Fat Vampire Value Meal (Books 1-4 in the series) (66 page)

Hours and hours passed. Nikki came and went. Maurice came and went. Reginald finished the pizza by himself. They both did several caffeine-spiked blood shots — Karl because he wanted the pick-me-up and Reginald because he barely consumed more blood as a vampire than he had protein as a human, and both dietary habits were equally destructive. They made notes and opened folders stuffed with paper. They made charts. They wore out Google trying to search for ways to help themselves win an election, but there seemed to be no way to make it work. They couldn’t make Charles look good enough in time, and they couldn’t make Timken look bad enough
 
to bring him down without inviting very serious side effects from the humans. Timken was going to win the election, and there was nothing they could do about it.
 

“Let’s kill him,” said Karl.
 

Reginald didn’t respond. Karl had suggested killing Timken every half hour for the entire night, and by now it was simply a form of verbal masturbation for him. They couldn’t remove Timken by force. They couldn’t make him lose the election. They couldn’t disrupt the election, either, which was another of Karl’s frequent suggestions. “If you can’t win the game, change the rules,” he said, but Reginald kept insisting that as much as he believed in bending rules, this was one contest that had to be won by the book because the book was the game itself. The election process had to be legitimized, both to calm an already panicky vampire population and to show itchy-trigger-fingered humans that they could behave like civilized beings rather than the monsters that humans — and their well-armed AVT forces — were convinced they were.
 

“Should we contact Charles?” said Reginald. “Coordinate efforts?”
 

But there was nothing to coordinate. Charles was an insufferable idiot, and Walker was a charismatic idiot. Neither insufferability nor charisma won contests by themselves, and it was painfully obvious that neither Charles nor Walker had any clue as to what they were doing. Timken, in a publicly-lauded act of generosity and fairness, had even freed Charles from custody because he said that a fair election couldn’t be conducted with one man in a cage. Charles was watched but otherwise free, and still he couldn’t rally support. Everything he did made him look worse — or, in Reginald’s opinion, made it obvious just what a total and completely dangerous asshole he actually was.
 

“Let’s kill him,” said Karl.

It was a joke, but Reginald stopped to consider it. He’d thrown out the box when it had become apparent that their only chance was to think incredibly far outside of it. What would happen if Charles died suddenly? But it was no use. If they framed Timken for Charles’s murder, it would do nearly as much damage as revealing the truth about Timken and the TGVs. And if Charles died in another way, his absence in the election would simply make the vote unanimous.
 

But would it make the election a farce, and force them to hold it again?
Reginald asked himself.
 

No,
he thought.
But even if it did, how would that change the outcome?
 

Timken had reached savior status. Barring a major scandal — which would be just as bad as his winning — nothing could sufficiently tarnish his image as to cause him to lose the election. Timken couldn’t
lose
, so he’d have to
be defeated…
which became more and more impossible with each passing day.
 

The night ended on a depressing note. Sometime after sunrise, Karl went to bed. Reginald cleaned up the paperwork and his notes, resisted the urge to throw them away, and dropped them into a wastebasket-shaped file instead. Maybe they’d be thrown out. Maybe they wouldn’t. It didn’t matter.
 

He talked it out with Nikki. Nikki didn’t try to help. She simply tried to make him feel better, but was unable. So she laid next to him, and sometime before falling asleep she slipped out of her pajamas and did what she could, without so much as punching him in the face, breaking furniture, or throwing him into a wall.
 

He talked it out with Maurice. Maurice didn’t want to talk about it. He felt guilty. He talked about all of the signs that Claude had exhibited over the years, and said that he should have known, that he should have ended Claude when he’d had the chance. Reginald told them that all they could do would be to wait and to watch for their chance to fix things after the election. Anything was possible. And instead of Maurice making him feel better, Reginald ended up trying to do the same for Maurice.
 

He talked it out with Claire, but Claire didn’t understand or care. She’d lived with terror in the background for months. She’d known that monsters were real for a full year. She’d more or less lived inside her house since they’d left the country, and she was becoming pale and sick-looking. It couldn’t be good for her. The vampire world had, since Timken’s takeover, fallen again into obscurity for Claire. She stayed inside on principle, to be safe for a while longer, but she told Reginald that the gangs of creatures that had been roaming the streets just a few weeks ago were gone. The world felt safer. She asked Reginald if maybe he was wrong. Maybe order — even a terrifying kind of order — was better than the disintegration that she’d hidden from and that her vampire friends had fled from. Maybe Timken was hungry for power, but what politician wasn’t? Maybe he’d settle in and rule, and maybe he’d become like Logan and shut down democracy, and maybe he’d be a tyrant… but maybe that was how it was supposed to be, and maybe it was okay.
 

That was the one possibility Reginald hadn’t considered. What if they simply let events unfold and allowed Timken to win? Maybe it would be like Claire said.
 

But as nice as the idea felt for two seconds, he couldn’t make it fit. It reminded him of the time his car had been banging and clattering and then had stopped for an hour, and he’d hoped against hope that it had fixed itself. But of course it hadn’t, and of course ignoring Timken wouldn’t end well. Dismissing the damning evidence and expecting the return of the status-quo was too miraculous and serendipitous to be correct. Every scenario his strategic vampire mind had explored — and there were thousands of variants — ended in war and genocide. There was simply no way he could make the facts fit a peaceful mold. The irony was that war was coming… exactly as Claire had predicted back on that hill in Germany, back before she had realized it was a prediction at all.
 

Reginald had attached his cell phone to his laptop to download some photos, and now, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the screen of the phone brighten. He looked over and saw that his phone’s desktop image had changed to one of Claire holding two thumbs up. Underneath was the message,
Don’t worry, be happy
.

Then a thought occurred to him. It ran from the base of his spine up into the crown of his head, then crept through his cerebrum like fingers. Everything was on fire. Scenarios unfolded. And for a moment, there was hope.
 

“Hey Claire,” he asked his computer screen. “Could you hack the vampire version of Facebook?”
 

Reginald’s web browser opened and he saw his main Fangbook news feed. At the top was a new status update from a user with the screen name of SpongeBob SquarePants.
 

The status update read,
Of course I could.

M
AGIC
F
INGERS

CLAIRE WAS BEING SOMEWHAT OVERCONFIDENT, but not much.
 

Over the week that followed, she explored the Fangbook network using Reginald’s login, which Claire, on her own, thought to spoof so that he appeared to be logging in from Europe so as not to alert any unwanted attention. Reginald didn’t give her his password; she simply thought her way in. She then proceeded to post photos which she’d cobbled together from her memory, from her creative subconscious, or from nothing: Reginald by the leaning tower of Pisa, which he’d never visited; Reginald standing on the bank of a Venice canal next to a man he’d never met; Reginald and Nikki and Maurice giving noogies to a wax museum figure of Margaret Thatcher, which they’d never done. At first, Reginald asked how she was creating the images, but after enough vague, disinterested,
well-duh
answers involving imagining pictures in the same way she’d think a thought, he stopped asking.
 

Claire reported that she was getting more and more comfortable with the process every day. She said that it felt like swimming.
Swimming
, Reginald said to Nikki, baffled. It wasn’t like looking at a screen and changing things in the way she used to do with a keyboard or a mouse. It was more like she entered the data itself and simply pushed it around. Encryption didn’t bother her in the least. She demonstrated that she could transfer money back and forth between Reginald’s bank and Nikki’s without credentials or an EFT authorization. She bought Nikki flowers using Reginald’s credit card because she said that Reginald was almost certainly not appreciating Nikki enough. She added a period in an obscure place in a
New York Times
online article so as not to attract notice, just to prove that she could do it. She asked Reginald if she could change the front page of CNN to read “Go Browns,” but Reginald objected on the basis of both the attention it would draw and the fact that he didn’t like the Cleveland Browns at all.
 

Then, focusing in on the task at hand, Claire tried manipulating inconsequential Fangbook votes. A minor measure was placed in front of the populous by the reestablished Council a week before the election that altered training requirements in vampire bootcamp. Claire read and announced the results in the middle of the voting period, then toggled thousands of votes like little switches, changing them from no to yes… and the measure, which was going to fail, passed with flying colors.
 

Timken had promised that the Fangbook election system was drum tight and unhackable. Reginald searched the internet and made phone calls and read everything he could about it. He even tried to hack it for hours on end, and got nowhere. After all of his research and investigation, Reginald was eventually able to determine two things: first, although Timken had commissioned the election-specific additions to the system as well as bankrolled and championed it, it seemed that he did not, in fact, have any sort of back door access to it. And second, the system was indeed impossible to hack… except, apparently, by a young girl who didn’t need a key to get through any electronic door.
 

The election security issue had been pored over from dozens of distinct and independent directions. Timken had rightly assumed that people would be suspicious about a system that wielded so much power and its ability to be influenced — either in software or via plain old corruption — by any person, and specifically by the person who had pushed and funded it. Timken had gone out of his way to provide everything that skeptics would need to assuage their doubts. The lengths to which Timken had gone to assure the public that the election would be fair was, in itself, suspicious to Reginald. It had the feel of a magician who draws attention with one hand so that the audience won’t watch the other hand working under the table. It led Reginald to believe that the Fangbook system was indeed straight and fair, because it was the shown hand. The decoy
had
to be imperturbable and unassailable. So where was the other hand — the one that was performing the tricks?

But of course, there
was
no hidden hand. Timken didn’t need an ace up his sleeve because he was playing fair. It was
Reginald
who was cheating.

Still, Reginald pursued every angle he could conceive of — every way that Timken might be able to influence the vote’s outcome. He’d determined that the system was fair, but what about access to the data? Were there vulnerabilities with Fangbook itself? Was it possible for a network of hackers to intervene between individual voters and the system, closer to their points of access, which were less secure? Could a virus be distributed in advance of the election that could act on an individual computer’s level, casting votes for Timken regardless of what the user entered or saw on her screen? What about the vampires that were involved? Did those higher up at Fangbook have sufficient access to cause problems, and could they be bought? Could the voters themselves be influenced or persuaded or threatened? Could a person other than a given voter cast a vote for that person?
 

But no matter how Reginald looked at it and no matter how paranoid he was and no matter how many permutations his super-brain ran through, he could find no weaknesses beyond infinitesimal issues that would never make more than infinitesimal differences in the outcome. The election would be fair. And that was, in one sense, good news. But in another sense, it was troubling news. If there was no known way to perturb the outcome of the election, how could one eleven-year-old girl do it?

“Magic fingers,” said Claire in a
fuhgeddaboutit
tone of voice when Reginald expressed his concerns. Then she wiggled her fingers in front of her camera and Reginald watched as blue arcs of electricity jumped between her fingers like sparks from a Van de Graaff generator.
 

“When did that start happening?” said Reginald, shocked. So far, he hadn’t even been thinking of what Claire could do as magic because there had been no visible phenomena. He realized he’d been thinking of it more like computer hacking, though it seemed far more creative and far more powerful.
 

“It didn’t,” said Claire. “I just made your video do it.”
 

Reginald sighed. “Could you not do that? I’m starting to doubt my reality. I kind of need to know that what I see is real. You’ve totally destroyed the truth of ‘seeing is believing’ for me.”
 

“Sorry. Sure.”