Vampires in Space

Taking Turns

When you live as long as we Vampires do, you have to move around in the human world. Take turns doing things. Sometimes the things you do are not the things you want to do. A necessary evil that is share and share alike.

I am weird in that I do not like to be in charge. None of my ego is stroked by it. Could not care less about power. I made enough money ages ago to be comfortable and happy. I like to learn, and I like to do important things, but things I think are important. Not things other people think are important. Getting Vampires safely off the Earth is important to me. Running an international company is not. When that International company is key to getting off the planet? Mixed feelings at best.

That is Heather and my situation right now. Well over a century ago, before she became an inter-universal being (in her more correct terminology, a multi-local-verse being) Heather was an early middle-aged mother and computer programmer. She was not looking for power even as hers is off the charts. She was not looking for her power to being central to the survival of the Vampire sub-species, but it is. In the same way, I resist being drafted to be in charge and made important, Heather resists her power and its importance. But only to a degree, because it is undeniable her 'normal' life has limits. Whether I like it or not, I also have to accept my time in the barrel. Victoria absolutely counts on me to get us safely off this Earth before the human race figures out we are real and kills us all.

In becoming important to Vampires, Heather has taken two turns: The first was when she merged with some sort of multi-localverse spark of life, created by the mating of beings that live in the between-space of all the Localverses. In the process, Heather gained mastery of all things energy. Since matter is energy and energy is matter, that is a pretty enormous area of mastery. A quick example: Most of the mass of a proton does NOT come from matter. More than 90% of the mass of a proton comes from the dynamics of quarks and gluons. On top of that, a Proton is almost all the mass of an Atom. Electrons count for nearly nothing. It takes about 1800 electrons to equal the mass of only one Proton. And the fun fact about all of that is that Heather controls ALL of it in this localverse.

The second time Heather turned was when she, Bill, and Cristine took the turn to become Vampires. Heather took the Vampire turn so that Bill and Cristine would have Vampire-length lives. Heather could already freeze or reset her aging via her ability to transform her body to energy and back, and upon return be anything or anyone she wanted to be. She wanted to share their existence. As a Vampire, she also shares part of my existence.

Even a century after meeting her, her abilities and her moral center boggle the mind and please the soul

Heather uses her power as little as she can get away with. Rather, she maintains a normal Vampire existence. Same as her husband and daughter. That means Heather is perpetually 25 and therefore always changing who she is to the human world. She would have had to do that anyway, as a non-aging super-being. Staying 'merely' Vampire is her preference.

In the early days of her super-powered existence, Heather started a software company via her mastery of electromagnetics and computers. She never has to lift a finger to write code, because she directly interfaces with computers to do it.

When she joined the Vampire world, she decided to come to my family to do it. A good and understandable choice. Helen is secretly the world's richest person. In all her long life she has managed money, marriage, and assets to keep them ever growing. A treasurer of the North American Vampire Council, she has access to vastly more assets. When Heather came to us to help her extend Bill and Cristine's lives via turning, the next natural step was to merge Heather's secret businesses with Helen's.

Heather was not as rich as Helen. She could have been, but that held no interest for her. Her original idea was to make enough money to control enough of the world around her to stay hidden. By merging her businesses and Helen's, and adding in her affinity for all things electronic, they can work together to stay in control of important things, and also use mastery of computers to shuffle things around and keep the secret of their size of the radar.

Never mind that machine intelligence advances we use in space come from Heather being able to essentially imprint her moral code into the machines. Asimov's three laws of robotics are nothing compared to that. The sentient computers we have in space are more or less her children and born directly of her mind.

A century passed like that. Helen, Heather, hidden machine intelligences that are illegal on Earth, and Vampire assets the world over serving the cause. In current times, Interplanetary was created as the front for all the clandestine activities. It's not the only Vampire company, but it is the biggest. The hardest part of the scale of the combined businesses is keeping them hidden. Making it not obvious they are all owned by one family. We are the real 'Global' in the room. No one knows about that but us. IE is a force to be reckoned with. Has to be to have what we are doing believable.

Our scale at Interplanetary means various members of the family have to take turns being the public face of IE. The front. In the same way, we have to change who the current Claremont at our winery, we rotate who the current CEO of IE is. The title is passed around. It has been Cristine, Nakoma, Diana, and Helen. Right now it is Heather. I am her right-hand person. President of R&D for a company that lives and breathes R&D, based upon Heather's abilities. Add in my Dad's and daughter Laura's scientific genius. Stir in Morgan's father's genius for making inventions practical.

Of all the family members who have held this role as the public faces of Interplanetary, and even though this is space and technology-related work, Heather and I are least temperamentally suited for it. Being in charge and running a business is Helen's thing. My Daughter Diana is amazing at it too. So is my son Ben. He'll be the next CEO after Heather.

I'm OK on the R&D side of this job. Natural nerd. I am not a political person, and over a century on the NorthAm Vampire ruling Council has not changed that. I rely always on Helen, Rachel, and Victoria to polish up my ramblings and make them palatable to the Vampire community. Denise, Anne, and Luciana similarly keep Crew under control, even if in theory it belongs to me.

All I can see is that in about 80 years I can get off Council and leave that shit behind. It will be even sooner with IE, since Humans will expect human-length tenures. Even with human lifetimes getting longer all the time, they are nothing like Vampire lifetimes. A human might see 150. A Siren or an Astral might see 250 if they avail themselves of human medicine. A Vampire is good for 10,000. Minimum. Some of the human longevity stuff is good for Vampires too. It has not been around long enough to know how much it extends our existence yet. Every advance in medicine makes Heather that much happier because it means Bill and Cristine will live that much longer.

Heather is as close to immortal as one can get. She survived being blown up with a Nuc. Any damage she gets she can undo with a trip out to Energyville.

For now, Heather and I are stuck with IE.

And stuck with this damn meeting.