Alex shrugged and gave her a half-hearted smile to cover his confusion. They walked along in silence for a short time, passing through a block crowded with small restaurants and bars, each spilling patrons and cooking smells out onto the sidewalk.
“Alex, do you know what vampires are?”
Margot’s eyes were cold as she looked at him. Alex laughed, the sound carried away by a rush of passing traffic. He’d been in Central so long, it felt strange and crowded here.
“Oh, what my life has become,” he said, smirking. “Please, go ahead and tell me.”
Margot eyed him coldly.
“Remember the nanomachines that they injected you with, when you first got to the Academy? The ones that saved your life?” Margot’s eyes narrowed as she spoke, but her tone remained cold and flat. “Well, they ended mine.”
Alex looked at Margot blankly.
“Oh, didn’t they tell you? Those nanites kill a third of the people they introduce them into.”
Alex shook his head, feeling a bit ill. Michael had mentioned that there was a mortality rate, of course, and he’d even said that it was high — but Alex had never suspected anything along those lines. He fought a bizarre desire to scratch at the now invisible spot on his upper arm where the IV had plugged in.
“That’s why the Hegemony objects so much to the Black Sun’s philosophy of mass-introduction to the populace at large,” Margot said with a shrug. “They are imagining a few billion corpses.”
Alex failed to keep the horror off his face, and Margot seemed amused by it.
“Obviously, to Anastasia’s crowd, that kind of thing goes with the territory,” Margot said, shrugging. “Anyway, if your body rejects the nanomachines, cardiac and respiratory arrest starts almost immediately, followed by total brain death. Fast and irreversible. But they can’t just bag the body and call the morgue, at least, not right away.”
Pausing for effect, Margot seemed to soak up the curiosity and repulsion she could see on Alex’s face.
“They trundle the bodies on down to the basement of the medical building, where the only vampire on staff works, an old guy named Jorge, who’s had the job for decades now. I don’t blame him for not giving it up; after all, it seems pretty damn easy, as long as you aren’t squeamish, and don’t mind the hours.”
She deftly maneuvered her way through a crowd of smokers outside of a packed, faux Irish-themed pub, carving a path through the drunks and the underdressed girls who lined the sidewalk, raising her voice so that Alex could hear her while they walked.
“Jorge keeps an eye on the bodies, Alex. Weird guy. For three days, twenty-four hours a day, for everyone who rejects the nanites. And most of the time, that’s his whole job — staring at corpses.”
Margot turned back and looked over her shoulder, giving Alex an almost feral grin. For the first time, he noticed that she did in fact have fangs — or rather, a pair of subtly elongated canine teeth, the points of which peaked out from underneath her pale lips when she smiled.
“He gets a lot of reading done. Except, of course, when one of them sits up and starts screaming.”
“How often does that happen?” Alex asked, morbidly curious.
“Not that often,” Margot said, slowing her pace as the sidewalk cleared, so that Alex could walk more easily alongside her. “In the time I’ve been at the Academy, it’s only happened twice.”
“You woke up needing to drink blood after a three day coma? That seems a little unlikely.”
Margot laughed dismissively.
“Hardly. There was no coma. I died, Alex. I died, and then three days later, the nanites woke me up. They’d repaired the damage to my body, and made a few other small changes while they were at it.”
Margot took obvious satisfaction from the horror she saw in his face.
“Are you… you know,” Alex asked hesitantly, looking at her with a certain amount of trepidation, “dead? You don’t seem like it.”
“It’s hard to say,” Margot admitted. “I don’t feel dead. My heart beats, I need to breathe, I get hungry — I even have hay fever in the spring. But that isn’t everything. Something is… wrong.”
Margot shook her head and looked up at the night sky. Maybe her eyes were different from Alex’s, but he couldn’t see anything besides a dull humidity that reflected the city’s ambient light back, a moist grey blanket hovering over the bay, and the fat yellow moon behind it.
“The last thing I remember is agreeing to the introduction,” Margot said, quiet enough that Alex had to walk closer to her to hear. “I remember that it burned, in my arm, where they put the IV in. I could tell from the look on the doctor’s face that was something was wrong, I remember Michael yelling something. Then there was a terrible pain in my chest, and then after that, nothing at all…”
Margot trailed off for a moment, frowning.
“When I woke up, my chest didn’t hurt anymore,” Margot said, shrugging. “And nothing else has much, since then.”
“Wow. That’s all kinds of fucked up. I mean, I tend to think that they shit that’s happened to me is pretty damn bad, but that’s really a whole lot worse…”
“Thanks. I think.”
“I still don’t really understand…”
Margot sighed, as she stepped deftly around an assortment of broken glass and sleeping transients. The sidewalk here was stained brownish-red, for reasons Alex preferred not to think about.
“The nanites inside you,” Margot said, pointing at Alex. “Help repair and maintain your body, right? If you get hurt, they help you heal, if you get sick, they help fight the disease. Did you know that you’re more-or-less immune to cancer? I think the administration started playing that part down, lately, to try and discourage smoking.”
Margot smiled slightly at this, then hooked a thumb at herself.
“Those same nanites malfunction inside me, Alex. And not only when they killed me. When they brought me back, too. Your body is permeated with nanites, true, but mine is contaminated with them,” Margot said grimly. “Among other little changes they made, the nanites purged all the marrow from my bones and replaced them with a mass of nanoassemblers. No bone marrow, no hemoglobin.”
“But why can’t the nanites make hemoglobin for you? Michael said they can manufacture tissue and stuff, even bone.”
“Yours can,” Margot said, bitterly. “Mine can’t. Mine can’t produce any kind of living tissue. Nothing biological.”
Alex had a whole series of alarming thoughts.
“So what happens when you get hurt? If your body can’t heal, and the nanomachines can’t repair damage, then…”
“Synthetic replacements.”
The vampire held up one arm in the sickly yellow light of a flickering street light, looking at it wistfully, the way people look at childhood photos.
“Two years ago, I was working a field op in Tbilisi, clearing out a Witch coven. One night, while we were purging the old cemetery, a Ghoul managed to take a big chunk out of my arm.”
“What the hell is a Ghoul?”
Margot paused to glare at him for the interruption, then continued.
“I probably would have bled to death, without the nanites. When I woke up the next morning, my arm was already rebuilt — entirely from synthetic materials, doped with nanites. I can’t feel anything with it, anymore. The lab says it’s mostly silicon.”
They walked in silence for a moment, then Alex shrugged.
“Okay, so all of that sucks,” Alex said, more callously than he meant to, “but why are you telling me all this?”
Margot spun around so fast Alex didn’t even have time to get his hands up between them, her long black coat flaring out as she spun, poking one finger firmly into the center of his chest, her face contorted with barely suppressed anger.
“What I am trying to tell you,” Margot said, with a quiet intensity, “is that I am a reanimated corpse, one filled with tiny machines that are gradually displacing everything organic in my body. And as strange and frightening as that makes me, Alex, that is nothing compared to how strange Eerie is. At least I was human being, at one point.”