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No matter where you come from, no matter what you done

You got six million ways to die, choose one . . .

Surrounded by a circle of its sniggering soon-to-be peers, Scientist Darnell’s dry husk folded up on itself like an old cocoon; his pulse slowed, stuttered, stopped. The younglings around him high-fived each other, cheered, and threw in at the bar to buy him a worthwhile first post-death drink, whenever his reborn cells chose to wake him back the fuck up.

Out on the Tank floor, meanwhile, Elder spun and sang, chin-slick with the last of Darnell’s blood. Her mind returning, automatically—as it usually did, in such ecstatic moments—to the “secret” plan which had dictated his forcible conversion in the first place: Not exactly inaccessible to whoever wanted to hear about its particulars for quite some time now, though she did like to think it still both complex and unique . . .

. . . and Eudo’s reaction alone, when she’d first explained it to him, had been more than enough to confirm that impression.

* * *

“Flynn’s in with some half-closeted vamp fetishist down at NASA,” she’d told him, as they sat together in Eudo’s idling car—shield discreetly up, muffling their voices from the Familiar chauffeur’s prying, half-mortal ears. “According to him, they’re gearing up to build themselves a Terrestrial Planet-Finder space telescope sometime during the next fifteen years, and launch it into Jupiter’s orbit. It’ll locate G-Class planets—that’s Earth-sized worlds, with oxygen in their atmospheres—and then send pre-loaded probes on reconnaissance planetfalls, to scout ’em out.”

“And so?”

“And so, I’m gonna be on one of those probes, when the Planet-Finder fires it off. A hundred and twenty extra pounds of weight, all wrapped up in an information-gathering marker pod strapped to the undercarriage. They fit me with a softwire package that relays a fake telemetry back to Mission Control on Earth, I put myself into hibernation for most of the journey . . .”

“What is this science fiction nonsense?”

“It’s progress, you fuckin’ relic. Evolution.”

“An elaborate and expensive way to commit suicide.”

Elder snorted, twirling her cane impatiently; thought about how fast the blade inside would razor that sneer from Eudo’s ex-monk face, if only she’d let herself let it. Then stepped down hard on that particular impulse, and snapped back—

“Way I see it, sport, we’re all dead already. So who gives a big, fat, staving-off-creeping-mortification-of-the-flesh-through-drinking-hot-fresh-human-blood fuh—”

Breaking in, dismissively: “I know how it is that you ‘see it’, Elder.”

“Oh, I’m very sure that you think you do.”

Eudo half-turned, favoring her with that look—the same one whose merest lowering hint had once been enough to pin her to her seat with fear and embarrassment, turn her insides to flame and her knees to water, render her instantly and automatically desperate to fall at his feet and do whatever it might take to make him happy again. But it’d been a good two hundred years since she’d felt either any of the above, or any need to conceal her feelings on the subject from the man-shaped thing who’d made and trained her: Her demon lover, her awful father. Her former master, still fuming over the mere fact of his pretty plaything’s self-emancipation, even though it’d been years on years on years since the lack of his approval had had even the slightest possible

effect on anything she did, or didn’t do.

“They think it’ll take about a century to reach full colonization,” Elder continued, “patiently.” “’Cause they’d need a compact power-source like an antimatter engine, and that takes a real conceptual breakthrough; hard to concentrate on, when you’re still havin’ to worry about petty little stuff like death and taxes. So Flynn brings Mr. Man by, I turn him and throw him back . . . this time next year, half of NASA’s gonna be working 24/7 to find the next potential Earth.2, on nothing but a liquid diet.”

“The Clave would never approve such a venture.”

“Like I need their approval. For anything.”

“Elder . . . ” he began, then paused. And began again a moment after, with a strange—almost new, somehow—note in his voice: “This world is all we have, child. We must either live in it as it is, or change what little we can—and live with the consequences of those changes, afterward. There’s nothing more to do, however much we may . . . occasionally . . . wish there were.”

And there was the Clave’s party line, in a proverbial nutshell: Traditionalist, exclusionist, literally conservative. All about having to preserve the vampire world’s “ancient, secret culture” at all and any cost, while conveniently forgetting that none of them actually had a culture to preserve, per se—just a bunch of fairly disgusting personal habits they’d somehow raised, over the millennia, to the status of (un)Holy Writ.

A calcified nightside parody of social structure run by those who deified the past to the point of glossing over how bad it had really been, back when they were still numerous enough to be feared, or their prey still knew enough to remember how to kill them. How they’d frozen stiff under the iron earth in cheap coffins, been poisoned like rats, hunted down and herded screaming from their catacombs to explode in the sunlight, tortured and scarred and burned at the fucking stake . . .

No, you’ve somehow skipped right on over all that, she thought. Because you don’t change, even living forever. You just—endure.

But those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. As you, Eudo—should definitely know.

“So dixit me, magistere,” she asked, her tone kept strictly conversational. “The world did turn out to be flat after all, right? And that Don Cristobal de Colon guy . . . he just fall off the edge, or what?”

Man, where was I born, anyway?

A thousand years of ebb and flow, empire-rise and -set, with nothing happening that hadn’t already happened a million times before. And then, three hundred years back—just around the time of Elder’s own Re-birth, strange to say—a critical mass of ideas, exploding outward. So many new devices. Curiosity like a viral cluster, an ever-spreading plague, increasing exponentially.

Three hundred years of change, of nearly constant forward motion. But if studying history had taught her anything, it was that momentum always peaked and dropped, the same way that milk left to sit always curdled. That people always forgot how good they had it, comparatively speaking, because the most recent generation—these twentieth- to twenty-first-century vampires, for example, with their routinely endless, intrinsic sense of entitlement—rarely understood exactly what drawbacks they’d been lucky to avoid having to deal with, in the first place.