Cohost writing prompt: @ireneista — Vampire hunter who thinks not only are vampires bigots, they never have plausible theories of change
"Young vampires," the hunter says, drawing the knife smoothly across the whetstone, "are just hunger on legs. Kill people for food, sleep. Kill, sleep. It's all they can do. And that's the root cause of everything, really."
"Is that so," Grace says. It seems polite. It seems less awkward than letting the guy just ramble to himself while he obsessively sharpens his knife all night, anyway. She's pretty she's getting the entire ramble, either way.
"Do you know how old the earliest preserved vampire histories are?"
She remembers that, actually, from humouring Trevor's rambles. "About three thousand years," she says helpfully, and throws the guy's sharpening rhythm right off. Rhetorical, apparently.
"That's all kinds of wrong," the guy says eventually, bedding himself back into his groove, narrating the red-string conspiracy wall permanently tacked to the inside of his own skull. "That's all kinds of wrong because they're older than that, and they keep records, so why don't they have the older ones? And in a roundabout way: because young vampires are just hunger on legs." He holds the blade up, squinting along the edge. "Because you can't let them, not if you want to survive. Angry human mobs versus lone, strictly nocturnal predators gets vampires killed. So they control their young. Mind control them."
"That's an interesting hypothesis for the origin of vampire hypnosis," Grace says, and he levels the point of the knife at her, across the room, scowling.
"Vampires," he says, "are arch-conservatives. Because they are permanently imprinted on, susceptible to control by, and moulded by the vampire who first clamped down on their mind and kept them in check during their young hunger. All the vampires in the world have puppet strings, a vast hierarchy of puppet strings, tapering upward to a single eldest master vampire. The survivor of a war, three millennia ago. Social ideas three millennia old, mores branded into the minds of every vampire under him, who brand them into every vampire under them, all the way to street level. Vampires don't change. Vampires can't change. A single, utterly inflexible, eusocial cultural hegemony enforced by mind control."
Grace considers whether or not to say it, opens her mouth: "But—"
Grace is a freak. Trevor Deacon, techbro, self-mythologising Silicon Valley frat douche, is a vampire; and one of his whims was to turn Grace, and just...see what happened, if he immediately hooked her up to a private blood bank, poured it into her until she came to her senses, instead of the traditional process of remote-controlling her brain and letting her off the leash a little, just often enough not to starve, for however many years it took.
Grace is not much more than a year old, and nobody's ever mind-controlled her; nobody's had to. She's perfectly well-behaved. Being dead, as far as she's concerned, has an extensive column of pluses.
It may not be prudent to spill all that to the vampire hunter weirdo.
"But things are getting lax, at street level," the weirdo says, grimly triumphant. "You, for example, have some mental latitude! And that's a good and a bad sign, because you know what that heralds?"
"Social...progress?"
"Vampire apocalypse." He wipes the knife clean, sheathes it, pulls out another one. "Every three millennia. Blank slate. Everything burns down, nearly all vampires kill each other, the survivors build a new vampire world that's culturally reset, closer to the contemporary human one. As best they can, anyway, with their thinking deformed by legacy; it's a curse, really. Arch-conservatism, written direct and immovable, into the brain. They can only even survive, culturally, by periodically razing themselves."
"Huh," Grace says.
Trevor kind of forgot about her, even before she was finished. Just another side project, launched and languishing unmaintained. She's not sure he even really realises she's wandering around, doing all her own thinking, with the run of his black budget labs and one of his black corporate Amex cards.
If she's a harbinger of the free-thinking vampire apocalypse, maybe she should put some thought into what kind of next vampire world she wants to see, and how she's going to get rid of all the vampires with other, shittier ideas. And work out what Trevor knows, and whether he's planning the same.
She silently finishes picking the handcuff lock.
"Interesting," she says.