Charles Stross - The Rhesus Chart

DONT BE SILLY, BOB, SAID MO. EVERYBODY KNOWS vampires dont exist.

I froze with my chopsticks halfway to my mouth, the tiny corpse of a tempura-battered baby squid clutched precariously between them, while I flailed for a reply to her non sequitur. We were dining out at an uncomfortably pricey conveyor-belt sushi restaurant just off Leicester Squareit was my treat, although I had an ulterior motive. Unfortunately I was in the doghouse for some reason. I didnt know why, and it might not even have been related to the deed Id brought her here to apologize for, but dinner showed every sign of turning into one of those rare but depressingly unfocussed marital arguments we had every few months. And the most prominent warning sign was this: the replacement of reasoned discussion with peremptory denial.

We cant be sure of that. I mean, doesnt that take us right into proving-a-negative territory? The ubiquity of the legends, the consistent elements, all suggest to me that maybe weve been looking in the wrong place

We were here because I thought it might help soften her up before I apologized for what Id done to her friend Pete the month before. But instead of unwinding or letting me tell her about my latest office project, shed switched into hypercritical mode as soon as we got to our booth. Apology shelved. Perhaps shed just had a bad day at the office, but begging forgiveness for sins of necessity committed in the line of duty was clearly off the menu for the time being. Ten years together, seven of them married, have taught me to recognize the signs: right now if I reminded her that the sun rose in the east shed start by stonewalling then escalate to a land war in Asia.

Bob. When she said my name like that, it gave me flashbacks to Miss Pearson in Primary Two (not my favorite teacher): Vampires cant exist. Thered be detailed records in the archives; they couldnt possibly evade detection by the state for any significant period. Besides whichshe aimed an alarmingly sharp wooden chopstick at my nosethered be corpses everywhere. Human blood is a poor nutrient source; its about 60 percent plasma by volume and only provides about 900 calories per liter, so your hypothetical blood-sucking fiend is going to have to drink about two and a half liters per a day. Those calories dont come in the form of useful stuff like glucose and fat: its mostly protein from circulating red blood cells. Dracula would have to exsanguinate a victim every day just to stay alive, and would suffer from chronic ketoacidosis. The total number of intentional homicides for the whole country is around 700 a year; a single vampire would cause a 50 percent spike in the murder rate. Or theyd have to take transfusion-sized donations about two thousand times a year. She capped the boss-level takedown with a tight-lipped, triumphant smile, the better to conceal her incisors: If you think you, or I, or anyone in the office could mind-control hundreds of people well enough to prevent at least one of them going to their GP to complain about the lethargy and anemia...

I gave in to the inevitable. Youve researched this already, havent you?

It came up in a brainstorming exercise about six years ago. We were investigating using ecosystem analysis to evaluate the probability of emergent new threat modalities. We also brainstormed golems, werewolves, and sasquatch. She took a spoonful of miso soup. If they existed wed know about them, Bob.

ButI paused to swallow my squid and pluck another one from the color-coded plate in front of meyour model assumes theyre obligate hemophages, doesnt it? And that theyre endothermic, or at least have an energy budget not entirely unlike every other vertebrate known to science. What if thats not the whole story? What if they eat

Bob. She stopped short of rolling her eyes, but I could see she was bored, and growing more annoyed by the minute: Eat your baby tentacle monsters before they go cold.

Mo has an aversion to pseudopods. When we first met, some very unpleasant people were trying to sacrifice her in order to summon an alien horror from beyond spacetime. Id distracted them long enough for the seventh cavalry to arrive, and sometime after that Mo and I had started datingbut she still couldnt (and cant) stomach calamari. I cleaned my plate and watched as she finished her soup.

Im done here, she announced, picking up her violin case without asking whether I was still hungry. Im going home.

Which is why I didnt get a chance to apologize for dragging Pete into the business in Colorado Springs. Or to explain my hypothesis about what vampirism really was, and what I was doing about it. Or to save our marriage.

THE NAMES HOWARD, BOB HOWARD. IM A COMPUTER SCIENCE graduate and IT person, and I work for the British government in London, as does my wife Mo, Dominique OBrien, who is a few years older than I am but still (in my opinion) a gorgeous redhead.

Thats the mundane version, cleared for public consumption. It is also deeply misleading, but its the version Im allowed to give to friends and family without being required to kill them, so well call that a net win. Its also not entirely false.

The secret organization I work for is commonly called the Laundry because when it was established in its current form in 1940 it was based above a Chinese laundry in Soho. As Q Department, SOE, it was tasked with waging an occult war against the Ahnenerbe-SS. Today, the name may have changed several times but its the same organizationthe one you have just been admitted to, if youre reading this classified journal and your hair isnt on fire due to the security wards on the cover.