The Once and Future Ms. Cheung

The next time a zombie asks me to dispose of a vampire: I’ll blast the zombie, then dust the vampire.

Max told us that Max the zombie said something about the ‘dark ones’ just before he — deanimated?

And now I’ve got finals to get through. If anything like what trashed Chip’s apartment shows up while I’m studying… I’ll be pissed.

Mom’s bugging me about medical school applications. But I don’t know about becoming a doctor: one was a vampire, another drinks too much, and the ones with the tweed jackets want to disassemble ‘restore’ me.

I want to talk to Max about studying computerish things, or maybe bioengineering, since I could be my own thesis topic.

( Cut so that Dot doesn't yell at me about the borked HTML )

Uma killed herself, in front of Dot and myself, two nights ago. The second time I've hesitated when I could have saved someone. I ought to have learned by now.

I could have saved Uma earlier if I hadn't listened to Todd's excuses the first time we confronted him, and his gang outside Uma's room.

It's not like you can kill Todd. Kat tried to, and now she's run off into a creepy Neil Gaiman-designed forest somewhere in Fairy.

The two people I'm closest with are gone, and I have to go be Supergirl.

Roberta says she's willing to destroy Vampster to get at Devins. So I'll have to look out for her.

And Carlos, he's knee deep in the supernatural, but he's walking around like he saw a ghost.

So I've got to keep an eye out for those two.

Where the hell is Tiffany? We could use her in this fight.

Uma's parents have broken out of jail, complicating things. I bet they'll want to have their revenge on Devins for Uma, so we can follow them to get to him.

Lauren took me up to Napa this weekend for mother/post-human daughter bonding at a spa. She drove, of course.

"It'll be nice when you get your license." She said as we drove over the Golden Gate. "Why did you just get a state Id?"

"Remember, demon goddess, able to fly?"

"What about shopping, how will you get home a sofa from Ikea?"

"I was hauling five-hundred pound bioreactor vessels up from Long Beach. I won't have a problem with a Klüngky or whatever silly names they have for a sofa."

"What about dating. Sometime you'll have to drive."

"Mo-THER, remember that old Superman movie?"

Lauren laughed.

"What's funny? Oh hell, I called you 'Mom'."

"Worse, dear, you said 'mo-THER'. A parent lives for those moments of exasperation."

Lauren listens to older music. Fleetwood Mac, Wings (something in common with robertwhitehat,) Foghat (?). I had tuned out the CD player in her car and was listening to Franz Ferdinand on my internals.

She noticed I was bobbing my head out of synch with Stevie Nicks.

"Are you okay, And, er Ifurita?"

"Yes."

Then she noticed me silently singing along to Matinee, and glared at me.

"You're listening to something else."

"Yes."

"How?"

"Gawd, Mom [again, wince], how many times do I have to tell you I have a digital configurable software layer on top of my cerebral cortex? I'm running iTunes in emulation."

"Great, my daughter's an iPod."

Oh, and I'm apparently a popular subject of fan art. Okay, so my namesake is a popular subject. I thought this was a cute drawing. Iffy doesn't look so, well, "despair you people, I am so beautiful and destructive."

Bragging time. Several people I know have been listing ten things they've done that they think their friends haven't.

1. Died
2. Fought a Slayer and survived.
3. Went on to date that Slayer's brother.
4. Broke up with Slayer's brother twice.
5. Worked for David Ben David without filing a sexual harassment suit (*).
6. Went unrecognized by my mother.
7. Had a $50,000 Ming-era vase thrown at me by my mother.
8. Flew across the Pacific, without an airplane.
9. Threatened to drop a CEO from a great height.
10. Struck out a werewolf.

* I was legally dead at the time, so, as much as I wanted to, I couldn't.

I've been coveting some new tshirts. dotslayer has some cool ones, but I don't want to copy her style. And I don't think she'd want a glitter "/usr/bin/girl" baby doll.

Anyway, I was at Dana Street today and Nick, the owner showed me the shirts he had made to promote the coffee house.

Another one of the regulars was going to take a photo of me modeling the shirt, but the batteries in his camera died. So he sent me a link to a photo he took. Not as nice as it'd be on me.

I think robertawhitehat ought to get Laney working on a Vampster tshirt.

The Guardian says the reports are an urban legend, and the vamp sounds like a wannabe, but I'll send this to the next staff meeting in case Dot or Max know any Slayers in Birmingham.

I'm back.

( Hong Kong, the Disaster, and my Return )

Hum, interesting interview.

"Libertarian individualism is completely self-defeating for the human enhancement movement. You want to make yourself and your kids smarter? You can take a smart pill and do your mental gymnastics, but you still need good books, stimulating friends, a solid education, a free and independent press, and a stable, well-regulated economy so your PDA keeps beaming Google searches and email chat into your eyeball through that laser display. And it might be nice to have a strong, independent Food and Drug Administration to make sure that your smart pill doesn't cause dementia in five years, and that that laser display doesn't blind you."

I can agree with that. I don't know if Dr. Ben David made any short cuts while he was trying to 'rush me to market'.

I realize I left a lot out of that last post. Namely why I left.

I've been seeing Chip since last January. He's a handsome boy, who let slip in his blog that he was crushing on me. I was in an unhealthy relationship (employment, not romantic) with someone Chip didn't like either.

Chip's sister and her friends helped me out of that bad job situation.

You'd think happy ever after, but no. I'm the most beautiful woman (mortal or not) that Chip had met, but I'd watch him moon over someone he'd meet at his DJ gigs up in the City. I'd sit at the bar, downing one cosmo after another, while he chats up every bit of boy or girl who comes up to ask what's in his record bag.

Yes, dear reader, a goddess is leaving her dirty underwear on the floor of his bedroom, and he's telling me that we're too young to be 'tied down.'

Then Vampster (where he works and I 'intern') hires the Cuban hottie: Carlos.

Carlos fought monsters in Africa. Carlos is knuckle-biting gorgeous. Carlos is a trained combat medic, so while I'm sprawled on the couch in the break room after fighting vamps, drinking a gallon of sugar water to power the little repair bots in my bloodstream, Chip's getting tender mercies from him.

I got fed up and broke up with him, twice. (The first time didn't count because some conservative wacko in Utah decided he didn't want to believe I could knock Chip into next week.)

And as soon as it was clear we'd broken-up. The Velveteen Sappho from marketing decides she's going to clutch me to her ample, corseted chest. No!

Our boss, Roberta, has been rolling her eyes and saying that she can't get involved in employee romances. So that leaves Kat and I to cry in our beers. Kat knows I prefer boys. Kat's been fending off Ms. Gothy's advances as well. And Ms. Gothy should know better.

Last Friday, I decided I'd had enough. I went to Gaseous, not because Chip was spinning (really,) but because if you sit at the bar long enough, some vamp or demon looking for a snack will hit on you. That would be fine, because I'd hit back harder.

And so, when some undead cutie in a leather coat with an accent chatted me up, I was ready for some therapeutic violence in the alley.

Wasn't to be, another guy with an accent decided he'd be my white knight. And Kat followed us out as well. So I didn't get to beat the crap out of the vampire before I staked him. They did.

I'd had it. I couldn't even pick a fight with the undead. It was time to take a time out and go to the place where Andrea (that is Me, version 1.0) was born.

And that's why I'm sitting on a beach in the Philippines, on my way to Hong Kong, instead of fighting vampires, zombies, or revisionist Mormons.

I'm in Sebu, on the way to Hong Kong. I'm going to stay here a couple of days to rest. The first leg of the trip was hell. I can't fly far at one time, so I had to use the Key to kick me up to around 100,000 feet like a rocket engine. It's cold, there's no air (I had to carry a small oxygen tank and heated face mask) and navigation's not so easy, even with GPS.

Getting to 100,000 feet means I'm holding onto the Key like a broomstick and hoping it doesn't get away from me (I didn't pack a life raft.) Then I have to shift to level flight and fire the Key about eight or nine times until I have enough speed to coast to a landing spot. I spent most of Saturday on Oahu recovering, and steeling myself for the jump to the Philippines.

The rest of the trip will be easy island hopping. And I should make it to Hong Kong by Thanksgiving.

Chip, if you read this, I've got a place in my buckytube-wrapped heart for you. But I needed all your heart, not a piece of it. I'm selfish about that.

And I'm not death obsessed, at least not the way I think you're seeing it. It's that I can't step back into Andeas' place. I'm not her. I don't think of myself as dead, but as someone with an odd history.

When we were fighting the thugees at my biological mom's, I was there because I was needed. I didn't feel the rage you'd feel if your mom was in danger. So you see why declaring Andrea to be alive again wouldn't feel right.

Ms. Ifurita No-Last-Name isn't a great identity, but it's what I have for now. But there may be more. Andrea was born in Hong Kong! She has dual citizenship.

I don't know exactly what I'm going to do when I get to Hong Kong. I know where Andrea's grandparents, aunts and uncles live. And it might be easier to come out to them.

Meanwhile, the beach is warm, I've got a burger from Jolibee's, and I have a lovely book to read.

I'll write more when I make it to Hong Kong.

I think our 'friend' Leviticus got some work from NBC.

Last week, before she took off to come out to her parents, dotslayer and I had a frank discussion. Better that than a fight, we would had beaten each other senseless.

She wanted to know why I haven't reassumed Andrea Eight Cheung's identity.

It's that little matter of her being legally dead, that I don't look like Andrea Eight Cheung, and oh, I don't remember being Andrea Eight Cheung.

We were at Andrea's mother's house a couple of Fridays ago, fighting off an army of Kali-worshiping cultists. maxw caught me, by accident, in a spell she cast to knock down a bunch of the cultists, and knocked me through the front window of Ms. Hargrove's house. I landed right in front of her. She didn't recognize me. Instead she threw a large, expensive, porcelain vase at me.

I don't think she's going to buy "Hi, I'm your daughter who you thought you cremated last year, but I don't look like I used to, and have no idea of what I used to be."

But she's dating Carlos' (the new guy) old boss. And he appears to be another demon hunter. I guess I'll see a lot of her.

But she's not going to believe the truth, even she starts sleeping with a wooden stake under her pillow.

---

I'm at the Vampster fundraiser for Doctors without Borders.

I let Laney dress me up as a Vampire Princess (this involves corsetry, something she's good at.) Chip's gone as the ghost of Byron. Roberta and her on-again, off-again boyfriend the FBI agent are dressed up Mulder and Scully (which is kinda lazy on his part, since he already has a badge and gun.) Ken's wearing a suit and a George Bush mask. He's not making any friends. Kat's someone from a comic book, she'll have to explain it to you.

maxw came to the party, even though she's a little at sea without Dot tonight. Since she's a honest to goodness witch, it's the same has being alone on Christmas or Alan Turing's birthday.

No real Vampires yet, but it's still early, so I'm going to get back to the party.

Last night I was trying to ignore Chip's flirting with the new guy, and focus on helping maxw debug a database connection problem that came up after we moved to the new office.

Over in the conference room, robertawhitehat and Diane (the CFO) were watching the World Series game between Boston and St. Louis.

This, I'm told, is a big deal because the Red Sox had not won the World Series since 1918. It involves a curse on the team, invoked when they traded Babe Ruth to the Yankees (a team everyone, except New Yorkers, despise).

Roberta was cheering and clapping, then she stopped and ran out of the conference room, and grabbed maxw and me.

"Do you realize we're on the verge of a Apocalypse?"

I looked at her, but Max was nodding. Max explained the curse, and said that the Sox winning the World Series might trigger an Apocalypse. And since we have fought baseball demons before [ed], it was worth checking.

It was the bottom of the sixth, so we had to go.

I flew up to Colma, our biggest necropolis, and saw the dead walking.

They were heading towards the caretaker's cottage, hundreds of them.

Roberta wasn't joking. I thumbed the safety on the key, and let my implants inventory targets.

The caretaker wasn't hiding in his cottage. He was outside, setting up a LCD projector when I touched down by him.

"Oh," he said, unworried, "one of the Vampster girls. Can you help me set up this screen?"

"Excuse me, sir? There's an army of the undead shambling up to your home."

"I know, and we need to get this set up before the ninth inning starts."

I pointed at the first of the dead, limping across the parking lot.

"Time," he said, "is short. Would you be a dear and tie this line to the street lamp?"

As the orange moon slipped out of the shadow of the Earth, the dead filled into his yard, and sat down. They were carrying little flags with the Red Sox logo, passing around little flasks, and excited. But they weren't homicidal.

I helped set up a large bedsheet as a screen, and the caretaker turned on the projector. And the fourth game of the 2004 World Series came on.

They didn't try to kill the caretaker or me. But they were growing more excited with every St. Louis out.

Soon enough, it was the bottom of the ninth inning. The Boston pitcher got the last three outs (even though the Cardinals threatened) and the game ended.

The dead cheered (well, they howled like tortured animals.)

Then they rose and went back to their graves. One of them came up and thanked the caretaker.

"Now, thank heavens, I can leave this world for good."

And he crumbled to dust at our feet, leaving a little, battered tin pin. In faded red letters, it said "World Champions."

The caretaker squatted down to pick it up, and pinned it to my jacket.

I don't go to conferences, that's robertawhitehat's job, but I hope they aren't all like the one described in VentureBlog.

Men! What a bunch of pervs. (That's what Dot would say. And she's right.)

Okay, not Chip, nor that new guy robertawhitehat hired.

Vampster's looking for a new office. Roberta's realtor drove us over to a place in Mountain View*, but the company renting the space says no, they aren't going to move after all.

I'm curious about what sort of company needs supernatural office space (besides ourselves,) and decide to go wander.

I run into a man in a coat and tie, Mr. Roche, wanting to know who the hell I am and what I'm doing here. I bat my eyes, toss my hair and tell him I'm the service tech from their Sun vendor. Stupid Iffy. He's smitten and chatting me up about going to work for him.

I took his card and a NDA to fill out. When we got back to our office I scrubbed my hands until they were pink.

Nothing fishy about him, just a suit with a taste for slender, pale and beautiful (and I'd bet a wife and kids at home.)

maxw and Roberta, however, have reason to believe something was funky over there, something involving Zombies and Google engineers with their brains gone missing. I get to go back for an interview.

I'd resigned myself to playing the honeypot, so I was going to wear something rather fan-service. Chip saw me and he got mad. "We're looking for Mr. Zombie Master, and you're dressing like you want to go for dinner and drinks with him."

I put on the black wool business suit instead.

When we got back to Mountain View (after doing the Hokey Pokey and singing three choruses of "Whoops, I Did It Again.") Drake was waiting for us.

Apparently he knew something about Mr. Roche (oh, and Dot was with us so you can imagine the witty banter between those two.)

I go on up ahead, Roche was expecting me. The others, carrying blunt implements, weren't expected and snuck in behind me. Chip had my Key.

Roche asks me about my resume -- and there's not much to say there. I've been a henchwoman and a test server. And I don't have a social security number, or a last name. Unfortunately Roche isn't deterred by those things. He wants to talk about this over dinner and drinks (you were right Chip.)

I blurted out that I wanted to see the offices, where I'd be working (if he said the bedroom, I'd had killed him on the spot [without confirming that he really was a bad guy, and not just a executive trolling for a fuck.])

So he takes me to the cube farm, and well, there's Zombies in the cube farm. And they're all using Vi (Max said later that they probably didn't have the dexterity required to do those meta-key combinations in Emacs.) Mr. Roche tries to bean me with a paper weight. I grab at him, but he gets away (that shouldn't happen.) He clobbers me and I'm yelling for the rest of the group to come in out of hiding and help fight the Zombies.

Roche is angry that I didn't fall over dead when he hit me. Leave it to me to fuck up some cranky executive's plans. He and Ben David would had got along.

I told Roche he's mistaken and I was going to dislocate his shoulder to make the point. However he made sick contortionist move and hit me again. I took a red stapler to him, and that didn't stop him. Instead started squishing out of his human skin and oh, joy, he's a demon, with six limbs.

The lady who had started the company walks in on this scene. She's angry that Chip, Max, Carlos, Dot, and Drake are destroying her zombies. She must have missed the "Zombies, kill Iffy" order Roche gave them.

The founder's husband had created the zombies a long time ago so they could have dedicated workers they didn't have to pay. But Roche, the new owner, thought they were lousy programmers, and started feeding them the brains of the smart candidates he interviewed. (So he didn't want to fuck me, he wanted me for my brains. Ick.)

That was enough. I took my Key from Chip, set it on squish, and finished off the Demon Roach.

Max disenchanted the remaining zombies, and the founder buried them in consecrated ground back up in Colma. She decided to get out of the outsourcing to the undead business.

Now we're waiting for the cleaners to find the place so they can set it up for us.

Chip gave me a pep talk about how bold and clever brave Ifurita was, but the whole dressing like a fanboy's wet dream was bothering him. He is, after all, the only fanboy in my life.

I need to pass for something less, well, impossible.

My, um, cleavage, for one thing. It needs to be less Jane Mansfield and more Maaya Sakamoto. Realistic.

I can get away with the titanium blonde look, since, after all, Dot's hair is blue.

And I need real work. Roberta's gone into "I don't want to hear or know about it," about my papers, so she won't let me do anything other than play Java Virtual Machine for Max, and that gets old fast.

* I don't know how I'm going to be able to zip in and out of there. GPS doesn't work, and to find the entrance you have to go around the block a few times singing "Roll On, You Bears," and do the Macarena.

Your Future as a Black Hole [MP3]

Some old SciFi writer on singularities.

Lightning Chaser

Linkblog on singularities

Nanotech Angels

Using pop-spirituality to promote nanotech? Um, I'm not wearing a red string around my wrist, so don't be getting ideas, Chip.

Dr. Ben David left the country. I heard he's lurking around Singapore, where he doesn't have to worry about bans on cloning and fetal tissue research.

Not that I was interested in continuing to play his henchwoman.

But what do I do for a living? I'd rather not play supernatural fetch, carry, and blast -- even if Drake was hiring. I'm glad he sacrificed his trinket, saving Chip, Max, and me in that big fight at the construction site last Spring, but I don't trust him. And he's even less human than I am.

I have a little money, I was able to find a brokerage account of Andrea's and convert it ready cash. So I buy coffee. My regeneration pod is in robertawhitehat's garage, she has an extra bedroom, and I'm not alergic to her cats. So I have a place to sleep.

I looked around for some jobs: Dana Street Coffee, and a temp job setting up computers for one of the local law firms. But I kept running into the same issue. I need an identity, and the only one I apparently had, Andrea, is legally dead.

So I asked Roberta about working for Vampster.

She liked the idea of having another supernatural savvy person on the staff. I'd do user support by day, and librarian by night. But I still need papers.

I'm going to have to ask for maxw's help with that.

Sitting here in my favorite perch in the Sutro Tower, overlooking the city, thinking about what happened this week.

Chip and I helped Dot and Max destroy René Monteroy, nearly killing Chip, and myself, as well as Dot and Max.

Chip had dosed himself with my replicator-saturated blood. You'll think he was daft (well, I still like him even though he can be) but his immune system would had neutralized it in a few minutes. All he had to do was 'smell' like me long enough for Monteroy to think he was me and feed off him.

The plan was working until something happened, I'm still not sure what it was, but something in Chip had latched onto the replicators and was driving them. And that shouldn't had happened.

The big hall in the half-completed house we were in spawned creatures like the Id monster in Forbidden Planet.

Then I'm going all wonky and non-linear.

I remember grabbing hold of Chip, Max grabbing Me, and Dot grabbing Max. And all of the sudden, I'm in The Matrix.

I found myself standing in a desert with a feral, dreadlocked woman in war paint. She's not happy to see me. She snarled, called me a demon, and said to someone I didn't see: "destroy her."

Miss Feral continued to circle me, and I couldn't fight. I was caught up in a knot of light and rapidly disassociating into a cloud of assemblers. I thought this might be fatal.

Then I see me, that is the me that Max said I was: Andrea.

Andrea walks over to Miss Feral and tells her, "she's human, not demon." Then she walks over and takes my hand, and I stop coming apart.

She smiles and tells me, "I know you don't know me, but I was you, and when you need to know, you will know me." Then she hands me the Key and I break out of the knot. I'm in a pile of people clutching Chip, Dot, and Max like the survivors of some disaster.

I was told that was when tifannbro convinced Drake to sacrifice the magic amulet he had killed Anthony Tran over.

I still don't know anything about Andrea Eight Cheung, the girl whose DNA is in me, other than what was in the files she gave me. I have her clothes, a little of her money, and one person, tifannbro, who remembers her.

The police took Drake away, and Dr. Ben David ran away.

Ben David's gone missing, but I bet he's staying with one of his libertarian freak buddies until things calm down. People like that don't go away.

ooc: entry private for Dot, Max, Roberta, and Chip

We should had all stopped Drake. We didn't, and that man is dead.

Dr. B__ D____ may be a bastard, but he didn't kill people (at least to the best of my knowledge.)

I just got off the phone with robertawhitehat. She's in Maui, but I had to tell her what happened to her house.

I was in the 'capsule', a comfy Ifurita-sized recharging stand for me, having a wonderful dream (the details I forget, it could had been about Chip, or puppies, or both.) Chip tried to call me, but I was in la-la land and didn't answer. I woke up, and realized that Chip had tried to reach me through the panic button. I called him, and he said they were alright, but they were coming over, and Drake was pissed.

I met them back in the garage of Roberta's place, where I have my capsule stashed.

I don't know Drake. He's Tiff's lover. I've seen him a couple of times. He came into the garage with Dot, Max, Tiff, and Chip. There was another man with them, a Vietnamese guy in a ninja suit, his arms tied behind him.

Drake was talking to the Vietnamese man, who had apparently been stalking him and Tiff. He wasn't yelling, but he was angry. The guy in the ninja suit said that he had been given the job of keeping an eye on Drake, the same way Dot and Tiff have been given the job of staking vampires.

Dot asked Drake why someone needed to keep an eye on him.

Ninja suit said that it was to protect the world from Drake.

Chip and Ninja suit started off being rude to one another, but started to get all simpatico.

Drake asked Ninja suit what would happen if he let him go. Ninja suit said he'd keep stalking him. Ninja suit also told him to give up something called the Amulet of Lothos.

Drake said no, and told him there was only one thing he could do.

While Drake was giving his speech, I picked up the Key, because I didn't like where he was going with it.

But before we could react, he picked up a Katana and beheaded Ninja suit.

I pointed the Key at Drake and set it for parboil, but Tiff got between him and me. Dot and Drake yelled at each other until something ripped off the door to the garage.

It was one of those things, you know the ones that bellow "Evesdaughter" and make me double over like Superman around green kryptonite? This time it had taken on the shape of the concrete of Roberta's driveway. Along with it was a vampire with an English accent. He called himself "Mr. X" and wanted to help Drake. I was too busy being in hideous pain to follow what happened closely, but I think Mr. X made a deal with Drake and Tiff. When I came to, Drake and Tiff were gone, along with the concrete golum and Mr. X.

I'm ready to call the police, but how do you explain that the guy who killed Ninja suit disappeared along with his girlfriend and a creepy, but well dressed vampire?