Interesting Places (Interesting Times #2) (10 page)

“She went back fourteen months,”
Seven said. “Before the mirror was broken. Before the war ended. She went
home.”

Oliver looked out the window. More
buildings along the Embarcadero had vanished, and new ones of a different
design had appeared in their places. They were tall, silvery metal structures,
with pulsating blue lines running from base to tip. Oliver had never seen
construction like that before. Well, he had, but only in science fiction
movies. It looked like the cityscape of an alien metropolis in a distant
galaxy.

“She tried to change what she did,”
Tyler said. “Well, of course she did. She didn’t want to be a murderer
anymore.” He sighed. “God damn it, Sally.”

“That much she succeeded at,” Artemis
said. “The cyborgs were not destroyed. Unfortunately, it appears that the cure
was not deployed, either. There can be little doubt they conquered their own
world and then invaded ours. They would have discovered the mirror, of course.
It appears they did not meet with much resistance.”

“What do we do?” Oliver asked.

“Nothing,” Artemis said. “It has
already happened. This timeline will be gone in a few more moments and we will
find ourselves in a new one. You won’t remember ever meeting me, Mr. Jones.”

“What about us?” Tyler asked. “Me and
Seven?”

“Difficult to say. I would have been
aware of the fracture shortly after it happened and activated our emergency
protocol for this kind of situation.”

“The house on Filbert Street,” Tyler
nodded. “Can it correct the timeline?”

“No,” Seven said, “but it will
correct
us
. From there we’ll work out a plan. But you and I won’t know
what’s happened. Only Artemis will. If we’re not with her we’ll have no idea…”

“Do not fear,” Artemis said. “I will
find you.” She looked around the room. “I will find all of you. I promise.”

The walls of the office shimmered and
Oliver suddenly found he could see through them. “But what about you? Won’t you
change, too?”

Artemis smiled wistfully at him. “I
never change, Mr. Jones.”

The office shimmered again, and then
it was gone. For an instant Oliver found himself suspended in midair, then the
world around him went black, and everything was gone.

Chapter 12

Oliver Jones had spent many idle
moments at work daydreaming about what it would be like if he had a more
interesting life. Stock analysis at the small hedge fund where he worked paid
the bills, and he was quite good at it, but there was nothing particularly
glamorous about studying Excel spreadsheets and crunching percentages all day.
Not that Oliver needed glamour. Just a little adventure, once in a while. Some
excitement. Certainly that shouldn’t have been too much to ask.

He couldn’t help but think the cyborg
invasion of Earth was really overdoing it.

The first of them had arrived in San
Francisco just over six months ago. Two hundred cyborgs had marched through a
portal in Haight-Ashbury and begun “conversions” almost immediately. The
conversion process consisted of injecting nanobots into a victim’s bloodstream,
where they began to replicate themselves. In short order they took over their
host’s higher brain functions. Oliver had seen the process more times than he
cared to count. It looked agonizing, with the victims writhing on the ground as
if their bodies were being controlled by a demented puppeteer. The screaming
never lasted more than an hour or so, which was roughly how long the initial
stages of conversion took. After that, cyborgs no longer expressed pain. Nor
did they express any emotions at all.

The later stages, in which they would
grow armor and one of their eyes began to glow blue, could take several days.
Oliver was sure the internal organs were modified as well, in ways he didn’t
want to imagine. It was something he preferred not to think about.

Oliver considered himself something
of an expert on the process. He was, to the best of his knowledge, the only
human alive it had never worked on.

The cyborgs had taken San Francisco’s
financial district on the second day of the invasion. Oliver and his coworkers
had spent the night hiding out in their office, waiting for the National Guard,
or the army, or
anyone
to come and get them out of there. The cyborgs
had come to their building instead, moving floor by floor, converting everyone
they could find. Oliver had been huddled in a closet when they dragged him out,
injected nanobots into his neck, and dropped him to the floor to undergo the
conversion process alongside the rest of his screaming, writhing coworkers. But
Oliver hadn’t screamed. The injection had been painful, and he’d felt a hot
flash afterward, but then nothing. When his converted former coworkers stood up
and headed for the building’s stairs to join their new comrades in their work,
Oliver had just sat there staring at them. Eventually another cyborg passed by
and injected him again, but exactly the same thing happened as before. There
was a brief moment of heat, as if he’d developed a sudden fever, and then it
was gone. After a third injection failed two baffled cyborgs had lifted him up
and carried him downstairs, where he was quickly transported to a medical
center near the Presidio for study.

Three months later the cyborgs had
conquered most of the western United States, which was when they ran into a
wall in the form of nearly every country on Earth with a military. If one good
thing had come out of the cyborg invasion, Oliver thought, it was that nearly
every other war being fought on the planet came to a quick end. Religious
divisions and disputes over territory and resources became irrelevant when
faced with a threat on this new scale. It was, in one sense, a great day for
humanity. On the other hand, millions were either dead or had been converted,
and there was no end in sight. The cyborgs had been unable to advance past the
Mississippi river, and the nanobot-filled cruise missiles they fired east had
been unable to provide them with any headway. The cyborgs believed that their
teleportation technology would eventually turn the tide. It was what had gotten
them to San Francisco in the first place, but where they had apparently found
moving world-to-world easy, point-to-point travel had been for whatever reason
much more difficult to master.

Oliver knew all of this because the
cyborg scientists that had been studying him since his capture had been happy
to tell him about it. They saw no reason not to. He was under constant watch in
case he tried to escape, and even if he did, he had nowhere to go. The last
human running around San Francisco wouldn’t go undetected for very long, and
the nearest human resistance group with any teeth operated out of the hills of
San Diego County, eight hours to the south by freeway. Even if Oliver managed
to steal a car, he doubted he’d make it a tenth of the way there.

Oliver had long since lost count of
how many times he’d been injected with nanobots. The cyborg scientists had
studied the results and determined that, through a process they couldn’t
understand, Oliver’s blood reacted to the injections by heating up and burning
the tiny machines to cinders. How this was possible without his superheated
blood turning Oliver himself into a pillar of fire was a mystery. He never felt
anything other than uncomfortably warm for a few moments, and once his blood
was purged of the machine invaders it returned to normal.

The tests continued, however. The
cyborgs seemed to have no end to the experiments they wanted to run on him.
This was advantageous to Oliver only in that it meant they wanted to keep him
alive and healthy. He was fed the same nutrient paste the cyborgs ate, which
tasted foul but was surprisingly filling, was allowed to exercise in a
fenced-off area outside, and was even provided with a television and DVDs to
watch in his room. Armed guards were never more than a few feet away, but it
beat the alternative. Oliver imagined they’d find a way to convert him one day,
and then a machine would take over his brain and he wouldn’t care anymore. He
wasn’t particularly looking forward to it.

Oliver was watching a British comedy
show about a hapless secret agent when one of the cyborg scientists entered his
room, syringe in hand. Two guards accompanied him, as was the usual. “Oliver
Jones, we require a blood sample.”

Oliver nodded. This scientist’s
designation number was SCI-3422XB. Each of the cyborgs had a designation that
identified their function and other information to other cyborgs, although
Oliver didn’t know what all of the other information meant. He’d picked up that
SCI meant scientist and SOL meant soldier, but that was about it.

SCI-3422XB wore a white lab coat over
his armor, which made him look more than a little ridiculous. Oliver had asked
about it once, given that there was no logical reason the cyborg needed to wear
it, and SCI-3422XB had told him that it was intended to make Oliver feel more
at ease with him. It came closer to making Oliver laugh, but he wasn’t going to
complain. If they really wanted to make him feel at ease, though, they could
start by getting rid of the armed guards outside of his room.

“I’m not going to have any blood left
one of these days,” Oliver said, pushing up the sleeve on his blue hospital
gown.

“That will not be a problem,” the
cyborg said. “We feed and hydrate you so that you will continue to produce
more.” He plunged the syringe into Oliver’s arm. Oliver had stopped wincing at
the less-than-gentle contact months ago. Being poked and prodded was so old hat
now he hardly noticed anymore.

The cyborg filled two vials with
Oliver’s blood and withdrew the syringe. “Satisfied?” Oliver asked.

“For now. We have an interesting new
set of tests to run.”

“Oh?”

SCI-3422XB nearly looked pleased with
himself, although Oliver knew cyborgs never felt pleased, or felt anything at
all. “We have discovered someone else who cannot be converted. We intend to
compare your blood to hers.”

“Seriously?” Oliver asked. “Who is
she?”

“A prisoner we captured nearby. It is
a most unusual situation. She claims to be a vampire.”

Oliver nearly laughed. He was about
to tell the cyborg that vampires weren’t real, but then again, it wouldn’t have
been very long ago that he’d have said that cyborgs weren’t real, either. He
wasn’t sure if he was comfortable making any assumptions. “Well…that’s pretty
interesting.”

“Indeed. We were unfamiliar with the
concept, but we confirmed that she is averse to sunlight and must consume human
blood to survive. She does not find our blood agreeable, so we intend to introduce
you very soon.”

“Oh?” That sounded ominous. “Should I
be worried?”

“I suppose it depends,” the cyborg
said.

“On what?”

“On how delicious you are.”

The introduction the cyborg had
spoken of came the very next day. Oliver was led under guard into an empty
operating theater and left alone. He spent a moment looking at himself in a
large mirror set in one of the walls. It was probably one-way glass, he
thought. Most likely all of the cyborg scientists were in an adjacent room,
watching and waiting to see what would happen next.

After a few minutes the door he had
been brought through opened again and two cyborg guards forced a woman in a
blue hospital gown inside. The woman’s hands had been bound behind her back
with metal cuffs and chains fastened her arms to her sides. She hissed
malevolently at the guards as they propelled her toward Oliver and then
retreated through the door. The door shut, locked, and Oliver found himself
alone with the vampire.

She didn’t look like much, at first
glance. The woman was Mexican, with dark hair and eyes that lingered on Oliver
for just a moment before scanning the room. Looking for an escape, Oliver
imagined. Maybe she’d find a way out and leave him alone.

That was not to be. After a moment the
woman turned her gaze back to Oliver. “What time is it?” she asked.

“What?”

“What time is it?”

“There isn’t a clock in my room,”
Oliver said. “It’s daytime.”

“Is the sun out?”

“Ah…yes.”

The woman grinned at him and he saw
fangs glistening where her canine teeth should have been. “Well then, you
understand I have to make this look good. And the truth is, I’m
very
hungry.”

Now it was Oliver who wanted very
much to escape, but there was no way out, unless he thought he could jump
through the mirror into the observation room. The vampire took a step toward
him. Even with her hands and arms bound, Oliver didn’t think he had much chance
of beating her in a fight, and he had just enough pride left that he wasn’t
going to start screaming and running around the room.

“We haven’t met,” he said. “I’m
Oliver. What’s your name?” Maybe if they made friends, she’d be less likely to
eat him?

The vampire stared into his eyes for
a moment. “You really have no idea, do you?”

“No. I’ve never actually met a
vampire.”

“You’re wrong,” she said. Then she
moved at him so quickly Oliver’s eyes hadn’t even registered it until her fangs
sank into his neck. Pain like fiery needles ran from the twin punctures all the
way down his arm and he nearly screamed.

The vampire took several gulps of his
blood and then released him. “You taste strange,” she said, her breath cool on
his neck. She looked at him quizzically. “You’re not exactly human, are you?”

“I was the last time I checked,”
Oliver said. His knees threatened to buckle at any moment, but the pain from
the vampire’s bite was already receding, replaced with a dull throbbing that
wasn’t much worse than a mild headache.

“And you’re already healing,” she
said, watching the skin of his neck. “Impressive. Chantal said there was
something supernatural about you, but I suspected she was willing to say
anything to keep me from ripping her head from her neck.” She smirked. “She
failed.”

Oliver wondered if blood loss was
making him delirious as well as dizzy. “What…the hell…are you talking about?”

The vampire shrugged as much as she
was able to with her arms chained into place. “It doesn’t matter right now. My
name is Maria, by the way. You’ll see me again.” She turned to the mirror.
“What else have you got?”

Two guards half-carried, half-dragged
Oliver back to his room. When they had him situated in his bed SCI-3422XB put a
needle in his arm and started an IV. “We must get your fluids back up, Oliver
Jones.”

“What did you really think you’d
learn from that?” Oliver asked. He was no longer in pain, but found himself
oddly tired.

“To see if you’d live, firstly. To
see if your blood can sustain her better than ours. At this moment we are
examining her to see how your blood affects her system. Depending on the
outcome, we may next want to see how her blood affects yours.”

“You want to give me
her
blood?”

“According to the mythology we have
accessed, that is typically how one becomes a vampire,” the cyborg said. “If
she is able to convert you, we will have learned something. If not, we will
also have learned something. Life is full of mysteries, is it not, Oliver
Jones?”

Oliver would have been inclined to
agree, but at the moment all he wanted to do was shut his eyes and go to sleep.
A moment later he did just that.