I knew it!
Though this still isn’t as terrifying as a supra-intelligent self-aware Internet only talking to one web developer via text on his web-enabled fridge. (And using Comic Sans to boot.)
Check out The Fridgularity here.
Vampire fiction was my education. It was all I was allowed to sink my teeth into when I was young.
And when I was just a little boy, I loved it. My mom introduced me to the vampire Lestat, and all his cronies, and I caught the hunger for bloodsucking then. We read Stephen King’s book, Salem’s Lot. We went back to the original, by Bram Stoker. And read other Victoriana.
But then something bad happened, at least for me and all the others who once found a thrill in the vampire myth – the vampires became the heroes of the stories. They became the ideal. And then they got sparkly.
It was at that point that I lost all interest. Mom found other things to occupy our time, and we moved on. Sure we were annoyed by the proliferation of teenie-bopper nosferatu, but we took it in stride.
And then humanity discovered that vampires were real.
People disappeared every year. Everybody knew that. The authorities assumed the people who disappeared were runaways, or homeless, or had nobody looking out for them, so they just kind of fell off the radar.
But then in 2021 the first conscious AI came online, and the fellow who invented it had lost a sister under similar circumstances. He instructed iT (short for intelligent Technology) to look for clues to her fate, and you know what iT found? Lots of people “disappeared” because the vampires were eating them, and then disposing of their bodies.
It was horrible. No doubt about it, but at the same time, it seemed like a pretty minor problem, given all our other issues – massive climate change, population migration, genocide. But at this point, we’d had TruBlood, Twilight, a host of other similar stories, and a generation of women had fallen in love with the idea of sparkly, sexy vampires. They sought out the hidden nests of the undead. Most never returned, and those that did make it home again usually ate all of their former family.
It was clear that something had to be done. Once and for all, many of us decided, we must eradicate the menace of vampires from the Earth. This rag-tag assemblage of people were probably the last group that you’d expect to tackle such dangerous quest – we were nerds, geeks, obsessive fanboys. But we were able to convince a few geneticists and nanotechnologists to work on technologies that could turn these evil bloodsuckers into productive members of society. And they did it!
All we had to do to turn a vampire back into a quasi-human was an injection of the nanotech in the heart.
iT helped us figure out the vectors — where did the vampires live during the day, and what did they do at night?
So we had a solution, and we had the information on how to find them, but there was still that pesky problem of delivering one injection into an extremely pissed-off vampire. Hardly the most promising of theraputic settings.
And that’s when we stepped up. Those of us who had once loved the vampire myth, but could no longer take the insipid literature of the new, sexy version of vampire. We looked at the problem and said, “We will do this terrible job.”
The called us Nosfaradudes.
While the vampires had practical invulnerability to regular weapons, superhuman strength, speed and senses, we had science. We were outfitted with full-body, full-spectrum light emitting suits. It was tight to the skin, but you couldn’t really tell because of the full-spectrum nodules covering every inch of it. Even a starving vampire would find it impossible to approach, because daylight would shine from us like miniature, rotund suns.
Many of the Nosfardudes were in it for the adventure. The violence. For me, it was all aesthetics. I needed to make the vampires pay, and not only for the pain they’d physically inflicted on generations of human beings.
For all those sparkly vampires, I would have my revenge.
The End
My longer fiction has %0 vampires that twinkle, though there are artifcial intelligences. Right now you can get the paperback of The Fridgularity for $3 off, if you buy it direct from Monkeyjoy Press. Use coupon code: YGMVFZZY. Available in all formats in all the usual online places:
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The stun bolt struck near me, and I was flying through the air. My hair crackled with static electricity. My vision went red. Quite possibly I soiled my expensive trousers. Did any of that worry me? No, I had much bigger problems. My brothers were coming back to town for the wedding.
I’d been dreading both events. Their inevitable return, and the marriage of Josh and Mary. Just as inevitable: the lovebirds’ request to have me, the Right Honorable Member of Parliament for Middlesex County, Ab Durer, as master of ceremonies.
I loathe the role of emcee. And my friends always ask me to do it.
Earlier that week, I’d foolishly complained to my brother Warren about emceeing again; he’d looked particularly scary in a suit of plate mail he always “wore” in the datasphere. An affectation, but it had plenty of impact.
“Well, why don’t me and the other brothers come?” he’d said.
“Uh. I’m not sure how good an idea that is,” I had said.
“Sure! It’s been ages since we saw you. Fabian and Petrovich have been pretty busy in Central America, but me and Deeter can convince them to come up.”
“No, I really don’t think you should. You’re not invited.”
“Hey!” shouted Warren, “we’re never invited. Just suck it up. We’re going to be there. Besides, Albrecht,” he said — emphasizing the “brecht”, just the way I’ve always hated it —”we have something to tell you.”
It had taken me a while to work up the courage to let Josh and Mary know that all four were planning to attend. Mary had burst into tears, and Josh confided, “You know, I thought this relationship was just going to be the end of my bachelorhood, not the end of everything.”
I’d laughed and mumbled something about the boys being much more mellow since they’d left high school. You had to admire the couple’s pluck. They made contingency plans, booking a full riot squad for the reception, buying doses of the best nanobiotics money could buy, and hiring Freeze-A-Head, “in case” of fatalities.
I felt so bad that I actually gave them my speech to vet, though I figured we would never get through the wedding, let alone the speeches. I was kind of torn on that. I hate emceeing — blathering into a holo-mic so that the relatives and friends attending remotely can enjoy the syrupy sentiments. And while everyone else whiffs up jazzy nanocaines and quaffs copious amounts of Old Nurberg’s Pink Ale (those who like it like it enough to go blind), I have to abstain.
On the other hand, did I really want to see my brothers back in town, just to avoid sobriety?
But I should get back to the stun bolts, and my electric fandango as I flew through the air, shouldn’t I?
°°°
Continue reading
Though I’m not sure the cartoon below has the elegance of the madeleine episode from The Remembrance of Lost Time (the first volume of which I’ve actually read), this cartoon below wins on brevity. If you want to save yourself several weeks of reading, and need to know about this reference, you can find the text for the madeleine episode here, or even better, you can read my own memory of how this passage goes, as follows:
“No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. I had developed superpowers. I could fly, and turn invisible, invisible, not only in the metaphorical sense, in the way that I was non-existent to the crowds of French wankers surrounding me because I was their social inferior, but actually unable to register to their visual senses, no matter their level of acuity! My brain was pulsing with incipient powers that raised in me several anxieties; would I be able to rip the bodice off the dancing girl who had so recently slighted me because of my deeply introverted and overly sensitive, many would say almost womanly nature, with my new found and burgeoning telekinesis? Would she object to my transparent advances, or succumb to my new super-strength, virility, nay, almost god-like extroversion and clear superiority? In any case, revenge would be mine!”
