Vampires and Cyborgs

As general rule vampires and cyborg tech don’t mix. Even those fellows who used to be deep in 99 Club Culture, Alita Battle Angel to the core of their mechanical hearths. When one of those gets invited to join a Nocturnal Court, they must learn to live without the implants.

To former subhumans is easier, since they never had a proper faerie inside their brain. Not as subhumans, since fairies only talk to true humans. Former 99C humans, they can have a hard time adjusting, on top of all the hard time the rest of us gets. Making things worse, they do not even know why they have such a bad time. Since being turned into a vampire temporarily erases the memories of previous existence. Temporarily, in most cases, anyway.

We know, of course. I have been working most my nights in the Cannels. Where the newly born children of night expend their first decades as mindless beasts. Craving for blood, constantly. Attacking everything that moves. Until the light of understanding, and eventually sanity, slowly came back to their eyes.

I started 500 years after the first vampire courts where stablished. Now, I have over 9.000 years of experience.

There is this one fellow.

His commitment to cyborg implants is so intense that he kept burning all his money and energy in getting the same surgeries. To have his skeleton replaced by cyborg Step 1 Surgical implant. The cyborg skeleton. Even when he aged pass the 500 years of Nocturnal Society. Passed the Great Change. He still continued to seek for those implants.

Despite the fact that he didn’t had bones, or any other organs, inside his body. Just the fluid darkness we all are made of. Still, he insisted in the implants.

The King felt I do not know why. Compassion, curiosity? Something.

With that additional support our friend was finally able to get access to the best technomagic available on our colony. The best techno mages specialized in cyborg implants, in Planet Gerunda.

Didn’t helped much.

Until we finally change the focus. Instead of try to make some technomagical cyborg implants that would accompany his vampiric nature. Our king worked with him to develop vampiric powers. To make the surgery unnecessary. Allowing him to absorb any cyborg implant immediately, by contact. Use them as cyborgs would.

Given the way vampiric powers work, our king had to learn it too. And once he did, he can pass the power to any member of our court who has affinity with this Blood-Seed.

So far, the power remains unique.

Possibly because it takes too much effort. And the benefits do not compensate the effort.

Unless you happen to be completely obsessed by the cyborg stuff. 99 Club culture attached to it, and all the extras that came in the package.

Only reason I can give myself. For why our majesty indulged this obsession so much. Was the exotic flavour this power has. Being original creation of our court.

Nocturnal Kings and Queens like to cultivate impracticalities like that. As a sort of trophy. They need symbols of status to show each other, and boast, since that sport reduces the need of war between the courts. All the efforts we make for make those less common still leave us with twice more cases of vampires killing each other in territory disputes, than what most of us would consider to be a high number, withing the borders of civilized reason.

Perhaps we should dig deeper in 99 traditions.

Compared to us, cyborgs rarely kill each other.