Descending Star

STALKERS

Victor soared and burrowed across d'Agostini National Park in broad daylight. He leapt from one tree top to the next over the deciduous forests, and he clawed molelike through the glacially scoured, denuded stone cliffs, painted in shattered quartz and feldspar. At all times he towed a sealed thirty gallon polypropylene canister, lashed to his torso by webbing. In the trees, the awkward container dangled beneath him and often shattered the tops of trees. Underground, it trailed behind him, the posterior segment of his wormlike progress through the stubbornly yielding earth. He rationally knew these precautions to be pointless, there hardly being a need for subterfuge in this desolate place within view of lands' end, but even in this austere isolation, forsaken by his lover, he cowered fearfully under the treacherous sunlight.

With several hours left to the day, he tore down a wall of vines and lichen to free a path to the stashed aft-propeller Rutan bi-plane. From the supply container, he removed a middling knapsack for the flight back to the States. He popped the forward exterior cargo door and slid the supply container and its remaining contents into the hold. Then he crouched under the fuselage and performed a deadlift on its beam, hoisting the aircraft up over his head, to walk it two hundred yards over the windswept gouges in stone left by primordial moraine forty thousand years ago. He carried the twenty-five hundred pound

aircraft across the inhospitable landscape to the unmarked, unpaved runway used by Park rangers. Only after he set it down in position for takeoff did he unlock, unfold and extend the wings.

Now he opened the knapsack and removed an assortment of electronics, all of mundane human manufacture. He had encased the devices in glass, to keep them dry through the ocean crossing Now he gently rapped each one against the stony ground, to shatter the glass and set them free. The shards had the consistency and color of cracked magma, translucent charcoal knives with umber and ochre beating within their semi-opaque hearts. He set the devices in the co-pilot's chair, to fiddle with them through the long journey north. Flight checks took mere seconds. He had sufficient fuel reserves to reach Peru, where he could bribe local airport officials for a refill. The fore and aft rotary engines roared to life, and he engaged the propellers. He applied the throttle, and the craft rolled forward, gradually accelerated on the downhill grade, and several hundred feet short of the rocky shore, the sea dropped away and yielded to the sky.

Victor set course and then turned to the small cache of gadgets on the adjacent seat. He carefully dusted fine grains of glass from the receptacles of a universal junction device that serviced every hardware interface protocol known to the twenty-first century, across a range of operating systems. With this device and the appropriate cables, he could slave any cellular phone or flash memory device to the laptop beside it. The latter had on its SSD card every rootkit, ROM flash, and cloning app he could conceivably need to jailbreak and burn any phone, camera or computer that came into his possession.

He had not written a single line of the software on the laptop. His area of expertise lay in knowing where on the Internet to find it. Victor had little or no technical aptitude with human technology. He merely exploited it. He had a poor grasp of human computational technology, and in this respect he was no exception among his kind. Vampires had difficulty, generally, with human-engineered technology, and this was not to suggest that they had a poor grasp of technology generally. Vampires had designed the direct mass-to-energy power cube in Jillian's cave, which would have been construed by human inquisitors as proof of either an extra-galactic alien landing or God. It was more the specific logical modality of human technology that vampires failed to grasp. They had a hard time with its serial nature, its linearity, and its failure to accommodate indeterminacy. Human computers worked sequentially, one step at a time. Even when they gave the impression of multi-tasking, they really just chunked workloads and time-shared them. Vampires did not think sequentially. They evaluated every possible outcome simultaneously, from moment to moment. Their innate computational capacity was so formidable that they had seldom ever bothered with the design of artificial calculators. A few did exist, on pedestals, in exhibits, as curiosities. Humans would not have recognized them as computers, which should have come as no surprise, with a moment's reflection, since in the early twenty-first century, humans still thought that their own brains were computers.