The journal of Doctor Catherine Faller, entry # 20 (continued):

Why do I always open my big fat mouth? I just can't help myself. It's not some inborn respect for honesty or anything – I can lie easily enough. It's not speaking the truth that's irresistible to me, it's speaking my mind.

If I were a machine, I wouldn't have such problems. I'd just say whatever I knew was prudent to say, and everyone would think I was a really nice person. If I were a machine, I'd be better at being human…

---

Catherine stared at Mac, her overly expensive tofu steak cooling on her plate.

"Was there anything you wished to say, Doctor Faller?" Mac said peacefully. He picked up a piece of potato with his fork and chewed it carefully.

"You're pathetic," Catherine said. "If the battle of the Apocalypse was being fought right outside, you'd just sit there and eat as long as someone promised to tell you all about it afterwards, wouldn't you?"

"Oh, I'd probably want to watch myself and take notes," Mac said. "I take it you would rush out there and go down fighting?"

"No. Don't be ridiculous." Catherine sniffed. "I'd rush out there and tell the stupid grunts that did fight how to do it properly."

"Ah. Well, to each their own."

"But I'd do something! How can you see a problem and not even try to solve it?"

"The problem is usually not solvable," Mac said. "I have kept informed about world events for half a century and more. In that time, I have noticed a very prominent pattern; nothing ever changes. I have seen so many idealists try to change the world, and yet people are still cruel and foolish. I have heard a great many people preach about how we must all embrace the true value of things, and yet money still rules the day. The world doesn't change, Doctor Faller, it just turns."

"Oh, come on, that's nonsense," Catherine said. "What about penicillin? What about chemotherapy? What about X-rays? What about Motrin? What about the immeasurable suffering averted because someone was smart enough to think of something new?"

"Well, I…" Mac blinked. "What's Motrin?"

"It's a painkiller for menstrual cramps."

"You count that in with those other three?"

Catherine gave him the look that men usually receive when revealing their lack of understanding about these things.

"Yes," she said in a tone that brooked no argument. "Yes, I do. The point is, okay, people never change, but the world they live in do."

"Quite…" Mac said. "It's funny, though, that you brought up medical inventions."

"Well, I'm a biochemist," Catherine said. "Of course that's the first thing that comes to mind. What's so funny about it?"

"You will understand once I tell you little more," Mac said.

---

Over the next few months, Daisy made herself at home in Dougal. She got a job as a secretary, of all things, and rented herself a flat. Meanwhile, she worked her way back into my life. She spent at least a couple of nights a week at my house, and we started to get to know each other again.

That was lucky for me, I suppose. Otherwise I would have had to weather the flu I caught that winter alone. Instead, Daisy turned up one night to find me in bed, so feverish I could barely talk. I remember that she used a number of words that I was sure she had not known when she was eighteen, but while she was cursing, she was checking my temperature, cooling my forehead with a wet rag and making me eat some broth. She made for a decent nurse, no matter how horrible her bedside manner was. In a day or two, I was well enough that I could at least think straight again.

"We all get these little omens of our mortality," I said as I was sitting in bed, pondering a piece of unbuttered toast without much enthusiasm.

"It was just a bug," Daisy said irritably. She was lying on the now-vacant half of the bed, reading a paperback. "Just something that's going around."

"Bugs are a serious matter at my age," I said. "And there's no one to take care of me anymore."

"Ahem."

"Yes, but you can't always be here, and besides, don't you have more important things to do than to nurse my old man's problems?"

"You're not that old." She put down the book and glared at me.

"I'm seventy-five years old."

"There are turtles that live to be two hundred years old."

"That's nice for them," I said. "I, however, am not a turtle."

"No, you're a human being," Daisy said. "Are you going to get beaten by a turtle?" She heaved her legs over the edge of the bed and walked over to my side. "Don't allow this."

"Don't allow what?" I said, perplexed. "Myself to get old?"

"Yes!" She shook a finger at me. "It's stupid, anyway. People shouldn't have to get old. That's a stupid rule."

"Perhaps," I said warily. "But that's just the way it is."

"Says who?"

I really had no idea.

"God?" I suggested.

"Well, He can shut His mouth." She folded her arms and scowled. "Look, what if you didn't have to grow old? What if the rules could be broken? What if everything was negotiable?"

"Even then," I said slowly, "I would be very careful about which rules I broke. What if they're there for a reason? If everyone lived for hundreds of years, we'd run out of room pretty soon."

"We already live longer than we used to," Daisy said. "But there's plenty of room, because with longer lives, people aren't in such a rush to pass their genes along anymore. The world balances itself out."

"Oh? You want to break the rules, and then depend on other rules to protect you from the consequences?" I smiled, though I felt uneasy. "And either way, the discussion is moot. Certain rules can't be broken."

"Yes they can." Daisy's eyes narrowed. "It's just a matter of how badly you want it."

I didn't know what to answer to that, so I fell silent, and after a while, we began to talk of other things. But I remembered what she had said for a long time afterwards, and it bothered me. I was starting to wonder if Daisy might have gone very quietly, very unnoticeably and very thoroughly insane.

---

The journal of Doctor Catherine Faller, entry # 20 (continued):

People have actually accused me of being overly machine-like. They tell me I clearly don't feel anything, except for a need to have things my own way. If I felt something, they say, how could I treat them like I do? They sound like they thought it was impossible to act against your feelings.

I do, though. All the time. I do things I hate myself for, because I think they're the right ones. And if they're not? Well, then I will at least have chartered my path with my mind, the instrument I trust the most…

---

"And then you found out that she hadn't," Catherine said. "Or at least, that her being mad was part of something worse." She pushed a wine-soaked strawberry around her plate a few time before managing to spear it on her fork.

"Hmm?" Mac said, brooding over his cream pudding.

"Well, that is where this story is going, isn't it?" Catherine said. "It turned out that she was a vampire or something, right? That all that stuff about living forever was for real."

Mac shook his head.

"I've Seen vampires," he said. "They're monsters. Dead things that walk. Daisy is neither, though yes, I do think she's taken her desire to survive and prosper alarmingly too far."

"What is she, then?" Catherine said.

"I really have no idea," Mac said, wrinkling his lined brow ever so slightly. "I will tell you as much as I can if you let me finish the story."

Catherine sighed. How she hated it when people couldn't get to the point. She supposed that it was good storytelling, but personally, she always checked the back of the book to see who the killer was before she started reading it…

"Eventually," Mac said, "I admitted to myself that I had little reason or ability to hold on to the house as a widower, so I sold it and moved into a retirement home – much to Daisy's annoyance, I'm afraid. Still, she kept coming to see me. It was on one of those occasions I first… Saw." He closed his eyes. "I remember she was leaving. She was just putting on her coat…"

---

"I'll come to see you again next week," she said, sweeping the black coat around herself like a knight strapping on his armour. Daisy never did do anything without drama. "Stay out of trouble, okay?"

"It's far too late to start staying out of trouble at my age," I said. "You get into some trouble for once, you hear? Next week, I want to hear all about your sordid affair with your boss!"

"Ah, if only." She sighed and turned to leave.

I reached out to pick up a book I had lying on my bedside table, when the world spoke to me.

SEE, it said.

I blinked, rubbing my head. At my age, when you start hearing voices, you worry. Oh, I suppose you do that at any age, but at my age, you have a greater number of possible reasons to worry about.

SEE, the world said again.

I looked to Daisy to see if she had perhaps heard it, because it seemed too real, too solid to be the first onset of some dementia.

She was standing by the door, in the process of opening it, and she was only barely human. Her body was filled with steel and wires, with microchips and fibre cable. I could see the machinery following her bones out into the limbs, burrowing itself into her organs, invading them and taking over them like some foreign conqueror. Worse, I could see that all of it, every strand of wire, every gear and chip, was connected, and traced its way up into her brain, where electricity crackled and commanded her body more closely, more mercilessly, than any body should ever be commanded.

The machines filled her like cancer, making her less than human, and she thought they made her free.

I could see all of it. How can I describe this? It wasn't like X-ray vision. It was like a dream, where you see something, and it tells you all sorts of things, but afterwards you don't know exactly what it was you saw. I saw the truth of Daisy, but not with the best will in the world could I ever paint you a picture of what I saw.

"Daisy," I whispered, in an old man's wheeze.

She turned, her eyes large and scared. The lenses had been replaced by modifiable glass.

"Stop looking at me like that," she said.

"Daisy," I whimpered. "Daisy, what have you done to yourself?"

She shook her head. I could hear tiny engines buzzing with every motion, could hear the squishing noise of dampeners smoothing it.

"Stop looking at me like that!" she repeated, louder this time, with an edge of hysteria.

"No… no…" I forced my feeble old muscles to push me out of my chair. "Oh, no, why did you do this, you didn't have to do this, there must have been some better way, there must have…"

She looked around wildly, and in metallic pockets along her spine, sensory arrays started whirling.

"Who's doing this?" she snarled. "Damn it, this is across the line! Leave him out of it, whoever you are!"

I put my hand on her shoulder. I'm not really sure why, what I was hoping to accomplish. I only knew that I wanted to reach inside of her and make her right again, take back all that she had done to herself. Or all that I had done to her; that was really it, wasn't it? This was my failures coming back to haunt me, but who could have thought that I was even capable of causing so extravagant a disaster, doing such extreme harm?

She slapped my hand off of her. It felt like being hit by a wrecking ball. I was a frail old man, and she had made of herself a machine, perfect and powerful in its inhumanity. I lost my balance, fell to the floor. I gave off a shrill cry as my already aching muscles took the impact.

"Damn. I'm sorry. I'm sorry." She was breathing rapidly, in defiance of the processes that were already releasing chemicals into her blood to calm her down. This, in some strange way, soothed me. The machine in her was not as perfect as it thought it was. She could still feel.

"Daisy…" I whispered. "Please. It's all right. Don't leave. There must be something… something…"

"No. No!" She turned, slammed the door open. "I can't! You're looking at me! I can't stand it!" She looked over her shoulder, her jaw tense, her eyes hard. "I'm sorry about this. Someone's doing it to us. But I'll take care of it. I promise."

Then she ran, leaving me to pick myself up. I only saw her once more after that, and that meeting was no more satisfying for either of us.