In Darkness' District: Five

This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to any persons, living or dead, or any events or situations are entirely coincidental. Some use is made of actual locales, landmarks and institutions. All of these usages are fictional in nature and intent, and are not to be misconstrued as attempts to disparage or recommend.

Part Five

Lace took a bit of a risk. She decided to check Ron out.

It seemed most likely that Ron had something resembling a major league tail on him. He was being kept brainwashed and drugged in a state of economic subservience. She assumed that the Shop, through some shadowy arm, had popped him into some rehab or State mental health program, and supplied the good doctors and nurses and social workers with a very impressive "Diagnosis and Case History". She suspected that it was really rather airtight. Certainly, she couldn't hope to spirit him away, at least not through the windows, not with bars on them.

Would Ron even want to be spirited away? He seemed quite content, but that could of course be merely an effect of his injections. What was in those injections, anyway? She knew a bit about the mental health industry, as opposed to the profession (there's quite a difference), and so she knew that there was doubtless a strong phenthiazine component, most likely Haldol or its equivalent. Ron didn't seem to have the usual stiffness that goes with Haldol, so there might be daily Cogentin tabs as well. He'd seemed to be a bit terrified as well as sedated, though, and she thought back to the licorice-y drink of Doctor Diablo. She'd never found out exactly what was in that either, but she had a good idea.

Once, while with the Cult, she'd deliberately taken a dose of The Fear. She'd just been watching a TV movie called "Genesis Two", a pilot for a Gene Roddenberry series that had never gotten off of the ground. The movie had depicted, among other things, a post-Armageddon society where women maintained a strict matriarchy through the use of plant-source toxins and drugs. One of the plants was a purported mutant strain of rauwolfia serpentinia, which was a source of not only rauwolfia (which had once shown promise in reduction of schizophrenic symptoms), but of beta-carboline, The Fear. She'd wondered if this could be done, but only momentarily. Hadn't she and the coven been doing just that to the detective they'd been weirding? Nobody had noticed, not the man himself, not passersby, nobody.

She thought that the Fear had been relegated to Schedule I of the Controlled Dangerous Substances list, putting it in a class with heroin, LSD and other totally proscribed substances. She recalled that the Designer Drug Act of 1984 (which totally outlawed all drugs which were even remotely chemically similar to illicit drugs of abuse, unless already certified by the FDA or comparable authority) had certainly not in any way reduced that availability of "Ecstasy" or MDMA. She also recalled the alleged CIA experiments on civilians during the Fifties, and decided that Ron might be a Clockwork Orange.

It seemed pretty likely to her, as she had felt within him a touch of fear that reeked less of any man's slight terror of a goddess than of psychochemical panic.

The CIA had supposedly tested spy/warfare drugs on unwitting civilians during the Fifties. Wouldn't the Shop, with its exclusively "black" operational purview and funding be willing to do the same? There was no doubt in her mind that the Shop would be quite willing to do so, especially to "sequester" a star witness in their case against someone who had killed one of their own.

Her investigations revealed that his place was well and truly watched, monitored, and bugged. Her equipment detected the operation of several kinds of standard Shop devices.

They'd never found Fred's body.

That was not such a great surprise, as there had been quite a bit of rain earlier in the week, and the Potomac was just short of flood. The waters appeared calm, almost, beneath the Key Bridge, but beneath the surface roiled mighty currents, and it was a fool who took any small craft out on the Potomac at flood. The brass at the Shop had desperately wanted Fred's body for autopsy, should he be killed instead of captured. They had nothing to show for a massive manhunt which had involved calling in a lot of markers... just the knowledge that there was at least one other vampire in town besides Fred and this woman Ron Smith had known as Lace. This was getting out of hand.

The Shop staff who concerned themselves with vampire-hunting knew that they must discard the legends they'd heard about vampires.

They knew, from their record, that vampires need not sleep in coffins during daylight. They knew that, in Fred's case at least, they could be quite active at any hour, ate food just like anyone else did, and some were at least as intelligent as the average human being.

They consulted with professional students of vampires and vampirism.

One very tired and harried-looking older gentleman merely handed them a copy of an old letter, and said, "This is a classic. It's from 1987, and it's been sent to every law enforcement agency in the country. It appears in none of their files. We have sent it out time and time again, and it has never appeared in the files. It seems that either it never gets to them, or it gets 'spiked' upon receipt. We are rather more convinced of the latter case."

They took the letter "home" and read it. Here is the text:



Sirs,


I have a strange tale to relate. I was traveling to
Washington, DC, on business. I was scheduled to be in town for
some time, so I took a place in the suburbs. I ride the subway to
work every morning.

I'm riding on the subway, looking at my fellow travellers,
categorizing them, and I see a very uncomfortable looking guy,
obviously paranoid, judging from the way his eyes are flickering
from passenger to passenger. A spy, maybe? No, a spy would be more
cool... Just nuts, I guess, or a drug casualty. Then I notice (I
say notice, because I guess I've been hearing it all along ) a
quiet snapping sound from behind me, and a little white dot goes
zipping past me... straight towards this flaky looking guy. It hit
him in the face, and he started visibly.

I do not use drugs or alcohol, and this is not something I
usually see.

So I start looking around, casually as I can, and I see that
quite a few of the people on the train are up to the same trick,
flicking their thumbs at this guy like kids flick marbles. These
guys are good  at this. They are hitting this guy regularly,
judging by his reaction...

He starts sneezing, wheezing, and rubbing at his neck like
it hurts him. He blows his nose, cranes his neck like he's trying
to adjust it. He never stops looking around at all of the other
riders. He looks mad as hell, getting totally paranoid... tendons
are standing whitely out on his hands. I wonder if he knows what's
going on? I guess he does, he must... Maybe that's why he's
looking around like that.

I see then that he's looking at me. He seems to recognize
me, perhaps mistaking me for someone he knows. Just for laughs, I
hang my hand out in the aisle, and flick my thumbs at him. He
glares at me, a particularly venomous look, and stands up as we
pull into a station. He leaves in what amounts to a huff, still
looking at me like I've turned into a bug-eyed monster.
Anyway, he's off of the train, and everyone, and I mean everyone,
checks the time, and then they go back to reading their papers. I
am totally baffled. I turn around and ask the guy behind me, did
you see that guy, what's with him?

The guy says, do I mean the vampire-man. My mouth drops
open.

He says you must be new in town. I say, yeah, I am. What do
you mean, vampire?

You know, he says. El Vampiro. Goddamn bloodsucker.

What's this? I ask, flicking my thumbs.

You don't know? he asks. Where you from, he wants to know.

Chicago, I lie.

OK, he says. Diffenbachia, beta-carboline, and Soma.

Huh?

You know... Soma. They sell it for headaches, but
it's a muscle relaxer. That's mainly what he's got going for him
is muscles and bone structure.

I don't get it.

If we relax the shit out of him, he's weak, he's slow, his
liver gets screwed up. If he goes into overdrive, his back goes
out, and then if he keeps it up, he tears himself apart. The Def,
the Diffenbachia, you know, the Mother-In-Law plant, it makes his
throat close up, makes him choke. The beta-carboline, it's a
chemical that induces fear. Learned that from the old
Soviets.

Jesus, I say. That's goddamned cold.

Yeah, he grins savagely, as it should be.

Why don't they just take him out and shoot him?

He hasn't done anything.

So why do it to him?

He's a goddamned vampire! he hisses, scowling fiercely, and then
mutters el vampiro, and begins pushing at his forehead as if his wires were
too tight.

But you say he hasn't done anything.

Nothing we can pin on him, he says.

He is well and fashionably dressed, like almost everyone
else in DC, wearing a long black trenchcoat. He also is black. I
ask him what he does. He says he's an attorney, with some alphabet
soup agency of the federal government.

Isn't he watched closely? I ask of him.

Of course, he says. Not my job, but I hear he's pretty good at dropping
tails. Someone's killing a lot of people in this town, and there's less
blood than there should be by the time the cops get there. That's right, one
guy is doing it all. Here, he says, and hands me a little packet. Vampire
repellent, he tells me. Keep it under your belt. Oh, my stop, he
concludes.

He gets up, bracing himself against deceleration, holding on
to the rail on top of my seat. His thumb recurves. The knuckle
closest to the hand is huge, arthritic looking, and sits well away
from the hand. From there, the long second leg of parallels the
metacarpals, and the final joint bends backwards at almost 100
degrees. His nails are very broad, greatly curved, and appear to
be extremely thick.

The train stops, rather lurchingly, as he strides
faultlessly to the door. He queues up first in line, and
straightens his tie, collar and cuffs and hitches his belt all in
about one second. The door slides open, and he strides out, barely
allowing the doors to clear his wide shoulders, which he holds
quite well back. His posture, like his attire, is impeccable.
I get off at the end of the line. I return to my security
townhome, and firmly lock the gate, and set the alarms.

Vampires. Jeeze.

Undeclared race wars. Conviction without trial, cruel and
unusual punishment of an individual who has reputedly done nothing
prosecutable to anyone, all on the basis of allegations that he
is a legendary or mythical being? How many amendments to the
Constitution are we throwing out the window, Mr. Modern and Equal
Black Attorney?

I think about Washington DC, with the highest rate of
unsolved murders in the nation, all ostensibly drug related. I
wonder if that's really the case here in The Nation's Capital, the
center of control and administration, where no one is allowed to
possess or even own a handgun. A sleepy southern town which has no
reason to exist except that George Washington wanted it across the
river from his farm.

If there really are vampires, or such creatures as could
give rise to such legends, what could they be, other than a
co-evolved species of hominid adapted to nocturnal predation upon
other hominids? Perhaps with rapid healing abilities, superior
strength and reflexes? Perhaps only a handgun wound to the head
would be a certain defense for an unlucky human.

I've been trying to flick objects of varying sizes and
densities at a target, a foot wide square of flypaper strips.
Maybe if I'd learned young enough, or had been practicing for
decades, maybe I could hit the center spot five times out of ten.
I'm talking about from ten feet away...

I tried a bit of this stuff on myself, and it is definitely
some kind of nasty stuff. I spent the next twenty minutes with
slow, powerful cramps twisting my spine, and for the next hour or
so, I was seized by a nameless dread. When I was in college, I had
heard of The Fear, a proscribed Soviet torture chemical mostly
used in the dreaded psychiatric prisons. Nobody ever voluntarily
uses it twice.

A week later, I noticed the telltale fingernail striations
of arsenic poisoning. I went to the drugstore and bought the
components of Marsh's test, and tested the "vampire repellent".
Arsenic positive... that would explain the poor guy's complexion,
and his debilitated posture. 

Some of the folks flicking slow murder at a skinny,
sickly-looking white boy were firing bank shots nearly thirty
feet, rebounding shots that were all, or almost all, hitting the mark.

Cliches come to my mind. Cliches may be old, or trite, but
they have their value. Cliches express complex thought in simple,
common terms.

I've been back into town a few times, and I've noticed:
People making strange gestures. Not any sign language I know of,
and my mother was deaf, and taught the deaf. I sign rather well,
myself. Sign language between spies? Can't be that many spies in
town. We're talking majority here. How long would spies last,
anyway, against "vampires"? Perhaps there really are no ordinary
people in the espionage business. Or perhaps a capital populatated
exclusively by "vampires" would be a simple effective defense against
penetration by Cold War enemies who were, after all, central European
whites, indistinguishable from the majority of Americans. But are they
taking orders, or giving them?

I saw a DC officer ticketing a jaywalker twenty yards from a
crack corner. The out-of-towner was aghast, his New Jersey accent
strident above the noise of traffic... then a cruiser pulled up...
the Jerseyite protested that jaywalking wasn't an arrestable
offense (I've looked it up... it isn't.) The cop threw him in,
just grabbed him under the armpit and threw him in... the
Jerseyite wasn't a small man, and the cop wasn't large - but the
cop just picked him up and threw him in. I saw bright blood, and a
protruding rib... and the cruiser just sped off, and as I stared
sidelong through my dark glasses, I saw the cops in the cruiser
doing... something... to the man. It didn't look like first aid.
As the cop walked on, the crack dealers grinned... showing teeth
most of the way back to their small pointy ears. I waited a bit,
then caught the next bus.

There are as many people on the streets at night as there
are during the day, all young, all hip, all well and fashionably
dressed. Even in the dimly lit bars their pupils barely dilate.
They are very hard to see in the dark corners... and in the light,
they are often rather pale. There is something strange about their
hands.

Many, if not most of the non-tourists in town have very
strange thumbs... and a powerful ridge of muscle to operate the
little fingers. There is something... variant... about the
shoulder structures.

A lot of the people here walk that cocky homeboy strut.
Others glide silently by me as I eat my burger in Dupont Circle at
high noon, light glinting off of their UV-protected mirror
shades... and their predatory gait reminds me of well-fed lions...
I also saw what was evidently a modified version of the popular
quarter-watt infrared-laser cigarette lighter... pointed directly
into the side of a man's eyes... when the man turned in that
direction, the other was already walking away with the device
pocketed... an excellent sleight of hand routine, but fearfully
practical, too much so for my tastes. I saw the man walk into a
moving bus, which sped through suddenly conspicuously absent
traffic, coming directly out of his conveniently-placed new blind
spot.

I bought a pair of mirrored wraparound sunglasses.

On the train today, I saw more signing and silent lipspeech...
like my mother and I often used to communicate when signing might
not have been polite... I caught some of it... and looked at the
man next to me. He was regarding me calmly, but my pulse
quickened, for he was looking directly sideways at me - without
turning his head. His eye was rotated at more than 90 degrees from
the forward plane... In the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man
is king, and this man could get his one eye focused directly where
I have limited peripheral vision at best. Now I can no longer
ignore the unusual zygomatic arch placement I've seen so often
here in the Nation's Capitol. I can also no longer ignore the
variances in the location of the foramen magnum, nor in the
temporomandibular joint.

His eye was so strange... as I looked away I thought I
glimpsed his cornea, which had been greatly curved, flattening as
if he were able, by some muscular action, to change the curvature,
using it as a secondary lens, and it seemed to change colors, even
as I watched.

On another train, I saw a - I don't know what I saw; I can
no longer think of these beings which seem to have occupied my
Nation's Capital as human - ...person purse his lips, revealing a
short piece of drinking-straw which he blew through, firing a
small dart of some sort into the neck of the man (this one _was_ a
Man) who absently scratched his neck, and shortly thereafter fell
into a deep sleep. The person who had fired the dart gave me an
amused look, as if daring me to do anything about this activity
of his. I got off of the train, and struggled not to run to my
rental car.

I'm thinking about Mr. Modern and Equal light-skinned black
attorney with a peculiar, well-thought-out, indeed, almost
rehearsed story to tell, and with no respect for the most basic
laws of the land, thinking about his funny simian hands,
animalistic claws, lightning gestures and savage toothy grin.
Cliches... and more cliches. I've been thinking, and thinking...
Red Herrings. Stalking-horses. I'm thinking about that guy on the
train, about pots calling kettles black. What I really think is
about being thrown to the wolves. My neck hurts, and it's getting
harder to breathe, and I'm so afraid.

I've been around town, in and out, and the bus drivers all call me by
name, and the foreigners all point and whisper when they see me board. I've
seen something totally new, some sort of crystalline injector that
look like clear monofilament, inserted into people's scalps, necks, wrists
or elbows, which seem to result in some sort of suggestible state, though
once I thought I saw someone drop stone dead after the application of such a
device. Will I be next? Or do they have something more sinister in store for
me?

The striations on my fingernails have deepened, and my food
in my locked security townhouse tested positive for arsenic for a
week, and then didn't test positive. In the meantime, I've been
eating out of cans, or I was until I saw that nobody in my usual
store was buying any canned goods. As I picked out a can of tuna,
several... individuals turned and smiled at me. They let me see a
lot of teeth, anyway. I bought the tuna, not wanting to look
suspicious... I thought I saw something like a dark-colored
hypodermic vanishing up the sleeve of the cashier as she weighed
my bag of oranges. I spent a ridiculous amount of money on a very
small amount of food that I am afraid to eat.

I used the Marsh's test on some arsenical rat poison I had
bought, and it didn't indicate, so I can't even get a reliable
test in this town. My skin has taken on a grayish-white tone, and
in the sunlight, I look like a dead thing.

Today, I watched, terrified, on the train, as they flicked
their slow poisons at me, and watched an out-of-towner listen
credulously to a tale told of me and my crimes... and on the
street today, pointed fingers followed me, and so did the
whispers... whispers saying: "El Vampiro... Vampire/Man."

I hope I can be brave, and hold together long enough to
think this through... I think they may know I've been thinking.

I'm thinking of leaving the country.

I wish I could leave the planet.

Given this clue, they began, seriously, to look around them.

There was indeed a vampire problem in the District of Columbia, but that there might be a problem of the suddenly apparent magnitude had never entered into their considerations. Had it not been brought to their attention by this recent affair, they might never have noticed, as they were for the most part living extremely sequestered lives due to the essentially furtive nature of their profession.

They wondered why, considering the body of knowledge concerning vampires, there had never been an agency of the Federal Government devoted full-time to the control of vampires.

Considering the size of their "black budget", they decided that formation (from parts of their organization) of such a task force was now a necessity. They entered into a structural reorganization that quietly split off a new, budgetarily-compartmentalized group. They had ridiculously large operations funds, and excellent equipment, and some of the top operatives available. The organization was incredibly secret, and had such loosed-rein controls that the DEA looked regimented by comparison.

The new agency was semi-humorously known as the FVK (Fearless Vampire Killers, the name taken from a song by the band Bad Brains).

The Shop had been conceived of as a clearinghouse of any and all information relating to possible future military and industrial conflict in any way relating to the security of the United States. An action arm had later been added. They were not restricted, as was the CIA, to out-of-country operations, nor were they (due to their exclusively "black" existence) in reality constrained by Constitutional considerations. The Directors of the CIA were to some degree aware of the Shop's role in certain multi-agency operations, and the FBI often found orders to cooperate with "heavies" of unspecified origin, sometimes using their own agents as Human Intelligence operatives furthering Shop goals. Nobody was totally aware of Shop goals and activities... they didn't even really answer to the President, as none of the last three Presidents had really heard of them.

The Old Guard of the Shop had been dumped directly into the public eye when Fred's dataworm listed them into the nation's mainframes and the operating systems of the NETS, and that had forced a radical reorganization, one result of which had been the spinoff of the FVK. As the Shop itself (which had long been suspected by "fringe" elements) came under the scrutiny it had so long avoided, past peccadilloes had been exposed, and heads were rolling all over the halls of Congress. The "black" or utterly secret nature of the funding for the FVK was drawn from no one specific Federal allocation. Indeed, much of the Shop-cum-FVK's funds were self-generating from accounts well-established and self-perpetuating.

The FVK began to grow in power and influence even as the Shop was dismantled.

The operating rationale of the agency went something like this:

There is a race of very manlike beings who prey upon us.

They are inherently inimical.

Active searches must be made.

They must be exposed, deposed, and destroyed whenever found.

When found, they must be captured if at all possible, for questioning and "medical analysis".

It just so happened that having opened their eyes to the obvious, they couldn't help noticing a rather large minority of people answering their description of vampires, most posing quite functionally as young urban professionals. They were employed in almost all fields, with the rather glaring exception of medicine, at least in the facilities examined by the operatives of the FVK. The assumption was (among the threat estimators of the FVK) that they avoided medical professionals who might easily become curious about these strange people. The FVK's thinktank made the obvious conclusion that these so-called vampires probably had medical facilities staffed exclusively by their own kind, dedicated to serving only their own kind. They didn't instigate any searches for such facilities; that could wait - but they occasionally lost sleep wondering what might happen to regular people who sought emergency treatment in such facilities.

The threat estimators, mostly a group of extremely well-educated functional paranoids, pondered the ramifications of a sizable minority of extremely deadly inimical beings occupying, quite unremarked, the Nation's Capital, and they were simply aghast.

A certain Shop/FVK scanner operator came forward with his skin- reflectivity spectra data from the Scatelli/Smith/Lace investigation (which had for some time been backburnered, but never forgotten) and the scanners were retuned, and hoverspies (those unique little micro-copters pioneered by the Israelis) orbited the city, randomly circling in expanding radii, imaging and recording in many different formats, with widely varying senses...

The tapes revealed a pattern.

There seemed to be two or more groups, possibly operating in concert, of different composition (as far as skin-reflectivity measurements could determine) which however shared many similar operational techniques. Could there be more than one race of vampires? One of the FVK's first investigative steps was to consciously discard as many of the prevalent stereotypes regarding vampires as was possible. Nobody was buying the notion that these beings were supernatural in origin, and Occam's Razor suggested that evolution was responsible. Some held out the possibility that the legends of infection, death and rebirth could be explained as an example of some sort of retroviral infection, with a period of coma and metamorphosis, but that raised questions about possible mechanisms for the evolution of such a virus, questions that could not be answered satisfactorily by present medical science. So the FVK went with Occam's Razor, and decided that they must be dealing with a race of manlike beings.

Insofar as possible, these strange invaders (of both types) seemed to be trying to raise the rate of society's decline, to increase the general malaise of the city's culture, and to supplant the appointed positions of Government power.

The video files revealed a consistent pattern of "stalking behavior". It appeared that some of these people (they had to think of them as people, even if they were by definition a clandestine enemy which was obviously attempting to control the capital of the most powerful democracy on Planet Earth; they were certainly capable of passing for normal humans) were practicing assassination techniques. Absolutely nobody seemed to notice it, so flawless were these techniques. It looked as if all of those who were capable of noticing it were an active part of it. It hadn't even been noticed by the FVK staff. It had been noticed by the computers controlling the hoverspies.

The hoverspies' on-board computers were only semi-linked to the monster mainframes on the ground, and couldn't really carry that much onboard "intelligence". Most of the payload had to be reserved for perception, motor and telemetry equipment. Some brains were required, though, and interruptable automatic subsystems and parallel processing were used wherever possible.

One of these systems was a LIDAR system used for collision avoidance. The Laser Interferometry Direction and Ranging was a step up from radar or sonar, as the interpretation subroutines automatically compacted and distilled the input data into a form directly usable both as optical (though not very resolved) and object/vector information.

A hoverspy had been locked on to a suspected vampire. The FVK was following individuals in an effort to determine contacts and routes of possible orders dissemination. The hoverspy had kept registering seemingly conflicting signals on the LIDAR band, signals indicating both rapid acceleration and steady pace. The operator, responding to the bells and whistles that lit up his comboard, wondered why the device hadn't jumped into the side of a tree. He switched display formats, opened up a few windows which he set for transparency, and localized the jinking of the subsystem.

The source of the conflicting signals was the subject.

He slowed the display to a factor of 30:1, and found that the LIDAR was not at all malfunctioning. It was correctly registering a vampire passing somebody, and throwing an amazingly fast but controlled kick of a type the operator (a fifth degree black belt in Kempo) had never seen before. The vampire never broke her stride for an instant. Later, in the enhanced-audio review, it was noted that without the accompanying video, it was quite impossible to tell exactly when the unnoticed harassment had occurred.

Enhanced video showed mere traces of a kick that must have been much faster than a professionally thrown baseball. The LIDAR indicated speeds approaching twohundred miles per hour at the snap of the kick, which was done with the leg extended, straight, throughout the entire kick, with the exception of the pulling-in at the focus of the kick, which otherwise would have certainly killed anyone at the receiving end of that kick.

The scanners were retuned for a much higher scan rate, and the sensitivity parameters were reconfigured. The kicks came into "focus". The more they watched, the more the secret observers were reminded of a subtle lethal ballet designed for murder.

It began to look as if there were "home-blocks" which had been thoroughly occupied for quite some time, perhaps two decades or more. What would normally appear to any casual passerby to be people on their way to work, power-lunches, or courtrooms stood revealed as patrolling gangs of subliminally intimidative invaders. At certain obviously coordinated and assigned times, specific individuals could be seen to meet with other specific individuals. They would patrol a specific area, and harass people. Intense examination of public access facilities in the suburbs confirmed this suspicion; convenience- and grocery-stores' video- surveillance cameras were tapped and some stores were quickly seen to be potential killing-fields. FVK operatives stopped eating red meat.

One thing that was percieved only over time was the existence of two or more differing groups. One of the groups, the one associated with the skin-reflectivity abnormalities, was the group that engaged in the lightning ballet. The other main group, which simply couldn't be distinguished from normal citizens other than behaviorally, engaged in activities more subtle. They seemed to be more concerned with chemical harassment. Who could this other group be? They concentrated on the first group, as they could be easily spotted by any scansystem tuned to look for those skin-reflectivity abnormalities. They decided to consult a few anthropologists, but unfortunately, the first three that they ran into had the characteristic reflectivity spectra. (Certain Shop operatives had begun to carry small flashlights with specially tinted filters. These emitted a beam which would show up on any "normal" persons, but which was absorbed by the skin of the beings they thought of as vampires.) One Shop thinktank consultant noted similarities in many members of the non- vampiric non-Mainstream group as being similar in description to legendary beings such as trolls, but his opinion was discounted as the eccentricity of an amazingly overworked person whose paradigm had not yet settled into the new mode after a forced realignment.

This opinion was revised when concealed-video surveillance tapes of most of the public busses revealed that unidentifiable individuals, generally of fairly-poor appearance seemed to be in possession of some technology, possibly purloined modified medical technology (one of the medical staff said one device appeared to be a modified arthroscopic suture-shooter). They used this technology almost indiscriminately, though they appeared to be able to recognize one another, though the FVK analysts were unable to discern any recognition signs. As a rule, some person would be sitting on the bus, and one of these questionable individuals would apply this tool to the base of the victim's neck immediately before either of them debarked, usually as a parting shot to a victim leaving the bus. (The assailants almost invariably seated themselves right next to the doors of the busses.) When some of the victims were seen on later videotapes, medical staffers were able to discern that their heads seemed to be subtly altered in shape. They theorized that the modified arthroscopic suture-shooters, which ordinarily shot a tiny plastic staple, had been modified so as to shoot some sort of barbed staple beneath the flesh, simultaneously anchoring the other end in the skull, which was probably chipped and weakened by the penetration. This would in effect act as did an orthodontists braces, with osteoporotic deformation of bone under pressure. Rage mounted within the FVK as it became clear that this particular batch of interlopers was deliberately crushing the heads of their victims through a most heinous misuse of medical technology, in what must have been an agonizing and lengthy process. When investigations were made, it was determined that very large numbers of suture-shooters were missing from hospital inventories, along with all sorts of odd chemicals, particularly endocrine hormones.

The FVK, itself an old hand at extremely foul tricks-of-the-trade, found itself aghast at the obvious implication that this particular group of interlopers seemed to be bending the latest in medical high-technology towards assaultive public surgery intended to produce deformities and metabolic eccentricities in their victims, probably turning ordinary people into monstrosities as serving not only the ends of incapacitating the victims, but as misdirection away from their own mostly physically- unremarkable selves. The remark concerning trolls was given more credence after these tapes made the rounds; certainly this sort of behavior was nothing less than full-blown ogrishness, and considering the particular endocrine hormones evidently in circulation, being injected into apparently random victims, trolls or something answering that physical description might indeed result.

The Shop was understandably reluctant to commit to any action plan until all of the facts were in.

The Shop became convinced that the Nation's Capital was already occupied. There was a question of exactly how the occupation could be dislodged; they were, after all, essentially military in nature and thinking, and were reluctant to simply accelerate the ongoing dispersion of government to the countryside. They wanted closure, but all the Shop could really do at this time was to pull closed the hole in which it already hid, and attempt to conceal the traces.

First, they subjected everyone on the staff to DNA fingerprinting and analysis. A couple of low-level Shop agents were discreetly given important-seeming assignments, sent abroad, and fed remarkably coherent batches of disinformation regarding a potential Shop inquiry into the possibility of the existence of vampires. In time, activities in town were modified, and thus it was that the Shop was convinced that they had identified certain genetic markers which tended to identify potential vampires. They were certainly able to determine which markers were associated with the variant skin-pigments. It was remarked in certain quarters that this was racist, and genocidal, but then, after all, it was vampires that they were after...

It was truly frightening to the Shop that fully a fourth of the intelligence community (with a preponderance in the operations and physical security arms) seemed to possess the genetic markers of vampirism. The hiding and reshuffling became ever more a matter of data transfers, blind hires, and equipment orders made, tracked, paid, and fulfilled entirely by automated means.

The level of paranoia had never been higher. The Shop took itself apart, and buried the pieces, but from its ashes rose a phenomenally resolute, dedicated and paranoid organization, which was as much a product of computer programming as it was of human political will.

Yet another secret society had been born, also permeating all levels of Government and commerce. The FVK was everywhere. Their watchword was, vampires are everywhere. They've occupied DC, and nobody voted for them.

The action plan was eventual eradication.

The battle cry was: take it back.

The weakest point of any democracy is the threat of Janissaries.

The Janissaries, historically, got their name from a group of slaves, selected by scholastic and athletic competitions by the ruling class of Turks. The winners of the competitions were sent to the capital, where they certainly improved and streamlined the bureaucracy, and also, over the course of two generations, assumed control so thoroughly that when their bloodless coup was exposed, the coup became bloody only for the ex-ruling class.

Any civilization allowing freedom of travel and settlement is susceptible to such a scheme. It appeared that a very intelligent, and physically superior class had been settling in the District of Columbia for quite some time now, quietly assuming the reins of Government. FVK think-tanks were quick to draw the historically obvious conclusion, that a widespread and well-coordinated effort existed, the apparent goal of which was to supplant the existing government through the simple expedient of first, occupying all available space within the District, then occupying personnel staffing positions, and harassing all opposition out of town. The historians knew that when some preset level of control was acquired, the harassment would become more focused, rapid and lethal.

This type of activity could never be stopped within the framework of Constitutional law. Only extra-legal activity could hope to suppress this.

Depending on what degree of consideration for the US Constitution and the forms of democratic Government was to be observed, there were different sets of tools available for activities in furtherance of the action plan. Many of these tools were assembled from lowest-level parts, machines instructing machines to make machines. As far as possible, anything resembling human presence was removed from the loop, sources of information were rigorously compartmentalized, and command/data files were wiped upon confirmation of transmission/completion.

The FVK wished to risk no possible discovery through the possible agency of crypto-vampires, or vampires' lackeys and minions, all of which were presumed to potentially exist. It was remarked, rather acidly, at the top-level meeting where this policy was adopted, that they ought to hunt up a few witches, and see if they couldn't have a seance and raise up the specter of Alger Hiss.

The speaker was then shown a greatly slowed long-perspective "spectrafiltered" telephoto film of no less than eighteen different people practicing their assassination techniques on one obviously bewildered individual, all in the space of less than a block. Herded to the end of that block, he'd stood shivering in a panic the cause of which he had never directly seen, and, surrounded by five people, all of which were of The Other Kind, waited for the light to change. Six more people began to converge on him in a pattern not unlike the pre-snap motions of Super Bowl teams, and the people around him took a step off of the curb, and a step back. The man (later determined to be an insurance company lobbyist, in town to press for legislation allowing mandatory genetic testing in certain occupations) took two steps forward, and was promptly struck by a bus, a bus he'd showed not the slightest sign of noticing. The people who had converged on him moments before his death had moved in such a manner as to block his view of the oncoming bus, and had formed solid ranks which would have blocked his escape if he had noticed the bus. The official who had made the remark about witches made another remark about witches, a remark more in line with the opinions of the Town Council of Colonial Salem.

Tracks were erased, and systems created new systems which cannibalized their predecessors. The whole affair rapidly came to resemble the life cycle of cockroaches in a closed box. The big ones chased the small ones, which ate the large ones which starved to death chasing smaller, faster offspring of theirs. Across the nation, datafiles were gathered chasing each other around the world in pieces and encrypted packets, coming to rest in assorted Shop facilities where Men and Women alone labored mightily to assemble the pieces of a virtual masterwork long-conceived yet never pursued. It took only three years to complete, drawing upon the talents of America's best and brightest, most of whom had no idea to which purposes their talents might be bent.

The success (or failure) of such an empire as America had become depends entirely upon the ability of the Empire's systems to identify and gather into the fold elements of genius.

Artist have always been the conscience of any nation, and a strange new Renaissance was upon America.

Universities are, in Albert Einstein's words, hostile to genius. This has been demonstrated time and time again... and the social traps that exist to prey upon those cast out of the fold prey disproportionately on genius. Most often, genius is kind, trusting, and all too innocent. There were, throughout the Eighties and Nineties, vast numbers of quite intelligent and artistically inclined youth of all persuasions and roots traveling the country in the wake of The Grateful Dead (a last relic of the Sixties' Peace Movement) all seemingly bent on destroying their minds with proscribed hallucinogens and silly philosophies. This was one of the more popular, and fortunately least destructive of the social spiders that spin their webs for people isolated by sheer population volume from their own kind. There were, of course alternative lifestyles that were more commercially-produced, such as the Industrial and Sixties-Retro lifestyles.

Various agencies had attempted to halt such trends, but little could be accomplished in the way of redemption through the technique of sentencing some of America's brightest young rebels to lengthy jail terms. The Shop sent its angels abroad, though, and managed to recruit many of those gifted young men and women who were most at risk. None of these wound up working for the Shop. Even the cynics at the shop didn't have the heart to try to turn idealistic young artists into master psychological manipulators and subterfuginous infiltrators.

What the Shop did was send a lot of very cogent and convincing reports to various Government agencies, and promoted the formation of special funds, which were directed at some previously unheard-of cow-colleges and arts-academies.

The genius of America was no longer necessarily at risk, except by their own choosing. Who would choose to decline full scholarship at beautiful, remote campuses staffed with some of the world's best (and secretly extremely well paid; the staff needed incentive to relocate to the "sticks") academicians? The experiment had begun in 1993, and was widely expected to produce the next generation of the world's great illuminaries.

The mid-nineties projects that had removed the best and brightest of America's youth to remote but suddenly superbly funded colleges had searched diligently to match the best probable tracks for individual students with the best possible facilities, using, interestingly enough, commercial market-research techniques. The students had been enticed by what amounted to bribery and blackmail, and so red-hot computer geeks found themselves all at one small Wyoming campus, and the students with the greatest talent and inclination towards micro-engineering found themselves in Iowa. Such geographically effective compartmentalization of resources had enabled the masterminds to keep the planned end-result of the effort secret. Stringent measures such as enforced isolation hadn't been required; the students generally believed that these ridiculously well funded "class projects" were supposed to keep America ahead of the Japanese in the household appliances market. They had such wonderful toys available that they tended to be completely and exclusively devoted to these projects. Of course, any tool can be turned into a weapon, and often, the best of their software and hardware production had many possible uses.

So Cray Mainframe CADCAM systems designed ever better and smaller, more compact subsystems. A logic and memory module designed as a LAN-peripherals-driver, when repackaged for MILSPEC uses made a superior effector/manipulator driver. Fuzzy-logic/AI applications designed for medical diagnostic assistance became superior logictree generators for strategic-files searches, and adaptive analog silicon-neural systems designed for better domestic internal combustion engine performance made wonderful integration busses for extremely different types of sensors, processors, and manipulators... All in all, the enticement-of-genius strategy had more than paid off, as it had created several highly competitive subcultures of youthfully exuberant intellectuals.

The manufacturing tolerances were generally much too fine for human beings to work with, so of course a robotic assembly line had been envisioned, and the dataworms had been sent forth to rewrite production schedules at unsuspecting factories, and dataprocessing machines had directed numerical-control machine-tools to make robots.

While genius students brainstormed and experimented with a view to enhancing the reliability and performance levels of peaceful domestic products, their counterparts-plus-twenty-years labored to assemble the scattered components into an integrated masterwork suitable for active defense throughout the next century.

The brainchildren of the brainy youths were culled for applicability to weapons systems, and system software and hardware components were finalized, and production began.

They had succeeded admirably. The basics of the frames had been worked out in the Defense Department researches on Cybernetic Anthropomorphous Machines during the 1960's, and while the hardware had been nearly perfected in that era, better uses were found for the hardware by the Japanese, who abandoned the pipe-dream of AI robots in favor of industrial uses of numerical-control machine tools, and had stolen a march on the rest of the world in roboticizing their factories, leapfrogging to a position of world leader in hightech, superprecision manufacture.

America, however, had always excelled at weapons-systems, and a large defense budget served as an excellent economic flywheel against free-market fluctuations, which always tended to operate in positive-feedback mode. So superior refrigerator-compressor designs were adapted to high-efficiency smallscale nuclear power generation, and the new, rapidly emerging world of "high-temperature" superconductors was tapped for the potentials in smallscale energy weapons.

A couple of bright boys and girls backed with one of the last large-block Federal research grants had finally produced the world's first truly high-temperature superconductor. They didn't bother to file for patents, but simply went about setting up a production facility, amid incredibly tight, and completely low-key security. It helped that they were all students at an A & M extension of the University of Alaska. It also helped that one of the students had been tracked since junior high- school as the exact personality-type for which the Shop was always searching, a type guaranteed to be either best employee or worst enemy. He had chosen the path of employee, when contacted, and let the Shop know what they'd done. The Shop committed massive resources to the project, fiscally nearly hamstringing the organization, and expanded it into a secret factory mass-producing superconductor.

In the continental United States, similar events occurred, but because of all of the secrecy, nobody in the public sector put all of these factors together. Compartmentalization was enforced by dataworms which cleverly ate mail, human operatives who drafted any who complained (Some resisted until shown the right films. Some were killed outright when their skins totally absorbed certain frequencies of light, and their files were seized, and sent back "home".) Finally, the product was mostly prepared, except for the necessary extremely-specialized human element.

Funds transferred themselves, and power came on at remote locations, and purchases were made by modem, and at factories across the land, and in other nations as well, digitally controlled machines routed components into assembly lines, and unusual assemblies began to be shipped through a variety of blinds and dead-drops. Many of these components arrived at remote locations to be left where they fell, often accompanied by refrigerator-sized boxes which seemed inordinately heavy to the men who unloaded them.

In a medium-sized warehouse in rural Iowa, a large drop-shipment of parts unpacked itself, a refrigerator-sized box peeling open like some exotic flower. Within the cardboard stood a device which further unfolded itself to reveal a sturdy base with an array of manipulators. Like some crazed mutant spider, it jerked into action, and began to open other boxes.

"Damned if I know," said a forklift operator who had been told by his boss to go load a shipment onto a railway car. "I just get a call from the Chicago office to load a load. I asked Johnny, and he said he got a call to go fetch stuff from a warehouse. He told me that there hadn't been a soul there except for some security guard, told him he'd just gotten an assignment to open the gates and oversee the loading. Said he got the key through the mail. I'm tempted to look inside one o' them boxes, but this shit stinks of Government so bad, I'm damned-near 'fraid to even think about it. Weird shit is happenin' all over the place these days, Bobby, and I am not tryin' to get caught up in it."

Lace retreated to her house, there to peruse her portfolio.

cHemitic Cultures, Inc., was making money.

Her court case was scheduled for three days from now, and she expected to win. Immediately upon a decision, she would begin manufacture of her new product line. Cultures had already been established, and bred, and normalized. Her only concern at this point was whether or not she would have to pay, or would be paid, royalties.

All of her patents were secured, all but this one, and she was ready to reconfigure the production line.

She wondered how she could market certain of her products.

Open advertising didn't seem advisable.

She guessed that she'd have to wait for the court decision on this issue, but in the meantime, other activities in her investments areas made her pause.

She had diversified almost immediately when cCI had moved into the black. She had decided to ensure a supplier for the parts she'd need for her new product lines. Her contested device needed a reliable source of certain chemicals, and also required consistent operator maintenance. She'd invested in a small company that made solenoids, stepmotors and other servo/sensory mechanisms. She had made a bit of money, and had invested widely throughout the field. As she perused her portfolio, she was a bit surprised to see just how much money she was making.

She was quite rich again.

Hell, why not reinvest?

She selected various component suppliers, and dropped a wad onto them. It was a bit harder to get the stocks than she'd anticipated. Somebody's computer immediately responded to her attempts to purchase certain of these companies stocks. It was as if free trading was allowed in small blocks, but attempts to assume control would be fought with really ridiculously large amounts of money. Her initial motions were of a large enough degree to set off alarms in somebody's trading-program, and her first cheap, easy purchases suddenly became prohibitively expensive. She set her computer to operate within certain limits, and left it to trade.

Checking back three days later, a patent victory under her belt, she checked her financial position and investments posture.

She was even richer.

News of her patent victory had pushed the value of cHemitic Cultures, Inc. even higher. She had split the company, and a certain portion of it was public again. She fought off certain attempts to grab it from her, attempts which came from well-known fronts for raiders specializing in biomedical companies. These attempts always pushed her stock values higher, as she took losses in other investments to capitalize and outbid (through fronts of her own) her competition for her own stocks. She even managed to occasionally make a few bucks in this manner.

Her main increase in income was due, however, to posted production and sales data concerning her suppliers, and their component sources.

Lace had decided to use robotics wherever applicable, as it reduced the human element and the inherent opportunities for error and infection.

The robots were much more sanitary than people, and since she was making culture incubators for products destined for human medical consumption, it made sense to increase automation wherever possible.

From the look of her component-manufacturer investments, somebody else was trying to automate. From the volume of sales and shipments, it appeared that someone was building a robotic factory.

Perhaps even a factory making robots. Lace was intrigued. She was curious to know if eventually this hypothetical new corporation would be able to undercut her suppliers. If so, she might well divest herself of her suppliers, if she could acquire a stock-ownership base within the new group. That would drive down supply costs, anyway.

She tried to look into the customers of these brisk little companies, and hit dead end after dead end.

There was no simple wall of blinds. The same fictitious group of private citizens owned majority blocks of all of the companies in question. They had, as seeming individuals, competed with her when she had sought large blocks of these companies. Neither she nor her computer had noticed.

She tried to link names-of-owners in her companies with names-of-owners in her customers. She got absolutely nowhere. The destination companies were all privately held, and exuded an air of secrecy that was almost palpable even through a modem.

So she decided (since there was really nothing else to do about this matter) to just let her money ride, and count up her earnings.

The young ones knew that someone was watching them. They didn't let up, though, not for a minute. They just did what anyone with a secret agenda did, they carried on as usual.

It was really obvious to them that they were being watched. The technique was all that wasn't known. They decided to put on a show.

They weren't really hurting anybody, not physically at least. Most of them really had no empathy. They hadn't really been allowed much opportunity for the development of empathy, and the chemicals which held them arrested in a pre-adult state had certain side effects, rendering them to all intents and purposes incapable of the finer emotions.

They had always known, and had on occasion had it rather forcefully demonstrated, that they were in many ways second-class citizens. The rage which any second-class citizen feels translated into a devil-may-care attitude, which was only exascerbated by the fact that if anyone deserved second-class status, it was most definitely them. So they danced their predatory dances, which were intended only for the peripheral vision of the "victims". Occasionally, they stuck them with pins in passing, leaving many citizens wondering whether or not they'd soon die of AIDS. The Caged didn't care at all that they were driving many of the less stable citizens to the brink of madness. Had they known, they would doubtless have intensified their efforts.

The agency that controlled them was itself a "black agency", one found on no rosters. Had there been a directory of "black operations", the Signatories Evaluation Board would have been hidden on the bottom of a footnote to some list. The Board had no real employees as such, being primarily a government-funded members-only-club with teeth. The operatives of the board were all Federal employees of some other agency, who occasionally switched hats in mid-thought. Some were highly paid men in positions of great power and authority... others were truck-drivers' wives, who worked part-time as nurses for Public Health departments across the country. The majority of large-city homeless- and indigent- assistance workers were affiliated. These people all possessed amazing clearances, and deserved them. They had kept their secret for almost sixty years. Resources were allocated, medications came by mail, and across the nation people came to local doctors at the VA Hospitals, and got examinations and prescriptions. The people who came and went were often pillars of their community, church elders, war heroes, bankers, and clerks. They saved their money, and sent their kids to college. Some of the kids, most of them really, never came back from college. This was understandable, as the parent generation tended to cluster in smallish towns, such as county seats in remote regions of the country. It was never much noticed among the parents, or their fellow citizens, that the final destinations of their children was most often the environs of the Nation's Capital.

Certain people obviously noticed them. They chose to put on the best show they could for these people. Why not? They assumed that the watchers were from the Signatories Evaluation Board, who knew full well what they were... They couldn't know, not being empathic at all, that they were scaring the hell out of some of the citizens, and had greatly influenced the formation of a government agency so paranoid that it turned itself over to direction by machines. They were just carrying on in their watched and metered lives.

Some lived incredibly normal, even fashionable lives. None hunted.

This last drove the FVK crazy.

Somebody was hunting town, though, and that was more the Metropolitan Police's problem.

There are active serial killers in absolutely every major metropolitan area. Statistically, it is inevitable, and with the decline of society's values and increase in population pressure, somebody or another is bound to snap. The FBI estimated in 1994 that there were between three hundred and five hundred serial killers at large in the country at any given time. Other agencies estimated that the FBI's estimate was low by at least one order of magnitude.

The District was no exception. Detectives had for awhile determined a pattern from mid '95 through most of '96, a pattern of predation upon local area bikerbar scum and small-time criminals. It fit the "Avenging Angel" profile. The pattern suddenly moved from that model, and instead of being concentrated mostly in the District's Northwest slums and projects, a new pattern emerged, of what seemed to be well-planned kidnappings and disappearances, scattered all over the voluminous suburban areas. Local investigators were baffled. One detective put forth the idea that it greatly resembled the activities of a group of people, but he was known around the VFW and the sports clubs as the kind of guy who believes that Masons control the world, and his remarks were discounted. For one thing, this couldn't be a group activity, since so far as anyone could tell, none of the victims were gang members.

Discounting the man had been unwise. He was indeed a fan of massive global conspiracy theories, but he was also one of the better detectives in the State of Virginia, despite his promotion to the Head of the Information Crimes Division of the Fairfax County police. He was one of the most "hip" cops in the country, as far as his exercise of office was concerned. He relentlessly pursued and prosecuted both criminal and negligent hackers, and his office was a first-stop point for anyone who wished to find out just what the networks knew about anybody. He was a local darling of the Electronic Frontier Foundation as he would, for a $10.00 fee per search, run any citizen's name (at the citizen's request, personal appearance & valid ID required) through the nets, and ask the citizen if the citizen had any complaints about the information returned. He would then direct the citizen to the appropriate agency if correction was required... or if sensitive or damaging information was found, legal action, from arrests to lawsuits could be arranged.

He went after hackers, unscrupulous listbrokers, and in general, gave the public a much greater sense of safety regarding the information world.

He was a bastion of modern, forward-looking, post-deconstructionist political will, serving his community as best he could. He had continued graduate school throughout his career as a policeman, as the force was willing to match any funds of his own that he put into furtherance of education. After ten years on the force, he finished his fourth matriculation, becoming one of several Juris Doctor cops on the Fairfax beat.

The country had spent the mid-nineties in a bitter depression and he was glad to be working at all, and police work suited him fine. He was making a difference. He often felt himself, as all cops do, to be fighting a war against a different breed of men that wished to tear apart the world that his kind had built. He made incredibly solid busts, and lost court cases only when the opposing attorneys were true heavyweights.

He had continued in school, as the environment suited him, and he loved the young ladies, and he was rather admired himself among the female grad students. He found school relaxing, and the campus was indeed one of the safer environments in an area where citycrime had taken advantage of rapid subway transportation, expanding its reign of terror even to such remote locations as this branch of George Mason. He found himself working towards a Master of Science in Statistical Methods and Behavioral Psychology, having discovered that computers and their operations were, for him, an easy thing. You just asked the right questions... By now he was a detective, Lieutenant in rank, but he was taken from the streets he loved and his education was now taken from his efforts at work in equal part with studies.

It was not surprising that he should become a cyberGhod.

He ran a BBS from home, and ran a massive government mainframe at work. It was one of the 1997 Cray Systems, Inc. jobs, a roomful of cryogenic processors and flashmemory. He was polite to his users on his home-BBS, as he let them know that this BBS was run by a cop, and not surprisingly, he had a lot of fellow officers calling his board. He unofficially linked coast to coast with other similarly-oriented systems from his home BBS, and monthly published his entire messagebase, securing copyright. His "paper" was often used by grad students as a preliminary publication source. He hadn't achieved any recognition as a scholarly journal, but some of his datafiles were used and reused by students across the nation, and his applications rooms ran packages that were the best that Federal money could buy. He had set up a secondary node to siphon Uniform Crime Reports and similar data from various Federal mainframes... not exactly in accord with procedure, but not exactly illegal, either.

Officially, he was responsible for both the compilation of data from various sources and for on-line research into new law-enforcement techniques. He sometimes muttered to himself that he had never intended to wind up as a librarian. He did a hell of a job, and somebody had to do it, and nobody did it as well as he did, so he took his raises, and sat in his office, and used idle time to keep up with the literature of his field.

There had been some very weird shit going on out in California a few years back. People had disappeared at a rather higher rate than was usual for even California, favorite home of the missing-persons complaint. The figures were not that much higher when looked at in raw abstract, but when the data on closure rates was added to the equation, the graphs jumped.

Whatever had plagued northern California had died out there, in the wake of a major bust of some kind of cult/revolutionary ring. He looked further into his "stacks" and found that at about the time the California group had taken a fall, "copycat" activity had begun elsewhere, and was on a steady rise.

There were persistent allegations, by children nationwide, of ritual abuse, of ritual animal mutilations, of secret cabalistic meetings. Very little ever came of these allegations, other than occasional arrests, and sometimes convictions for child abuse, incest, and child prostitution.

There were nationwide reports by enraged farmers of mutilated cattle, of strange crop circles, and occasionally, owners of very large private tracts of land reported finding strange circles of rocks, generally in the shape of a cross on a wheel, with a bloodstained centerpiece. Quite often, the blood turned out to be, in part at least, human.

The numbers of missing person was on the rise everywhere, and very often, the missing persons were not criminal or drifter types, but solid citizens, mothers and fathers and their children. Occasionally, entire families utterly vanished, as if removed from the very Earth.

The FVK embarked, in early 1996, on a campaign of blackmail and intimidation, in an attempt to accelerate an already existing trend towards relocation of Federal headquarters out of the District. They were very successful. Their mission was simplified by the 1995 destruction of the Oklahoma City Federal Building, which demonstrated how vulnerable were centralized Federal presences to sabotage using the simplest techologies. Finally the government had wakened to the fact that with a single home-made nuclear device, even one which simply spread radionucleide dusts, any city could be speedily rendered uninhabitable. The FVK braintrust wondered why this had not been previously considered. They decided that the government was being kept centralized intentionally, so that the reins of power might be more easily seized. The FVK identified the persons responsible for making the decisions to remain in the District or to relocate, made them offers they couldn't refuse, and the diaspora of government began in earnest.

By 1998, most of the files warehouses of the CIA, FBI, LEAA and the Library of Congress had been rather quietly removed from the various suburban locations they had once occupied. They were in general removed to the most rural areas that could be found. Small cities sprang up almost overnight, cities almost totally self-contained, and to a great degree self-supporting. County seats in rural Iowa, West Virginia, and Minnesota went from near-ghost towns to Federal company towns. Unemployment dropped to near zero in these places, and a fanatic loyalty was produced. An East Coast accent, let alone a foreign one, would be cause for remarks and suspicion. It was interesting to note that the places which had once been home to anti-government militias suddenly became intensely pro-government when the government put them to work running the agencies such as the BATF which had once caused the militias' ideologues the greatest concern.

A decades-old Shop report had predicted the eventual decline of the power of the cities in the wake of a crossover from industrial to service/information economy. This had indeed occurred, most prominently in the cities of the southwest and south central United States, and the Shop report had made certain recommendations. Since economic Darwinism selected for lean, mean production units in competition rather than large economic sectors operating in restraint of trade (when viewed in a global context; locally, the opposite applied), a promotion of the formation of such mini-industries and their supporting communities made a great deal of sense. With the advent of the InterNet, and eventually the NETS (with their statutorily-guaranteed minimum access), optical fiber began to connect every town with a telephone company with every other. Government donation of mainframe idle-time for remote computation accelerated the trend.

Failed company towns were identified, and those with the most intact abandoned facilities were more-or-less purchased outright. The new telefactor/robotic industry was hard pressed to supply components for the machines which clambered over the ruins of last century's factories and mines, cannibalizing and refabricating.

As smalltown America became the diffuse nexus of a new industrial might, the Government became also more diffuse. This was entirely in line with what the founding fathers had envisioned when they had devised a political system suitable for a nation of landed agrarian gentry.

As the institutions of higher education and industry fled to the countryside, advancing relentlessly towards a mode of hightech decentralization, robotic manufacture and distributed research, the cities settled deeper into their role as a vast cesspool of human misery.

Doctor Diablo was alive and well.

In the wake of the massive busts that had swept California, he had pulled his proverbial hole in after himself, and had stashed his monies, and had parted ways with the Cult. The Cult, or its shattered remnants, searched and searched for him, but he was a bit beyond their reach, as he was attending medical school in Paris and Geneva. Some of the decadence he had seen in those ancient cities made the Cult seem rather tame, and he had managed to discover, and peripherally participate in, some of the most dangerous. As a society dedicated to pure evil, the Cult was pretty dogmatic, hidebound, and in fact, fundamentalist, about what could be expected of a purely American homegrown evil. The things that existed in Europe were quite less definable, more traditional... but certainly no less deadly.

He had managed to slake his taste for gruesomeness, however, and retained his dedication to evil. He had also become something of an epicure. The evil he had known in America was the best that he'd been able to find or make, but, like a provincial chef of the highest order suddenly confronted with the best in international cuisine, he'd had to broaden his palate.

He'd completed his medical degree, and had indulged his taste for twisted ironies by broadening his educational purview to include forensics. He had graduated Summa Cum Laude from the Sorbonne in forensic medicine in 1997, and now he was the Medical Examiner for the District of Columbia.

He indulged his curiosity by performing nonstandard tests on the cadavers he was presented with, but kept his results to himself.

He found beta-carboline, and tetrodotoxin, and various unusual hypnotics such as scopalamine and ketamine in combination in some of his clientele, and interestingly enough, most of these people had been delivered to him with their throats cut. He listed the cause of death as exsanguination, perpetrator unknown.

He might no longer be a member of this provincial little exclusively American evil known as the California Cannibal Cult, having moved on to bigger and better evils, but he felt a smarmy loyalty to his old "alma mater". He covered for them. It was easy. Besides, that was why he was here in his present position as the District of Colombia's Medical Examiner. Evidence suppression was his new role in life.

He'd been turned in Geneva. It had been ridiculously easy.

When the Berlin Wall fell, when the edifices that had housed Communism in Europe tumbled back into the streets from which they'd been raised, the KGB and its satellites had cut themselves loose, destroying self-incriminatory files whenever possible, retaining other files and also the methodologies, and above all, the experience and will to dominate through whatever means were necessary. No longer under the direction of any particular political will, the former agents of formerly Communist powers had formed a sinister group of men and women dedicated to nothing more than mere personal power and nothing less than global domination.

As a secret society living within the greater society, like one worm within the heart of the rose they were greatly alert for the presence of other worms. The other worms shared certain traits, such as a functional paranoia often expressed by compulsions to remove evidence, reluctance to dine in public, and similar predilections. When these former moles, operatives and station chiefs found persons previously unknown to them exchanging recognition signs, using semantically unusual phrases and words, and exhibiting elaborate protocols of identification and introduction, they knew that they were on to the trail of new and tasty game. They'd learned early on to feed on smaller, more criminal enterprises, gathering the useful to themselves, and eliminating the foolish or resistant. Interestingly enough, they made no headway in the District. The Caged young ones did perform an extremely useful service; when given clearance to do so, they did exceptional jobs of identifying and removing persons attempting penetrations and usurpations by foreign operatives.

Doctor Diablo had been fucking a slightly vivisected near-corpse with an IV full of some utterly new psychoactives slowly dripping into his veins when the hotel mirror had rolled down into the wall, and he saw instead of his reflection, the lenses of several cameras and grim-faced men. One of the cameramen had expressed a desire, in thickly Bulgar Russian accents, to perform on Diablo the same experiments that the Doctor had been engaged in, and terrified in the grip of his strange brew, the pharmacologist had sworn away his previous plans and had become the slave of Moscow's secretive ex-elite.

They'd turned up the drip, and Doctor Diablo had spent a long fortnight in a hell of his own concoction, and had emerged scarred to the greatest depth of what remained of his soul.

In covering for the Cult, he was exceeding his initiative, and acting in contravention of the orders given him by his masters.

There was a darkness over town these days.

The level of anxiety even in the suburbs was amazing. As far out as Olney, Maryland, and Sterling, Virginia, there were bars on windows, multiple alarms on doors, and handgun ownership (often extremely illegal) was at record levels.

Youth gangs permeated the suburbs, and the terror of the legitimate bourgeoisie was only increased by the factionalism of modern youth.

There were skinheads, disaffected neo-Nazi lower and middle class youth, characterized by racism, violence and criminality. They often clashed with anyone and everyone with little or no provocation. The police simply hated the skinheads, and despite the skinheads' drug-free or straight-edge leanings, tried to drive the "skins" into hiding or flight.

There were, of course, the "Deadheads", still following the Grateful Dead around the country, but they mainly ate a lot of LSD and really didn't much bother people. The Deadheads, of course, had their own specialized predators amongst them, as they were a vagrant and transient subculture. They were similar to the Gypsies in that, but they mostly wanted to spread peace, enlightenment, and New Age philosophy, along with a little blotter acid and magic mushrooms. Their own predators were a scary bunch, really friendly hippies and their chicks who would put you up for the night, feed you strange food, and take everything you had, and leave you overdosed on hallucinogenics in some lost neck of the woods.

The real problem was the gangsters, the rockboys, and their customers.

Crack cocaine had gripped DC and environs in a fist of terror since the late eighties.

There were literally thousands of deaths, and tens of thousands of shootings. It had been remarked that there had been less killing in the Desert Storm conflict of 1991 than had occurred in the drug wars of the early nineties. This was not strictly true, but the figures were within an order of magnitude. The Desert Storm war had been a triumph of military precision, for the most part, but in the drugwar-zones of the Capital's slums the weapons of choice were handguns, generally carried by inexperienced and untrained youth. The kids often hit what they aimed at, but generally only after expending an eighteen-round clip full of 9mm parabellum rounds. Innocent people in their houses cooking dinner, old ladies sitting on their porches, and juveniles at schools were as often shot as were the desired targets.

Parents desperate to save the lives of their children moved into the farthest reaches of the suburbs, but like a madman fleeing delusions of persecution, they often found that despite all speed and distance, they had taken their problems along with them. The children had been acculturated into the society of violence and poverty, and acculturation is very hard to shed even if well-understood and change is desired.

The efficient and farflung public transit systems of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority moved the citizenry speedily to work in the mornings, and home at night, and upon the same rails traveled a plague of discontent and anger, a plague that was armed to the teeth. The citizens were tired of all of the violence, and had allowed legislation for severe handgun control. They didn't bother to think it all through, and riding a wave of hysteria, they had permitted themselves to be disarmed even as a wave of weapons heists put unprecedented military-class firepower into the hands of children.

Carjackings became ever more common, and the citizens found themselves restricted more and more to use of the public transit systems, as District area insurance rates skyrocketed. This only made them more accessible to the criminals.

Lace was wearing black again. The watering hole where she'd met Ron was only thirty yards from the Dupont Circle Metrorail exit, but she'd had to run a gauntlet of about fifteen different panhandlers. One large individual had actually touched her, mouthing some mad obscenity concerning "blue-eyed devils" destroying the black man, you owe me, give me a dollar, and he had suddenly sprouted a one-centimeter slash below his eye, and she did the little disappearance dance of her kind, fading into the crowd of Classless that filled the streets.

She hadn't been near the place for a month. She'd been a busy woman.

cHemitic Cultures, Inc. had a new product line.

She loved her new product.

She didn't think she would ever have to hunt again.

For a month, she'd been living as her ancient ancestors might have lived, well-fed on the blood of Men, and there was no Hunger in her at all. She decided that she had better give it a year before she tried to market it, to see if there had been anything left out of her nutrient formulas. In the month that she'd satisfied her needs with the output of her new device, she'd felt not a twinge of Hunger, and she decided that she could easily learn to love this.

To all intents and purposes, she was just another woman. No secret need, no planning for seduction of some witless prey, no slowly creeping insanity and rage.

She had choices again... and choice tasted of freedom.

She loved the new taste of freedom.

It was something she had not tasted for years.

She paid the cover, and entered. Ron was not to be seen, but there was quite a crowd. She bellied up to the rail and ordered. She retreated to a corner and sat for awhile. Still no sign of Ron... so she sat and sipped her white wine, and watched the crowd.

Another vampyress greeted her. It was Trishya, one of the Morgue crew. They exchanged a sign or two, and then Trishya caught sight of another of her friends and hurried away from Lace. It looked as if Lace had unwittingly walked in on bat night.

What the hell. She decided to sit it out, and try to fade into mass of the Caged Ones.

The Caged Ones knew better than to dose, but they certainly weren't at all above doing the monkey dances of the Touch-Me-Not faction. They slowly drove the mere Normals from the bar with oneirotaxic hallucinotropic fascinatory techniques, slowly hypnotizing and herding the poor unwitting slowfolk towards the doors. Lace had quite mixed feelings about such activity. On the one hand, it was, technically, a pure joy to behold. Human psychiatrists and behavioral psychologists would trade vital organs for such innate knowledge of their own cognitive and perceptual processes... On the other hand, Lace had within her memories of how she had been when she was "human", when she had as yet been unexposed to the faster, spectrally greater world of her kind. She (or this facet of her personality) was totally aghast at the ease with which, totally unnoticed and unremarked, her kind was able to assume even without the use of the Power total control over the unconscious motivations of their natural prey.

She reflected for a moment, and decided that since the young ones had no need to hunt, due to their medication, it was all the worse. Why do it then? Merely because it was possible? Somewhere deep within the recesses of her memory, a truthtable formed, and sorted... and the answer that came to her she liked not at all.

Given a choice, questions of Good versus Evil applied, and given a choice, use of such techniques was reprehensible at best, despicable at worst. She assumed that the quality of evil depended on motivations, and there were no obvious motivations at work, other than the desire to practice ancient cultural skills, and to acquire a clear field of operations. Was this to be a meet, then?

It appeared that it was indeed a meet. She'd never been to one, wishing to avoid such concentrations of her kind. A twentyish-looking vampyr sat upon the rail, and signed for order. The vampyrs in the bar all turned to face him, dropping the alignments they had assumed (having turned to practicing on each other in the absence of Normals), and gave him their full attention. He switched to audible nightspeech mode. Soft whistled sibilants, clicks and pops filled the room, masked by normal speech. Lace was nearly incompetent at the nightspeech, so she mainly watched the signs of a nearby vampyress who was translating for her deaf companion. (Vampyrs suffer from birth defects caused by Rubella no less than do mainstream humans.) A strange thought flitted through her head... I wonder what mainstream Deaf people make of our constant non-verbal non-AmESLan communication?

She translated mentally:

I suppose you all know that we have a little vampyr problem here in DC. We wouldn't be having this meet if the situation were otherwise.

We are all going to have to greatly modify our behavior as regards The Project. Please restrict signs to recognition modes only. For more concise or elaborate communication, please restrict yourselves to punctuational-cryptographic in written modes, and nightspeech in verbal mode. As we all know, there is no better method for determining the existence of positive surveillance than outrageous behavior. One watches for reactions, and later, one watches for failure to react. One can then positively determine routes and degrees of communication.

We generally do not expect similar techniques to be used against us, but we have, several of us, experienced episodes which lead us to conclude that this is indeed the case. Provocations are to cease immediately. As far as our standard annoyance techniques which we normally reserve for members of the Signatories Evaluation Board, it seems that we have been applying these techniques rather randomly to private citizens, foreign nationals with diplomatic credentials (and who can know what they have reported to their respective governments?) and apparently, agencies independent of the Signatories Evaluation Board have become aware of our existence. We have no idea who these people are, as a rule, nor are we certain of what agencies these more-than-hypothetical observers represent.

Therefor, be on guard, and be on our best behavior. The next time you report for inquisition, you may not be questioned merely by the Evaluators.

Ron never did show up, which Lace counted as a bit of a blessing. The other vampyrs would have run him right out, and she had noticed that it was the people on phenthiazines (which work by suppressing conditioned reflex) who most often noticed her kind. They didn't look away when a dustball flicked past them, and often looked straight at a vampyr when others were distracted, and the fascinations almost never worked properly on such persons. Fortunately for her kind they most often discounted the weirds her kind laid on the hapless Normals as further evidence of their disturbances.

Had Ron shown, she could not easily have left, as it would have made her stand out from the group, and vampyrs were much less tolerant of "deviance" than were Normals. The ability of the mad to discern them from the rest of the herd was anathematic. To a Normal, a non-violent crazy person was merely an annoyance. To a vampyr, a non-violent crazy person was an absolute threat of exposure. A violent crazy person was a massive threat, for these people could almost invariably and immediately distinguish a vampyr from a Normal person, and had no compunctions whatsoever about tracking and attempting to destroy a vampyr. She reflected that being able to discern predatory beings masquerading as the normal citizens who could not discern the (really quite obvious) differences would make anyone crazy. If you could see monsters where nobody else could, even if you did not become crazy, you'd soon become known as a crazy.

It wouldn't help such a Normal at all that vampyrs sought out such persons, and did their best to make them crazy. Such activity was, to a vampyr, evolutionarily beneficial and survival-enhancing. Why not remove threats? Violence was out of the question; a person struck down after ranting about vampires being everywhere would perhaps be believed in retrospect. Therefor, one pushed someone who was already out on a cliff right over the edge.

Fred and Cala had taught her how to do it, and she'd watched it done. It was really pretty easy. You distracted the normal Normals with the flick of something small and fast across their field of vision, and when they looked away, you "tweaked" the target-person. The optimal technique used something Cala had called The Drill, which was basically an acupuncturists' needle, a very fine wire that left a wound that healed almost instantly, leaving no mark but guaranteed to strike any nerve to fire. As the Normals' eyes subconsciously tracked the little flicked subliminal distractions, one feinted an attack on the target. The target would slowly go nuts under the pressure of someone "attacking" them from behind. Adrenaline byproducts would build up and act as hallucinogens... and the crazy would get crazier. When finally pressed far enough, the distracted Normals would suddenly turn to see a madman attacking someone for "no discernible reason". When examined for sanity at the behest of the courts, if the crazy told the truth (Goddamned vampires keep bugging me, tryin' to make me crazy!) he would be locked up for certain. Those who could not be incited to attack most often withdrew into catatonia.

She wondered at the kinds of minds that could create a problem, a label for the problem, "paranoia", a definition of the problem, and could then promulgate the dissemination of this "percept" or "ideon" into a larger culture to the point of near-universal acceptance. There were of course actual paranoids, but in DC, most paranoids were paranoid for a reason.

She wondered more at the kind of mind that would accept such a lie at face value, internalize it unquestioningly, and would incarcerate, drug, and occasionally lobotomize their own best defense against the predators who hid amongst them.

No wonder that those who knew her kind for what they were, who knew her kinds' games and deceits for what they were, called her kind Fiends and Demons.

It was also no wonder that her kind called the Normal people who were taken in by such manipulation of their worldview, Cattle.

The Big Lie techniques of her kind caused these people to cull from their own kind those who could detect their self-styled Overseers, Owners and Masters... rather like domestic bovines pushing those other bovines who could smell the blood closest to the slaughterhouse, or to the outside of the herd, to be the first to be taken by the wolves.

She perused this allegory further, and if her kind were wolves, and Normals were cattle, what then was she? She had hunted the edge of the herd, taking the rejected, preying upon the predators among the herd... it came to her then, that as most of the Caged Ones (who were obviously about to make an attempt to become less Caged than The Cage) were on the medications and need not hunt, but were "fed", they were (continuing the allegory) Dogs. She had been a Wolf, wild and miserable, but free. The Normals were the Cattle. Where were the Men in her allegory?

His brain had been cut, his eyes widened and re-lensed. He no longer thought as did a Man, and he had been rebuilt from the ground up.

In The House of Pain he had been reborn.

The psychosurgical technique of severing his corpus callosum would have divided the mind of any ordinary man, leaving an intellect divided between the visual-spatial and verbal-kinesic worlds. This man had been a troublemaker all of his life, though, and despite his very superior problem solving abilities, he never would amount to much. He was beset by a combination of educational bete-noires: adult hyperactivity, distributed perceptual linkage, and mixed cerebral dominance. He was also what would be called by those who would belittle one who could not avoid noticing them, a paranoid.

He had always been, and would always be, hyperalert, slow to tire, fast to react. His actions had the quality of being "impulsive", that is, rapid to the point of being often mistaken for reflexes. He actually had no reflexes, all of his activities being directly cued by his mind, however subconscious those cues might be.

The distributed perceptual linkages made it possible for him to read, carry on a conversation, and play a musical instrument at the same time. It also made it impossible for him to focus exclusively on any one thing, and combined with his hyperactivity, made him almost ineducable insofar as standard educational practices were concerned. Only a very rare and beautiful inherent love of language, and music and art had made it possible for a very healthy and active little boy living in roughly fifteen times the perceptual world of a normal human able to learn at all. Most of his kind were called autistic... but he had been raised in a remote part of the country, and the birds and flowers and falling snowflakes had not been so demanding and threatening as the constant whine and howling of traffic and hundreds of pedestrians would have been to a city child of his kind. A kinder age would have called him "bewildered", for a Wild Man is indeed what he was.

His mixed cerebral dominance meant that all of the functions, memories and abilities which existed in either hemisphere of his brain existed to the same degree in the other. Should he learn any "handedness-preferenced" skill with one side, in a matter of days or weeks, the other side could exactly mirror-image the new ability. He could write simultaneously, in identical cursives, with both hands, either mirror-imaged, or forwards, or backwards.

Being the type of hyperactive that moves the whole body instead of merely twitching a finger or foot restlessly, he was given to constant exercise, and so his parents taught him to dance at an early age. He became a very good dancer, and when this failed to exhaust him to the point of manageability, he was taught to wrestle, in both classical (Greek) and oriental (Judo and Aikido) styles. This kept him tired, and in excellent physical shape, but unfortunately had the undesirable side-effect of teaching him how to fight. His oriental instructors recognized a potential star-pupil, and also recognized the unruliness, and taught him meditational and contemplative techniques. This only served to sharpen his awarenesses, but also taught him restraint, introspection, and equanimity.

He lived in a very different world from most of his classmates at the special-educational facilities to which his despairing parents had remanded him when puberty and the concomitant hormonal onslaught made him completely unmanageable.

He had been medicated for his unmanageability a few times, but this had been stopped when it developed that he reacted badly to all of the medications used on him. He made it a point to react badly to drugs. Most of his classmates were greatly dysfunctional in some way or another. He was, by contrast, extremely hyperfunctional, and bored out of his mind. He complained repeatedly of his boredom, citing the evidence of his tests and essays which indicated that he had been operating at a post-highschool level since he was twelve, but the staff was damned if they would release a genius-level hyperactive with post-adult fighting capacity into the "normal world" without superstandard socialization.

As he matured, the staff became ever more aware of what a different creature he was.

He could reliably track and repeat verbatim six technical-level conversations while juggling on a tightrope. The number of conversations he could track and repeat dropped to three when he was doing integrals in his head. The staff really didn't know what to do with him when he had hit fifteen, and several of the staff members (all of whom were post-doctorates in Human Development) began to amuse themselves by giving him college level courses in useful fields such as mathematics, computer programming, astrophysics, and literature. Some of the more cynical staff began to compose post-doctoral dissertations on his syndrome, which they amusedly termed hyperhumanity.

He was pretty much alone in the world. He had read everything available, purloining doctoral level texts, and was conversant with most of the staff at their levels of expertise within their fields. By the time his eighteenth birthday approached, he was an uncertified college graduate in twelve sciences and six arts.

The government had no idea what to do about him.

He had long since attracted the attention of the Federal Government, and various agencies had pondered the ramifications of releasing into the world an extremely healthy young man who had never since age eight been a child, and who had been basically a little animal before that time. Professional threat estimators (including, under false colors, Shop investigators) considered him one of the more dangerous persons ever, considering that he had independently designed a fission device, portable laser weaponry, and Magnetohydrodynamic spacedrives before the age of sixteen, all on the basis of a few classes in math and physics, and the knowledge that such things were possible.

Did he resent the people who had held him captive among the insane, the brain-damaged, and the genetically incompetent? At one time, he had held them in incredible contempt, and hated them with the passion of which only an adolescent is capable, but the staff at his academy had expected this, and had done their best to present only a benign face to him, and despite his awareness of the increasing fear and apprehension concerning him and his incipient freedom, his emergent adult faculties of empathy and social responsibility superseded any lingering resentments.

When he was sixteen, he was resigned to being a prisoner, having been one most of his life, and when he was sequestered from the imbeciles and rejects and given accelerated schooling, he learned to appreciate the extra work as a reward in itself, not as an additional vicissitude.

This attitude allowed him to see himself as being blessed by having a staff of thirty who were more or less assigned to answer his every question, instead of becoming paranoid about being watched, monitored, tested and discussed by thirty people who were making him their lives' work.

In the wake of a 1992 case (Foucha v. Louisiana, where the defendant had been incarcerated in a mental institution after found incompetent to stand trial due to a drug-induced delusional disorder. He was later examined and found to be sane, but "antisocial". Prison psychiatrists labeled Foucha as being potentially dangerous upon release, and begged the state to continue his confinement. Foucha fought this.) the Supreme Court had permitted "preventative detention" of diagnosed "psychologically abnormal" persons.

Richard Thurston was a very nice guy, considering that he had the capacity to break almost anybody in half with really minimal effort. He was kind to his pets, was impossible to rile in any debate, took defeats and setbacks (few as they were) in stride with an easy grace... and he had no idea as his eighteenth birthday approached that his friends on the staff were initiating court action to have him declared "an irremediable and incorrigible hazard to public safety; incurably insane, and mentally defective".

In such cases, psychosurgery was authorized, up to and including the new "cortex bombs", implanted devices which would rather quietly explode within a person's cranium, leaving valuable reclaimable organs intact, but reducing a person's mind and soul to organic jelly. More commonly, the semantic centers were destroyed along with the frontal lobes, and deaf, dumb and devoid of will, what had once been a human being would drift uncaringly through a fog of incomprehensible existence.

Had he suspected, he would have quietly crushed his own larynx.

As it was, the Shop broke him out.

The training wasn't that difficult. He already understood most of the computer languages then current: C variants, Ada, Jovial, the universal Basic and the new FORTRAN 97.

What was difficult were he various surgeries he had to undergo. Once they had been explained to him, certain of them made sense, were desirable. The modifications to his corneas were certainly desirable, as they would give him wraparound vision, with heavy filtering outside of the visual spectrum. He was greatly less convinced about the partial severance of the corpus callosum, which would allow totally independent tracking by each eye, and considering his other neurological peculiarities, pretty much make each side of him a complete and functional human being. When they began to inform him as to his mission, he began to understand what a benefit this would be, and acquiesced.

First, though, came a lot of training.

Virtual realities had really been predicted quite accurately by one William Gibson in his novel, Neuromancer, which won several awards for its vision of a gritty but technically profound future. Mr. Gibson had coined the term "cyberspace" which entered into the English language with an amazing rapidity. Cyberspace was seen by Mr. Gibson as an electronically-induced consensus hallucination... but in the late 1990's, no consensus had been reached, and Mr. Gibson's vision of surface-electrode simulated stimuli was far from reality.

Richard was to be a pioneer in the realization of that dream, but surface electrodes simply wouldn't do the trick.

There were, along with the callosectomy which split him into two complete unconscious minds operating under the direction of one conscious mind, several implants, mostly sub-scalp, though some went deeper. A cortex bomb was not installed, as Richard was to be the master-node of a diffuse cybernetic organism, and usurpation of detonation control-codes was considered a definite possibility. The mesh of fine wires that spread under his healing scalp was not noticeable to any casual observer, and once healed, even Richard had a difficult time tracing the paths.

Training was similar to any biofeedback training. He learned to code binary for each discrete wire end, and soon, simple on/off gave way to octal coding, then to hexadecimal coding. It was really rather similar to learning sign language, but each special "word" was a specific command to a remote operating system. The training for sensory discretion was more difficult, as it amounted to learning to discern frequency, waveform, and envelope with nerve ends which normally would have been reserved for pressure-sensing at the surface of his scalp. It helped that he was already a rather accomplished musician. He caught hell for wiring one of his training devices into a MIDI converter, and using it to drive a polyphonic synthesizer, his mind alone producing a really quite splendid rendition of the Brandenburg Concerto.

His new eyes took some getting used to... he would be sitting at a table, eating, and someone would open a door almost directly behind him, and he would see them. The fiberoptic mesh in a vatgrown modified clone of his own corneal tissue acted as would an insect's compound eye. A dot would appear at the edge of his vision, and as he turned his head towards the source, it would resolve into a bad computergraphic low-resolution image of a biped. As his eye continued to track, the raised rim of the fisheye torus would acquire the image, and it would spring into tight focus at the limit of his peripheral vision. The fisheye redirected peripheral vision into the macula, the portion of the retina which was most densely packed with receptors. A small lump on the pseudo-cornea made sure that he no longer had blind spots... but it required a great deal of training to modify eye-hand co-ordination and his perceptual paradigms to the point where the consequent astigmatism no longer made flat objects look semicylindrical.

The training for visual interpretation of the scalp inputs was really scary, as it consisted of floating in a sensory-deprivation tank, with only the scalp inputs between him and madness. Doubtless this was greatly responsible for the speed with which he learned to resolve what amounted to a furious itching of his scalp into comprehensible (if very low-resolution) images.

They trained him to use telefactors. The telefactors were mostly such devices as forklifts, bulldozers and other such heavy equipment modified for remote control, but there also was some practice with smaller, faster devices. He had a wonderful time playing with the model airplanes, buzzing the compound for effect... there was never any sense of actually "being" the machines, any more than one could "be" one's arm, but the remote effectors became much easier to operate, and by the beginning of January, 1999, he could assume control of almost any telefactor device as easily as a modern kid could begin to play any Nintendo videogame.

The FVK had (they thought) a constant lock on (they thought) enough of the vampires to begin assembling case studies. The vampires came, and went, to work, to the movies, to shopping centers, to drugstores. The last greatly concerned the FVK, as it had occurred to some of the staff that the vampires couldn't possibly avoid hunting (the FVK was still operating under the assumption that such skill, knowledge and speed as the vampires exhibited could not possibly have evolved except under the pressures of having to hunt beings as intelligent as themselves) without some sort of dietary or drug regimen as nutritional support.

First they had eliminated the obvious. In 1990, the Red Cross had removed operations from the District to Baltimore. FVK crews established surveillance of the Red Cross facility, and found that indeed, the amount of blood transfused into human patients was greatly less than the amount of blood collected. They tried to make allowances for possible experimental uses of human blood, and still could not account for over three-quarters of the missing blood.

They followed certain specific vampires everywhere they went, and the only lead common to all of the subjects was certain pharmaceutical outlets. Efforts were made to raid the databases of these outlets, but a wall of uncommon security was shielding all of these outlets' databases and customerlists. They even tried running some of their high-powered icebreaker and mole viruses through the systems, but the intrusion countermeasures were of NSA quality.

Ron was wandering down the sidewalk, trying to shake the feeling of dread that was a part of his every waking second, when a woman bumped into him. Normally, when he went anywhere, he divided his attention, mostly looking at his feet in a posture greatly expressive of depression and destitution, occasionally checking the world around him to see if a riot was headed his way. Today, though, his induced agoraphobia was very intense, and he did not see the woman until she had almost knocked him on his ass.

He had been feeling rather depressed lately, as he had finally met a woman he was interested in, and had immediately lost her. He had been back to the watering hole a few times, looking for Lace, and he hadn't been able to find her.

He was even more depressed by the fact that the Mental Health department was going to more or less cut him loose.

The nameless, faceless mid-level bureaucrat who he had last seen upon his release almost four years ago had called him in, and had told him that the city could no longer continue to pay his rent and groceries. He had a choice of either being dropped from the program (although he was still required to receive twice-monthly injections at government expense) or he could move to the projects at Fifth Street and the Southeast Freeway. There was no way in hell that a timid white boy would long survive at the projects, so it looked like he was going to be out on the streets, and soon. He was beating the streets looking for temporary work, and he was facing some pretty stiff competition.

Ron could not possibly be aware that he had been cut loose in the wake of the final dissolution and removal of overt Shop influences from the District.

He did, though, become suddenly aware of bouncing off of a woman he had not seen coming, and as he gathered his wits and courage for the inevitable confrontation, he noticed that the woman he had bounced off of was quite pale (though also somehow very dark), wore a very tasteful and expensive peach ensemble, and had lovely green eyes looking right into him over a mysterious smile... "Lace!" he exclaimed.

"Hi, Ron! Fancy that, me just bumping into you like this... what are you doing for lunch?"

"Uh, uh, nothing." He was flabbergasted. Totally out of the blue, his goddess had descended and wanted him to do lunch. "Where do you want to go?"

"Almost anyplace will do. How about McDonald's, or is that too upscale for you?"

The FVK tipped its hand a bit when it inserted a warrant into a datastream directed to a court clerk in Northern Virginia. The court clerk handed a stack of documents to a Federal Judge, who barely paused in his rubberstamping of these warrants. Another Controlled Dangerous Substances case... it seemed that they would never end.

The warrant was served by a team of FBI agents, who arrested three men as they walked towards their private clinic. The men clammed up, as they expected to make a phone call to a lawyer who would recognize certain code phrases, and would notify appropriate other members of the Signatories Evaluation Board. The men never got to make that phone call. The FBI agents duly surrendered their charges to the men who met them at the appointed place, the men who proffered appropriate credentials.

Clamming up is not the thing to do when confronted by the FVK. The men certainly didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition, nor the latest in veridical drugs.

McDonald's was just what Ron liked.

They sat in one of the darker corners of the restaurant, and Lace somehow managed to wolf down two Big Macs(tm) and was putting away a large fries with a great deal of vigor. Ron nibbled, rabbitlike, on a large Chef's salad, and was somewhat appalled by her appetite.

"How do manage to eat so much? Are you just breaking training?"

"Why, no! I just didn't have breakfast this morning." She was almost finished. She grinned at him a little bit, and then finished snacking down her fries. "Wanna take a ride with me?"

"Where to?"

"How about Frederick, Maryland?"

"Great," he said, and suddenly a flash of pre-treatment memory surfaced. "I'm from there. Great place and all, but when I left for college, I was damned glad."

"But it's such a beautiful place! And it's a lovely May day... perfect for a drive..." She smiled at him more widely, and in the light, he saw that her teeth were very white and quite long. She must have had a great orthodontist, he thought inanely. His own teeth were somewhat irregular, and typical of the kids who grew up in the countryside of the Catoctin mountains outside of Frederick.

"It is that. I haven't seen that many nice spring days around here. Usually it just goes straight from winter into summer. Sure, I'm up for a ride. Where's your car?"

"We have to ride Metro to get to it. I keep it uptown, don'tcha know? It's got a really nice stereo in it, and I really don't feel like getting it ripped off."

The car was a really nice 1996 T-Bird, and when she cranked it up, it purred just like a great cat. She had some options packages he didn't know you could get on a 'Bird, like full-time fourwheel drive, quad-Positrac. She recited a little litany as they worked their way out of Silver Spring where she had it parked in a 24-hour self-serve storage facility.

"Lessee," she said as they headed out on Georgia Avenue northbound, "we got yer basic T-Bird, 1996, heavily modified and highly illegal highcompression smallblock V-8. You wouldn't believe the aspiration package I have on this thing. Full-time fourwheel drive, selectable suspension, Pirelli's best radials with run-flat inserts..."

"What's the deal here Lace, this is better equipped than most State Police pursuit cars!"

"You haven't seen the half of it yet. Ever see Road Warrior?"

He cracked up. "Don't tell me you have bombs on the gas tank..."

"OK," she said, "I won't tell you."

She was a good driver. She seemed to have an excellent sense of traffic timing, and despite the fact that the T-Bird was what passed for a full-sized car these days (most of the surrounding traffic had four or less cylinders) she certainly got up the road. She liked to play with the controls a lot, and this was just traffic. He wondered how she'd handle an actual crisis situation.

He resolved to curb his wondering in the future. There was an additional joystick-type lever on the gearshift console, and a smaller one next to it... it had the look of aftermarket special-equipment. When a small car jumped the light in front of them, he braced for collision. Lace didn't even blink, a good thing at the speed they were going. She aimed right at the car, which had stalled in the intersection, grabbed the joystick, yanked the wheel left, and described a small circle with the joystick. She heel-and-toed the pedals, and Ron could feel the transfer of power between the wheels of the car as the European radials cut and bit into the macadam. There was never a moment's sensation of loss of control, and they shot past the baffled driver in the small car. She had accelerated rapidly when the situation had developed, jumping quickly ahead of the traffic pack for more room to maneuver.

He unswallowed his heart, and said, "I guess you can drive. What does that lever do?"

"It's a manual select for the 'quad-posi'... allows me to prefer power to whichever wheel."

"Why didn't you just go for manual systems all around, since you like to play so much?"

"I like the speed of automatic systems, OK? Plus when you don't need the control, they take care of themselves." They were well ahead of the pack, and she relaxed. He had noticed a great seriousness in the way she drove, and he enjoyed watching her eyes as they tracked the cars around them.

"What's the other lever for?"

"Continuously-variable under/overdrive. I can go from 2-to-1 to 1-to-2. It allows me to keep the engine revs up for greater torque-on-demand."

"You must be the most serious driver I have ever met. In fact, I am sure of it."

They were passing through Glenmont, and she caught the right lane for a hole-shot, and began to blow by on the right. "Check this out," Lace advised.

She reached into the spotless ashtray, hooked her fingers into it, and pulled out. The ashtray slid out and with it emerged a small control panel. She flipped three switches, and pushed the whole contraption back into the slot from which it had emerged and there was a tiny bleeping sound, and a tiny light glowed on the instrument panel, projecting an illuminated box onto the plastic of the panel. It was rather like a heads-up display in a jet fighter.

"Cool!" he said, then, "What did that do?"

She laughed, and reached out and pulled back on the smallest console lever. The engine-note rose up the scale as she pressed down on the pedal a bit. Their speed was unaffected. A small guage labelled "turbo revs" suddenly jumped across its dial.

"OK," she told him, "the conditions are now at half-underdriven, tranny overdrive inhibited, Porsche pop-off turbo revved to speed, blowers enabled."

"Blowers?" he said, and she grinned again.

The standard "boost" gauge began to move over a bit, and she grinned and kicked it.

The Bird shrieked as, somewhere beneath the hood, a spooled-up turbocharger kicked in, the transmission dropped out of drive into passing gear, and she let the small lever drift back towards its center position. They gathered speed at a really amazing rate, and she shoved the small lever forward, and they made what seemed to be a jump into hyperspace. He looked over at the speedometer. The were doing almost onehundred-ten miles per hour. He looked back, and saw only smoke, dust and the rapidly dwindling front ends of some other cars.

They blew down Glenmont hill towards Aspen Hill, alone on the road.

There was something strange going on in Aspen Hill, something outside of the normal range of human activity.

Immediately past the intersections of Connecticut and Georgia Avenues was the campus of the now-defunct Vitro Labs. The sprawl of buildings had been mostly deserted since 1995, when the expanding global peace had obviated the need for advanced weapons research. The "Beltway Bandits" (as local defense contractors were known) had suffered along with the rest of the defense establishment. Vitro had gone under, with their main building being converted into a huge national-chain hardware- specialty store. The other buildings had been attached and mothballed by some agency or another in 1997.

Beyond the Home Depot, the Vitro parking lot was filled with row upon row of trailers. As they paused in the parking lot of the Seven-Eleven across Georgia Avenue from the main entrance to Vitro, a tractor unhooked itself from one of the trailers. Something matte black, camouflage and glittering was visible within the back of one of the trailers. It vaguely resembled a forklift. A man came around the side of the trailer and shut the door. Lace started her car, and sipping her soda, again headed north on Georgia Avenue.

"What exactly is up here in Frederick, Lace?" Ron asked as they blew into town on I-70, headed west.

"I have a small company out here, biomedical research, development and manufacturing. You'll get to see it... you'll be fascinated. I am, and I own the place." She grinned a bit.

"I hope so... of course, anything you're involved in has to be interesting..."

The ride up had been filled with such attempts at drawing her out. Lace maintained an air of mystery, and Ron kept up with a lot of lame conversational ploys, pretty much amounting to bad pickup lines from a seventies-era disco movie.

"Ron, you don't need to try so hard. You've already got me, sort of. I really do enjoy your company... just kick back, and enjoy the ride. You wouldn't want me to do anything anti-therapeutic, now do you? I wouldn't have invited you along if I hadn't wanted to see you, to talk to you... all in good time, my dear..."

"OK," he said, resigning himself to the inevitable mysteriousness of the woman.

She grinned at him again, glancing at him sidelong from beneath her fashion shades, and cranked up another tape.

Perhaps you'd like to read Part Six?
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