by Kim Newman
Bummer! Still, no need to charge the guns again.
‘Options are available,’ Lefty continued. ‘A nexus is in operation on Floor 88. The Security Suite.’
‘Show me that on the plan,’ said Nezumi, talking familiarly with Lefty.
Nothing happened.
‘Lefty…?’
‘Does User Jun Zero wish to enter details of Secondary User? Fifteen items of identification will be required.’
‘Do what she asks,’ he said.
The building plan sprung out in 3D. Sharing a small elevator with a large wirework robosaur felt dangerous, though it was only a projection. His eye was drawn to the jut-snout head, bristling with antennae. Why give a skyscraper a face? Was this the Princess’s idea of a twenty-first-century sphinx? A wonder of the world.
Nezumi stepped through the model, light-lines across her face and hands.
She tapped a section and a shaft – this one, Hal supposed – lit up.
For an unauthorised Secondary User, Nezumi mastered the interface quicker than he had. Jun Zero wouldn’t like that. But Jun Zero was a jerk.
‘From the Security Suite, we should be able to get anywhere in the building,’ said Nezumi.
‘It’ll be left unmanned and ready for us to waltz in then.’
‘Not at all,’ said Nezumi, sliding out a couple of inches of her sword.
The dragon switched off.
‘Take us down,’ said Hal, wearily. ‘To Floor 88.’
The elevator began to move.
Hal didn’t want to think about whether he’d done the right thing or the wrong thing, but the next item that popped up on his mental menu was that vampire elevator in Holland and he really, really didn’t want to think about that.
He hummed along with the catchy song.
DR AKIBA
His eyes had been plucked out and his ears torn off.
His mouth and nostrils were pinched closed, buried under new-grown flesh. Would he drown in his own body? He couldn’t draw breath – but his lungs weren’t straining to the point of bursting. Panic abated before it could take hold. Turning vampire wrought violent physical changes, which were still in process. His heart beat, though at a slower rate. A respiratory system was as vestigial to what he was now as an appendix was to a warm man. His lungs would hang like empty wineskins in his ribcage. The pseudo-mouths in the palms of his hands were for feeding. The blood he took would be pre-aerated in the lungs of his donors.
He was a noppera-bō, one of the faceless ones.
The creature that attacked him had wandered off. Now he was competition not food. She was not his mother-in-darkness. He’d injected himself with v-blood from the kit. The noppera-bō must have affected the turning, to infuse him with her peculiar bloodline. She was mad – whipped to craziness by the blood spilled when Drift Kaiju cut him open. Akiba was over his initial frenzy of rage, terror and red thirst – an expression he’d heard often but only now understood. He thought he was sane, though psychiatry was not a field in which self-diagnosis was recommended.
He was feeling differently. Feeling more. His thinking was changed, accelerated, opened up to new possibilities. He had fresh senses. He might be deaf and blind, but he felt more than he had ever heard or seen.
He didn’t need to live in an air environment. Well-fed, he could survive underwater. He could control his internal pressure to resist the crushing weight of the depths. Heat and cold were of interest, but did not cause discomfort. His rewired nerves translated sensations painful to his former self into an exciting range of stimuli. He didn’t yet have a vocabulary to describe his range of feeling, or a mouth to speak the words.
The smooth, featureless skin that grew over his ravaged face was a new sense organ. A giant mask-shaped tongue. Everything – breeze, night-sounds, moving bodies – registered as salt or sugar. He had complex functional synaesthesia, experiencing and interpreting the world outside via new neural pathways. The vampire blood he had injected fed his changing brain. The warm blood he had sucked was an accelerant. The blood mix made him high, he thought idly.
As a med student, he’d tried a lot of drugs. Doctors always had the best pills. Tokiko’s staff hit him up for samples to get them through long shifts at the hotel.
This was better than any pharmacy spree.
He should write a paper.
The night sky burned tangerine and shadows were alive. He had as clear a sense of what happened out of conventional eyeshot as in plain view. There was no hiding from him. He was aware of people all over Daikaiju Plaza and could tell vampire from warm, human from animal. All living things – even insects and birds – were notes in a symphony. He ‘saw’ beyond the spectrum. The pulses and heartbeats and broadcast emotions were an intricate tapestry of harmonic threads. He was significantly more aware of everything. If a leaf fell, he’d know its childhood nickname.
A great roaring soul loomed over him then broke into a million ectoplasm moths and dissipated. It was the ghost of the Armourdillo, spirit of the machine, departing to a plane where meat was under metal, where motors drove people, where naked humans chest-bumped and fought to a chorus of car horns in a demolition arena slick with lovely, lovely blood.
How had he made it so far with such limited senses?
Without eyes, without a mouth, he was reborn.
Nearby, there had been an explosion. A small building demolished. Gunfire, burned flesh, and the heady, seductive tang of spilled blood.
He had to focus – not be distracted by novelties.
A small battle was in progress. The Plaza was clearing out. Fear spread through the Bund, faster than any infection.
No one new had fallen from the Daikaiju Building.
Drift Kaiju was dead. One moment he was a living thing of pulses and tastes and moving parts. Then, he was a cooling shape. The spirit that spilled from him was dew, much less magnificent than the ghost of the ’dillo. Nothing was left of DK but motile germs in his body – passengers on a sunken submarine, life-support shut off and death certain. They’d bloom wonderfully as the corpse perished but go extinct when it was dirt.
His first kill.
Akiba the healer was a killer now. With a taste for blood. A new need. An addict of murder.
No time to contemplate that. Too much else was new.
A living, quick person came close to him – angled on straight, looking at where his face had been.
‘Doc,’ said an unfamiliar voice. ‘Mate, is that you?’
No, not unfamiliar – a voice he knew, heard a different way. Sound waves vibrating against the smooth no-face. It was as much eardrum as tongue.
Derek radiated sympathy and puzzlement.
‘How are you even alive?’
Akiba wanted to tell Derek he was fine but words stuck in his throat. His shoulders shook with silent laughter. Of course he couldn’t speak. His vocal cords were shapeshifting. His body was repurposing industriously. A model of instantaneous, reactive/protective evolution. New organs, new functions.
He could tell so much more, but communicate nothing.
‘Fuck, that’s gross,’ thought Derek.
Ah. Noppera-bō had telepathy. The literature didn’t mention it. Maybe faceless ones never let faced ones know of their hidden advantage.
‘Poor old Akiba. Bloke’s got a girlfriend. She’s gonna have a shock.’
Akiba wanted Derek to stop thinking so loud.
Which he did.
‘Weird,’ said Derek. ‘What was that?’
He tried to put a more complicated thought into Derek’s head. Warn him about the danger. Akiba didn’t yet have the mental tools to use all his capabilities. He was too busy trying to stay alive to experiment. He should make it a priority to get a notepad and a pencil – both on strings to go around his neck.
‘Are you still in there, Doc?’ asked Derek. ‘Behind the no-face?’
Akiba resorted to crude sign language and gave a thumbs-up.
‘Good on ya. I don’t know what’
s up, but the mission’s proper futzed. I reckon some scunner’s sold us out.’
Akiba wanted to tell Derek about Drift Kaiju.
The kid had tried to kill him. Come to think of it, he’d succeeded.
He saw through Derek – his heartbeat, his temperature, the panic he was quashing.
All his life – when he was alive – Akiba had been a poor judge of character. How else to explain Tokiko? Now, he was a human lie detector. He knew a good, true soul when it hovered in front of him.
And he knew the other kinds.
He and Derek were on their own. Golgotha was corrupt. Gokemidoro too. The rest of the crew weren’t acting in anyone’s interests but their own. EarthGuard was compromised. Maybe the Kuran faction was okay, but they were losing the power game.
Akiba sensed two purposeful souls, converging.
Hunter and Killer.
Drift Kaiju was an amateur assassin. These were the pros.
They moved across the Plaza, darting from what they believed was one piece of cover to another. He ‘saw’ them better when they were out of his theoretical sight line – thinking themselves safe, they showed their real selves. The scrawny Killer had a bulkier soul stuck to him. A smoky, death-hungry demon’s hands clasped the youth’s neck like a strangling rope. Hunter was a crash dummy of hatred with too many guns and knives. Less to him than a paper target.
Akiba knew the positions they were trying to take up.
He and Derek would be in crossfire.
He made gunshapes with his hands and waved as if playing bandits, then nodded to the advancing EarthGuard rogues.
‘Timmy’s down the well, Lassie?’ said Derek, catching on.
RICHARD JEPERSON
The ‘D’ word didn’t impress the Princess.
If the apparition was indeed her.
Was she live or was she Memorex? Richard couldn’t tell whether this Christina was her shifted shape or a transmitted/recorded hologram. She was a visual/aural presence but nothing else. In a room where boiling primary emotions gave him a headache, she didn’t even radiate sociopath static. Several chilling individuals were within his empathetic reach, as many among the hostages as the gunmen. His sanity shuddered if he nudged their auras. Sitting close to the twelve-foot-tall blow-up Princess was more like being too close to a television. What was disturbing about her was seeing but not sensing.
By all accounts, the woman wasn’t all there in the first place. Transforming into a spectral sparkle removed her even further from obligations of the flesh.
What did the rest of humanity look like to her?
Everyone else in the ballroom – vampire and warm – must seem as ridiculous as the umbrella goblin.
What could she want? How could she be reasoned with?
Radu cel Frumos stood like a messenger boy, envelope burning his hand.
‘Christina’ didn’t turn her odd eyes to him. She watched everything, like the Wire. No specific detail was worth her attention. Not even a truly dead guest or two.
Radu waved his arms, flapping his silly, cardboardy sleeves.
He had a small army and many guns. He’d personally wasted a valuable human resource – golden lads were not cheap! – and casually had Cottonmouth commit a murder that would send global stock markets into a tailspin.
Then he dropped the biggest name in the night-world.
He deserved to be acknowledged!
It would be just like a Son of the Dragon to slaughter four hundred or so because he didn’t like to be ignored.
‘You are to stop,’ said the Bey. ‘By order of Count Dracula, King of the Cats, sovereign of the undead, your liege and monarch.’
‘You’ve just said “The boss of you” five different ways,’ Richard put in.
Radu, already irritated with the Princess, was enraged.
He kicked the dead dot.com billionaire in the head.
‘How funny do you think he thinks you are?’ the vampire snapped.
‘Not terribly,’ Richard admitted.
‘I shouldn’t think so,’ said Radu, point made. ‘Now, keep quiet, Mr ageing-rapidly-towards-dilapidation-and-death Jeperson. The giants are talking. You’re little people.’
‘Am I little people too?’ said Syrie.
‘Yes, sugarlump. Teeny Teena to his Tommy Thumb. You only have money. This is about position. Kings and queens and rolling heads, capisce?’
Through a connection to the Shah, Syrie Van Epp could demand to be addressed as Hazrat-i-’Aliya Aqdas Shahzadi Syrie Khanum – Her Royal Highness Princess Syrie. Her tasteful business cards weren’t cluttered with that mouthful. She had three doctorates – actually studied for, rather than honoraries snaffled in return for a hand-out – and didn’t use them on her letterhead. Founding and financing Wings Over the World put her in the frame for a Nobel Peace Prize. She made it known through back channels that she wouldn’t accept. She thought titles were for inadequates with something to prove. Radu was bragging to the wrong vampire.
None of this got Christina’s attention.
Everyone in the room looked at the Princess. They couldn’t help it. Richard’s face numbed and prickled. Being in the presence was likely to give them sunburn. Some vampires might catch fire and go up like roman candles. Christina Light was a pagan crystal idol, radiant with the spirit of the volcano goddess. Or a camp art installation, Madonna in stained glass, an Andy Warhol screen print of the Lady in the Lake, Knife-Faced Gorgiositude to the Max.
What did Dracula want her to stop doing?
Christina was lucky to be born with a last name. Her father was almost certainly not the American Mr Light who married her Italian mother. She came by her title and a first fortune by marrying the short-lived, weak-blooded Prince Casamassima. Her bloodline came from her father-in-darkness, Count Oblensky – soon thereafter nowhere to be seen. She had practised self-improvement for over a hundred years. She might have improved herself to such a degree that lesser mortals – ie: everyone – would never catch up.
‘We know of your “ascension”,’ said Radu. ‘At the stroke of midnight – how dramatic! – you intend to abandon what’s left of your body and seed yourself throughout the World Wide Web. With this coup, you believe you will take the helm and steer the destiny of the planet.’
The Bey was talking about something he didn’t understand – something he’d been told.
Richard was an old bloke who couldn’t set up a laser printer without crashing every computer in the Club, but he’d been briefed by earnest experts. He tried to get his head round transhumanism, the singularity, AI and digi-geddon. The Ascension wasn’t a new idea to him. Arthur C. Clarke had floated the possibility that Christina might try something like this. Those in the know bought tinfoil sou’westers. The Princess Casamassima scared them more than the Millennium Bug, Black Helicopters and Jun Zero put together.
But, seriously…?
Richard looked at Christina’s hovering mask.
When, in 1969, your basic garden-variety diabolical mastermind tried to take over the world with a super-computer, all it took to thwart their wicked plan was a strategic power cut and a karate chop. Thirty years on, there was no plug to pull, no master programmer to nobble. The system was too vast, too intricate, too diffuse, to shut down. It was the World Wide Web. There’d always be a back-up in an anonymous shed on an industrial estate in Ohio or the Ukraine.
The major factor wasn’t even the power or the will to do the thing, but the prosaic drudge of waiting decades for governments, businesses and workmen to lay the cables, hook up the servers, and install the terminals. Think of the delays, the financing arguments, the tea breaks. Now, in injury time for the twentieth century, an electronic brain – a node of a greater e-brain – was installed in every home, workplace, pocket. Your bank, your job, your corner shop, your best friend and that odorous fellow who sold French postcards – all were online. The world was dependent on the whirring, flashing connective tissue the Princess aspired to possess. No wonder crackpots
signed up with Aum Draht.
Given a choice between the web going dark and accepting a new Regina Mundi, Richard wasn’t sure the vote would go against the Princess. That was why the Diogenes Club, all the way back to that forward-thinking autocrat Mycroft Holmes, had a policy of doing what the world needed, not what it wanted.
Once, Christina’s shapeshift-to-a-glowworm stunt was simply a novelty on a level with Kasa-obake contorting into an umbrella. Now her party piece had applications. Her unique vampire physiology afforded her opportunities if she was ambitious, insane or visionary enough to seize them. Lesser immortals must seethe with envy.
Everyone knew the Princess could turn to light. But what was light? Illumination. Information. Electricity. Lightning.
Extreme transhumanists sought to upload consciousness to servers, mapping brain patterns digitally, leaving behind empty shells. Farewell to the flesh and an eternity of quiet contemplation in the cyber-aether, so long as a direct debit paid the phone bills. Christina was three-quarters of the way there already. She could turn to coherent light the way other vampires could do bats, wolves or mists. Her consciousness, removed from its physical cage, remained intact.
As Radu said, she could seed herself through the web.
Aum Draht adepts saw reality as a computer simulation, controlled by a higher being.
Christina Light could be their Wire.
And Dracula – John Alucard – wanted her to hold back.
So did Aum Draht, of course. No cult likes a deity to contradict the high priests. Just ask Caiaphas.
For all his Beverly Hills castles, Dracula was a mediaeval conqueror. His idea of power was simple, brutal and had worked for five hundred years. He counted victories in gold, land, songs sung about him, and – always, always, always – blood. Christina Light was liberated from that mind-trap. Pretty advanced for a Victorian new-born. She must have been exhausting.
He remembered what Geneviève told him. ‘Don’t look for anyone behind the curtain. Christina has no puppet master. Because she’s a pretty face, men think she must be just a figurehead, but she really isn’t. She’s herself alone. You have to deal with that, or do what I did – run away, very far away, and hope she has too much else to be getting on with ever to think of you.’