Chattanooga was like a town that played as a city; it was governed like one, and yet its size limited its tourism to merely the value of historical interest.

Several new apartments were being built, and most of the restaurants were going out of business, with fewer and fewer replacing them by the year. In one, was a young hacker named Vincent, with his right arm converted into a synthetic flesh prosthetic. He opened the text based web browser using his holographic hand tattoo that used to be charged an arm and a leg for it, working seventy eight hour shifts at fifteen an hour before one could even hope to get one. But ever since he gave blood to the local clinical vampire, he now gets routine payments from the clinic tanks. His sister had worked in the red light district, being sold for two hour shifts to occasional werewolf packs.

During the day, he rests under the glow of the sun. But by night he conducts various forms of intelligence gathering, various statistics about how the fare-folk differentiate from standard sentience. He was a lapsed Catholic, now a nightly specter of his once self. He had hoped that there was a god that could save his sister from the worst of sexual abuses, but instead he had come to depend on a certain level of self-reliance. But his sister insisted on her line of work, saying it was the only way to keep them fed.

His own line of work only covered half a down payment for a warp mobile, the rest going to his various interest in different kinds of Linux laptops. They say if you hire a vampire, then the amount of work you get out of them for programming jobs outweighed the overtime pay an employer was required to pay out. One hundred years ago, people worried that it be Mexicans, but even they hated the current blood suckers. What remained of the United States was one of the few parts of the world that hadn't installed some form of Universal Basic Income. Move over to the California Republic, and you got those benefits, so he heard, but it was difficult to get in. And various fleeing vampire clans, ever since the proletarian werewolves decapitated the vamp queen, there was a level of fear that variety of the undead experienced that was far more intense than for a human being gently bit in the neck. At least for the girls in bow, and ballroom dancers, under the glow of Dark Wave lights, they savored the feeling of short gentle shivers down their spine. And they tingled from the flow of blood letting.

So most of the time one was grateful to live in Chattanooga, that had gradually turned into a specific variety of religious right. This made it especially dangerous for hookers, as they couldn't tell their friends, who were not in that line of work, that they were being assaulted by CyVamp cops. Vincent felt a certain degree of protectiveness he felt for nobody else by his dear sister. He had a sister in law, but she was kidnapped by dream-scanners, and now he barely recognized her, her mind and memories erased, complete with digital enhancements, like holographic tattoo, sonar, and various sensors one might more easily expect to see where a stealth bomber than a human being.

Bits and pieces of her personality would flow on IPFS, a collection of local host servers, connected through public gateways. And she would visit him while he would use Casefile, that allowed him to collect various forms of meta data without even having to break into an individuals computer. His sister and law tried to make him quit, but his addiction was simply to large. His girlfriend was decapitated by guillotine gun five years ago, and he had never been emotionally the same since. Part of him died when his sister died, the rest of him went when he gave his blood to a homeless girl in Market Street. He met at midnight, and she was barely clothed. He took off his jacket to keep her from freezing from the nuclear Winter snow. She fainted in his arms.

On his phone, he called an ambulance.

-- Emergency, there is a girl passed out besides me. I can't feel her pulse.

Little did he know, the girl was a vampire princess. She narrowly survived the onslaught of the governor's office. For his service, he now gets lifetime Universal Basic Income, while other rot in the street. He wished there was something he could do, but over time bits and pieces of mind scattered about, like chaffing and winnowing, filling the void with random images from the past, in particular, before the vampires evolved from humans. They had begun to form after World War III, and most people we call humans, are actually half human half vampire. They lack the sensitivity to sunlight like their old masters. He was one of the few pure humans left on Earth after the calamity from the sky. The others scattered about into various tribes in the Urban Forest.

On most days he chills out at the local dark wave scene, but tonight he wanted to go get some coffee at the local Irish pub, blended with scotch, vodka, and caramel, gently downed with Talon cigars, until the smoke would become to much for him to bare. For him, he contemplated the idea of running into a speeding car, but knew that there was a vampire darling child reliant on him. For, it made him feel like he could go on. When he arrived at the hospital, he gently held her hand.

-- How about a story?

-- Yes please.

-- It once started with a young bunny.

He kissed her on the forehead.

-- And what next.

A doctor came him, and told him that it was getting late. Vincent promised to complete the story sometimes soon. The girl waved goodbye and blew him a kiss.

Blown kisses reminded him of his first wife. The girl's eyes were also similar in color. There was something about her that didn't seem purely undead, as if her mother were a human, her father a CyVamp Dream-Scanner. She could know much about his past, yet only gently smiles at him, as if his own past no longer mattered, that there was only the future to look to.

He slept, he dreamed.

He woke up to a knock on the door.

It was one of those extended text message conversations from his sister. He knew that her line of work was dangerous, but never bother to say anything, as he always felt out of place in the conversation.

-- My night terrors have become more realistic, yet paradoxically unrealistic. Last night, it was about how I visited a Starbucks deeper into Chattanooga, right around where Sugars is (in real life there isn't a Starbucks there, as far as I know), and there I met these two guys that kept acting condescending of me being a woman into science fiction), and began sexually assaulting me in the store while the employees only watched and didn't act like they cared. The assaulter then messaged and blocked me on Diaspora for calling him out as being one who assaults women.

-- Yea people on decentralized social media can be losers sometimes. I've tried hanging out in some places, and it seemed like everyone I met was either paranoid schizophrenic, or anarchic-capitalist.

In many ways, Vincent and his sister felt worlds apart, yet in other ways they would more similar than twins. -- Did you know I'm giving blood Lucy?

-- No I didn't? Whose the lucky individual?

-- It's a young vampire girl. I'll need to go in and check on her later, I'm not entirely sure how the undead handles differences in blood type. You might think they'd check to see if the blood matches, but considering she's undead.

Lucy realized how it was that they had enough money to live away from their parents. Particularly her mother, had always told her that she would never have enough money to live downtown on her own. But suddenly loads of cash came in out of nowhere, as if from a mystical faucet. -- It seems like you care more about her than our own parents. Would you give blood to your own mother?

-- Irrelevant, mother has a different blood type.

-- And she's not a vampire.

-- Only for blood.

They say the media is filled with crooks, propaganda storybooks. The evening scrolls through various talking heads without knowledge of actual gun statistics, simply playing the mouth piece for their corporate masters. And in one scene, they mentioned how some places should ramp up surveillance in high schools, not even letting them in unless they pass through a metal scanner. Theater of security. Why even bring your kids to school, thought Vincent. It was far better to raise your own student. They wouldn't have to follow irrelevant school uniforms. American had trickle down economics, but the only thing immediate that actually trickled down was the age group to be spied on through Google OS laptops. The only solutions were those in order to devote them as a matter of a full time job, one needed to have already graduated high school.

When you're a blood donor to a half vampire, the only thing that bites is the feeling that she might never be truly tolerated in American society. The rest that bit had more to do with credit card vampires working for Wall street, in fact the only reason we're in this mess, is Wall Street. While most people blamed it on Walmart, the reality was Wall Start was many times richer than Sam Walton could have ever been, operating in Petro dollars on an international scale, invading various government across Europe, Asia, and South America. All this is on the record, though Microsoft bought MSNBC would like to tell you its all conspiracy. While subsequently marketing the Russian narrative, while Vincent contemplates voting for Jill Stein. At least she wasn't a blood sucker like Donald Trump. American already experienced its last stand after World War III, and somehow the Trump family managed to survive. But he only controlled a small portion of what was once the United States, with various states now Nation States, without their own spin on Libertarian philosophy. Nothing sucks blood like a decaying empire. And yet it's the vampires that American society hates, because it was the Vampires from South of the border, that simply wanted to live their life the best they could. Even if that meant evading medical care for fear of deportation to hell below the Bible belt. Vincent wanted to crush state authority like a school teacher giving a students paddle welts.

Vincent new friends in high school that wanted to join the Army, but now he assumed they had switched over to law enforcement S.W.A.T teams, tearing reality a new asshole, while the proletarian watch sessions of the super bowl. But for Vincent, he no longer thought of sports.

He thought only of thirst.

Vincent had mixed feelings about copywrite as a programmer of free software and as an observer of life. He wanted to own his own story, but share others coding efforts on IPFS.

IPFS was an interplanetary file system, similar to the internet. But unlike the corporate webs, each markup coder hosted their node on their own local machine, accessible by a public gateway. But Vincent missed meeting friends on places like Diaspora, flowing together like cybernetic dubstep dance floors.

He dreamed of meeting a French vampires, yet couldn't come to terms with wanting to decapitate them as much as loving them like blood unrelated siblings, while holding digital imprints of severed heads in his lap.

Vincent floated aimlessly.

He woke up from a nap.

The reality was if he tried dating real women, he couldnt sexually perform do to uncanny similarities. If a stranger looked like his cousin, albeit she was cute, it took to much mental work arounds for it not to feel like incest. Mixed with agoraphobia, he was lost in a sea of his own despair.

That day he got coffee, and was called ma'am again. ... Which he kind of liked.

Vincent was unsure of what to make of the machine reading. The computer suggested that the half vamp girl's heart was clinging onto life. Under the knife, she bleeds. She needs, she hungers. The doctors warn him that his supply may not be enough for her. But still he holds onto hope. He never ordinarily liked kids, ever since his siblings children came into the world. And yet now, here he was trying make one hold on just a little bit more. In his mind, he thought of children's stories he could read to her, and wanted to treat her to a camping trip roasting marsh mellows by the camp fire, even if the entire planet was essentially a burnt out camp ground by this point.

She gasps.

A month later, she becomes another cyborg vamp, trying to make it through. She visits Vincent occasionally at the hospital, giving blood to her giver.

It was time to give back.

Ladybug shared her blood.

Vincent and his three sisters shared a sibling from his father's second wife. Vince himself was the product of his third wife. He wondered what his forgotten sibling would look like, and how close she was to his father. He saw her in a postcard, decorated with Christmas decorations. Along side her dead brother, and Vincent's three siblings, she had dark brown hair. Ordinarily kids started out with lighter hair in their early years, and it would get gradually darker as they increase in decades. None of them seemed to look particularly happy in each other's presence. Almost like the Hatfield and McCoys. All those broken children's toys, and old books scattered about. Yet now instead of books was the third stage of the world wide web, the Interplanetary File System. You might think that with things floating around it, it would be easy to find loved ones. And yet, by the nature of gradually increasing data in different scales of infinity, this in fact made it difficult to find anyone.

He had been to a family get together with his cousins, and met a girl of similar age to he. It was one of his cousin's wedding, and she was one of her friends. The girl seemed aloof to everyone else in the dining hall, focusing primarily on her outdated Android phone. The only time she looked up, was when she spoke few word to Vincent. It was one of the few times her could find anyone that he could relate to, giving his social awkwardness. And yet do this very aspect of his character, he couldn't find it in himself to talk to her. So now he things of the lost opportunities, as he rots in his bed.

Vincent wanted to become a spy, but didn't want to work for the government. He wanted to have an assistant that can look inside areas of which he couldn't fit. With his friend he had given blood to, and her giving some blood back, they owed each other a certain level of sibling bond with benefits, as the girl become older. In a way, this was part of why he was attached to her. The other was that, in a way, she looked like the daughter of the girl he had met at his cousin's wedding all those years ago. And now, as she slips on her goggles to open the frame of an older laptop, she took instructions from her boyfriend, asking when operating system to load. Both carried a one time pad sub system to communicate when she was off to her Freshman year in college, coupled with a method of asymmetric authentication. They switched the keys and key pairs constantly. He constantly worried about her, although she insisted she could take care of herself.

He named her Ladybug. Ladybug carried ninja throwing stars, and at one point had to bite a man in the neck to get him off on her. She was the type of girl some would consider her attractive of Lolicon porn videos, despite being almost twenty. Her blond ponytail acting like a saddle for a pony. But she was always to fend off most guys, not so much by her strength, but by her wit.

She treated most guys like pieces of shit.

But she loved for Vincent, her doing the splits.

If Vincent could describe his life story, it would be a deadbeat musackle--a musical without lyrics composed of out of tune dial tones. He social life was tone deaf to any apparent vision of outsiders; but just because something is conventional wisdom doesn't make it smart. This upstart found that one could be smart, and still lack common sense. But sometimes being the uncommon sort meant doing things in an unconventional way. And in the world of computers, sometimes that was how hackers were born. He didn't start like most hackers, being an apparent early prodigy, much like his girlfriend. It was one of the things they shared, among other things. But she liked regular musicals, while he preferred the flow of music unaccompanied by country lyrics. His life seemed to flow away from him like a waterfall, his room mate the only life raft keeping him holding on. She reminded him of one of his school mates girlfriend's, and on some level it seemed there was a family resemblance. However this girl wore Boston Birkenstock clogs without socks more often than Emma ever did, whom only wore that style once. The shoes became somewhat of an association with sex with nerds for him.

But he had the maturity at this point, not to ask girls out for dates. He waited for them to make the first move, and let them invite him inside. This only became more exaggerated after he had become a creature of the night. The blood transfusion she gave him made him have a different level of abilities than he already had, although he remained the sort to hide from behind the scenes. He found he could turn into a bat, and crawl through holes like a rat. Or be a black cat lying down on its belly fat, to catch other midnight splats like mirror shade brats. He hung out in the shadows even more now, although it was already a note able habit. He had grown up wanting to become a werewolf, and at times he indeed Lucid Dream Shifted. But now with Vampire Blood flowing in his veins, this added certain methodologies that was unconventional for canids, although it wasn't anything like you would expect from the Underworld movies, for if one had both abilities sometimes they would become a master of none.

He kept programmer, despite his ability to run.

He wished to outrun vampire girls.

Except Ladybug.

When you stare long enough at a drinking glass and a rolling chair, sometimes your eyes begin to cross and it looks like the chair is blending into the glass. Vincent stared into his rolling chair, noticing Lady bug blending into his lap while she sucked his dick. The flow of friction blending with lubrication, the heat of the sun suddenly chilled with the coolness of Eggnog Ice cream.

The life.

It always seemed to be the football player/United States soldier type European exchange students seemed to go for. Whether that be German links, Belgian Waffles, or French toast. Vincent came to consider French in particular to be slimy frogs, only a little bit better than his fellow American kin. No matter where he lived, he always felt like an outsider. His friend Liana in particular he always felt confused, as she seemed to like toying with him, but at the end of the day, like other girls in Blackman High School, it seemed like almost every straight girl went for the masculine mainstream type. At least nobody who was anarcho-communist, although at the time Vincent did not know of that term in particular. But vaguely remembered when his mother told him about the political compass test on line.

And the strange thing was, if he were to ask her about it today, she would deny having ever heard of it, that it was him that introduced the concept. He didn't trust any woman, like his mother, but especially foreign girls. Not because of any particular disdain, but simply from getting tired of all the years he'd been rejected by attracted woman, at least in his head. Although he was never brave enough to directly ask anyone out. And the last exchange student he knew, only knew him by his most embarrassing mistake. In retrospect, her giving him German Marks (right when the EU was switching to the Euro, or Gyro as he would joke) may have been a clue she either liked him, or wanted to pay him off in order to keep his wanting glances away.

And now he wasn't sure how to feel.

But Ladybug didn't seem to notice his feels.

He rarely went out much, given lack of work. He had worked for Goodwill Corporation, but had quit when his mom wanted him to work for his aunt in Knoxville, Tennessee. Later on his cousin would move in, and eventually Vincent would move out into an extended stay hotel. But now in his studio apartment, one might think, if not for the rent payments every month, that there was nobody there inside for a considerable amount of time. All that changed somewhat when Ladybug came into the picture, but that still left enough time on his own to look at different kinds of animated porn on different fetish sites. Although these days this has become few fewer, since he had switched to IPFS. Now it took just as much time building up one's web page, but it came with the territory, as his favorite JRPG character would say.

He had never been a huge fan of Steampunk, considering it somewhat of a bastard child of Cyberpunk. But Grandia was one of the unique exceptions to this rule. Although in retrospect, this was probably an ill advised opinion, when he started opening to read one of the first Steampunk novels. For a considerable amount of time, he had written primarily science fiction, but now generally wrote a variety of scifi styled magical realism. Some elements of society and technology simply need no explanation, although some elements may be different from what one may expect. In this way, he was similar to the author of this story. However he was male, and I am female. But it seemed like every character I write would end up similar to me, whether I liked it or not. For Vincent, it was simply his own desire to fulfill dreams that I could only imagine.

Yet the melting clocks of time, gave way to humming midnight fairies, and Vampires drifting from the world of waking and sleeping. Vincent wanted to be part of his own story he wrote for himself.

It was like a collection of blank pages.

It was time to leave a note.

Vincent wasn't used to the social life. Having been raised in a small town, in the same state he always been since he was a child of the early twenty first century. So when ladies flirt with him now, it was a mix of feeling flattered, and feeling like it was to little to late. He had never been much of a flirt. Even Ladybug, whom he had raised into her college years, considers him more of a father than someone to fuck around with, although even she can't resist sucking his dick after classes. Most of the classes were audited, and the few homework she did have was mostly done during her off hours at campus. On some level, he didn't want to spend his life dating, as while it was never an issue with him, he would always worry whether girls would cheat on him, and yet strangly, not be open to the idea of polysexual relationship. He was under the impression that girls preferred football player and American soldier types, rather than Anarchists. And he was among the most leftist of the collectivist anarcho culture.

His best friend was more on the right leaning spectrum, although its been months since he had seen them. She was the one that got him into joining The Satanic Temple, who have now achieved a certain level of political ubiquity in government offices as a viable third party. Vincent was unsure whether the TST temple was really all that picky about who joined their club, although they certainly pretended to have things like background checks. Back if someone like Demi or Lilith could join, perhaps TST wasn't anymore Left Libertarian than Church Of Satan. Vincent had always been one of a kind, or even more now that he combined elements of Cipherpunk philosophy, civil war re-constructionist, and Anarcho-Communism political vies. He never found a group he could completely click with.

For Ladybug, she was his assistant.

But he still collected most meta data himself.

-- On November, Xor the scans. Your papers have arrived. Tonight lets dine out. Xor keys to use, bathe later After midnight. Wednesday afternoon.

Vincent rolled up the message, and burned it in his cigarette. He was unsure what his sister was wanting, except he knew that he hadn't seen her in a while. Perhaps she merely wanted to say hello, but she wasn't sure. Vincent knew there was a lot of means of secure communications that simply had no equivalent in the world of computers. Whenever her wanted to send keys to a corrospondent, he would first encrypt them using his sister's public key. In order to mislead any potential interceptors, he would have several different versions of red herring private keys presumed to be his sister's private keys blended in together in a deck of cards. He would shuffle these cards several times, and package them with the message. This way, while his sister still had her real public kept in her posession. In this way, the secret police would assume they already have the private keys, and would focus on trying to decrypt the session key.

Both he and his sister only used a session key once, although there was a time in the distant past when they used one twice. But no more than two times, as any private agent worth their salt, knows if two messages can be encrypted using the same key, then all other messages back into the end of time could stil be decrypted. In real life, they focused on using stream ciphers rather encrypting bulk data with block ciphers.

At the diner, his sister told him what the message was really about. She had made arrangement with the local front restaurant, that in order to conceal their tracks, served real food and alcohol. In the back, she told him about a secret organization called World Oasis, an espionage ring that has recently been apprehended. But several members wanted new talent to refill their ranks. It was composed of a mixture of humans and vampires, who wanted to hide their subversive activities under the form of legitamate activities like book stores, so they can more aptly hide than their Antifa counterparts. The only reason they were captured at all, was because of a rogue CIA agent, working for both the Central Intellegence Agency and World Oasis. They needed talent to weed out double agents, using current state of the art civilian information gathering.

Vincent was unsure of what to make of the proposal, as he had never had to have a job since after high school, and even then his mother wanted him to work for his aunt instead.

But some things have to give.

-- We'll see.

The nature of the internet is a mixture of truth and disinformation; Jennifer Laurence could star as the wife of shipwrecked Christopher Columbus in American, and her mother beheaded by axe and block for giving them wrong direction, the ship crashing into a jungle, and being burried by a giant Tsunami. Instead, the internet might say that it was Jennifer Laurence that had her head chopped off living at the MCs aunts in a slumber party where Vincent would use the bathroom, sleep, masturbate, and eat dinner inside the living room, finishing up by saying he fixed their loose cabinet, but they still might want to see a professional later. And its Jennifer Laurence's family that shipwrecked in the Americas, their ship buried under an ice burg on the coast. Vincent remembered her a teacher he knew once said perhaps someday we would no longer have ice burgs. He proposed covering it with wax while it still existed, and plant that in the middle of the ocean. In this way, plastic lasts forever unlike Ice. And who gave a damn about the fishes consuming its toxins under the sea.

And yet on the other hand, he was sick and tired of politicians catering to social justice topics, rather on the overall poverty of all Americans. It was only in America where even Black politicians would ignore the votes of their African American constituents, with the oddity of black people calling their black president racist again them, and claiming that white people could not be poor. But reality was more complex. In the US, everybody who wasn't a movie star was barely able to qualify for food stamps, and yet still politicians talks exclusively about the plight of people of color, as if they somehow knew, their time was almost up, and they needed to hold off the most important conversation: that it was more important to talk about the poverty of all Americans.

And not just pretend care.

We needed healthcare for all.

Vincent wanted to minimize the amount of junk on his computer, and encouraged Ladybug to do the same. At times he would collect as many as thirty different home brewed encryption programs, but realized that he could improve on the two main public key infrastructures: RSA (that requires two large primes for its trap door function), and Diffie Hellman (that relies on difficult logarithm problems); he needed a system to allow him to send an actual message rather than just a session key, so it needed to be short enough not to be vulnerable to Known Plaintext attacks. Ladybug kept a log of different character profile details of different mob bosses and corrupt corporate CEOs on her laptop, but was not yet much of a coder.

Vincent didn't want to contend with Mob Bosses directly; like other cults there was a risk that if one murdered them, it would martyr them into something like a saint in the eyes of those who follow them. With their death, he couldn't continue to scan for information about them. Instead he wanted them to be die alone, forgotten, and their followers scattered about like the wind. In the case of the leader's murder, like Joseph Smith, the very nature of their death creates a grouping that had continued to last into the twenty first century. The future wasn't paved with roads of air and flying cars, but cyberspace cults; INTERNET mafia lords in corporate castles.

Our current life was not one big brother, but different varieties of little brothers with different partitioned job titles, none of which new anything about the other professions, For the mob, their profession was death. However, World Oasis was not like the mafia of the roaring twenties, whatever the truth of the actual poverty rate. Instead they were closer to what one point label contractual spies, rather than government hired hands. There were government restrictions on how people's data could be used in the government, but there was no law as of yet against conducting such surveillance as part of trade secrets. World Oasis had a psychic espionage ring, composed primarily of remote viewers, but also people to maintain the computer's of the front company: a company that sold divining instruments and magic books, in a world where people have long sense given up on magic. Even Latin Americans began to feel as if the Universe had lost its mystery.

And yet, at the same time, the modern world had its own variety of mysteries, clocked in the darkest reaches of government conspiracy, even eventually corporate conspiracy. Vincent didn't want to be a product.

Ladybug had a stealth prosthetic eye. Rather than glass, it was made from biologically inert synthetic flesh, microdot cameras embedded within.

She had this ever since the World Oasis removed her left eye as a punishment for screwing up. But she was able to heal quickly, being part vampire. But she remained low key up until the point that she had met Vincent. She was taught various techniques of information gathering, including picking away at passwords using dictionary attacks, periodically changing her digital fingerprint and mac address. Her father, a full blood, had been adapt at safe cracking, but this was the software age, and the way locks were constructed were completely different. It only took one photograph to collect them inside a database, with both hidden and overt identities . Even with a one time concealment device, it was difficult to find good spots to hide local servers and QR codes. It had been a few months since she had graduated college. She had wanted to get a Masters Of Fine Arts, but settled for a Bachelors.

hile Vincent himself never bothered with college, claiming that it was all a scam, she held onto the idea of being qualified for an English teacher position. But she was not allowed to work, having previously worked for a non national spy gang. Even if she swore off the brain drugs, there was also a portion of this still flowing through her veins. With humans, it was simply a matter of having the right dose of nicotine, alcohol, or caffeine. But for those with vampire blood flowing within, they needed medication to treat their sensitive skin. If you were lucky, one of the one percent, you could get by even without health insurance. But the rest of the creatures of the night had to make do with various arcane street concoctions, things you never knew whether they really had Swamper or Krocodile. Swamper was a linguistic distortion from the word Vampoma, a play on words that combined vampirism with glacoma. For the blood suckers desires, they craved an end to their misery.

They wanted Swamper like weed.

You might think, if you lived in Chattanooga for about a year, you'd get used to its specifics. But some things you never quite can. For one thing, it was the kind of place where, despite being two thousand and eighteen, there were still people walking around in hippie clogs and acid trip woven shirts made of nylon. And yet despite the veneer of the counter culture, politically it was closer to authoritarian conservative more than any of city that Ladybug had ever been. She herself never dressed like a hippie, except for her Birkenstock Boston clogs. For everything else she wore, there was mainly black polyester: the short shorts she wore, the short sleeve t shirt, and her ankle socks. She wore a pair of Ballistics goggles, something for which Vincent wondered why considering the both of them only ever went out at night.

But they both knew that at night street cameras were most active, with specific details of surveillance more subtle in the current decade than the clunky electronics of the past. And now espionage was taught in grade school, the intelligence services were more careful about how they approached collecting intelligence. At times they would even bargain with those who find out they were being watched, but agreeing to not turn them in: if the victim were an adult, sexual favors were exchanged., fellatio being the most popular sort. But for those still in high school, usually they'd purchase them tickets to their favorite R rated movie, couple with government grade false IDs. The agents would cover their backs. However neither Vincent or Ladybug had such contacts in high places, and thus had to have the utmost care in covering their tracks. So when World Oasis came a calling, Ladybug was unsure what to expect.

She knew better than to trust them at their word.

In the book nineteen eighty, O'Brien was the type of guy to set up false flags about the brotherhood. It made Ladybug especially caution about trusting anything on the surface level, and therefore only agreed to meet people in undisclosed locations, usually with their faces covered by Guy Fawks masks. Even still, the conversation were mostly superficially docile, subtly eluding to threats of her own livelihood if she were to disclose their trade secrets to Vincent. But one night, she proposed the idea of having him help them finding information about the local authoritarian democrat candidate, so that they could have something they could use against the candidates in such a way, as to give them the edge of corporations that would want to bribe them to enact certain local policies.

-- I'll think about it. The case officer said.

-- Thanks.

Ladybug left Vincent a message, but she was unsure whether he would receive it. She carefully embedded it in Vincent's steganographic code.

Then she went out the door, and went on her way to try to have a conversation with her case officer, about negotiating a deal on how to best go about hiring. Vincent was not yet a vampire, and he only briefly dabbled in remote viewing. But she hoped that perhaps eventually she could get him back into, despite the skepticism of people that he had met on the web. After all, skeptics often did not have an accurate picture of reality, often being the same kind of people that vote for political office in a reactionary fashion. But Vincent was different, he thought carefully through his decisions. Surely he must have known the societal impact of his decision to give blood to vampire, and yet for whatever reason he chose to give his life fluid anyway when in any other circumstance of his life, he was shy like a mouse in bed. But he would watch girls with knives in their necks, yet would go out of trance.

But when he chose to focus, on things that he was interested in, he would most definitely complete the task that he would assign for himself. Her case officer wanted the phone number of the most current Green Party Candidate, but was to careful to outright do a web search for them himself. He had plenty of servants through the last two decades, that would do his bidding in the most closely kept secrecy of his corporate chambers. For Vincent, the one whom Ladybug wanted to bargain with, his only chamber was his bedroom, under the idea that staying inside at all the hours of the day would protect him from government surveillance. But there was more than one way to skin a cat.

And Vincent was a wild cat.

She stalked for her bargain at night.

Vincent the Psychic.

Ladybug had always been short, although she had tried wearing high heels to accommodate this fact, but now she exclusively wore Birkenstocks inside, and hiking boots during urban exploration at night. Vincent was unaware of the fact that she had got herself a pet rat, back when she was exploring the sewer system. The other vampire agency, one that World Oasis had always fought against, captured her one night. Bound by a rope from a street light pole, she clung onto it to try to force it off. She had inadvertently brought the vermin, though she never thought of her as such, from the sewer entrance, when she carried for herself a slice of Bacon and Mushroom pizza. She felt a rumbling, and a gnawing in her purse, and gently rummaged her her hand through it. The rat hopped into her hand, because it was unable to get out, after having some of her pizza. She gently brushed the rat's back, it giving her puppy eyes. She asked what it was doing in there.

The rat pecked her cheek with its tongue, and a friendship was formed. She would bring the rat with her when she went to college, carefully hiding it in her backpack, and giving the contraption holes for it to breath in. She had gotten to the point in her technical expertise, that her sole rivals in computer security class never bothered to help, and thus never looked through her things without her consent. But one night, she had left her second backpack outside the door, and it being Chattanooga, the backpack was stolen. For months she thought the rat was lost, but instead it was able to gnaw itself out.

Tonight, she felt a similar gnawing in her purse.

The rat had returned to see her. She was unsure how Vincent would feel about her old best friend, but knew that he also had unconventional interests as well. She just hoped that he didn't hate rats.

Vincent remembered the time before he moved back to Chattanooga.

The sky above the memory lane was covered in acid rain. "The first porn pills that I would ever take." he said, hoping for a final goodnight.

Bits and bytes, it was the stuff taught as basics in high school computer class. Boring, but necessary. At least at first. The flickered out at light speed,and I get on my computer. I checked logged in, checked email, and jacked out. He had tried various writing websites since the start of my class, and yet there was nothing like writing in my notebook at home. To think that, so young, he refused to roam with other cattle. Other girls, while more beautiful than he, were as close as you could get to cows. And so few among them, were as tender as the lambs. And, alone in the darkness, he savored their silence as he fell into a dream.

He thought of girls getting their heads taken off by guillotine, imagining brief acquaintances he knew at school dining in the blood of friends. He became puffed on, and he felt a coolness like someone washing his under regions with a wash cloth. And he dreamed of them speaking the King's French while whispering in his ear. Indeed, the rest of his school days would be an excellent year. You wouldn't think someone as harmless looking, would have a thing for blood, and yet the more his sexuality developed, the more certain desires had intensified since graduation. He despised crowded events, like graduation and wedding day. He preferred to ride horses in the clouds, seeing shadows split by illuminated lights of the streets. He stalked the night.

The night consents, as he wander in its shadows.

In its shadows, He carried a cane with him, feel something following him. Then he woke up, as if from a fall.

At times writing of his life is difficult, but that is because so often it has been far to strange for people to believe. His only wish was for it to be as normal as other vampires who stalk the night. When you see nothing but emptiness, at times your mind fills in the blanks. And often such thoughts come alive. And yet for the longest time, he had dreams of being taken aboard by alien spacecraft. He remember when he was young, a young grey told him that he wouldn't be harmed.

Many of his sensations of sex, have been with the grays from the reticulan region. Demons, angels, shadows; all these things are far more tame, his terrors far darker than the opus of Mein Kamph. For, as you see, he had gotten away with much, and yet do to the nature of it, almost nobody ever notices it. It was midnight, when he had met his sister in the red light district. She was wearing a red dress, and offered to take him in. He had moved out after his parents had died, leaving him behind at twenty eight. Now he goes through life wandering if there is any childhood left to live.

In his mind, he dreams of fantasy adventures of children flying gliders, riding on the wings on birds in flight. And yet he goes through his days plying his trade in stream and block ciphers, under the glow of black candle lights.

He never chose to publish the few novels he wrote, part of it being a matter of self-doubt, and part of it was the shame of his own sexuality.

It had been many months since World War III, and in many ways it both exceeded and and underwhelmed his imagination. Then robot rebels came and went, then the super computer overlords. On the run from dream-scanners, he found himself hoping for some kind of release from his misery. It started out as technology designed to scan your brainwaves testing for issues related to sleep apnea, but gradually evolved to watch over developments of deviant personality traits. And now he sleeps in wait, wondering whether they will come for him again at night.

Vincent considered himself more of a diarist, though he could see the confusion with science fiction. But his life was not a fiction book. At one point had wanted children, but it's to late now. We're children beneath the darkened sky. Beneath a shadowed sun. His body was meat.

He once knew a guy who would meet trolls under a bridge, although in actuality they were just homeless people trying to find a place to live. Even so, he would thrust them with one of his daggers, and watch as they reel in extreme pain. Needless to say, he wasn't friends with him for very long. Only for about a year. When he had left his sister's house, exchanging phone numbers, he kept her as a network contact while she was off the wire. He would explore bridges in the suburbs outside of the city, finding colonies of soldiers that had survived the war, making their life Terra forming the total darkness that was the underground sewers.

Cardboard cut outs were re-purposed into makeshift houses, where they stored cookware. Some of them had become bandits, because society didn't want them. He met two that were roasting rats on a stick, while he thought only of his sister. What we think of as sewers today, where actually ancient battle grounds built by a culture far older than Ancient Sumeria, possibly as much as 18,000 years in the past. And now, in the year 2019, we live in the aftermath of the great re-purposing back in the 1970s. But certain figures on the walls and statues give clues to this far ancient culture, who rode on flying wings that reached the sky. And now, here we are, eating roasted rats underneath the holographic metropolis, wondering when the bridges far above us will eventually fall and kill us.

-- I wouldn't give them one a year, said one bandit. -- What makes you say that man? -- See those columns above? They're already cracking. -- He pointed to the seemingly seamless column, implying that that was the one that would eventually collapse. It was an unstable life, not much better than the tail end of the nineteenth century, although they probably thought this was better than when they were rebuilt by their masters over in North Korea all those years ago. -- It's inevitable.

Indeed, the only reason they're still alive now, is do to a kind of genetic modification, that allowed their body to regenerate from radiation poisoning.But throwing up all the time do to their immune system made this aspect a miserable existence. He adjusted my mirror goggles, and then crash on his futon.

Nothing like sleep.

When Orwell wrote 1984, he wasn't expecting there to be simulation coastal vistas, using meat space avatars, while glancing the view while on the wire. Unlike like groups specialized towards sex education, in practice actual sex education was surprisingly prescient for the writer. And yet the thing that hit the eighties and nineties was virtual reality, then the world wide web. But now we're already having the idea of quantum networks being discussed, extending concepts of mass surveillance beyond what was conceived of in the nineteen forties. And the old public key systems were slowly going the way of the dinosaur.

The classic game consoles have become the latest dinosaurs, with each latest generation having their maximum development expectancy set around five years at the most, aside from the few home brew developers. I had given up game development a long time ago, prefering the flow of text on the page. And yet sometimes I miss the old days of loading the makers, and churning out demos of games in my development bucket list. But now, his own bucket list is to exist. And his thoughts display on quantum holographic networks displaying the words "to be or not to me, that is the question."

His drifting in the world of darkness, as if he was already dead.

He thought I heard a voice, in what seemed like a digitized version of an ancient language far older than the age of Egypt and Sumeria. The group of underground nomads had been walking through the tunnels for some time, when they found a previously undiscovered room. The others thought of it as a get rich quick scheme, finding spare parts to sell on the black market. Yet for me, I was preoccupied by the statue that stood before us by the flat screen computer monitors. It had a vague semblance of Roman and Egyptian statues, except that the garb looked to him from a previously unknown star faring civilization, indicated by the appearance what seemed to be some ancient space helmet.

The computer rooms were built on top of ancient Native American temple, from a culture that was as old, if not older, than the Inca.

-- Get a load of this lady.

-- Ain't she a beauty?

-- I wonder how much this stature would be worth? And look, not a single crack on it. While the others were thinking of how much they could sell it for, there was something about that gave off a sinister presence.

Vincent split from the others into a separate room. Just in time, as when one of them tried to steal the monitors, a false door opened up a portal that unleashed men with space helmets attacking them with laser beams. His friends told him to break for it, so he took his futon and left the scene trusting their judgment, and his instincts to survive. Suddenly the room grew quieter, and slowly quieter. It then became silent. One of the men came out alive, but said that they were all surrounded by armed guards from a different galaxy, and that they let him live long enough to reveal to me a message.

-- Don't go to far down here, there are things which we were not meant to see.

You might think that he almost died, but as best as Vincent could, he nursed his friend back to health. However his right arm continued to be bruised for the next few days after. He called his sister.

-- Can you do me and a friend a favor?

-- What do you need?

-- Medical attention.

It was the following morning me and my friend woke up in the hospital. He spent the entire morning watching television mindlessly, while trying to think of what happened in those tunnels in the darkness. He was left craving going back down to find out what the meaning of the symbols were, and the meaning of that statue. Since he wasn't injured, he left my friend to the care of his sister as he made his way back toward the tunnels, leaving my futon at the hospital. She said she would roll it up, and his friend could sleep at her place tonight.

As much as you get used to wandering the darkness, there isn't anything like wandering it alone. Vincent walked through the tunnels, slashing and thrusting giant rodents, and eventually came upon the room in which we had left. Already, the room had been cleaned up, despite having no natural reason for the corpses absence. He stared at the portal in which the monstrosities had exited.

He touched my hands along the wall

He found the room began to swirl around, and he warped into what seemed like a laboratory in hell, with various abominations, craving to eat his flesh. Vincent made sure to only stay inside of the lab. He heard a voice in the darkness. It was a young woman in her early twenties, who said that he should not have arrived there, that it was a top secret government facility.

Moments later she asked how he had found the place. Vincent noted that him and his friends had been living in the tunnels for some time, and that it was only recently that a friend of his had been kind enough to let them stay with her. But the lady, other than this question, remained largely elusive about what was beyond the tunnels.

He was knocked out by cyborg guards, woke up at Ravina's place.

-- And just where have you been? She asks.

-- Where am I?

-- At my place, you will always sleep here. -- She adjusted the blankets for me, while I situated on the futon.

-- I found you outside in the cold at midnight. Don't leave me like that again, and your friend, he needs you.

I had nothing else to say then. I was left thinking of the tunnels.

It was a year later he met Ladybug.

A new search engine: it replaced its logo with GNU Search Engine to replace the old Google, animated its background above the Earth's atmosphere; type in a search, and it takes you to a real time street view of everywhere on the globe.

It's primary function to connect to various street lamp and satellite images in real time. Even the hardiest of anarchists could not go into space, and knock out the power systems of the globalist elite. One could get specific time stamps of real life meta-data, from the color of people's houses, and the inside of people's kitchens. None of the spices that we use to cook with would be kept secret for very long, provided one lived in an Urban district, where people are constantly under surveillance from microphones and micro-cams hidden inside of the lenses. Even more overtly, you can't find a grocery store without some form of security camera. Most of the meta-data is collected by various micro-cams in public places, although new laws have been proposed to allow for spying inside of people's home. The most paranoid of outcasts, have had to adapt to living inside of RVs and portable tiny homes, in order to avoid the restrictions that come with renting a studio apartment. They say the footage is to prevent shop lifting, but the only thieves they ever apprehend are various minority groups.

Angela, who works as a museum curator, had just turned fifty five. For a vampiress, that would make her around fifteen, perhaps twenty at the oldest. Unlike her father, she chose not to have other cybernetic prosthesis to extend her lifespan, so she ages like the standard undead. In the public life, she displays to people various mock up severed heads of different vampire types produced after the third world war. At night, she goes around hunting other vampires, kidnapping women whom she charms with her youthful appearance, and then takes her to her home, where they are guillotined. The walls around her basement are sound proofed, and the only sound people outside will ever hear are faint sounds of whispers in the dark.

Angela has kept this double life for close to ten years. It helped that generally the non undead police division was reluctant to even admit to the existence of the undead. And the undead forces would rather let a murderer go free, than clue into the fact that vampires exist. It was a very unique time after the fall of the United States, when various states went onto to become their own independent nations, most notably in the South, that has a degree of bitterness about their plight since the end of the first Civil War. Within this environment, it wasn't until her girlfriend Dianette, whom she had grown up with since middle school, eventually discovered her basement one evening, and found out the truth of why Angela was able to find so may types of vampire heads, within this large basement, she met a conspirator that had connections to World Oasis, before splintering off, and aided Angela in making the humans she seduced look like they committed suicide.

It was simply a matter of making them bit onto the rope that held the blade up. All she had to do was paddle them, and eventually the pain with making them open their mouths. They carefully made sure there was not any hidden security cameras, and in this way, Angela had a steady supply of vampire heads, that she decorated with native American face paint, claiming that vampires had existed in the US long before the American empire. It helped that this was largely true, except that native Americans were never recorded as having been Francophone and blond.

One night, Danette sneaked behind Angela. She took out her blowgun, and aimed true. She aimed it into her pressure point. The blowguns were able to make less noise than AR-15s, meaning she could slink away at light speed, and make her girlfriend's death look like a suicide. The leader of World Oasis, Angela's father, wanted Ladybug and Vincent to locate the whereabouts of Danette, so they could squelch the threat to their family's livelihood.

Even if it meant cracking some eggs.

Suppose one lived in a duplex, one connected by a autocratic patriarch, the other ruled by Libertarian Social Democracy; on one side, the Left Libertarians run their household purely on green energy, and the flow gravity and water. The other side runs by standard fossil fuels. If the water flowed inside the house, the water could accidentally flood the house of the patriarch. The family of green as a group decided, they would dig a whole that leads the underground river, so that the water would not flow into the patriarch's side of the duplex. This was a family of group decisions, while the other was based on the decision of one. Culturally, this was to be expected; the patriarch came from the deepest of the Southern part of the United States. The ones that liked green energy had been lived for many years in the California Republic, only visiting Tennessee in order to visit with family.

The green family had one daughter, who slept on a hammock; she wore a green tee shirt, blue jeans, and a pair of green wooden clog slippers to bed. She would at times complain about how their living room smelled like fish. This was because there was a deep pit, surrounded by glass walls to keep the flowing water out, in the middle of the room. But for the most part, she benefited from the constant supply of electricity that she came to take for granted. Her neighbor, around her age, lived largely with the opposite situation. He would constantly lock his door to protect himself from his dictatorial father, and there would be constant power outages do to the overbearing government regulations on energy usage. This meant, at times, the patriarchs family having to rely on cold cereal for dinner, instead of pancakes and bacon.

The boy slept on the floor, largely because his parents could not afford a bed. But he had his own methods of communication under the nose of his parents. La Belle de l'Verte famille would sometimes talk to him by Styrofoam cups, connected by a line that reached a same cup on the other end. She spoke of how back in the North West, she had known a friend whose family had came from Indiana. When she would ride the air-rail bus with her friend, her friend noted how sometimes, it seemed like the bus would time a brief dip in the Indiana shopping mall district, an urban sprawl composed largely of millions of micro shopping malls; soon the entire state would be a giant shopping mall. For Belle, she would note how the scenery would melt into the visuals of this shopping mall.

Then when they finally reached the shop, suddenly the scenery would revert back to Los Angeles. And how they didn't quite have the same kind of technology here. The boy on the other end, would always be fascinated by such stories, and wondering why there indeed wasn't such technology here. Instead, he mainly kept a laptop, as a gift from his parents. Here, because of his parents restrictive demands against using the network, made from himself a sneaker network composed of groups of different thumb drives, exchanging messages at school. He didn't have worry about social steganography while on the wire, because the only social network was a homemade one, composed of the urban underground within Chattanooga.

His friends nicknamed him Sputnik, because of his love for Russian media, instead of the state run media. Exchanging thumb drives with his girlfriend neighbor would seem a little off to his overbearing parents, so he worked around the problem by telling her by cups, what the name of the video was on RT, and Belle would browse to this page on her home network that her parents did not restrict. In this respect, there was a certain level of unspoken equality between the two, despite the two family's large political differences.

Although Sputnik himself was just as green as Belle, although for sake of his own privileges, until he ran away from home, would not speak of his views, because he wondered whether his parents had eyes in the walls. Sputnik wanted to eventually move in with Belle, but she was unsure how her parents would feel, despite them being generally freer about sexuality; but they were more concerned about what would happen to Sputnik, and they certainly did not want harassment by Sputnik's father in chief. At night, Belle and Sputnik would exchange information about current news in the quietest corner of the cafeteria, and they would mask their words using null ciphers in order to conceal the information from the security guards that patrolled the area for those plotting any sort of disobedience. This was where the term Belle Ciphering came from.

And Vincent used them liberally.

As liberally as a green.