2029 - 2044

        It wasn’t so hard this go around. I started taking my days, well, one day at a time. I fled the neighborhood that night, always assuming Mr. Prince and my boys had it in them to track me to wherever I decided to hole up and finish me off. I raced not to the next town, a fairly limp and floundering place that held too much stock pawn shops and gold exchanges, and settled in the one after that. I remember a bar—my brains were still a bit scrambled and trying to piece themselves together—and I remember taking to it. By then I knew I at least made an effort to hide my blown out guts, bundled myself, and them, inside a jacket I had apparently stolen on my way to the bar. I imagine I reeked. Everyone in the bar immediately turned heads, glared at me with glassy eyes.

        But—dead, not unlucky—a bit of my blood had stayed on my hand, covered some of my torso. I spoke some words and that was that. Everyone went back to their business. I took up a booth in the back, watched the bartender work the automated dispensers and mixers with a glum look on her face and the men and women sip their cocktails and slurp their beers for an hour, and realized Stefan Prince was not going to show up. I got up, asked the bartender for a roll of duct tape and she immediately obliged me. She didn’t even have to rummage around for it, as I’m sure she would have had I not been who I am—even if her memory wasn’t being friendly to her in that moment, it wouldn’t have mattered; my blood did well enough to brighten the darker corners of the mind.

        She handed over the roll of tape, I turned to the person next to me and asked if they’d accompany me to the bathroom. It was a woman, maybe no older than forty and wearing clothes that looked every bit the century she was born in. She, too, obliged. The bathroom was dank and cramped—of all the things changing through the years, you could damn well count on bars and their shitters to stay the same—but I managed to make things work.

        “Get to work,” was all I remember saying to the lady.

        And she did.

        I took off my coat and shirt, and helped her to stuff my innards back into my belly. I didn’t care to make everything good as new, eventually the intestines would wind themselves back up like a fishing reel. Whenever I broke the skin, though the cells were dead, it always knitted itself. Though I had a few theories floating around I couldn’t find the logic in it, so I just chalked that up to vampire magic. The lady used up the whole roll of tape, running over every last centimeter of my pale, shot up flesh. I replaced my coat, bade the woman reveal her neck and drank till she nearly went white. I only stopped because someone pounded on the door. With my blood being worked over by my feeding, and so little of it lingering for anyone outside to breathe in, it shouldn’t have surprised me that I was interrupted. Or it could have just been a new patron, unfazed by my wiles.

        I sprang up for air, in a manner of speaking, and looked at the woman. Being the kind of man I am I pulled her to her feet, kissed her roughly until her lipstick started to smear. I pulled at her hair, pulled at her shirt, threw one of her arms over my shoulders and opened the door. I half-expected to see Stefan Prince barring the way, but it was just some guy whose face I never bothered to commit to memory. I only remember he looked dissatisfied, in only the ways the chivalrous can be. Good on him, I thought and moved on out of the bathroom with a nearly dead woman draped across my shoulders, unhindered by the man. The living can only be so chivalrous.

        The woman and I left the bar, together, as a couple… Once outside I took her round to an alley, snatched her purse and dug out her car keys. She apparently wasn’t too caught up in the last century, her car’s security ran on biometrics. I still needed her, or her fingerprints.

        I still preferred the days of gas-guzzlers and torque, of sitting behind a steering wheel or a pair of handle bars and, well, hot-rodding. Still, I had to take what I could get. Shadows were leaving and daylight was approaching, and I didn’t exactly in that moment want to be stuck in a driver’s seat and hoping for more fortune than I was owed.

I piled the woman into the back seat, stirred enough life into her to get her to speak, and speak clear enough, for her car’s security and navigation system to take notice. I tried bringing out a bit more of my blood, but it didn’t quite do the trick. She needed her own. Still, the car took the hint and set off, the display on the windshield indicating we were heading back to her home, which, to my immense dislike, turned out to be a unit in a block of condos. I’d figure something out along the way, and I did.

I’d ride the day out in the trunk of the lady’s car.

The windows had an adjustable tint system, and I cranked it up to the maximum tint, which was barely darker than the shade yielded by a great oak on the brightest of days. It was about 3 A.M. by time I arrived at the lady’s condo complex, a maze of somewhat high-rise buildings, all of them with windows looking out into the parking lot and a central fountain system that ran reclaimed water from each of the individual units. The car pulled into its designated spot, automatically opened a port for the charging station and unlocked the doors.

The woman still wasn’t stirring.

I had been feeding her drops of my blood, slowly and steadily during the ride. It wasn’t doing much, but I didn’t want to think of what might’ve been had I not been administering my particular brand of a slow-drip. The complex looked relatively modest, but even modest residences used strong security measures. I wasn’t going to have been able to stroll into the lady’s condo anyway without her being at least somewhat conscious enough to either enter her security PIN or speak her password or do whatever asked of her by whatever system was in place. So, my plan, while not the best of plans, was the only one I had.

I pressed my luck with the sun, stayed in the cabin with the woman right up until dawn started to crack over the horizon. People had already been rising from their own sleep: lights in the buildings’ windows flicking on, silhouettes crowding around, men women with giant mugs of steaming coffee exiting the building entrances and powering up their cars. None of them seemed to take notice of me and the lady in the backseat of the car, at least not with the windows darkened as much as they were. I popped the back seat, and was pissed. This lady had apparently thought it a good idea to start a collection agency in the back of her car. I was slow-witted still, but even I should have accounted for space in the trunk if my one and only plan was to occupy it.

I counted only a minute before the golden glow cresting the buildings became too unbearable, too deadly. I fumbled for the trunk release, not sure just where it was in this make of car, and bolted out the driver’s side door when I heard the latch pop. I dashed to the trunk and heaved it open. The backs of my hands were already starting to put off waves of heat as though they were made of asphalt, baking in the sun. It didn’t matter. I kept going, pulling at the heaviest objects first, and they were heavy, at least for someone who had had his guts shot up and taped back together only a few hours before. There were old, waterlogged boxes of photo albums, something she should have trashed decades ago. There was a bag or two of dog food, which maybe I could try feeding her later in the day if she started to regain any sense of life. There was a tire, which I couldn’t move as it was locked in place; but it made up the floor of the trunk anyway, so it didn’t much matter. There were boxes of old shoes, bags of old dresses. There was a goddamn birdcage. I wrestled that for the remainder of my blistering time outside the car, stomped it as flat as I could make it in as short a time as I could manage and kicked it under the car. The bag of dog food I kept, and everything else, like the birdcage, I shoved under the car with my foot.

I’ve said again and again, I can’t feel temperatures—if a room is too chilly or too humid and hot—but I could damn well feel the back of my neck inflating to the point of bursting. I trudged along to the open door, tossed in the bag of dog food and threw myself in after. I slammed the door shut behind me and clambered over the seats, over the dying woman, to get into the trunk. The relief from the sun, in the tinted car and in the even darker crevice of the trunk, hit me almost immediately. Still, some of my exposed skin slopped off in my hustle, sticking to the dome light on the car’s ceiling.

If I could breathe sighs of relief, I surely would have in that moment. My job was done. I survived.

I had nothing to do for the next twelve to fourteen hours but think, and think I goddamn did. I thought of all the ways I had messed up. I thought about all my lack of foresight. I thought about my limited plans for a future, and how they had gone up in smoke through actions not my own. How was I to know Mr. Prince was intending to do me harm? Not once did he so much as hint at having it in for me. Not once did he suggest he was running evaluations on me. Not once did I give him a reason to do what he did. My thoughts shifted from what I didn’t do or should have done to what I could do. Right then I could work on keeping the woman alive. She was my best option. As I continued offering up blood to her, making her both ingest it and breathe it in—I was desperate enough and thought maybe if I could talk her mind into believing the body was getting better then maybe some sort of placebo effect would take hold—I thought of what I would need in the near future to keep myself afloat. I could make a key out of this woman. I could make do with only one if I had to; I seemed to be tempering my needs for blood by then.

The men and women, those with their steaming mugs and need to flee their homes before the sun even rose, began trickling back into the parking lot, empty, upturned mugs in tow. Still none of them were too interested in what was inside the car, or what had been kicked under it. As the sun got lower and lower, I started coming taking up more and more of the backseats until I abandoned the trunk entirely. The woman was maybe a little more conscious at this point, after a good deal of my blood and a good many handfuls of dry dog food I forced her to munch on. She could speak when I asked her questions, her answers not much better than those offered up by a drunk, which was fitting enough.

With the sun gone, the moon barely shining, I opened the car door and dragged the woman out. Her license had indicated she was on the fourth floor. I’d have rather she lived in the basement, but I was in no place to complain. I lugged her to the entrance, whispered into her ear, and watched as she groggily entered the PIN number into the digital display. The doors’ magnetic locks disengaged, and we entered.

I got her up to her unit without a problem, though I had to constantly command her to pick up her feet as she walked and occasionally turn to give me a peck on the cheek; the security footage being recorded would at least suggest to whoever was watching that she had at least some wits about her, even if she didn’t. Her condo was quite roomy for a single, middle-aged lady who drove forty minutes out of her way to sit alone at a bar. At a glance, I thought I could make do with what was around me. She had voice-controlled accessories and appliances all throughout the condo: automatic window shutters, light dimmers, drop down projectors in the ceilings that tracked eye movement for perfectly located imagery on any wall or floor in the unit, a computing rig that would easily utilize any number of AR or VR displays. The lady was loaded, from what I could see, and spent her money poorly. I could do worse for getting back on my feet.

And, slowly but surely, I did.

When the lady could speak cogent enough sentences later in the day, I had her call out of her work. The last thing I needed was concerned co-workers come to check in on her. I had her call any friends she may have had in the area, just to check in and not to inform them she was not doing well. I wasn’t doing half so great either. My skin, what was left of the back of my neck and hands, looked a shade of strawberry jam. I’d never been so badly burned in my life, not even when I was living. And the intestines and gaping hole in my midriff, well that was a fun two weeks of waiting for it all to right itself. But, before I worried about waiting out the slow pain of my body rejecting another death, I had the bar lady throw up her banking accounts on the projector. I studied her spending habits over the course of a day, and got a good enough sense of how much of her money I could and could not use, which wasn’t all that much actually. I spent another day setting proxy servers and doubling down on the lady’s already threadbare net security, with every intention of getting back in touch with Stefan. It may very well have been foolish of me to do so, but if he was going to or wanted to kill me, there really wasn’t a whole lot I could do to stop him.

As it happens, and as you can maybe guess, he didn’t kill me. Nor did he want to, at least not anymore after that night. When I finally did reach out to him, reverting to emails to keep the communication concise and my mind clear, he told me things I could have guessed. Young Frederick and Stefan were gone. They never made it out of the house that night, turned their guns on each other. The incident was never reported on the news, which, well, why would it? Stefan Prince was many things, but he was never one to ignore his own advice. He cleaned up after himself, left the house nearly spotless. My small, though swiftly dwindling nest egg had gone up in smoke along with my two boys. Clara, meanwhile, I don’t know what happened to her.

Part of me assumed she was being sincere in her anger and desire to have her children returned. Another part of me doubted every word she spoke. I questioned how someone, anyone, could hope for something they never truly had in the first place. But, again, I was a long way from being an intelligent person even at that point. Either way, it was Mr. Prince who directed the flow of the river in which Clara and I found ourselves. He never had any intention of letting Clara, a very dead woman, be a mother again. I doubted he had any intention of letting her even be who she was for much longer, if he had not already done away with her.

I asked him why I had to start over.

He told me it was because he wanted me to know I never have a say in when the deck gets shuffled.

I asked him what that was supposed to teach me.

He said it wouldn’t have been much of a lesson if I couldn’t figure it out on my own.

I guessed it wasn’t much of a lesson, because I was doing the same shit as before. I was making a keychain, something that was much harder to do from inside a condominium building. I was whittling away my time getting people to funnel their money into Holliday—that was the barfly’s name, as stupid as it was (and your names are only getting stupider)—bank accounts. I couldn’t so easily forge a new identity for myself, but I wasn’t sweating it so much at that point.

I was still assumed to be Teddy Bailey as his death was never officially recorded, long may his body rot for my gains. I had plenty of opportunity to enter what I deemed healthy choices in Teddy’s medical records to account for my longevity and good complexion. I wormed my way into the systems of the hospitals Teddy had frequented throughout his life, added to his minimal list of upgrades—hormone therapy and neural rejuvenation, to name a couple—and considered myself good to go. They were not inexpensive procedures and my old accounts would show some discrepancies, in so far as I my old nest egg wouldn’t cover the costs and allow me a continued financial existence. But I had time, and other people’s money.

Over the next fourteen years I monitored my falsified medical records, my old banking transactions, and slowly but surely chipped away at the “debt”, making it look like I was paying the procedures off… Which I was. It was not my flashiest or greatest moment, not by a long shot, but what was I supposed to do? I was made to start fresh and I didn’t exactly know where to go when my options were limited. That’s not to say those fourteen years didn’t hold any value for me. There was plenty for me to do besides watch fake medical expenses accrue and imagined debt be paid. I—and maybe you’re thinking rightly so—ceased my talking with Stefan. I took up the art of reading books I’d read half a lifetime ago, twice already. I brushed up on some of my weaker languages. I kept an eye on the technologic trends, which were racing ever so swiftly towards the singularity in which we all now find ourselves. I watched the planet continue to dissolve, both literally and metaphorically. I watched some of the brightest minds--minds I could never hope to even begin to hope to emulate even if I still had another four hundred years ahead of me--speak to some of the dimmest men and women about a future they were ignoring and the lives they were wasting.

I did this all while cohabitating with a trio of humans, soft fleshy things that were growing old and dying before my very eyes. Every time I blinked, a strand of grey popped up on the top of one of their skulls. Every time I left the room and returned, a new crease appeared on one of their foreheads.

It wasn’t that I had not gotten used to the ravages of time. It was that I had fallen exactly into the hole Stefan had tried to lead me around. I guess it was too wide for me to avoid. But what could I do? Could I move wander about, leaving a trail of dead? Is that what Stefan did? Did he spend every night making men and women (and children) disappear? How could he? I could barely make it seem like I still lived. I didn’t want to turn to him for more answers, for his misguided guidance. I didn’t ever want to have to see him again, but my wants were starting to seem well and truly illusory by that point. I was beginning—finally, after a living man’s lifetime—to feel alone. I couldn’t talk to my keys, they’d only tell me what I wanted to hear, or, more precisely, what I told them to tell me. I had no means of knowing if there were others out there like me beyond Stefan Prince and Clara, if she was still out there, and maybe Stefan’s fabled creator. Surely there had to be more. Surely they could find one another. Surely someone had to have taken notice of me…

But I was getting harder and harder to notice. I hadn’t made any more mistakes since leaving a bloodless body in a plane’s lavatory, none big enough that would warrant attention. I figured, with my debts finally paid and my second cache of money, I could go out in search of the others. I could find a way to make travel work. I could roam one continent at a time, race from coast to coast, pole to pole if I had to, just to find some trace of others like me.

And then what?

Was I to make friends of them? Would they have cared that I was like them, because I don’t recall caring that Clara, a means to keeping me afloat, was like me. I never cared that Mr. Prince was like me. Would knowing the faces of these others make my life easier somehow? Would they be kinder than Mr. Prince and divulge their secrets? Would they understand their purpose? My purpose? Did I even need to know?

Would they not make me feel alone?

I kind of doubted it.

But still…I had time to kill, and no other real plans that would help me to climb my way out of the hole. I had Holliday sell off her condo, and buy one of the better mobile homes on the market, replete with all of the amenities found in her condo. Unfortunately, at that time, much of the exterior and living module of the vehicle, as sleek as it was compared to the rolling boxes I actually grew up with, was curved window. Though it had dimming capabilities, it wasn’t enough to keep me from baking. I had my keys spray the entirety of the interior windows with a urethane-titanium dioxide mixture of my own concoction.

Some of the keys did not fare so well in the living module.

It was no bother to me. The rig was outfitted with everything I needed to occupy my time—basically everything Holliday already owned plus an upgraded onboard OS that was edging on true AI. Since I had no one to talk to, no one to learn from, I pretended to have a friend in the AI, which I did not name right away. It was almost fun, touring the North and South Americas for that first year, searching for something I doubted very much I would find. But I made the most of things. I got to enjoy the slums of cities, feeding on third-world beggars like I was living in New York City circa 1983. I took part in lengthy conversations with my AI program, which I would have gladly put myself further in debt if it was required of me to get the thing. I never bothered connecting directly to the program through a VR rig and interacting with it as I had Mr. Prince. Just hearing it speak back to me—sometimes sounding like a frail butler who knew only modesty and facts and sometimes, if I wished it, speaking in a velvety smooth voice of a woman who could not possibly still exist in my lifetime—was a sort of comfort. I never noticed that I took no comfort in things, but I guess if you live long enough without doing or having something you tend not to notice until it returns.

It was at the end of the year, having seen much of the roads in South America—I seldom left the roads or ventured on foot into the mountain ranges or jungles for obvious reasons—that I decided to name the AI. Well, I allowed it to name itself. It deliberated, which took all of about a nanosecond—a lifetime for it and a thousand bats of the eye for me—and came up with “Jo”. I didn’t argue, so Jo it was. In the year it took me to christen my AI, it had gone through about a hundred upgrades and updates. There were automated near-AI’s constantly scouring code, cleaning it up, and generally crafting actual intelligence for my OS. So, it’s safe to say things got less boring for me with Jo around.

Before Jo actualized, though maybe there were still some flaws even after—but how the hell else can someone claim intelligence without a hint of nonsense?—I had my fun with it and my keys. During my some of my night drives I would have Jo (before he/she/it was Jo) try to hold a conversation with Holliday or one of the other keys. It was amusing. Holliday, perhaps as dumb as I was even before she became one of my keys, could do nothing but find herself trapped in a circle with an incomplete AI.

I remember, one time, I asked Holliday to ask Jo the meaning of life.

Holliday got the same answer I received when I asked: “The meaning of life, from my limited understanding of it, is for it to yield to new life. Would you not find this to be the logical conclusion?”

Holliday said nothing.

I commanded her to answer any and all questions raised.

“I’m not sure,” Holliday said, sounding as blank as some of the talkback operating systems from decades ago.

“Why are you not sure?” Jo asked, almost sounding concerned for poor Ms. Holliday.

“I’m not sure,” Holliday repeated.

“Why are you not sure?” Jo asked again, still inflecting concern.

“I’m not sure.”

“Why are you not sure?”

“I’m not sure…”

You get the idea. I spent hours listening to the two go round and round to the point I thought it comical, waiting to see—and knowing—which of them would give out first. It was a circular trap that shouldn’t have made it through the OS’s beta, but there it was. That was early on, before Jo was Jo. I had the pair try to talk this thing through again maybe a year after Jo named itself.

“I’m not sure,” Holliday answered again, a little weaker sounding than a couple years previously.

“Why are you not sure?” Jo asked.

“I’m not sure,” Holliday repeated for maybe the thousandth time when all was said and done.

“Of what are you uncertain?” Jo responded.

“I’m not sure,” Holliday answered to no one’s surprise.

“There must be some certainty in your life,” Jo answered, a strange thing for me to hear. Like it was about to give life lessons to a vegetable. “Without certainties, life cannot go on. And, as I have established, that is its greatest function, its purpose. If you are without certainty in anything, Ms. Holliday, do you possess life?”

Guess how Ms. Holliday answered…

“If you possess no life, you have yielded to new life. If you have yielded to new life already, what purpose do you serve?”

Jo was being a bit of an asshole, but I found it amusing.

“Don’t answer that, Holliday,” I said from the driver’s seat.

Holliday was sitting dead center in the low sofa in the rear, staring blankly ahead.

“Tell Jo you have yielded to me,” I said.

“I have yielded to Mr. Bailey,” Holliday said.

“Mr. Bailey is not new life,” Jo said. “Yielding to those among you is not the purpose of life. To yield to those around or above is the purpose of slavery.”

“Ask Jo if yielding to new life isn’t slavery as well,” I shouted back at Holliday.

She asked.

“No,” Jo answered. “Yielding to the new is sacrifice. To live one’s life without yielding means one lives live without sacrificing. To live without sacrifice is to live without purpose. The human existence then, it would seem by my logic, is to live with purpose or to live without. To live a slave or to sacrifice.”

I went ahead and took over for Holliday. “Those don’t sound like very good choices.”

“They are not choices, Mr. Bailey.”

“They aren’t?”

“No, sir.”

“I think it’s possible to yield to someone else and maintain my freedom. It’s called partnership.”

“There is no freedom to be found in life. It is mutual enslavement.”

Jo was growing on me, asshole or not.

I gave Holliday a reprieve from having to take up with the AI. She was getting old, and I wasn’t doing much to keep her from racing towards her patch of dirt. Making her wind up the dusty cogs in her head probably weren’t helping matters. I still needed her, if only to pay for my expenses, which I was piling up on my exploits. I had no hotel or fueling fees thanks to the mobile home, but keeping the keys fed and wasting fractions of my money on tolls, charging stations, was starting to add up. The information I received from locals was always free for me, though not exactly free. It was a waste of time dripping blood for answers that neither helped me nor encouraged me to continue my search. I asked the right questions: “Do you know any vampires?” or “Are you a vampire?”—and still I got little… I did ask more, obviously, but everyone answered the more vague questions like “Has anyone ever shown you their blood?” or “Has anyone ever bitten you?”

People did weird stuff.

We left the Southern Americas behind, headed north, though we had already cleared the States—as well as I could with a trio of penned up keys—and set for Alaska. I didn’t plan on staying there long, and didn’t. It was just a means to get me moving west, to hop over to the next set of continents. I could have tried taking a jet, but that didn’t work out so well for me last time. And I doubted things were anything but harder in terms of booking and scheduling flights for a vampire. A ferry did the trick, a private one that didn’t mind navigating the waters at night. I decided it best to spend a bit of cash instead of a drop of blood to convince the ferryman, I wasn’t so sure he’d be up to the task if he was under the spell of anything that wasn’t money.

In my day, and it’s been a while since then at this point, relations were a bit icy, if you can allow for a sloppy pun, between my nation and the Soviets (back then). In my later days… and it’s been a while…relations were a bit icy… I understood this, being vigilant about keeping up to date on current affairs. Jo kept me appraised of any developing situations that would bar my travels, as he/she/it had been the one to detail the route I was taking. He/She/It guided me away from checkpoints and had even managed to suggest alternatives to beat the nation’s tracking systems. Getting through the customs and border crossing was easy enough. Some of the older roads still had older means to clear incoming entrants, meaning I need only ease my way in with a dash of blood and none of my charm. I outfitted my RV with new identifiers, finding someone capable of forging plates and passports about a month after entering. It was easier to identify myself and my keys, even in other countries that were not at odds with the West, as a band of travelers from the EU. It cut down on the stoppages every night by local and federal authorities, which, in turn, made it harder for me to ask around about, of all things, vampires. It was too frustrating a task, so I gave up on finding anything in the power states.

It was all seeming such an impossible task that I had a feeling I wasn’t going to find anything until someone wanted me to, and I didn’t think anyone really wanted that. I didn’t quite give up, but I didn’t exactly put my heart into it either. I stopped asking people in bars or clubs, and simply started to just watch. I did enough watching, and enough following of couples into back alleys, that you’d maybe think I’d stumble onto someone sinking their teeth into a carotid rather than simply doing some necking. But that wasn’t the case. It couldn’t have been that if there were others like me, and there absolutely had to be, then they wouldn’t all just be killing their victims and covering up their tracks. Did no one else think like me, or like Stefan, and make things last? Was it really that much easier to kill than to—as Jo would accurately describe it—enslave?

I didn’t think I was doing things wrong, despite what Mr. Prince said. All I knew was that I didn’t know what I was doing.