about?”

  Alien civilizations keep to themselves. Our communications are purely pragmatic: stay out of our backyard, any objections if we settle such-and-such a system? And so on. We are not even certain of the physical nature of most alien species. Psychologically we behave like the humans, we communicate from the same locations using the same frequencies, and we adhere to the same treaties and agreements. So, as far as the rest of the galaxy is concerned, I am a human being and a part of a vital and ongoing human civilization.

  Imagine that there were cloud creatures living in the atmosphere of a gas giant planet. They are each a kilometer long. You don’t visit their planet and they don’t visit you, you only communicate long distance via inter-stellar laser. Something happens and the species is replaced with another one that is 100 kilometers long and has a completely different chemical makeup, but they behave exactly the same as the previous species. One cloud being is much like another: who cares? So to an alien, one terrestrial-planet surface-dwelling linear-logic single-mind social being is much like another. That one weighs 70 kilograms and is made of water and organic molecules, while the other weighs 2,000,000 kilograms and is made of metal and composites, is hardly worth taking note of.

 

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