First Tenet Blood is the oath of dark nothing. Second Tenet Appalled witness of life, blood invents death. Third Tenet Blood is the strength of death. Fourth Tenet Dreams dissolve in blood, blood dissolves in dreams. Author’s Note: [The Blood Creed came to me in a lucid dream years ago. Since then, a story has been shimmering into consciousness around these precepts. It’s still mostly absence rehearsing a narration by Cruz, a young, newbie vampire, and the ghost of his girlfriend, Eva. In this scene, also from a lucid dream, the undead student meets the Branded Man, the ancient slayer who made him a vampire some weeks earlier. Here, Cruz discovers that Eva’s wraith is actually a dissociated self of her vampire body, a mindless, living corpse in thrall to the Branded Man. Got that? Then, here we go…] Eva was gone. Across the street, rounding the corner, a large man approached. In tight, grimy tee and beat-up cargo pants, he had such massive shoulders and narrow hips, he looked like human geometry. The black knit cap pulled low over his brow only heightened his Cro-Magnon features, beardless and blunt. I recognized that bulldog jaw, and a barb of fear twisted in my chest. Eva had delivered me to the Branded Man! He noticed me at once. The desolation in that socketed gaze hurtled me into the next instant, where he stood very close. His hypnotic glamor swamped me in sundown iridescence, and I would have wilted with dreamy languor if Eva hadn’t shouted. I can’t even remember what she yelled, but I leaped toward her voice. The Branded Man’s thick arm grasped the emptiness where I had stood. And I caught the bold tattoo across his deltoid, where the fabric of his filthy tee had frayed: SPQR. From across the street, I waved him back. “Who are you?” He stood squarely at the curb, leaning forward, ready to spring. “You know.” His voice occupied a dark body, his accent East Euro. Maybe Slovenian like Slavoj Žižek, a living philosopher I admire. Deeply reverberant, his words filled my head more like a thought than a voice: “I made you real.” Real? How is being a vampyr more real than the life I lost? I wish I’d asked him that right then, at our first encounter. Instead, I ventured another stupid question, “What do you want?” His voice strummed a dark chord, full of real feeling, “You.” I backed away. Drained of emotion, the oversize vampyr insisted in a tired voice, “I made you real.” He stepped off the curb, deliberate as a panther. “Now, I need you.” Need? Fear cut deep, and I nearly bawled, “Stay away from me!” But a streetwalker came around the corner that moment, and I balked. Her casual stroll stopped with a stagger-freeze, leaving her oddly still in the city’s halogen night. A street-lit manikin. She wore white moccasins, electric blue workout tights, and an ecru blouse open to the navel. Taut leather cords crisscrossed her chest stretching fabric translucent against the dark aureoles of her breasts. Absurdly sexy, ludicrously lurid, her erotic presence surpassed illusion – but only from the neck down. She had the head of a demented street performer. Black thatch-cut Kabuki hair obscured her eyes with fringes stiff as bristles. Radish red lipstick smeared her mouth, as if crayoned by a nine-year-old. Around her throat, a band of dun leather collared her to her profession. I wanted to warn her away from the vampyr. Vampyrs – the Branded Man … and me. “You don’t recognize her.” The Branded Man’s moray grin tightened. “Eva?” “You are her man.” The Branded Man crossed the street. “You are hers. Do not think to flee.” The soft delivery of those dire words in the aura of the Branded Man’s glamor relaxed the taut moment, which all at once felt like a window open on a balmy sunset. I listened to him with a mild and receptive expression. “Do you see how she is shod?” Hacksaw teeth glinted in a brief smile from up close. “Do you recognize the leather of her thongs, her neck band? Human flesh, all of it, cured and tanned. The flayed hides of the men she has lured to me.” I stared dumbstruck, drugged by the dusk ethers around him. “How have you eluded me, scamp?” A shadow of curiosity dimmed his murderous glare as he pressed closer. “Scores I’ve made real. None have eluded me. Only you.” Eva’s body was standing right there. She remained unmoving, a jazzy figure of lust and violence. Didn’t this lug realize that her watchful ghost had kept me out of his grasp from the beginning? I listened for her and heard only the city. The giant glowered at my silence. “I did not find you here by chance. Nor with prowess. You came to me.” His grunt punched me, “Why?” Why had Eva led me to this paralyzed moment? To see that she wasn’t a ghost. My mind whirled. She was undead! “Cruz.” Her whisper slipped by, close and filigreed with winter’s scent. Her tone, shaken and dim, carried her shock. “That’s not me. That’s not who I am.” My attention sharpened to see if the large vampyr heard her too. He didn’t. His lock-stare never wavered, challenging me to answer him. Eva’s chill perfume cut through the bull vampyr’s glamor. “Distract him. Ask for help. Quick.” “Your creed,” I croaked and edged away. “I heard about that. You have a code, right? That’s why I’m here.” I gestured at the moon sylphs and spectral dancers cavorting alongside a passing taxi and admitted, “Nothing makes sense since you attacked us.” “You came to me – for this?” His tone of thick suspicion red-flagged imminent violence. “To know more, yeah.” “I do not believe you, scamp.” The long-shouldered vampyr lunged. And an icy gust of Eva’s scent pushed me sideways. The mauler charged past and collided with a parked car so forcefully it rocked

The horse faces forward in a deep hour. Silent and attentive, it wears a ghostly mask that doesn’t hide the weary world of its gaze. The rider looks aside, all dreams fallen from those eyes. Darkness is their prism. On this side of the pale, we recognize who sits in the saddle. And we aren’t surprised by the beauty of that figure. The ghost of tomorrow is the ordinary strangeness of today.

Higher atmospheres veil the coming night in vaporous blues and dusty indigo. Frail stars and celestial bodies leak through the fading light. By the time the sun has settled atop a grass stem too thin to carry anything else, the incredible depths of the sky open. Our galaxy tilts above the faint furnace-glow of sunset. A scent of old dreams whispers from this image. Remote forebears understood twilight as portal magic, access to another realm, which begins where it ends. Dare we listen to this slender flame caught in the throat of night? Its silence speaks for the universe. Its silence is the emptiness that bears the universe and its own emptiness.

While playing Poohsticks, they spotted the hideous thing in the water. Meemur saw it first, during their third upstream drop. Four-year-old Ru Shi didn’t notice and rushed to the downstream side of the bridge to see whose Poohstick won the race. The anthroid stood unmoving at the rail. It watched the odd creature skimming over the creek’s rocky bed. Brown and flat as a flounder, it slid effortlessly against the current. One side of its asymmetrical body, the part moving forward, looked like two beaver tails of uneven size run over by a truck. The posterior swished a length of brown segmented bone naked as a spine. The inception of |hub| nearly a decade ago had made information available everywhere, and Meemur uploaded its visual record of the previous two minutes. |Hub| quickly identified the organism: Stylophoran. An echinoderm of the early Paleozoic. Extinct four hundred million years. “You won!” Ru Shi announced zestily. She climbed onto the deck beam beside Meemur and peered over the railing into clear, sliding water. “Is that a skate?” “Very good, Peachy.” Meemur timed out for a fraction of a second to trace a causal process. Why had it used a retired nickname from Ru Shi’s toddler days? “It does resemble a skate, doesn’t it? But no. It’s an early ancestor of the starfish.” “It doesn’t look like a starfish.” “And we don’t look like our early ancestors.” To keep her occupied, it asked, “Who is an early ancestor of people and apes?” Ru Shi |hubbed| with a subtle eyeroll and promptly reported, “Dawn Monkey!” “That’s a good example. Eosimias. It’s an ancestor that could fit in the palm of your hand and looked more like a marmoset than you do.” While the child |hubbed| images of marmosets – “They have big mustaches!” – Meemur bipped her mother, Bao Jin, the optickle of the stylophoran. “Golden children?” That was Meemur’s name for the Supra taxon of cortical-enhanced human beings with whom Bao Jin worked or – more realistically – served at Nova Helix. The preeminent biotecture consortium had not yet publicly acknowledged the existence of this new breed of augmented humans. The |hub| offered nothing about them. Meemur only knew they existed from Bao Jin. During private time together, when she reviewed the anthroid’s psybergnostic controller in the shoulder-pack it carried everywhere, she told him about the golden children. Nova Helix had engendered a superphylum of humans with Bio-Accelerated Morphics. They had accomplished this in a research facility designed as a kill box, to terminate unforeseen consequences. The golden children hacked the facility within two weeks of their BAM-generation as neuter adolescents. They turned their wing of the facility into a fortress and continued development under their own direction with an almost telepathic cohesion among the twenty-seven individuals. In their eighth year, the golden children had developed and deployed in high orbit the solar parasols that soon powered most of civilization. At age ten, they had devised psybergnostic processors that made anthroids somebodies. One achievement above all others – |hub| – changed the world universally and, as its name stated, to the core. Its advent immediately defined a universal Before and After. Satellite-constellations in polar orbits sheathed Earth with a global network of pulsed electromagnetic frequencies. The pulses exquisitely meshed with the voltage-gated ions in human brains the world over. Overnight – on the first day of 1 After Hub – anyone anywhere on the planet could go online directly. Accessed by simple eyeroll patterns, |hub| provided, without implants, immediate information for all people from the world’s archives and social channels. Direct, immediate connections and |hub|-linked AI translators enabled unexpected communal alliances. Governments and corporations began to collapse within months. Currency disappeared, replaced by |hubits| (prn you-bits), tied to human value instead of fungible exchange. In less than a year, the new global network of linked minds had established the Mitwelt – a global production and distribution community that eliminated owners and managers and directly conjoined individual skills and communal needs with the world’s resources. Instead of money, people received |hubits| from the Mitwelt for their services, including learning new skills. Accumulated |hubits| purchased recreations and extraordinary opportunities beyond the standard needs of social life guaranteed all. “This visitor from the distant past,” Bao Jin said to Meemur in the night garden while Ru Shi slept in an adjacent nursery. “– this stylophoran …” The anthroid stood facing the nursery’s infographic glass door, watching the child’s cortical potential undulate across the pane. Neon sine waves elongated toward sleep. Both of Meemur’s palms pressed against the glass acted as acoustic drivers softly projecting a familiar lullaby into the room. “This is mischief from Supra’s second generation.” Bao Jin’s voice glimmered with anxiety. “The young Supras have been interested recently in phylogenetic symmilarity metrics. Reviving long extinct organisms is likely one of their antics.” “They are four years old.” Meemur marveled at their audacity. Aware that Bao Jin was looking at it expectantly, the anthroid caught on. She wants me to say what we both know, to express aloud why we are surprised. It faced its manager, who sat in her gardening denims on a stone bench beneath a trellis of white roses. “Releasing such creatures into the environment means the youngest of the golden children have already superseded the authority of the first generation. So soon?” “Maybe not soon enough.” She sighed, with irritation or pensiveness, the anthroid couldn’t tell which. “Too many civic cohorts and production alliances worldwide are unhappy with the Mitwelt. The older generations still yearn for the sequestered ways before |hub|. Hard to believe, only a few years ago borders and governments partitioned humanity into sovereign states.” Meemur heard reason trying to outpace fear. The appearance of the stylophoran meant their future had transformed into a wilderness of freedom. “I called Ru Shi ‘Peachy’ today.” “You haven’t called her that…” “In 847 days, not since she lost her buccal fat.” Meemur gestured to the slung shoulder pack containing its psybergnostic

Why does the straw look broken in the water? Because light moves slower in water. Why? The scattering of photons off water molecules isn’t the reason. Photons are very small and almost all of them zip right through the water without ever meeting a water molecule. The actual reason connects us with the reality of light. Photons, the quanta of light, not only experience what actually happens to them, they also feel what could occur. The probability is quite low that any one photon might slam into a water molecule and get absorbed by an electron – and yet, all the photons are literally moved by the odds that it could happen. The sum of all possible ways that each photon can move through water produces an influence that determines how all the photons move: it slows them down. Even the vast majority of photons that never actually interact with a water molecule move slower! This everyday phenomenon is called the index of refraction, and it exposes the wave function to plain sight. We are seeing the influence of probabilities on the physical world – the direct effect of parallel realities. Do you think I’m exaggerating or mistaken? Or are you seeing the straw in the water fracture reality? Can you trust what you see? Against all odds, you are here, where the tributaries of chance converge. The only real question remaining: Will you ever know all the selves living through you?

The moon in a day sky kites above orchard lawns and rolling hills. I forget who I was before. Among crooked lanes of gnarled apple trees, breezes wend their wild ways. I listen deeper and hear far off the dirge of the sea. Realer than real, a white elk – wearing a crown! – steps through the dark trees into streaked rays of sunlight. Its antlers burn silver. And the smell of windfall mulch steps back from a thriving musk so sudden it hushes time. Summer hovers. Filled with gusty surprise, a thought balloon inflates. It catches the breeze and soars swiftly away from me, toward the honed edge of the moon. When it pops, the elk startles and bounds down the narrow ways, moments spinning after. I wake. Love fills me the way sunlight holds the room. I blink and squint. Yet, wherever I look, everything wears a crown.