Creche - Part 1

It was warm there, in the chamber where the Circle lay, slightly warmer than Bal found comfortable. It was dark, too, but the monitor displays beside each of the thirty-three armatures that held the bodies of his circle-mates provided enough light that he had no trouble navigating between them.

He stepped up beside the last of them, turning the display to face him. “Chair Thirty-Three," he said aloud. "Name is Eve Oh-Three-Seven-Whack-G-Two-Six-M-L. Heart rate is normal, BP is also normal.” He released the screen, which swiveled back around to cast its dull light over the woman’s face, and leaned over the chair, pulling lightly at each of the opaque white hoses going into her body, and at each of the light bands around the joints of her arms and legs. “Top, side, and bottom tubes are attached firmly. Restraints are also attached.” He ran his hands and eyes down from her head all the way to her calves, checking that each of the woman’s linkups were secure. Three behind each ear, he thought to himself as he moved, two in the back of the neck, one at the top of each shoulder, one at each hip, one at the base of the spine, a pair on each leg, just above the ankle. “All linkup cables are secure, free of corrosion, and transmitting.”

He turned away from the armature, looking over the rows of bodies before turning toward the large terminal in the center of the room. “That’s everyone, Aitchqueue. Twenty-two maintainers and eleven Honored.”

There was a pause, and then a voice from the terminal said, “First Report has been received and recorded. Thank you, Bal.”

“My pleasure.”

“And your Promise?”

Bal nodded. “Of course,” he said, approaching the terminal and placing his hands on the smooth plastic surfaces on each side of the terminal screen, where the hands of countless others had worn the satin surfaces to a nearly reflective shine. The screen went momentarily blank, and then the words ‘Balthazar 037/SLTX5: Recording Promise Now’ appeared.

Bal took a deep breath, and then spoke. “My name is Balthazar Oh-Three-Seven-Whack-S-L-T-X-Five. I am, as of now, alive. I hereby promise that I will not die within the next twelve hours.”

There was silence for a moment before the voice from the terminal spoke again. “…OK. Artemidorus confirms your status and accepts the Promise. Talk to you in a halfday, Bal.”

“Thanks, Aitch.”

As he closed the transmission and the terminal screen faded to a dull glow, Bal sighed. He wished, not for the first time, that the Aitchqueue could have stayed on the line a bit longer, that he could have just talked for a bit. It was forbidden, of course; Section 38 of the Maintainer’s Handbook specifically stated that “the Central Maintainers’ Terminal is only to be used as needed to facilitate the maintainer in his/her task, or in the case of an emergency; all other functions should be handled at the Non-Essential Access Terminal (NAT).” In any case, the Aitchqueue probably didn’t have the time for idle chat—there where thousands of Circles, and only a handful of them were made up of Aitchqueues, the few who were chosen to gather the reports from the maintainers and deliver them directly to Artemidorus.

He left the Circle chamber, tapping the panel that closed the large circular door as he came back into his living area. Bal imagined that the high-ceilinged space had been beautiful when it was built; the luminescent white panels that made up the walls, floor, and ceiling would have given the place a light, airy feel, even though it was almost a mile under the surface. In the centuries since, however, as one maintainer or another had needed access to one of the many of Artemidorus’ subsystems, the panels had been pulled away and discarded until only a little over half of the floor and less than that of the walls and ceiling were left, except for the thin steel frame that had held the tiles. Those that remained did little to hide the machines that surrounded the space, or their coatings of dust and grease.

Bal picked his way over to the food-prep alcove, avoiding the holes in the floor with large steps and, in one place where several tiles had been removed, a small hop. The cooled pantry held the usual soy-based meat products, cereal powders, and flavoring and nutritional supplements, and also a small amount of real bacon. Bal’s hand paused over the red-and-white hunk of meat for a moment, then moved on; the real stuff was for special occasions. Technically, he was allowed any amount of whatever Artemidorus could produce, as was any maintainer when he was performing the Task. In practice, though, he’d been taught not to be wasteful, and when he had to place a requisition statement with Artemidorus through the NAT, and Artemidorus had to allocate the vat, and grow the meat, and cure it… better to save it for when he really needed it, and stick to the soy and grain products, which were themselves byproducts and leftovers of the production of the nutritional fluid that kept the rest of the Circle from starving in their sleep. Some beef-flavored soy, heated with one of the liquid flavor suppliments that suited the flavor of meat, and a couple of the small cakes he’d made a few days ago made an acceptable soy-meat sandwich. He’d eaten the same thing for every meal for two days now, though, and it was beginning to get boring. Then again, that was true of everything outside the Dream. At least the coffee he could afford to splurge on; he’d just received his new shipment on the Transit a few days ago, and it’d be at least a week before he even made a noticeable dent in his supply.

He set his food down on the small table across from the alcove and then turned to the NAT for a moment, setting it to tap into the Dream on an audio feed and seek out something with a melody. A message appeared on the screen: ‘A Reminder: For your protection, Artemidorus has limited access to the Dream to an hour a day during your Task. Thank you.’ It lingered for a moment, then the speakers roared to life, flitting through the sounds of a battle, a pair of lovers, and an argument before settling on something resembling strings and piano.

Bal chewed and listened. The dangers of excessive access to the Dream while accomplishing the Task had been explained to him when he was a child, by one of the teachers in the creche. A maintainer who spent too much time immersing himself in the Dream while outside it risked getting too involved and forgetting his Task, or else missing it too much and forgetting his Promise. On the other hand, given that the archive set aside for the maintainers was relatively small, and every piece of entertainment media in it - every piece of music, text, and video, and every interactive simulation - was at least two hundred years old, Artemidorus had decided to allow a certain amount of access, if 'decided' was the right word to describe any conclusion Artemidorus came to.

When he had finished his food and returned his cooking implements to the sanitizing cupboard, Bal thought about his day. First, the marking of the calendar wall and the reading of the Items, and then... this was always the problem. The Task of the Maintainer only required he be in the Circle chamber for First and Second Report, and so he had to find ways to occupy himself for the eleven hours between the two. Once, the Task had also required the performing of various diagnostic checks, and the Maintainer's Handbook made mention of that, but Artemidorus had made the diagnostics obsolete years before Bal was even born; you only had to do maintenance now if something broke down, and almost nothing ever did. What would he do today? He could experiment with his foodstuffs, try to come up with something new. Or perhaps another day exploring, though he'd seen just about everything he could reach in time to be back for Second Report, and if you weren't there for Second Report they woke an Enforcer to see if you'd broken your Promise.

Bal's eyes snapped back into focus. First, the calendar wall and the Items. Then, he'd see.

No one in the Circle knew who had started the calendar wall. Well, at least Raph, the one who woke Bal, didn't know, and neither did Kezia, the one Bal woke, and they were the only two members of the Circle he'd ever met while he was awake. It wasn't mentioned in the Maintainer's Handbook, either, although there were journal entries stored in the archive in the NAT that talked about it, and maintainers hadn't been encouraged to keep journals in over a hundred years. On the side of the room opposite the food prep alcove, a few feet from the foot of Bal's bed, one of the few remaining sections of wall panel had been divided by deep gouges in the plastic into seven columns and eleven rows; seventy-seven days, the length of the Task. Below the panel, a low table held a few small items: a wide pen with a felt tip, a small glowing sphere in a support cradle, and the old, battered Maintainer's Handbook, lying open.

Bal picked up the pen from the table, marked a square, counted the empty ones. Twenty-six days to go. He nodded, set the pen back down, and flipped through the book until he found the Items. He didn't really need the book for this—they'd said the items every morning in the creche, until every child remembered them by heart—but it seemed better to have the words there in front of him, more correct.

Bal lifted the sphere from the cradle and held it over the Handbook so that it illuminated the words on the page, and read aloud.

"Item One: The Dream is Your Right."

Actually, as far as Bal could remember, the Handbook didn't really say anything specific about whether the Items were to be read aloud, but this was something Bal had done every single day of his waking life.

"Item Two: The Task is Your Responsibility."

Artemidorus had so far been silent on the topic, not that Bal had ever asked it. Bal thought that Artemidorus probably approved of those who did, even though it didn't force the issue on those who didn't.

"Item Three: Artemidorus knows the reasons for its decisions, and it is you; Therefore, trust yourself."

Bal suspected that Raph didn't read the Items, at least not often. It always seemed to Bal that when Raph woke him, there was always a thin coating of dust on the Handbook. Raph did still mark the days on the calendar wall, though, and that was something.

"Item Four: Your Task is Your Own; There is No Other For You."

Ah, well, twenty-six days left. Twenty-six days, and then he'd wake Kezia for the Transfer, when he'd tell her about any changes since the last cycle rotation, and make sure she was ready for her Task.

"Item Five: Those Who Shirk Their Responsibility Also Give Up Their Right."

Twenty-six days, and then Kezia and he would wipe the calendar wall clean together, and then Kezia would put him back to sleep. Not the shallow kind he got between days, either, but the real sleep, the one where he would Dream again. As his mind became a part of Artemidorus once more, he'd re-enter the Dream, the same Dream that everyone Dreamed, the Dream where they were all gods, where they could have and do anything they ever wanted and where everyone was happy. Twenty-six days, and then he'd be filled with bliss again, instead of this boredom. Twenty-six days.

No. It was easier to think of it as just one more day. Every day was just one more day, and every day you did the Task and you said the Items and you kept your Promise and trusted Artemidorus when it said that this was the best way. Maybe it wasn’t perfect, but it was a small price to pay for the Dream, and in any case, to do otherwise was... even the thought was sickening. Either it made you dead, and a Promise-breaker as well, or worse than dead, a Shirker, forbidden to ever Dream again, and once you were a Shirker, you almost always became a Promise-breaker, too.

Still, it was never easy. Twenty-six days was still a long time, even if each was 'just one more.' Bal stood and turned from the small table. Time to find something to do.

Teacher

It was in Rome that he finally caught up to me. He had been chasing for me for months, and I am forced to admit that his skill was not insiginificant; he was clearly a hunter of no small regard, though whether he had always been a hunter of my kind or of different game it is still impossible for me to say. In any case, it was very clever, the way he took off the pressure when I fled from Dresden to Rome, allowing me to believe I had lost him, and then struck the moment I let down my guard. The details are not important; it is enough to say that he clearly knew of our kind, and he used his every advantage to back me into an inescapable situation and then, interestingly, to capture rather than kill me.

It was the month of September, in the year ninteen hundred and ninty-four. I was one hundred and eighty-seven years old.

I found myself bound to a chair, in a dark chill room that felt like a basement, or perhaps a decomissioned meat locker. Even my sensitive eyes found it impossible to see to the walls, so it was either a very large room or one totally sealed of light, for even my kind cannot see in total darkness.

Even if I could not see, I was not totally insensate. There was someone with me in the darkness, a mortal human, standing about ten feet in front of me. The speed of his heart’s beating spoke of terror or excitement, or in this modern age perhaps only hypertension, as anticlimactic as that is. After a few minutes he spoke. “What are you?”

I raised my eyebrows, even though I knew the gesture would be lost. “I believe you know full well what I am sir, else you would not have me here.”

The voice spoke again. “I wanna hear you say it.”

I sighed. “If I must. I am a vampire, a child of the night, a lurker in darkness, et cetera, et cetera.”

A light flared in the darkness, and I smelled the sulfurous odor of a match being struck. The man took the burning matchstick and put it to the mantle of the propane lantern he was holding. The mantle began to glow brightly, and the man shook out the match and tossed it lightly to the floor beside him. “I wouldn’t joke about things just now, if I were you,” he said. “After all, you’re not the one with the power here. I am.”

I looked around the room. It was indeed a meat locker, or something similar, a windowless metal box. Crucifixes of various sizes and descriptions hung from the walls. “I see,” I said. “And I suppose that the rope you’ve tied me to this chair with-“

“Holy water soaked.” He said, grinning. You’re not going anywhere.”

“Indeed,” I said, looking up from my restraints to the man. He was short, slim but wiry. What little hair there was on his head was dark brown, and circled from temple to temple around the back, leaving the top totally untouched. “Why, then,” I asked, “have you brought me here?”

The man began to pace back and forth. “I’ve been a hunter for twenty-five years. I’ve killed just about any animal you can name, from squirrels to elephants. In all that time,” he said, turning to me, “No matter what I killed, no matter what I used to kill it, I never really felt like a predator, you know? Just a monkey using a tool.”

He pulled a knife from a sheath at his belt and pointed it at me. “But you vamps, you’re hunters all the way through, ain’cha?” It was a hunting knife, the kind with a hook on the back side of the blade for disemboweling caught prey. “Evil sons of bitches, sure, but you’re made to hunt.”

“And so you want to be one of us,” I said.

“I’m gonna do a better job of it than you do, that’s for damn sure. Look at you, for example. All the strength and speed you got, you’d think you’re a natural killer, but I’ve seen your ‘flocks’ in London and Paris. Gangs of people you keep around because they want you to feed on ‘em. A wolf playing sheepdog. I’ll be a better monster than you ever were.” He spat.

“And if I refuse?”

He gestured to the walls. “Not exactly as if you can escape, is it? But, if you won’t…” The man walked the few feet to the steel door of the room, pulled the lever that locked it, and pushed. Sunlight poured in the doorway, landing a few feet from me. My eyes stung.

“Enough!” I shouted. “I’ll do as you ask, just close the damn door!”

The hunter smiled, and sealed the hatch.

I will not recount the exact events of the change. Needless to say, it takes more than a bite to make one of us, or the world would be overrun with our kind. I will say that it is an unpleasant process, both for the sire and the fledgling. It took little more than an hour for the change to happen. When it was done, the man looked up at me from the floor, the pupils of his eyes dialated in the the extreme.

I looked down at him from the chair. “Do you feel it? The hunger, the power?” He nodded. “Good,” I said, and then I laughed. “Now that you’re one of us, I feel I should repair some of your erroneous notions about our kind.”

“One,” I said, tearing away the ropes binding me to the chair and standing, “the Catholics have no power over me, nor does any other faith. Ours is a physiological affliction, not a spiritual one.”

I stepped over to him, grasping him by the throat and lifting him bodily to his feet. “Two: our strength and speed is fueled by the blood we drink. Thus, it should be noted that you, who have not yet fed, are weak right now, weaker than you were as a man.” I held him there in the air, dangling from his neck, his legs kicking feebly. “Oh, stop trying to breathe,” I said, “it’s not as if it’s anything other than habit.”

Turning, I slammed him against the wall next to the door and held him there. “Three: while it is painful and damaging to all of us, sunlight is only immediately fatal to the newly-sired.” I pulled the handle, and the door swung out, the light pouring in again. The skin on the side of the man’s face began to crackle and peel.

I leaned in close, placing my mouth just a hair’s breadth away from his ear. “You made the mistake, my friend, of mistaking caution and restraint for weakness. Just because one can do something does not permit him the right to do so.” I pulled him away from the wall, put him between myself and the door, and then walked forward.

“A vampire I may be,” I said to him, as his neck began to turn to ash in my hand, “but I have never been a monster.”

Rubber Bats

He’d tried. He’d tried so hard, schemed for so long, done everything he could think of, and still, after all this time, all of his planning, he’d failed again. It seemed that, no matter how patient, how careful, he just couldn’t die.

He hadn’t always longed for death, of course. In the beginning, when the change had first come over him, he’d relished the feeling of power, of control. He almost didn’t believe he’d been one of them, one of the damned cattle that seemed to fawn over him, to obey his every whim, to give themselves freely to his embrace whenever he asked. However, that had been almost too many years ago to remember, and now he was just tired, and soul-crushingly bored, and so he’d decided that it was time to die. The trouble was, he had no idea how to do it. Vlad paced across the top of the ruined tower, pausing at the edge of the parapet and lamenting that he couldn’t just throw himself into the gorge below. It wouldn’t have worked, of course. Nothing ever did. When he’d first made the decision, he’d tried everything he could think of; he’d drunk holy water, eaten garlic by the handful, stood and greeted the morning sun. All had hurt like hell, but here he still was. He’d even tried to impale himself, but even with his great strength, he just didn’t have the right angle to punch the wooden stake through his ribs and into his heart. Of course, none of his servants would help; they all loved “the master” far too much to ever see him come to harm, and on the single occasion where he’d gotten that Renfield to swing the hammer, he’d barely tapped the end of the stake. Useless.

He’d finally decided that the only way it was going to happen was if he got a human to do it for him, to take his death from them, just as he’d taken his life from them for all of these years. He had thought, at the time, that it would be exceedingly easy; the local legends spoke volumes about his kind. These people knew about vampires! With high spirits, he’d set himself up in the castle and started blatantly feeding on the population of the nearby town, leaving bodies in gutters with their necks cleanly pierced. He’d imagined it would only be a matter of weeks before the peasants rose up against their monstrous Count and put an end to him. Instead, they’d told their children to stay away from the castle and gone on about their lives. He turned his head toward the town and offered them a silent curse.

He decided he’d have to be more subtle about it. He’d gone to England and set himself up under an assumed name as an aloof but charming figure, looking for just the right man to carry out the job. He thought he’d found him, too, and so he’d dragged this Aubrey halfway across Europe over a period of months, ruining men and ravishing women to show the youth exactly what kind of man he was, and finally spying on the boy and killing a mussle-woman he seemed to be falling for. Finally, he’d gotten himself “killed” in front of the young man and then shown up a month later back in England at an event at which he knew the other would be. For a moment, Vlad had hoped that his work had paid off, but then he’d gotten impatient at waiting for the boy to strike, and so he’d applied too much pressure, pushed too hard by threatening to run off with Aubrey’s sister. Instead of striking, the boy had cracked, succumbed to the mental strain, and there was nothing for it but to drain the girl dry and return to Moldavia.

He’d sulked for a long time, then, just as he was doing now, but he hadn’t lost his resolve. He just needed to play a longer game. The new boy, Harker, had been something of a surprise; he’d expected an older solicitor, one of those crusty old bastards that wouldn’t stand for any sort of funny business. Still, he’d attempted to make the best of it. It was painfully slow going.He’d decked the castle in all the ghastly materials he could find, down to making sure that there were rats in every corner and spiders in every web. He’d stared longingly at the boy’s throat all through their meals together, only came out at night, locked the boy in so he felt confined and claustrophobic. He’d stood right behind Harker as he was shaving and breathed as heavily as he thought he could get away with, so that the man couldn’t help but notice his lack of reflection, and then, rather convincingly he thought, he’d flung the mirror away as though he hated the thing. He’d even sicced his wives, remnants of his younger days, on the youth, to make him fear not only for his life but for his very soul, and then he’d let the man escape and pursued him back to England.

Vlad’s jaw clinched, and he stamped his foot on the stone roof. It had all been going so well! Harker had hired a damned vampire hunter, for Christ’s sake! The man knew how to kill him! He’d proved that when he put down the other one he’d created, that Lucy Something-or-another. Staked her and cut off her head! Thorough and precise! And yet, after everything, after leading a wide trail back here to his castle, after paying the gypsies to kill one of them just so they’d be sure to be mad enough, even after all that… what had they done? Slashed his throat and stabbed him with a knife, as if such pitiful wounds would even keep him down for long. Damn damn damn!

The Count’s fist struck the stone of the parapet. For a moment he seemed frozen, and then he breathed in deeply, more from habit than anything else even after all these years. Yet another failure. He let out the breath in a long sigh, then composed himself and straightened the collar of his cape. There would be other opportunities, other places and times. He was nothing if not patient. He gripped the edge of the cape, twirled it up in front of his face, and mustered his best soul-piercing gaze. Some day, he’d figure it out.