Nightlord: Orb (11 page)

My name is Vladimir Smith, a name I find much funnier that it probably is.  It says I’m an organ donor and I’m supposed to wear glasses if I drive any non-autonomous vehicle.  I’ve also got some leads on getting in touch with a man who can set me up with a whole false identity, rather than merely a fake card.  I guess there isn’t a whole lot of illegal immigration in the Pennsylvania region.  Hopefully, I’ll also be able to afford a credit card, bank account, skinphone, and a Google Cabs account.  Things are looking up.

Bronze is hiding in a public park about six blocks away.  She’s right next to the playground equipment.  Well, she’s not exactly hiding; she’s blending in.  We burned off her paint job so she could pretend to be a statue and conserve her energy.  A couple of official-looking types in city uniforms came out to look at her and scratch their heads, but nobody has yet gotten around to bringing in a crane and moving her.  I suspect she can stay as long as it’s cheaper for the city to leave her where she is.

She actually enjoys people-watching.  She also thinks it’s fun that the local kids treat her like a park fixture for climbing on and running around.  According to her (via Firebrand), none of them have seen a real horse, only pictures on the cyber.  She’s kind of popular.  She was even in the news, an article about an anonymous donation to the playground area.  Nobody’s claimed responsibility for her.

Since she’s not moving, she’s expending almost no energy.  She doesn’t need to graze, and the Ascension Field is actually feeding her faster than she’s using it.  As long as she just stands there, she’s effectively charging her batteries.  This is a good thing for her disguise as a statue.  To be fair, it’s an impressive disguise.

I keep the Orb of Evil in its bowling bag.  This is stuffed in the back of the top shelf of the closet.  It isn’t happy.  It’s never happy.  I don’t care.  I’m not sure what I should do with it, long-term.  Drop it in the ocean?  It’ll sink to the bottom for some geological period, then show up again.  Drop it in a volcano?  Maybe, but anyone over four feet tall does not simply walk into an active volcano.  What does that leave me?

Firebrand is having a hard time adapting to the year 2048.  There’s no place for a sword.  It spends most of its time on top of the radiator—heat comes with the apartment, but there is no air conditioning—while trying to do whatever the dragon-sword equivalent of snoozing is.  It’s kind of like a cat, I suppose.  In the evenings, between the end of the workday and the start of my night prowling, it brings me up to date on all the gossip in the building.  It can hear people thinking farther than it can hear their voices.

The old lady in 3A, Ms. Winkowski (I’ve probably spelled it wrong), thinks I’m a sweet boy I carried her groceries up for her once and I keep taking down her trash whenever she puts it outside her door.  Well, she’s an old lady and doesn’t need to be going up and down all those stairs.  She invites me in for a cookie every time she sees me.  I don’t have the heart to tell her I don’t like them; my sense of taste dials up shortbread cookies into the same range as Crazy Ahmed’s Spicy Curry of Death. I think her cookies are a little heavy on the vanilla extract, too, but it will take hot irons and bamboo under the fingernails before I tell her that.

I always accept; it won’t kill me to eat a cookie now and then.  She keeps threatening to bake me some brownies, though.  I’m not sure how that’s going to go down.

Jasmine, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the angry Asian couple in 3B, thinks I’m cute and prefers to be called “Jazz.”  Her parents don’t know either of these facts, which is a good thing.  They don’t like
anybody
in the building, least of all “that thief of a slumlord, Mr. Plamler.”  They always seem to be shouting in a language I don’t understand.  I don’t know why.  Firebrand tells me they argue about everything, from who moved a dish to where to get milk.  Jasmine tries to block them out with her earphones and studying while pretending her life doesn’t suck.  She has my sympathy, for whatever that’s worth.

I’m one door down from Ms. Winkowski.  There should be a 3C and a 3D, but those were subdivided to make 3C, D, E, F, G, and H.  I share the two original bathrooms with those.  Firebrand thinks the guys living in D, E, and G are boring, nervous about the neighborhood, and bordering on financial desperation.  It also informs me the woman in 3H is definitely both a drug user and a freelance prostitute, as well as part of the reason 3E and 3G are bordering on financial desperation.

Strangely, if I think back to some of the places I’ve lived (and died), I find my living arrangements aren’t all that bad.  This would bother me, if I let it.

I have some magical diagrams on the floor, under some salvaged throw rugs, drawing in power.  I’m also experimenting with a transformer spell to take other forms of energy—infrared radiation, as from a heater, or even sunlight—and convert it into magical power.  I have one that works, but it’s not even as useful as an Ascension Sphere.  However, if I can build a more highly-charged magical environment, I can build a stronger spell, which will make it easier to build an even more highly-charged magical environment, and so on.  Eventually.  At least, I think it will work that way, but magic has already proven it behaves in ways that don’t sensible to me.  This drives me up a wall, over the roof, and back down the chimney.  I’d say it drives me crazy, but that’s less of a parkway, more of a driveway.

I’ll get around to it.  It’s not like I don’t have time.  Which is weird, considering I always seem to be pressed for time regarding the things that need to be done
now
.  Is it a thing about my point of view, or is it an objective reality?

I wonder if there are any other immortals out there?  We could compare notes.  Maybe we could form a club—or a mutual support group.  Immortals Anonymous, maybe?

What else…?

Firebrand, while snoozing on the radiator, made me wonder about how it absorbs heat.  It likes heat, but it loves fire.  Both of these seem to strengthen it in some way, as though it eats them.  Bronze eats actual fuel sources, but Bronze has internal spaces where she can burn things, like a furnace.  Firebrand absorbs thermal energy.  It also generates it.

It’s also a thaumivore.  It’s an enchanted item.  It lives on magic.  Does it convert heat energy into magical energy?

Firebrand is not overwhelmingly pleased when I subject it to intense scrutiny.  It’s like putting a person on an operating table and standing over him with funny goggles on.  It’s nerve-wracking.

On the other hand, Firebrand’s magical matrix definitely includes a conversion function.  I could hardly miss it; it’s a heavy-duty piece of work.  This was a good thing, since the rest of the enchantment was darn near incomprehensible.  Whoever built the initial enchantment on Firebrand was either brilliant or insane.  Either way, I didn’t have long to examine it; Firebrand claimed the examination was painful.

I let it go.  I had a good look at an energy-to-magic conversion spell that seemed to handle heavy power loads without much trouble.  It gave me something to think about regarding my own conversion spells.

Other things… Oh, yes.  I still kill people.  Most often it’s in self-defense, but I dabble as a hobby, too.

I wonder why it never takes long to find someone who is ready to die.  Is it because there are so many, many people in Pittsburgh?  Or is it statistics?  If one out of every ten thousand is truly at the end of their road, then out of a million people…  Or is it the nature of modern society?  Is the percentage higher than in Rethven?  Or is it Pittsburgh?  Or is it something about me?  Are there relatively few people ready to die, but something inside me knows where to find them?

I can take a walk across the 16
th
Street bridge at night have a chat with someone who plans to jump… oh, about one time in three, I’d say.  I do try to talk them out of it.  I’m not that kind of monster.

I tell people that, if they jump, I’m jumping with them.  They never believe me until I join them on the edge.  Strangely, it seems to help them.  I don’t understand why.  I stand there and talk with them, or try to.  There’s something about the idea of a perfect stranger saying, “If you jump, you won’t jump alone.”  I don’t know what it is, but the ones who believe me walk away instead of plummeting.

Those who go ahead and jump find out I’m not kidding.  I go with them into the Allegheny.  It’s not like I’m going to drown, after all, and a bridge is hardly a private spot to have dinner.

Besides, drowning strikes me as an unpleasant way to go.  I’m painless and much faster.  They die on the way down rather than in the water.

Then I sink to the bottom with the corpse, tear it open for the blood, and walk upriver to a place I can climb out.  I’m usually dry before I make it home.

When there’s nobody on the bridge, I actually make it across.  Sometimes I can sense a derelict in a cardboard box, waiting for me.  Sometimes it’s the person huddled in a doorway, out of the rain.  Once, there was a young man in a bus station with empty eyes and needle tracks hidden under his long sleeves.

Most of the time, though, dinner finds me.  I not only eat well, but I make a profit, too.  Because of my bribes and questions, I now know people who will buy jewelry and guns without asking where they came from.  Drugs I dump with the crumbs.

Saturday, August 22
nd

Since the library is closed on Sunday, I spend all day Saturdays reading and trying to get used to the changes.  The library still has free Internet—excuse me, “cyber access”—for anyone who walks in off the street.  Their old-fashioned terminals don’t require a skinphone, either.

Skinphones are worn like wristwatches.  Most models are about an inch wide and maybe a quarter-inch thick.  For a screen, those models have a flexible membrane that clings to your forearm; it’s invisible until you actually use it.  High-end models cover your forearm with what looks more like decorative forearm armor.  Those project images into the air—an interactive hologram.  I haven’t got one, yet, because I don’t officially exist.  They don’t assign phone numbers to figments.

I’m really considering the idea of leaving the country and trying to re-enter it as an undocumented refugee.  From Greenland, maybe, or Patagonia.  Somewhere.  It might be simpler.  It’s one of the things I read about in the library.  Maybe I should ask an immigration officer or a lawyer.  My cousin wants to move here—what’s the process and the pitfalls?

Another handy thing about being able to cyber into the web is the way I can look up people and events I think I know something about.  Sasha, Travis, Hutch, Terri… me.

Sasha, as far as I can tell, doesn’t exist.  At least, not under that name.  She used quite a number of them, though, so if she is around, there’s no telling what she’s calling herself today.

Weirdly, there
is
a record of a house at her old address.  There isn’t a whole lot of information on it, but it featured in the news when it burned down.  I find this strangely disturbing and somewhat confusing.  It doesn’t actually use the word mansion; it’s “the house,” or “the building.”  It might have been a perfectly normal house rather than a vampire lair with a bunker for a basement.

Travis, on the other hand, is apparently still practicing medicine, now as a senior doctor in a partnership.  He’s a nephrologist and his practice is in Seattle.  Lots of good reviews, too; people like a doctor that can make a kidney stone go away.  Of course, people also like a man with a hand drill and determination if he can make a kidney stone go away.

There’s also a record of
me
teaching at the university.  Apparently, I authored and co-authored several papers, mostly on wormholes and quantum mechanics.  “I” retired from teaching at the age of sixty-eight.  I don’t know where “I” am now, but I would be pushing eighty, assuming I’m still alive.

If I get arrested and fingerprinted, will I be in the database?

I don’t like this.

Everyone else I researched was either dead or had moved away.  All I could find on Hutch was an old obituary about his wife of thirty-eight years passing away in Florida.  Terri’s obituary was in 2033 from ovarian cancer.

In some ways, it’s better to come back to a clean slate.  Reading about everyone was depressing.  It brought them back to mind and made me miss them.

But do I miss them?  I miss the people I used to know.  I’m pretty sure these aren’t the people I knew.  Close, maybe, but different people.  Maybe one universe over; maybe several universes over.  These are alternates, alternatives, not-quite-them.  This isn’t even my world, much less my old friends.

Is there a world where everything is exactly as I remember it, only without me?  One where Sasha and I didn’t get burned out of the house by a bunch of fanatics?  One where I disappeared anyway—a convenient universe I can simply step into and pretend I never left?

Maybe.  A truly infinite set contains an infinite number of possibilities.  That doesn’t mean it contains the possibility I want.  I could have an infinite series of odd numbers and it would still never get me any even numbers.

I really want to go look.

Monday, August 24
th

I finally met with a guy who billed himself as “The Third Magus of the CyberWizards.”

“But you can call me BitRate.”

“BitRate?”

“I’m old-school.”

I didn’t laugh.

BitRate was a round man with too much hair, too much oil, and a sweat-stained headset access unit complete with wireless VR fingertips.  He looked at me twice, I think; the rest of the time his attention was fixed on the images in his glasses.  His hands kept moving, poking, dragging, grasping, waving.  It was a trifle spooky.

And I always thought publicly taking a call on your mobile phone was rude.  Modern etiquette is weird.

We negotiated in a basement apartment with a sizable hole in one wall.  From the look of it, the wires and fiber optics leading into BitRate’s equipment would be highly objectionable if ever discovered by a communications company.  My guess is he picked his residence for the location.  It certainly wasn’t for the view.

I was asking for serious cyber-wizardry, as he called it.  Personal history and records, driver’s license, education, work history, tax returns, everything. 

“You want it bulletproof and bricked up?” he asked, still poking and prodding the air.

“If that means I want to use it the rest of my life and to have it stand up under the IRS audit, then yes.”

“IRS?”

“Internal Revenue Service.”

“Oh!  You mean the Federal Tax System.  Yeah… is that your big worry?”

“I’d also like it to stand up under close inspection during the murder investigation.”

BitRate looked at me for the second time.

“You got one coming?”

“Not that I know of, but I like to be prepared.  I’d rather not have it fall apart and force me to buy a new one.  That could get expensive.  I’d rather buy a quality product the first time.”

“Hunh,” he grunted, and refocused.  “Yeah… yeah… hmm.  Yeah.  Do you mind being from Juneau?”

“I’ll learn to speak Alaskan.”

“That’ll help.  You’ll need a bank account to get the credit cards—deposit extra.”

“Can you put money in it?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Look, wetbrain, there’s a metamorphic encryption engine between user accounts and actual funds.  Don’t pretend to be cyber-smart by what you see on the vid.”

I wasn’t completely sure what he meant, aside from “Shut up and let me do my job.”  I waited quietly.

“Ting.  We’re carbonite.”

“You can do it?”

“Got it set up and frozen.  You need to pump thirty deep my way and you’ll thaw.”

“That’s thirty thousand dollars?”

“What I said.”

“Okay.  It’ll take me a bit to scrape that together—maybe a week.”

“It’s buried for now.  Get me a digital stick and the eye in the pyramid will open.”

A digital stick was like a gift card, or a prepaid debit card.  It could be used like cash without carrying folding money.  I’m not sure about the eye in the pyramid; modern slang isn’t my forté.

“I’ll get right on it,” I promised.

The way I saw it, I now had a pressing need for serious amounts of money.  I mean, until that point, I was content to work for a living and occasionally kill muggers.  I should have anticipated this.  Once I become a Real Boy instead of a wooden puppet, I’ll have to play the part.  Ideally, I’d like to be wealthy enough I don’t have to work, but not so wealthy I have to hire flunkies to give people the brush-off.  A couple million dollars should do it.

It would be smart to do that before I became a real person.  I can start with money and my artificial history will say I’m supposed to have it.  After that, my information starts to track in real time.  I’d have to come up with a way to explain how I get money.

So, how do I go about making a big pile of money in under a week?

It bore thinking about.

Basically, there are only a few ways to make money.  You can earn it, or you can steal it.  Well, there’s a third way; you can
find
it.  I disregarded the third way.  Finding pirate treasure or picking the lottery numbers was so drastically unlikely it wasn’t useful.  I could, in theory, use my psychic tendrils to feel my way through a pile of scratch-off tickets, but that would be a long, laborious process with no guarantee of anything more than minor gains.

Earning the money was even more unlikely.  True, I could find better-paying work.  I could hire out as a freelance hitman and build a reputation.  Inside a year, I feel certain I would have high-paying jobs lining up for my services.  For another career, I could be a circus performer or a cage fighter.  Doubtless there were a hundred occupations that paid better than professional dock-walloper.

None of which was going to make enough money in the next week.

So, stealing it.

My immediate impulse was to go find a professional criminal, take his money, demand to know who his boss was, and repeat the process up the food chain until I had enough.  But, while refreshingly direct and effective, when you get to the level of criminals with that much loot, they generally have some sort of connection to the local power structure.  They also have friends, family, and allies.  I could have some version of organized crime and the police both after me at the same time.  That was trouble I didn’t need.

On the other hand, Pittsburgh has a couple of casinos.  Better yet, Atlantic City was close enough for a weekend visit.

I got my makeup on and bought a pair of stylish, wraparound shades.  Someday, when I have spare money lying around, I plan to get some full-eyeball costume contact lenses.  I dressed as well as I could—not very—and took the bus.

I spent some time evaluating various games.

Craps is tricky.  I have psychic tendrils at night and can grab the dice, no problem.  Even during the day, I have a limited version of that telekinetic ability; dice are well within my weight limit.  I even have eyes sharp enough to spot the pips I want on dice in mid-flight down the length of the table.

What I don’t have is the skill to do it.  It’s harder than you might think, mentally grabbing a pair of plastic cubes on different trajectories, continuing those separate trajectories, making them bounce believably, all the while rotating them so they land on the proper sides.

As an exercise, go throw a single die and then describe it—the path it took, the bounces it made, and why it landed on the face it did.  Go on.  I’ll wait.  I’ll have to wait, because that homework assignment is going to take a while.  Now do it twice, and do it in real time.

There were some ugly mutterings around the craps table the first few times I tried my mind powers on the dice.  It doesn’t look good when they come to a sudden stop.  It makes people think in terms of special dice and magnets under the table.  This does not make the patrons comfortable.

I did notice something strange, though.  It was still in the afternoon and I was watching another shooter toss the dice.  I focused intently, trying to make them bounce and roll believably, for practice.  Everything seemed to slow down as my time sense started to shift.  Now, this happens to people all the time when they’re under intense stress, but this was unusual.  The dice hung there in the air, turning slowly as they drifted toward the end of the table.  Everything crept along at about half-speed or so.

That throw came up seven, no problem.  It even looked good on the bounces.

I got distracted.  I started trying to provoke that mental state again, rather than devoting my full attention to controlling dice.  Turns out I can do it, but it takes a minute or two before it starts to kick in.  My guess is it’s some type of altered brain chemistry.  My voluntary nervous system behaves like a superconductor.  If that sort of change has made it into my brain, could my processor speed increase?  With enough of the right neurotransmitters, this seems like a logical possibility.

Even during the day, as a mortal, I have faster reflexes, extra-hand telekinesis, and the ability to speed up my time sense.  Not bad.  There are good points to being a part-time undead.

On the other hand, it takes an immense amount of focus and concentration to get it going, and it seems to be physically draining.  Lucky for me, casinos also have really good deals in their restaurants.

As far as other potential gambling avenues are concerned, slot machines would normally be ideal for this.  Reach inside, feel the spinning wheels, and stop them where you want them.  That ought to work, right?  But all the slots I could find were electronic.  There’s nothing to grab.  Oh, I could short one out pretty easily, but that ruins it.  It doesn’t go nuts and gush money.  Even if it did, I feel certain I would not be allowed to keep it.

Cards of all sorts—blackjack, poker, baccarat, whatever—aren’t impossible.  I can feel with my tendrils, carefully stroking the next card to feel for the differences in the printing.  It takes time, though, and knowing the next card, while a huge advantage, only improves the odds of winning by some percent.  If I’m playing blackjack and have thirteen while the dealer has eighteen, knowing the next card is a king does me no good.  Either way, I lose.  Still, given lots of time to play, I could make a significant profit.

Roulette has some of the best payoff odds in a casino.  If you hit the exact number, it pays off at thirty-five to one.  Of course, your odds (in America) of hitting that exact number are thirty-
seven
to one, so the casino makes a small but steady profit.

I found out that little white ball doesn’t weigh much.  The hard part was making it look natural, but it’s nowhere near as hard as making a pair of dice bounce realistically.  There’s only one thing to watch, and it doesn’t matter how it lands—the orientation is immaterial.  I lost some one-dollar chips while I practiced.  I’d wander up, watch a couple of spins while trying to be subtle, place a bet on a number, lose it, and wander off to practice my technique at something else.

I was down to my last ten dollars before I went back to roulette.  I played the colors—bet on black or red—for five straight passes, doubling my winnings each time, before I pretended to lose my nerve.  I cashed in my chips and walked.

To another casino.

Spread the losses around, that’s the trick.  I could take a casino for a million, no problem, but they wouldn’t like that.  When they noticed, they would probably want to use me for publicity—“See the big winner!”—so as to recoup some of their losses.  A less-reputable place might assist me with carrying all that money… out the back door.  But let us not dwell on that.

There’s also a limit on how much you can win before you have to fill out special tax forms.  At that level, they don’t let you leave until you do the paperwork.  Since I can’t answer most of the questions, I can’t make that much in one stop.  I want to avoid notice.

Heck, I could have made a living like this and avoided all the day labor jobs.  There were only two problems with it.

First, it’s stealing.  Yes, yes—stealing from a casino.  Granted.  They have money.  Lots of money.  It’s still stealing.  Maybe that’s not too bad, considering I drink blood from people.  It’s the financial version of socially responsible vampirism, sucking out a little money without damaging the business.  I accept I’m costing them money and lowering their profits to help myself, but that doesn’t mean I like it.  As a vampire, I prefer to find someone who is dying—or volunteering to die, as in the case of assailants—rather than take a drink from someone and send them on their way.

The other reason I don’t make a living this way is the math.  If I did this on a regular basis with the local casinos, they would start to recognize me as a statistical anomaly.  This scheme depended on hitting each casino for a moderate amount and never going back.

Getting greedy will get you noticed.  And get you in trouble.

Now, to get some new clothes and a train ticket to Atlantic City.