milliways_bar | (no subject)

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Jim has been rather enjoying spending weeks being moody and depressed in his suite, mainly because Sherlock's up there to make sure he's not actually all that moody and depressed. Bloody boyfriends, and their way of making life better. Jim would grump about that if he weren't pleased by it.

He's only in the bar now because his favourite distraction is asleep and anyway, they need food. Jim puts in a large order and, on a whim, asks for a current newspaper from their world. Bar provides an iPad with various headlines, and he scrolls through until he hits upon the news that NASA has discovered a solar system where life might have evolved.

He forgets about the food, and pretty much everything else for a while. Eventually he wanders over to the Window, still reading, and then just sits looking out at the explosions.

(The ice cream he bought will be melting all over the Bar at some point, so if anyone wants free food he's probably not going to object, or even notice.)

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Jim puts his hand over his heart.

'You're not impugning computer sciences Father, surely? I can't be hearing that right.'

That's not very progressive. But he grins, and swirls ice around his glass with a lazy hand.

'It looks like your world is ripe for future takeover by the Great Orange, then. But you have vampires, so a solution suggests itself without too much effort.'

"We should let our problems solve each other?" Harman says, wryly. "Always a good approach."

Jim shrugs again, bored.

'You should use what weapons you have available. It's not like the problems are going to go away on their own.'

He slouches sideways on his armchair. He's entirely louche, but his eyes are beyond sharp.

'Tell me about your vampires then, seeing as I'm not about to get the scolding I so richly deserve.'

"If you think you deserve it, why should I bore you by delivering it?" Harman smiles.

Pause.

"We call them Code Fives, from the Roman numeral. And they are dead bodie without souls, animated by a strain of virus."

He just laughs. He doesn't - and clearly doesn't - think he deserves it. Or rather, knows he does and knows it wouldn't make any difference whatsoever, outside of providing amusement at Harman's expense.

'V for Vampire. Neat.'

He sips his drink, kicking his legs a little.

'Do you mean like zombies?'

"No," Harman says. "Their brains still work properly, their memories are all there, their skills, knowledge and so on. They talk and argue and can pretend to be human. But they are no longer themselves, stop caring about the people they used to love, and no longer show up in mirrors, on film, on video or even on voice recordings or transmissions."

'...they sound just like other vampires.'

Who even he would not characterise as dead bodies without souls.

'Do you consider them having lost their humanity because they don't love who they used to? Living people do that, don't they?'

"They have lost all their principles, ethics and moral compass," Harman says. "The only thing they care about is the survival of vampires as a species, and themselves as an individual. They are incapable of altruism and will use anyone or anything to further their goals."

'...still not seeing your point.'

Vampire species aside, Harman just described him. And there are other humans like him, rare as they might be. It's not something confined to vampires.

"They are animated corpses, directed by the collective conscious of the entirety of that virus spread -- as far as we can tell now," Harman says. "Each vampire is hardly more than one cell of a superorganism."

Jim pulls a face.

'So you're not sure?'

He's awfully judgemental for someone who's not sure.

"They're not telling us," Harman says. "Our scientists research them and come to a conclusion factoring in all known data points. What we don't know yet, we can't take into consideration. We constantly gain new knowledge, so the holographic picture our science paints of that entity or entities shifts constantly. That is how all science works -- focused on questions, not answers. In that, all science must always be only the newest state of error."

Pause.

"For example, we recently found out that they can regenerate individual vampires."

'You're telling me about science?'

Amusing.

'But again, can't all vampires do that to a certain degree? If you believe stories.'

"They can only be neutralised by wooden stakes -- or carbon bullets -- or sunlight," Harman says. "What we didn't know until recently is that the dark brown granules that remain when a vampire body explosively burned up will re-integrate into that same body once infused with the blood of another vampire."

'So how can you categorise that as a virus? That's not how viruses work.'

Mutation maybe, but only in the broadest sense.

"Because that is how it's transmitted," Harman says. "We have identified it, and can test for it. In other aspects, it works more like a slime mould."

A virus and a slime mould. This world sounds like it has very mixed science.

'And, what? You think they're trying to take over the world?'

They probably are. That's the way it always goes.

"Of course they are," Harman says. "Our theory is that they aim to prevent us from messing up their food source. We're in 1998, and even the vampires feel the millennial panic. For a long time, they'd been nothing but low-key parasites, very careful not to startle the host organism. We have watched them for centuries, and interfered where needed."

'You've known about them for centuries,' Jim says blankly, 'and haven't yet controlled them entirely, and they haven't actually tried to rise up against you?'

This is hardly the way of usual vampire stories, and they don't actually sound like they're doing much of anything at all. The vampires, that is.

"That is right," Harman says. "Like a good parasite, they tried to escape notice, and apart from a few localised outbreaks that have passed into folklore, it had worked for them -- and for us as well. If we learned anything from those outbreaks, it was that most human casualties were caused by humans when witch-hunt dynamics got out of control. We don't want that again with a population of nearly seven billion humans, and a few hundred vampires."

'Why not? It'd solve the population crisis, and would deprive your vampires of a food source so widespread they can afford to come out of hiding.'

Obviously.

"Because they are people, with souls, and every life and soul is precious," Harman says, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

'Well, that's certainly one way of looking at things,' he says mildly, polite but quite obviously thinking what total bullshit that is.

'But no doubt the vampires would make the same argument for themselves.'

"They don't," Harman says, mildly. "They argue mock-rationally, and pose as a persecuted minority, if challenged."

'But you don't believe them.'

A member of the Catholic church with stringent and unyielding views? SURELY NOT.