by Feeder Watts

No one knew why so many of our vampires, reconstituted from the scattered intronic embers of our stirred-up genome, turned out to be gay. All we knew is they were too damned good at it.

Click.

Wells leaned over the bar, parallax-mapped visuals slithering over his forearms and back onto the gleaming formica. The bartender, bangs askew and sleeves rolled up to reveal a roiling sea of tesselated ink, gave him a practiced expression of disinterest.

“What’ll you have?”

There, in the mirror behind the bar, just visible over her shoulder, gleamed the tapetic eyes of a nightmare. Pale skin, pronounced canines just visible in a shadow of a smile, framed by a jaw too large for comfort. Wells froze, hunched involuntarily.

He knew the signs, of course. Had seen a picture, once, in school. For an interminable second it stared at him, in the mirror, unmoving, with that awful smile spreading over its face like a slowly ripping seam. Then one of the dancefloor lights, tumbling in its ceiling mount, flared across his vision, and in that moment, the vampire was gone.

Wells spun around, chest tight, adrenaline flooding his shaky limbs–but there was only the hustle of Dram’s: drunk girls and a man in a gaudy purple suit, an out-of-place businesswoman with what he guessed was an escort, a gaggle of lagomorph lacrosse players whose bulging thongs were anchored in the rear by stubby fluffball tails. He turned to the bartender, wordless, but she had already moved on.

Wells left the bar stumbling in the company of a woman named Minnow, or Minerva, or something to that effect–the bar’s subsonics had a way of fucking with soft consonants while they tickled your viscera. They made it half a block before a shadow detached itself from the wall and flowed, so quickly his eyes defocused trying to track the motion, to an uncanny stop, centimeters from his face.

“I take him from here.”

One arm flicked out, mantis-like, to caress the side of his face. Wells was frozen again, breath cold-pooling in his lungs. Marrow had dropped her purse, and was screaming: a long, keening, high-pitched affair.

“Hush now.” Something blurred, the wailing died away to a murmur, and Mirror dropped to the wet asphalt. The fingers against Well’s temple, tapping out an ancient dance in broken time, had never ceased their drumming. “Mustn’t attract attention.”

The vampire’s eyes gleamed purple and yellow in the reflected neon; he whispered promises against Wells’ cheek that his mind could not remember, but his cock, swelling against his trousers, understood full well. The world dimmed around them, leaving the glow of the vampire’s eyes, his flushed skin, and the prickling trails of raindrops, tracing rivulets across Wells’ face and neck. As one predatory hand closed around his throat, and the trickle of blood to his brain thinned, Wells gulped, and softly nodded. There was the ghost of a smile across the vampire’s face, a rushing in his ears, and the words, “Good boy.”

Wells awoke to cold vinyl, metal bars, and the sounds of fucking.

He lay in a cage. Large, considering, though he couldn’t do more than sit up. About a meter off the floor. Padded on the bottom. Past the bars, in the middle of a pool of red light, he could see a frame in the shape of a cube, and suspended in the center of it, his limbs absorbed by blobs of black elastomeric smartglue anchored to the upper corners of the frame, hung the fattest man he had ever seen. He was moaning: gutteral, animal sounds. His flesh swung and rippled with the impact of every–

the vampire is fucking him holy shit the vampire is fucking him

Wells tried to calm the rising gorge in his throat. It wasn’t impossible, he supposed. Interbreeding had occurred regularly, so the drive must be there. After all, that’s how we were able to recover their genome to begin with. The vampires had never fully speciated–and in fact, there was an argument to be made that the paracentric inversion on Xq21.3 which defined so much of their kind more accurately resembled a syndrome than a…

This is isn’t helping.  Focus.

As he watched in fascinated revulsion–nothing against gays, of course, but his own tastes ran to buxom women, and this was just–the angular vampire ceased jackhammering away and looked dead at him.

“Be right with you, meat.”

Then he leaned over, and sunk his fangs into his suspended prey, who redoubled his hapless moaning. Wells couldn’t tell whether the noises were pain or ecstasy, or some mixture of both, but the blood dripping from two puncture wounds in his inner thigh was all too real. His motions more fluid, wasteful, the vampire grunted and sucked hungrily at the wound, and his hand disappeared into the folds between the man’s legs, and pushed there. The man let out a deep bellow, almost bovine, and blew an enormous load, cum spurting from his cock to coat his bulging, furry belly with thick traces. The vampire licked at these hungrily, and smeared the rest, with his fingers, into the fat man’s mouth, who slurped away as if he’d never tasted anything so sweet.

Thus satisfied, the vampire pulled back, and wiped the blood from his chin. The man gurgled happily to himself, swinging gently in the frame. “Now then. Meat. We have a nice talk.”

“Let me the fuck out of here. Don’t you–”

“–know I’m with Intersys? If I don’t check in…” The vampire leaned in, mocking, and matched Wells’ words in lockstep. Wells tried again.

“Seriously, nobody has–” “–to know about this. About you. Just let me go and I’ll stay quiet.”

His captor grinned. “But you don’t stay quiet, do you, meat? It bubbles through your subconscious even now. A dozen meters out the door, and you are already calling the authorities. You must be tired of it, meat. Always catching up to yourself, two seconds behind, rationalizing decisions that were never yours to begin with?”

The vampire made a gutteral click in the back of his throat, and two more enormous-chested men, arms and quads bulging with muscle, crawled out of the darkened corners of the room and nuzzled into his crotch adoringly. The thicker one, barrel-chested with a dusting of red fur, reared up on his haunches and licked at the vampire’s fingers, who pushed them idly into the man’s mouth.

“What the fuck have you–”

“I free them, meat. The same way I free you. No more cross-talk. Self-doubt. Bicameral monologue damped. This construct of ‘self’ that you cling to, the lie of consciousness, bypassed. It is…” he smiled to himself, “Most humane.”

At this, the thicker of the two bears dropped to all fours, grunted and wriggled his meaty ass. Casually, the vampire sat down on him, and let the silver-haired, shorter man rest his chin on the vampire’s knee. “See? Your kind is happiest this way.”

Wells noticed that the vampire had been tapping his foot against the floor, a polyrhythmic tattoo which echoed quietly in the room. How long had he been doing that?

The vampire leaned in, very close. He just moved wrong, somehow. Wells curled into a ball, pulling as far away from the bars as possible.

“Want you to imagine something: The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian.”

Wells felt a swelling pressure building in his loins; his thighs went stiff, twitching erratically, and semen spurted uncontrollably from his cock, a static fuzz of firebursts playing out in waves over the back of his skull. His eyes jiggled in their sockets, and Wells’ body slackened as the vampire pulled him from the cage, dragged him through a series of darkened rooms, and strapped him to the spotless, articulated plastic chair of a field surgery unit. An inhibitor field sectioned him neatly at the neck, leaving only the sensation of the vampire’s chilled fingers running through his hair, buzzing. A sudden coolness. He was being shaved.

“Need you awake for this part,” the vampire murmured. Wells stuttered, the orgasmic siezure still sparking through his nerves, triggering staccato tics in his left cheek.

“kh-kh-kh-kh-”

“It fades already. Only so much possible with subliminals.” The vampire’s hand was almost tender as he stroked Wells’ beard. Wells thought he would shiver at the touch, but the field kept his body perfectly still. Only his jaw quivered.

A few taps, and the surgical unit whined to life, its limbs licking each other clean as it went through its sterilization ritual. Then four swooped down from the ceiling to surround him, like a spider descending on its prey. A brief glow, some kind of spray at the sides of his skull–the skin went numb there–then two of the arms clamped down on his head tighly, and there was a sharp, pinprick pain over his ear. Wells whimpered as something pierced the bone there, then a tiny mechanical sound and the sensation of something being threaded.

“Standard nanofibril array. Subaxonic potential resolution, localized chemoassay. Collects telemetry for neurosurgical targeting.”

Wells squeezed his eyes tight enough for form constants to glow, shifting, behind the warm darkness of his lids. One of the machine’s arms retrieved a small flat disc from the fab, and pressed it coolly over the insertion site. It clicked, beeped once, and went quiet.

“Please…”

“Nothing changes yet. You’re still a you. Have to find out where you live before we can fix that.”

“Wells looked on dumbly as the arms swung to his left side. "You can’t… fix consciousness. It’s… intrinsic.”

The vampire gazed intently. Wells had the distinct feeling of being measured.

“Selective alterations to the anterior cingulate gyrus, thalamus, amygdala, remapping emotional response. Microlesions in the right parietal lobe involved in transcendental experiences, self-other distinction, and perception of time. Alteration of the caudate nucleus, Broca’s area, and Wernicke’s: productive aphasia, disruption of internal monologue. Crosswiring of mirror neurons elicits prosocial sensitivity. Work in progress. Still, results speak–” he clicked softly “–for themselves.”

The vampire stamped him on the shoulder with an injector, which hissed briefly.

“Viral gene-tailoring complex. Upregulation of endogenous κ-opioid production involved in pain response. Rebalances testosterone, myostatin, growth factors. Adjustments to insulin and leptin. Increased appetite, muscle-building capacity, yes? Make a nice, thick meat of you.”

“The others… you made them this way?”

“Shouldn’t be surprising. You do the same. Breed cattle for muscularity, docility. Milk production. For fish: artificial coloring and texture enhancement. We both seek hyperstimulus.”

This took a moment to sink in.

“Besides, alteration raises their hematocrit. They make…” He smiled wistfully. “…too much blood. Mutually beneficial arrangement.”

“Doesn’t feel very fucking beneficial.”

“And yet you want this anyway. Fascinated by it, meat. I see the hunger in you for months now; the way you whimper in your sleep. In the alley, you do not resist. Only your conscious self requires the narrative of overpowering force.”

“I’m fucking straight, man! I don’t want any of this shit!”

“You are provided with this narrative, yes. But, like so many poor tastes, correctible with the proper equipment. A neuroaestheticist could change this in an afternoon.”

Wells thought about his stiffening cock, in the alleyway. How he had watched the fucking with a mix of horror and fascination. “You can’t. You didn’t.”

“I do.”

Wells realized the vampire’s feet were still tapping out that secret, disjointed tattoo. Something whispered in the hollow void of his body, deep within the inhibitor field. An echo, he thought.

Or an answer.

The first day was the hardest. Wells tossed, sweating in his cage as the virus consumed him; he ran a temperature of 104, and a thin mucous dribbled from his lips. In some half-remembered fever dream, he felt the hot breath of men surrounding him, panting, pawing, sniffing at his body through the bars.

The fever broke on the third day, and Wells awoke to a hunger clawing in his gut, and an open door to his cage. In the center of the room, the vampire sat alone, holding a polycarbonate bottle.

“You’re hungry, meat. Come get some food.”

At the far end of the room, on the left, lay a doorway, and a staircase leading up. An exit?

“Come here, meat. I don’t harm you.”

Vampires think in present tense, Wells recalled. Each memory a flashback, each projection, a thread of consciousness sent racing ahead.

“Come.” It was a command. Tentatively, Wells unfolded himself from the cage and took a shaky step forward–but his knees buckled, and he fell to all fours. The vampire inclined his head slightly. “That’s all right, meat. Right here.”

Wells reached out to snatch the outstretched bottle, and scuttled back to the cage. Thick, delicious, chocolate milk. He downed the entire liter, and his twitching cock left a trail of precum smeared across the vinyl padding.

His cage was left unlocked that day, though Wells stayed within it. Waiting. Watching for a way out. The vampire filled a trough in the back of the room with gallons of the milkshake, and let the other… men… out to feed.  They wagged eagerly at his feet, then bounded over to the trough. Wells watched them slurp down buckets of the stuff before they passed out in a contented pile. The vampire smiled, and quietly left the room.

The door to the left remained open.

After half an hour, giving his disused joints a chance to acclimate to standing, Wells made his way cautiously to the doorway, and up the stairs. A light shone at the top, and he thought he could hear the sounds of traffic outside.

At the top of the stairs, he found a concrete wall covered in smartpaint, and a small speaker, from which emanated the rumbling sounds of street life. Then a quiet voice behind him, like diamond on slate, whispered into his ear.

“Want you to imagine something.”

That evening, while the ultramagnets howled and the radiosurgery arms traced their beta-filigrees along his scalp, Wells remembered the way the vampire’s arm had calmly folded, after he had taken the shake. The glinting canines at the corner of his smile. How he’d waited to escape.

On the fourth day, he sat cautiously at the foot of the vampire’s chair, and while the shake filled his grumbling gut, felt the gentle polyrhythmic tapping  of his captor’s fingers along the base of the skull.

Wells wasn’t sure why he’d been so frightened, before. They’re just like us, he thought. Just… smarter. His cock twitched again. Had he always produced this much pre?

Must be the hormones, he thought.

After his feeding, Wells watched as the vampire unlocked the remaining cages. He slapped their asses and rubbed them appraisingly, then filled the trough. While the men gulped away, beards dripping with the thick chocolate mixture, Wells moved a little closer. Just to get a look. They were so strong; so round. He liked the way the fat hung from their bellies, especially on all fours. He wondered if he’d be that size someday, too.

There was a door at the far end of the room, but it didn’t seem particularly relevant.

Each night, Wells lay down in the chair the vampire offered him, and let the machines caress his skull with gentle loving fire. Afterwards, the vampire led him back into his cage, and he slept in fitful whimpers.

It missed being fed by hand. The way its Master had straddled it, one cold hand around his neck, eyes never breaking contact, pouring the shake down his gullet. It would swallow gratefully, dribbling a bit onto this one’s thickening pecs and belly. It craved Master’s contact; to have so much of his body pressed against it was overwhelming. The sheer power of him, the restraint, the grace of his slender limbs. It didn’t raise its gaze often, but when it was called, it stared into its Master’s eyes, and the world would melt like warm honey.

It relived those moments often, as it slurped from the trough with the others. Felt their warm, sweaty bodies pressed against its flesh. It loved nuzzling into their beards as they slept entangled, smelling the rich, salty musk of their slickened fur. Grabbing hold of their soft fat. Their thick fingers tracing the sensitive underhang of his wiggling belly, as its Master fucked them in turns. It craved that, too.

A click echoed in the concrete room. It perked up immediately, and crawled to its Master’s feet.

“You’ve been a very good boy, meat. Are you ready?”

Not much came down from the cortex any more. This one didn’t understand the words, but didn’t have to. When its Master leaned in to claim the warm flesh along its neck, he found the muscle there already outstretched, compliant, in an eager, tender yearning.

End Notes

Homocadherin is a pun on Protocadherin, a critical protein in Peter Watts novels Blindsight, The Colonel, and Echopraxia. The books describe a post-scarcity, ecologically-devastated world in which humans are losing relevance to their posthuman creations: AIs, augmented humans, and vampires–an offshoot subspecies of humanity which preyed on humans.

Of course, vampires in fiction are gay as fuck. While Watts indicates that vampires interbred with humans, and therefore at least some of them must want to fuck us, he studiously avoids imbuing his vampires with any kind of sex appeal. This story asks the blindingly obvious question: if vampires do want to fuck us, and they are gay, how might they go about it?

Watts’ vampires are extremely fucking smart. They read people like RuPaul’s brought out glasses for the whole family, subconsciously reprogramming baseline humans through hieroglyphics, vocalizations, and tapping fingers against the victim’s face. Gay men have long used foot tapping as a signal of interest in public sex, so perhaps it is not too far-fetched to envision vampires tapping their feet to elicit homosexual desire.

In Echopraxia, the vampire Valerie uses subliminal signals and a trigger–the image of Christ on the cross–to induce siezures in humans. Our vampire chooses a famously gay image from Christianity–St. Sebastian, whose lusty gaze suggests that not only is he one thirsty bottom, but that he’s getting off on the pain of all those arrows.

Blindsight also makes it clear that vampires are not at all friendly. Like some CEOs, they’re high-functioning sociopaths who occasionally consume their employees. Like some other CEOs, I assume they enjoy terrifically kinky sex lives. This story has a little bit of both. To be absolutely clear, abducting straight men in dark alleys, locking them in cages, and altering their higher brain functions in order to lock them into a permanent subspace is unethical as fuck. Do not do this. Come to think of, you probably shouldn’t do anything people in a Peter Watts story do.

Blindsight is concerned with the superfluity of consciousness, and Echopraxia extends this notion to manipulated minds: zombies which possess no internal agency, humans bearing deeply embedded psychological filters or triggers, humans whose agency is subverted by biological agents. In some ways, I think subspace–like most trance activities–is about the voluntary, collaborative, partial suspension of consciousness. Submissives often lose the capacity to track time, experience subtle perceptual shifts, feel an intense connection or dissolution of personal identity, and lose some capacity for language processing. Homocadherin explores the involuntary transition to an intensely submissive headspace, induced via subliminal programming and the modification of brain pathways.

Brain editing is commonplace in Blindsight’s world: one character is a neuroaestheticist, who tailors human preferences, say, in music, to be more compatible with their chosen partners. Sometimes these tweaks are voluntary. Other times they occur without the consent of the participants; e.g. when performed by state actors. Our vampire takes an aggressive approach, making radical modifications to his captive’s preferences. This is an incredibly serious violation of consent. Do not edit your partner’s brain–or anyone else’s, for that matter. If someone tells you that all social interaction modifies neural connectivity, consider appealing to common sense.

As a near-perfect predictor of human consciousness, our vampire has identified a latent desire in Wells: he believes himself to be an independent straight man, but in fact, wants to be a.) submissive and b.) beta as fuck. I think many of us can empathize with that cognitive dissonance in the coming-out process. Many of us sought the archetype of a powerful Dominant who perceives our true selves and helps us to realize them–it’s a time-honored trope in Leather culture. We wish to be known.

In Homocadherin the narrative is extreme, but in a sense, Wells’ transformation allows him to become both happy and self-actualized. If you are a happiness-maximizing utilitarian, this should make you extremely uncomfortable. You may be uncomfortable for lots of reasons. I sure am, and I wrote the damn thing.

The spider Wells analogizes the surgerical unit to is Deinopis, though he doesn’t know it by that name.

The conclusion is patterned on an interaction between Valerie and Bruks in the conclusion of Echopraxia; Valerie, a vampire, gradually acclimates Bruks to her presence by repeated closer exposure. The language of the final paragraphs is a callback to Watts’ short story Home, and is one of the few places where Watts’ gets inside the head of a person that doesn’t have a PhD in molecular biochem.

Right then, that’s enough. Scamper along, boys. Right then, that’s enough. Scamper along, boys.

I wonder if it’s possible to have a hardware description language that is also a normal language, such that any hardware description is also an emulator of the hardware described, and any program is also its own ASIC specification.

Spelling errors like the ones talked about here come from the normieverse, where people hear words spoken more often than they read words