The Shape of Things to Come (Hypernaturals 15)

Cultural Point of View

The last of the audio recording finished playing.

It was the entire conversation with Kyung-sook. The final piece of information following a detailed overview of a few days ago. Most, but not all the Crew actions that had been recently taken on the other side of the planet. Unimportant details were left out. Where we got submarines. How we added extra underwater run time to them. How we snuck a fleet of C4-equipped drones into the Geo undetected. Slowly. Carefully, and not all at once. Dealing with humans and in-Geo resources. All the drones were made there, for example. We never had to do a thing to get them there. Our part was getting the C4 there, setting the drones up in their launch locations after testing the hell out of them, and then having the deep cover teams get the hell out of there. With more distraction and handywavyness in the Philippines of Crew gathering, boats being readied, and other things for them to look at and ponder upon.

They don't need to know about any of that.

What we did display for this briefing was timelines of the action, complete with select diagrams and pictures from space of boats looking for other tiny fragments of boats and top-down views of imploded buildings with stolen goods in them. Dust visibly trailing away in the air. Not from fire, but from powdered concrete. Neither building caught fire. The human fire departments on the scene sprayed water to abate dust.

Hitomi and Long exchanged a look, and I liked the progress that it indicated to me. After a century of being her chattel in their former Geo, Long is still pretty subservient to Hitomi despite being told over and over he does not have to be. In that visual exchange, there was no looking down. No averting eyes. No 'your wish is my command' bullshit. That was a look as between two people exchanging insider information. It was a knowing look.

Denise, Jessica, Morgan, and I are in the conference room with Hitomi and Long. The wall is still covered with monitors, but mostly dark now. A couple of monitors are running screen savers. Dancing patterns of color. It's a conference room, and we still use the display wall to show things we are talking about in here.

I have accused Luciana of calling meetings just to display pictures of nude males on the wall screen. Pictures from her infamous Conclave talk about male Vampires.

Luciana never rises to the bait. "Nope. Just naked stuff Denise brings in of you." or some variation of that is what I usually get back. I love the lack of respect. Makes me happy. I need that to be ready for spending time with Hitomi.

The four of us waited to see where this went.

"You knew I called back to the Geo to report in from the Cruise ship during the Conclave." Hitomi said. I think she thought she is in trouble. A little defensive.

"Of course I was, aware, Hitomi." I managed to keep most of the irritation she went directly to the conclusion out of my voice. "That is not why I played that conversation or had you briefed in on the situation. The Elders acted upon the information you gave them from the Conclave, but if they had asked for copies of all the Conclave presentations we would have sent them. Encrypted, but we would have given them the key. That was a global Conclave, and none of what was talked about out there in the Atlantic on the 'MS Rose' was a secret inside the Vampire community. Not even the larger Vampire related community. It was the biggest Conclave ever held! That is part of the disconnect. The fucking Elders keep acting like we are hiding things from them, and sneaking around when we have been and are willing to share our knowledge. To the degree it is possible to be open and keep the Secret from the humans, we have been!"

"I ... Do not understand." Hitomi was relieved and confused at the same time.

Because of Morgan's influence on my musical life the Led Zeppelin lyric 'Dazed and Confused' popped into my head, but I did not sing it. Hitomi and Long would not understand. Also, not really appropriate as that one is about hurt and abuse and telling lies, and this is the opposite of that. "I did not bring you two into the know about our operation to pump you for knowledge, although I do have one question. I wanted you to know this from me before you got it from your friends that remain in the AsiaPac Vampire Geo. Perhaps get some distorted version of this. You know how global gossip works: The Vampire telephone. In one end of the Vampire gossip line goes the fact that a boat exploded near Beijing, and out the other end pops the elaborate story of a coup attempt involving hoards of Crew, automatic weapons, and threats to use nuclear weapons."