Reality Hack (6 page)

‘What option?’ Kellog just looked at her, which obviously meant she was supposed to work it out for herself. She frowned. The woman on the phone at Battersea had said something… She might find the owner if the cat had been… ‘A chip! The cat might have been chipped.’

Kellog gave her a nod. ‘Any vet should be willing to scan for it if you take the cat in. If there is a chip, they should be able to get you the owner’s address. We’ll check the Carew woman after lunch. Hanson would skin you alive if she caught you eating in the computer room.’

Somehow Nisa did not think he was being figurative. ‘What’s on the menu after that? More procedures?’

‘Something more esoteric. You’ll be learning about Bugs. And when your lunch is firmly settled, we’ll be doing judo.’

‘You’re going to teach me to fight?!’

‘I’m going to teach you how to avoid getting killed,’ Kellog replied flatly.

~~~

Jennifer Anne Carew had no criminal record, but she was in the PND, specifically, the record of her death was in there since she had lived alone, died in her home, and it had been three days before the body was discovered. There had been a routine investigation, but the autopsy had concluded the death was natural causes. She had been eighty-three and her heart had given out.

‘So, she’s dead,’ Kellog said. ‘What now?’

‘Well… It could still be her cat, but if it is, she’s not going to tell me. I’ll… go over there and talk to her neighbours. Maybe they’ll recognise the description.’

Kellog gave a nod. ‘I’d suggest getting the ID chip checked as well.’ As far as Nisa could tell, that was about as high as praise got from the man. ‘Right, back to the conference room. It’s time to introduce you to esoteric zoology.’

The TV screen was there for presentations, not watching the football at weekends. Kellog even had a little remote control gizmo which seemed to drive a computer somewhere, and that had been set up with a slide presentation on the basic types of entities XC had to deal with. The first slide showed an upside-down tree structure with ‘Bugs’ written above it, branching down to five types: Daath Beings/Glitches, Fairies, Skinchangers, Spirits, and Vampires. Spirits was further divided into Demons, Elementals, Ghosts, and Other.

‘Daath Beings?’ Nisa asked.

‘All in good time,’ Kellog replied.

‘Okay… Fairies? Seriously?’

Kellog clicked a button and the slide changed to one headed ‘Fairies.’ ‘Actually, most of them dislike the term. Don’t use it to their faces.’

There were, apparently, a number of subdivisions. Trooping fairies liked company, but others were solitary. There were Seelie and Unseelie, which was not the same as good and evil, but the Unseelie were generally more malign.

‘The ones we see these days are almost universally small,’ Kellog told her. ‘They still get the odd Redcap in the Scottish border regions, but you won’t normally see anything bigger than a cat.’

‘Are there any in London?’ Nisa asked.

‘We get fairies around the parks. What you’d think of as fairies: small, winged. If you get acorns thrown at you from a tree, it probably isn’t squirrels.’

The next slide skipped on to Skinchangers which were generally
not
, as Nisa had expected, werewolves. Werewolves and other such legends tended to be the result of magicians using charmed animal pelts to change shape. The practice went back so far no one knew when it had started. It was one of the primary indications that, while magic was not normal to The System, it was also not entirely unplanned. People had to have been doing ritualised magic when The System began, likely a holdover from previous iterations where it had featured more strongly.

Skinchangers were entities able to shift their forms without spells. There was evidence to suggest they had also been around since the beginning, though some were newer.

‘The most dangerous of them, the Skin
walkers
, were once magicians,’ Kellog informed her. ‘The type name is a generalisation of that name. Somehow they internalised both the magic of the pelts they used and the spirit of the hunt they were meant to reinforce with their rituals. The result is an undead monster, able to steal the skin of anything and use it to change into that form. That includes replacing real people. They’re sadistic and they enjoy killing. Modern technology has just made them more dangerous too.’

‘Uh, how?’

‘Refrigeration. The skin they wear won’t rot, but they couldn’t easily store extras until we invented freezers. Now the damn things can swap forms whenever they want.’

Spirits was a long subject. There were the defined ones: ghosts, elementals, and demons. Ghosts were the spirits of dead people, obviously. The theory was that a program was composed of two primary components, one directing the other. When the subsystem representing the body shut down, the mental, directing, component could remain active if there was a bug in its code.

‘Personally I think that’s not quite right,’ Kellog said. ‘I think the continued existence is intended, but they aren’t supposed to stay within this part of The System.’

‘So where are they supposed to go?’

‘Some form of limbo or purgatory. We know the essential components get recycled. Reincarnated, if you like. That doesn’t happen immediately so there’s a storage facility.’

‘You
know
this?’ Nisa had never really believed in anything beyond death. All that ‘past life experience’ stuff was hogwash and she certainly did not believe in Heaven.

‘Every spirit carries pointers to previous incarnations. That’s why past life regression actually works sometimes. Occasionally a spirit can access those memories without help, but that’s a bug. There are, maybe, a hundred, two hundred thousand basic personalities which get recycled and replicated to make up the whole population. Most of your personality comes from experience based on that basic set of characteristics. Your spirit is five thousand years old, but
you
are a unique instance of it.’

‘Oh,’ Nisa said.

Kellog went back to the screen to explain that elementals were embodiments of not just the four, or five, elements everyone knew about, but also of other characteristics like hunger, lust, or anger. The emotional elementals tended to get called eidolons, but they were all elemental spirits.

And then there were demons, which were able to materialise more easily than other spirits. Yes, they could be summoned and no, it was not a good idea. Get yourself in hock to a demon for power or wealth, or anything else, and it could pull your soul back to its home when you died. There was evidence that some Bugs were the result of spirits tortured by demons for a couple of centuries before getting returned to the pool.

There were a few other spirit forms which did not fit any of the conventional types. Generally they went in for possessing the living or animating corpses, and most of them were malign. It was general policy to exorcise and destroy where they were found.

Nisa had been expecting Kellog to go on to vampires, but the next slide was headed ‘Daath.’ She frowned at the word and the picture under it, which looked like something out of either an HP Lovecraft novel or a Japanese hentai movie.

‘Wizards call it “Daath,”’ he said, ‘but that’s just a name for things which aren’t meant to exist.’

‘I thought that was what Bugs were.’

‘Yes, but Bugs fit into The System, more or less, and these things don’t. These are entities that somehow manage to cross into the current iteration from previous ones. Exactly how that happens we don’t know. Daath entities can be just about anything from weird worm infestations to things with the power of gods. Glitches fall into the same category since they’re not meant to exist, but Glitches have no sentience.’

‘So Great Cthulhu really does wait in–’

‘Lovecraft made a lot of that up, but he heard stories from people who had witnessed a few things that were probably Daath entities. They aren’t common in this country. We get a lot more Glitches.’

Glitches, it seemed, could take just about any form, but the most common was electrical disturbances. Modern science had come up with ways to deal with those, unless they were exceptionally large. The second most common were temporal anomalies, but those just manifested as images from the past appearing in the present. They were weird and occasionally caused accidents, but they faded quickly and there was no transference of matter in either direction. Nisa asked and even magic could not achieve genuine time travel.

And then Kellog flicked over to the vampires slide, which showed a long list of different things vampires used to suck the life out of people. It started with blood, sure, but then there was ‘vital fluids,’ which was presumably not just blood, youth, breath, heat, fear, sex, bio-electric energy from the nerves, salt, sleep, ‘life force,’ and just about anything else. Each mechanism had its own vampire, which could be material, immaterial, or both.

‘If there are so many,’ Nisa asked, ‘how come we don’t see evidence of them?’

‘They’ve become very good at hiding their activities, or they always were. Lamias steal the breath from sleeping infants. They can’t affect anything older than about six months. The child appears to die in the crib and, now, we blame Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. If someone winds up in hospital because their neurotransmitters have been drained, or there’s almost no salt in their system, they’ve got some unknown medical condition. We’re exceptionally good at rationalising the unusual in this age of science. A couple of hundred years ago people would have been out burning the nearest old lady with a wart. Before that it was plague or evil spirits. Frankly, people have got worse at dealing with the supernatural as they’ve decided not to believe in it.’

‘You said the memory loss thing from the mind control was common,’ Nisa commented. ‘I guess a lot of them can swoop in, suck someone nearly to death, and leave, and the victim is clueless about what happened, like me.’

‘It is a common side effect, yes.’ There was just a little tension in his voice. It was barely there, but Nisa could hear it. He was anticipating a question and unsure how to answer it.

She asked it anyway. ‘So, what kind attacked me?’

Kellog just stared at her for several seconds until she began to feel distinctly uncomfortable. Then he said, ‘I was informed that telling you the exact nature of the vampire that attacked you would be… stressful.’

Nisa blinked at him and then scanned down the list. She had not been bitten and her food had not been salty after the attack, and she had had no trouble sleeping. There was fear or the neurological thing, but what was stressful about that? If she had been terrified, she could not remember it. She had not been cold and she was still the same age and…

Her eyes widened as it hit her. ‘Oh my God, I was raped.’

Kellog took a step toward her, hesitated. His fists clenched. ‘I–’ he began.

Nisa shook her head. ‘I don’t remember it. None of it. It didn’t happen.’ She wondered who she was trying to convince. Just the way he was acting suggested that her inference was correct. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Get on with the show.’

He looked like he was going to say something else, but he turned sharply and clicked through to the next slide: more detail on the blood-drinking variety of vamp. Nisa settled down to learn.

When he got to a slide labelled ‘Incubi and Succubi,’ he clicked straight through to the next one.

Tower Hamlets, June 24
^th
.

Nisa woke up, biting back a scream, and fumbled for the light switch beside her bed. Her eyes flicked around the room, terror in them, but there were no faceless figures. She was not strapped to a bench, spread and open. They were not going to…

She lay down and curled into a tight ball. Her stomach ached. There was still no memory of what had actually happened, but somehow that just made it worse. She was trying hard not to cry when she felt a hot tongue lick at her cheek and looked up into a pair of green eyes.

‘It’s okay,’ she said to the cat. ‘I was… attacked by… You wouldn’t understand any of it, but it’s bad and I don’t… I don’t quite know how to deal with it yet.’

Cat gave a consoling mewl, almost as if she
did
understand, and licked Nisa’s cheek again. Then she curled up against Nisa’s arm and stroking the animal between the ears seemed like it might help. Sleeping was going to be hard and Cat was warm and appeared to be genuinely concerned at her distress, and…

The purring started, softly at first, but growing in intensity. Cat was happy and, somehow, that seemed to just soak into Nisa through the throbbing purr. The ache in her stomach subsided. She felt warm, loved. Her mind drifted with the rising and falling tone, and it felt
good
. And after a minute of that, Nisa drifted back into dreamless sleep.

Westminster.

‘You look tired,’ Kellog commented when Nisa walked into the conference room.

‘Nightmare,’ Nisa told him. ‘I guess I went from the denial stage straight to depression. I woke up in the middle of the night from an even more twisted version of my usual nightmares. Thankfully cat purrs appear to be very soporific.’

‘The cat you found purred you to sleep?’ One of his eyebrows had gone up. Nisa had always been jealous of people who could do that.

‘Uh-huh. Thinking about it, she did it the first night too.’

‘Interesting. Also, I don’t think you skipped the anger phase. I still have bruises from yesterday’s judo lessons.’

Nisa’s lips quirked. ‘You know, I didn’t think you
had
a sense of humour.’

‘I don’t,’ he replied, but he turned away quickly and she thought she saw his mouth shifting into a smile as he clicked the screen on. ‘You’ll sleep tonight. I’m going to shift the judo up a notch.’

Tower Hamlets, June 28
^th
.

Hawgood Street was maybe four hundred yards from Leopold Street, if you could fly, and certainly within walking distance. It was part of a set of roads which marked the edges of Furze Green, a small park, and off the main roads, which had to have been useful if you kept a cat.