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

I didn't become a physician because I wanted to help people. I did it because I was interested in the human body, because it paid well, and because it seemed like as good a line of study as anything else.

Some doctors get a God complex. They think they can save every patient. What can you say about me? What do you call someone who considers every patient beyond saving, until proven otherwise?

What do you call someone who sees someone who tries to convince himself that he can help, and wishes she could manage to see anything but self-delusion?

---

"So, you were right," Catherine said. "Not a vampire." She took a sip of coffee. "Something a great deal more interesting, I'd say."

"Interesting?" Mac snorted. "I guess you could put it like that."

"Well, why not?" Catherine grinned. "What, you've never wished that you didn't have to be so damn human?"

"No," Mac said. "Call me old-fashioned, because I am, but I consider human a good thing to be."

Catherine shrugged. As far as she was concerned, being human was the best of a number of bad alternatives.

"Well, she's still guilty of the capital sin, as I see it," she said. "She didn't share that marvellous technology of hers with anyone. We could all have been cyborgs. But I guess she wanted to keep the power for herself." She sniffed. "Pathetic."

"Doctor Faller," Mac said patiently, "you might think you would enjoy the prospect of going the way of Daisy, but believe me, if you had been there, if you had seen it, you would have been as revolted as I was. Sacrificing everything that you are just to get rid of your human weaknesses… well, that's what one would call throwing out the baby with the bathwater."

"Perhaps," Catherine said. "So what do you think happened to her? Secret government project? Mad scientist? Deal with some kind of high-tech devil?"

"I don't think that matters," Mac said. "All I'd like to know is how it could be revoked."

"Mmm." Catherine spun her cup around on its plate. "Maybe you should finish the story before I start theorising wildly."

---

Daisy didn't come back next week, or the next. In the end, I went looking for her. It should have been easier than it was. I knew where she lived, and I knew where she worked. But no one answered when I rang her doorbell, and no matter how long I waited outside of her house, I never saw her come or go. I tried to catch her at her job, but somehow, she had always just stepped outside when I came to see her. In the end, her boss had stern words with me.

"I really don't know what your family situation is," he said. "She used to talk about her grandfather a lot, and then she just stopped. I don't know what you've done to her. I don't know what she has done to you. And I have no idea how she always seems to know that you're going to come by, but the fact is, every time you do, I'm left without a secretary for two hours. That is two hours when I don't perform at my peak. Two hours when I let the team down. Two hours when I fail the stockholders. I don't enjoy that. Please take your quarrel out of my office and keep it there."

I Saw him, and there was something off about him. No circuitry under the skin, no fibre-optic cables running alongside his nerves, just something glossy and artificial, like he had been manufactured instead of born.

"You're like her," I said.

"In that I put work before personal life, yes," he said. I couldn't make out any dishonesty in him, and I'm usually good at that sort of thing. Maybe he didn't even know what he was.

Weeks went by. I Saw other creatures, walking the streets as bold as you please, and I made some notes about them. I found that there was another man in my retirement home, an ex-Major in the army, who could See. He told me that it was our duty to keep our home and everyone else who lived there safe. I did not contradict him, and when he put me on sentry duty, I sat by the window for hours on end, just to make sure no people who were dead or artificial or animal entered the home. None ever did.

When I saw her again, it was on her terms. It was a quiet night, and I was taking a walk through the park to clear my head. I swear that the bench was empty when I walked past it, but then I heard her voice behind me, and when I turned around, she was sitting there.

The Sight wasn't with me; she looked the same as she always did. If it had happened before, I might have doubted the voice had ever spoken to me, doubted that the vision had been anything but an old man's dementia. But I had Seen a lot since then, and learned that there were others like me. I knew what I had Seen.

"I've been looking for you," I said.

"I know," she said. "I wasn't ready to see you."

I sat down on the bench next to her.

"I was hoping I'd find something," she said. "Some reference. Some tiny note on some obscure website. Some little trinket of information from some wand-waving bozo. There isn't anything. I don't know what's happening."

"Well, I don't either," I said. "It seems we're not quite normal, either of us." I smiled faintly. "But then, we already knew that, didn't we?"

She nodded.

"But something reached out and made me different," I said. "You made yourself different, didn't you?"

She looked straight at me.

"Yes."

"How?" I said. "How is it possible?"

"That's just the thing. There's no reason for anything to be impossible. There are no rules. They're just… restrictions. If you push, they yield a little. If you push harder, they yield some more. You can do anything. It's just a matter of how stubborn you are."

"And of the price you're willing to pay, to push away those restrictions," I said.

She looked down.

"Yeah. And that."

"Why did you do it?" I said. "All of this? What made you think this was a reasonable price to pay?"

"Because people shouldn't have to die," she said. "Because people shouldn't be too weak to do anything they want. Because people shouldn't be held down by any rule not of their own making."

I shook my head. I didn't know how to meet such a strange argument. If someone argues against a rule, you can attempt to prove that the rule is just. But if someone argues against the very concept of rules, what do you say to them?

"But that price," I insisted. "Say that you're right. Say that people can really live forever and do anything they want. Would they still be people, if they did that? People die. People have limits. If you take away the limits, what's left? What has no limits?"

Daisy shrugged.

"God?" she suggested.

"Is that what you want to be? I think God is a pretty lonely fellow. Why would He have created mankind, if He wasn't absolutely desperate for company, any company?"

"It's moot, anyway," Daisy said. "I walk, I talk, I eat, I drink. I dream. I ache. I cry. I fuck. I'm human enough."

"Are you?" I said. "Where does the line go? Can you even understand what being human is now? When I first Saw you, you knocked me down."

"I didn't mean to…" Daisy began.

"I know. It's okay." I sighed. "But there was a moment, there, when it could have crossed your mind that other people are small and fragile compared to you, that we don't all have steel-enforced skeletons. And it didn't. I think you've stopped being human in the strictest sense. Or at least you will before long. Unless you turn back now."

"Turn back?"

"Undo whatever it was you did," I said. "Be human again. Come back to us."

"You're asking me to cripple myself!" she said.

"I'm asking you to save your soul."

She got up from the bench, scowling furiously. Her hands were tightened into fists by her sides.

"No! You don't understand anything. I shouldn't be like you, it's you who should be like me. Everyone should be more than human."

"Machines aren't more than human," I said. "And I have lived a long, full life, without having wires wrapped around my brain. What more could I ask for? What more could you? You don't need to make yourself a monster to live life to the fullest. Please? I'll help you. In any way I can. Just… stop it now. While you have the chance."

She frowned at me.

"It's much too late for that," she said. "A 'long, full life' isn't even nearly enough for me now." She started walking away from me.

"Daisy!" I shouted in desperation. "Do you want to die as a freak?"

"Stop calling me that!" She turned, black coat whipping around her. "My name is Diana! My name is Diana Helsing, and I'll never die!"

Then she was gone, swallowed by the night, and I was left contemplating the cost of failure.

---

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

Maybe stupid hope is part of being human. Maybe we all get to choose between weighing the odds and doing what's sensible, or deciding that what we need is possible to achieve.

Wishful thinking isn't really an evolutionary no-no. After all, if you decide to be reasonable, you never even try. People who convince themselves that something can be done sometimes find that it actually can be.

---

Catherine counted out the money for the meal. The real challenge with these things was to figure out how little you could tip while making it look like you were bad at math as opposed to being a cheapskate.

"You see?" Mac said quietly.

Catherine sighed.

"Yeah. Actually, yeah. I do think I see what you're getting at. But why don't you give me the full, angsty rundown?"

"She's going to live forever," Mac said. "Or at least she thinks she is, and I can't say I doubt her. She's going to walk around and become less and less human, but at the core she'll always be Daisy Brown. My granddaughter. The result of my weakness and my failures." He closed his eyes. "My disgrace won't end. It will live on forever, to torment countless generations yet to come."

"Oh, get over it," Catherine said. "Nothing ever really ends. Nothing ever really begins, either. Why does she have to be your creation? Can't she be her mother's? Can't she be your mother's? Time didn't start at your birth, you know."

Mac snorted, smiling faintly.

"Well, this is the only way I can see it, I'm afraid. I messed up. Because of me, my daughter destroyed herself. Because of her, my granddaughter turned herself into a monster. I could blame it on someone else, I suppose, but what would the point be? I did what I did, and this is the result."

Catherine shrugged. Everyone did what they did, and the result was rarely very nice.

"I don't know if I can help you," she said. "But I'm going to try. Not for your sake or anything. I'm just interested."

"Thank you," Mac said quietly.

"And I'd appreciate your help, too," Catherine said. "You wouldn't have to do anything. Just… See, right? Just tell me everything you See, and I'll consider that help enough."

"Life is very simple for you, isn't it, Doctor Faller?" Mac said.

Catherine snorted. She had known from the start that he was a fool.