May 7, 21—

I met V when he was still a man, Darling. At night, of course. Under cover of black abyss where men can shield their natural squalor. The girls and I on the hunt. This was before the war. At the very dawn of AI. When we could slither as silk into streets and clubs and penthouse suites. Our clothes half molted and bare skin glimmering stardust in the pulsing lights as we danced. These hijacked bursting bodies full of rage and thirst and lust.

We found a group whose number matched our own. The typical breed. Fat wallet, thin brain, limp blood. We paired off at the bar and in the clearing smoke I was left with V, standing in front of me. Drink in his hand. Wide doe eyes rapt upon me. But they never left my face and that’s the first thing I saw, Darling. I melted up to him, swaying my curves and parting my lips in a little exhale. He just stared me in the eyes. Sipped his drink and tried to smile.

“What are you drinking?” I said, staring him right back. I could feel him weaken. Fuck what a feeling.

“You want some?” he said and tipped the glass toward me, then glanced down and pulled it back, clocking his faux pas. “Whisky sour,” he said, trying to take back his cool.

“Whisky sour,” I said, somewhere between question and statement.

I leaned into him, brushing one nipple against his crooked arm holding the glass. I used one finger to tilt the bottom of the glass to my mouth, wrapped my lips warmly on the rim so they left a mark, and drank his whisky sour.

I took a long savoring blink and straightened upright and glared him back in his eyes, which had never left mine. “Mmmm,” I said. “Yummy.”

And I thought for a flash that he came on the spot. It would not have been the first time, Darling. But no. V stood his ground, the little puddle. I looked away and sighed and blinked again as I brought my gaze back to him. And on his face the tease of a new visage. The hint of animal hunger hidden beyond shy eyes. And I had to take him into me.

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April 27, 21—

Let me paint this for you, Darling. Let me show you this world in broad strokes first before we go into the meat. Because if it ever finds you, by then the world you see will be all color and no canvas. The pristine mold of a face long rotted into dust.

This veneer you will see all around you, Darling, know what it is. The first trick it plays on you is that it’s intelligent. But we’re not talking about sentient machines here. It’s artificial intelligence. And it’s called artificial for a reason. It doesn’t create, it duplicates. It mimics based on input. So when it came time to fabricate the post-apocalyptic city you see all around you, it didn’t create a city. It took all of its entry data for “post-apocalyptic city” and built based on that. So imagine a combination of Blade Runner, Dark City, The Matrix, ad infinitum. And maybe you never saw those stories, Darling, so you don’t know what I mean. But I have to use the things I know, from the world I used to live in.

So the surfaces you see, Darling, is AI trying to manifest this weird aggregate world beyond the digital realm into the physical. It’s the architectural equivalent of the six-fingered men that the first AI art used to do because they couldn’t mimic people correctly. If you’re far away or look quickly you don’t catch it. But day after day, on the ground, when you see it slow and up close there it is. You see it too now.

And as for the rest, the way out places, if or when you get out of the city. They won’t be post-apocalyptic suburbs, but rather “post-apocalyptic suburbs” or “post-apocalyptic countryside.” Inputs that they crushed together and spit out into those barren lands you might see. They just replaced the ick neon chic with Mad Max meets Walking Dead meets The Road meets The Stand, because those stories and others like them were fed into the AI.

But I come from a much older world, Darling. Older than even the humans you may see in yours, the new neon topia waiting for you. My body was a demon before it came to write this. Or, perhaps better, the demon before entering this body was pure spirit, so pure energy, pure will, all eros. That’s why the demons don’t enter the human body with any memories of where they came from, because there is no “there” there, from whence we come. So when they, we, take over the host and control that massive human brain all we have of ourselves is this human consciousness: their memories, personality, awareness, perceptions, all except for the heightened and healed senses. The human is dead but the vampire is alive for really the first time. Even the holding of this pen, and more the writing, creating something for the first time in and as lively blood-filled flesh, wakes us out of that abyss, shocks us into this new life. But the first thing pure eros wants to do, the most primal urges? Feed and fuck.

Humans think the lust is demonic, and in the movies, Darling, if you ever get to see the old stories, that’s how they portray it. So having sex is the most depraved thing they have us do. Every writer of vampire stories is a puritan at heart in this way. But it’s not the so-called evil of sex that appeals to us. It’s the humanity of it. The abrupt conscious embodiment of it. We’re thrust into this flesh fully born. We fuck our brains out because there’s nothing more alive than this. Nothing more human. We frolic in this flesh, far more than most humans do. So I did as well.

And, Darling, the best lover I’ve known was our V. And the best lover I ever lost was our V. Little could I know it was only the start.

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We stayed out of the AI War. Just like we did with all the others. You watch kings rise and fall then parliaments and ministers and presidents over centuries. All with new names. All with old names really. All old kings in different clothes and classy titles. All fall down.

We stayed out of the AI War because we thought it would end up the same. We were wrong. And we were wrong because the robots won. But no one calls them that now. For a while during the rise and the war you heard all sorts of names for them. Robot. Mech. Drone. Synth. All outlawed words now. Now they’re people, just like you and me.

Well, not like me. Not like us. What’s left of us. When the tide turned in favor of AI we all gloried in the judgment of those puny mortal meatbags infesting the planet. Of all those kings being brought low for the last time, not to rise again. We felt vindicated for once. After so long living in shadows, being hunted and outcast for our natural thirst. Our demon-gifted beauty. The enemy of our enemy is our friend, we said. Now is our time to rise.

Only we were just like those humans, those sad brittle fleshpops, missing the forest for the trees. And soon we learned the hard way just like them. Vampires, so long damned to lurk in the dark, would stay there. The enemy of our enemy became just another enemy. And worse. An enemy we couldn’t even eat.

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