Fat Vampire 6: Survival of the Fattest (10 page)

“Then how could
any
of this have been predestined, if there’s all this free will?”
 

“That’s not what I said, fatass,” said Maurice.
 

Reginald wondered if the stickiness of his current predicament was the reason he was so intent on insulting himself through Maurice, but ultimately it didn’t matter. He and Mental Maurice had had this discussion over and over and over again, Reginald versus Reginald, trying to riddle out one of the greatest philosophical riddles of all time: was it possible to have both choice and destiny? Could one system incorporate the other?

Reginald just shook his head. He plucked another piece of information from the memory of a vampire who’d lived and died four millennia earlier, then set it next to a casual interaction that Maurice himself had observed just fifty years ago. The two pieces fit and leant meaning to each other. Reginald felt a small realization, then kept working.
 

“It’s interesting,” said Reginald.
 

Maurice just looked over. Because he was Maurice’s memories animated by Reginald’s thought processes, he already knew what Reginald found interesting. But to keep the back and forth going, he said, “What is?”

“We aren’t actually immortal.”
 

Maurice smiled. It was the real Maurice smiling. Reginald could feel the difference. Maurice’s blood ran through Reginald’s veins, and vampire blood had a sort of consciousness of its own. He’d never talk to Maurice for real again, but this was the sort of thing that Maurice would have agreed with, and found clever.
 

“It
is
interesting, isn’t it?” said Maurice.
 

“Why do you think we always end up dying in the end?”
 

Maurice shrugged. “As the great sage Chuck Palahniuk once said, ‘On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.’ Nothing lives forever. Immortality is about potential, not reality. There are one-celled organisms that can live forever, but their immortality assumes that the people watching out for them give them everything they need to keep living, and that they don’t eventually just get bored and throw those organisms into the incinerator. We have the biological
potential
to live forever, but literally doing so is impossible.”
 

“Why?”

“Because forever is forever. It’s never over, so nobody can ever get there. The best you can do is ‘immortal… so far.’”
 

“Very philosophical,” said Reginald.

Maurice looked back to the puzzle and resumed sorting pieces. “Besides, the odds just aren’t in immortality’s favor. Not as it exists for vampires, anyway. It’s pretty unlikely that you’d ever just wake up one day and walk into a sharp stake, but it’s possible, right? So if it’s possible, it’ll eventually happen in the true sense of forever, given infinite chances. Same with being attacked by a random crazy person, or being decapitated in an accident. What happens when the sun one day swells and its corona burns Earth to a cinder? What then? Or what if you simply decide one day that you’ve had enough of living, and walk out into the sun?”
 

Reginald looked at the Maurice who wasn’t really Maurice, realizing all at once how much he missed him.

“Had you had enough of living, Maurice?” he asked.
 

Maurice gave him a tight-lipped frown. Reginald knew what the expression meant: that Maurice was just an echo, and that he couldn’t actually answer the question in the here and now.

“Just make a guess,” said Reginald.
 

“I’d lived for over two thousand years, Reginald,” Maurice’s memories told him. “I doubt I actually
wanted
to die, but the fact that I did isn’t a tragedy. Claude didn’t end a life that wouldn’t, one day, have ended anyway.”
 

“So because we all die in the end, nothing is worthwhile,” said Reginald.
 

Maurice shook his head — a gesture that was totally and completely Maurice. “Don’t be such a nihilist, fatass,” he said.
 

Reginald looked at the vast puzzle, then nodded to Maurice. Maurice nodded back. The exchange of nods declared that progress on the codex’s assembly had been made, so Reginald let the fog dissipate and withdrew from his headspace. A moment later he resurfaced in his room in the USVC building, where Nikki was sitting beside him, clicking away on her laptop. He sat up and looked at the screen. She was perusing Fangbook, checking in on her various groups.
 

“You’re awake,” she said.
 

“I wasn’t asleep.”
 

“Were you working on the codex?”
 

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Was it rusty? Did you have a hard time getting back in?”
 

“Not at all. It actually felt good to put my mental hands back to work. Comfortable, even.”

Her eyes softened. “Was Maurice still there?”
 

Reginald sighed. “I don’t think its healthy for either of us to think of him as if he were a person,” he said. Then he caught his slip and corrected himself: “… to think of
it
as if
it
were a person.”
 

He rolled to the side and cupped Nikki’s calf with his hand. She was wearing the robe provided by the building’s domestic housekeeping staff, just like maid service in a hotel. The robe was unsexy, but Nikki made it work.
 

“Did you figure out what’s up with Timken?” she asked.

Reginald consulted what he’d seen in his head: the slightly-more-assembled codex and the emotional readings he’d gotten from Timken during the meeting. Timken, like Claude, had seemed to know that he should keep his mental shutters up around the Chosen One, but Reginald had still gotten the flavor of his thoughts — enough to proceed and not run off screaming, anyway.

“He’s being honest with us. Timken isn’t a problem. Claude is the problem, and if he’s smart, he’ll stay away.”
 

“Like Walker,” said Nikki. They’d already laughed about Walker’s absence in the meeting. Nikki had said she resented his not being there. She wanted to knee him in the testicles. Reginald had assured her that it still hurt a vampire man when his boys got crushed.

“The thing about Timken is that he’s always believed he’s doing the right thing,” said Reginald. “That’s what’s so terrible about him. It’s almost hard to hate him because he’s always trying; he just tries in such horrible ways. He’s like a Boy Scout in spirit, but he doesn’t realize he’s looking at life through a melted piece of glass.”
 

“Mmm.”

“So, fine,” said Reginald with a sigh. “We’ll help them set up their meeting with Lafontaine. Try to keep Timken from being killed. And if…”
 

Nikki raised her eyebrows at him.
 

“Hey, I don’t want Timken killed. Not now.”
 

Nikki raised her eyebrows further.
 

“The cows have left the barn, my darling. Humanity got a pole up the ass already. All that would happen if Timken died now would be Walker, Claude, or Charles stepping in. It’s time we talk about the least of all assholes.”
 

“Wow,” said Nikki. “You’re right. How terrible.”
 

“Hey,” said Reginald, rolling onto his back, “that’s politics for you.”
 

There was a knock on the door. Reginald answered it while Nikki closed her laptop and set it aside. He found Ophelia in the hallway, with Brian already dressed and ready beside her. Brian nodded, apparently to let Reginald know that everything appeared to be more or less under control. It was a ludicrous gesture, but it was totally Brian. He was assuring Reginald that it would be okay to listen to Ophelia, because he could take her down if she got ornery. It was true, but it was stupid.

“We’re ready,” said Ophelia.
 

Reginald turned to Nikki. She stood and began walking toward her suitcase.

“Five minutes,” said Reginald as Nikki slipped the robe from her shoulders.
 

He closed the door. Brian, who’d been peering through the closing door and watching Nikki’s bare back, said, “Dammit.”

M
ENTAL

ON THE WALK DOWN TO what Reginald assumed would be some sort of a situation room, Ophelia gave them an update. Reginald had gone to sleep immediately after returning from their previous meeting, then had gone into his codex trance immediately after waking. Nikki had been surfing Fangbook, but most of what Ophelia had to report wasn’t public anyway.
 

“There have been two new incidents,” she told them. “One happened just outside New York at another blood farm… and this despite the fact that all of the farms were cautioned to be on high alert.” She shook her head. “Idiots. Somehow the stock still got the best of the guards. We don’t know how. We don’t know if the insurgents were on milkers at the time or locked down in their cells; it’s not a free-range facility. We also have no idea what they’re using for weapons, except that as in the other incursions, they’re using silver for restraint. What’s going on there is totally inside the walls and the public is unaware. The only reason we even know there
was
an incident is because they told us about it.”
 

Reginald looked over at Ophelia, trying to keep up with her brisk pace. “They?”
 

“The humans at the facility. One of them got a phone from one of the guards, took video, and emailed it to us.”
 

“Here? Directly to the USVC?”

Ophelia nodded grimly. “The president’s classified personal email account. We have no idea how they got the address.” She walked faster. “The other incident was an electronic incursion on Fangbook. A hack. It…”
 

Nikki interrupted. “I didn’t see anything on Fangbook,” she said.
 

“They didn’t get far. Fangbook is almost as tight as the USVC itself, with the exception of email, apparently. We use Fangbook as a redundant information archive. Keep that under your hat, though; vampires don’t like to think that the government is harvesting their information. But it’s good that we were, because that’s how we spotted the hack while it was still in progress.”
 

“Did you trace it?” said Reginald.
 

Ophelia said nothing and kept walking.
 

Reginald laughed. “I guess not. Pretty good for a bunch of monkeys, huh? So that means the incident with the Geneva sun blocker
was
a hack. So not only can they bust your security, but you have no idea how they’re doing it, where they’re doing it from, or where they’re getting equipment that can go toe-to-toe with yours. Or how they’ve gotten the minds together to figure all of this out in the first place.”
 

He looked at Ophelia’s face as they walked. She seemed vaguely angry, but it was a helpless sort of anger. She mostly looked as if she just wanted it all to go away, and for Reginald to stop talking about it.
 

“Oh, but that’s not even the whole story, is it?” he said, now chuckling openly while reading her face. “You’ve done a bunch of futile satellite surveys, haven’t you? Because you’ve figured out that all of this would take a lab — a
big
lab, probably the size of a small city. Because those humans have got a lot to do, right? They’re developing new weapons, creating biological warfare agents, probably hotwiring computers and chips. And that last one is a hell of a task in itself, because given all of the technological advances the vampire government must have had in the past forty years, the humans would need to have some seriously impressive computers if they hoped to even keep up with…”
 

Reginald stopped because he’d caught a flitting thought from Ophelia’s mind while simultaneously reading a pained expression on her face. The one-two punch of realizations made him burst into rich laughter.
 

“You haven’t
had
any advances!” he blurted. The thought was so funny that he stumbled sideways into Brian. “You haven’t! You kept making new computers based on the old models, and you piggybacked on the human internet, and you figured out how to use the humans’ resources to launch and build the space stations behind the sun blockers. But you haven’t
changed
them at all, have you? You’ve just copied their work, without ever making any improvements!”
 

Ophelia said nothing and walked faster. Reginald followed behind, feeling strangely vindicated. Something had clicked in his mind, and he felt a handful of pieces of the codex fall into place without effort. He’d known since the end of the war that there was a strong link between the human and vampire species, but he’d never worked out the nature of that link. Now, watching Ophelia, he realized that what the angels had said all those years ago was true: that vampires simply weren’t any good at evolving. When he’d first heard Santos say that in the angels’ anteroom back in Luxembourg, he’d assumed it was a comment on their society — that vampires were so arrogant and complacent that they were content to sit on their laurels, never becoming more than they already were. But now he saw that the truth might be more literal, and that mental improvement might actually be beyond vampires other than himself. Was it possible that what was true of vampire bodies was true of vampire minds as well? Over the course of centuries, Reginald knew he could maximize the limited potential he’d been given and achieve speed and strength relative to humans, but he’d never be able to lose weight or surpass the strength of a vampire currently stronger than him. Was that also true of thought? Were the world’s vampires frozen with a set amount of intelligence at the time of turning and incapable of truly evolving and innovating?
 

Reginald was still laughing. Brian and Nikki didn’t seem to appreciate the joke (or get it; they had vampire minds, after all, har-har) and stared at him as his eyes started to water. But Reginald found the situation hilarious.
Hilaaaaaarious
. Here they were, forty years down the road, and nothing had changed. The population looked exactly the same, and they were all still using the same technology — not just in the cities, but all the way at the top, in the military and government. The world had hit a stand-still. Perusing vampire history in the absence of human innovation was like reading the same page of a book over and over again.