Wednesday

I had messages from both Phil and Pam this morning thanking me for helping set that up. They are happy now, and invited us to another double date next Tuesday to celebrate.

In the morning I met with Kelly and we finished off the details on my scanning proposal by adding in the specific equipment I had researched. She sent it off to the head of the library.

I went down to the 5th floor and met Anna for lunch.

“Do you think Phil and Pam are going to work out long term?” I asked Anna.

“Probably. Did you see the way they were looking at each other last night when they left?”

“Yeah. They both texted me their thanks.”

“They texted me to say thanks, too. So ready to find two more tonight?”

“Huh?”

“Let’s go to the straight club tonight and find two more of those guys too shy to ask a girl out. If they have someone they were interested in, we try and set them up, and if not, we try to encourage them to ask someone.”

“Oh. Sure. You mean to keep doing this and help everyone who needs it?”

“Why not? I thought it was fun helping Phil and Pam.”

“OK. I’m in.”

“Meet you at 6 at the door to the straight club. Dress like you normally do for our dates; I’ll dress down to that level too, because I don’t want to scare off anyone thinking I’m too good for them.”

“That sounds like a sensible plan.”

When we got down there, we saw one of those couples who were eyeing each other, but neither seemed ready to make a move. I went to the guy and Anna to the girl and we pointed each of them out to the other, but they still didn’t do anything. After a brief strategy discussion, we went back to them and took them separately out on the dance floor ourselves, coming together, spinning them about, and finally Anna and I held each others’ hands on both sides of them, pinning them between us.

They just looked at each other for a bit, and then the guy said, “I think our dance partners set us up.”

“I was actually hoping to meet you, but you wouldn’t come over.”

“I’ve never actually asked someone out before. I was afraid of being too much like the pushy guys I had to deal with before I started dressing up as a guy.”

“How could you be so afraid you wouldn’t ask someone at all?”

The guy just stood there with a stunned look for a moment, and the girl pulled him to her and gave him a big sloppy kiss. While they were doing that, Anna and I released them, and came together for our own kiss on one side. Another song started, and they started trying to dance to it. We danced alongside them, but neither of them was very coordinated about it, and it looked like they were going to split up.

Anna stopped them and asked, “Have you two eaten?”

“No,” they said in unison.

“Let’s go eat something and talk about it.”

They were not nearly as insecure as Phil and Pam had been, just shy, and they opened up pretty easily. They were both embarrassed about their dancing performance, though.

I said, “You don’t have to dance. There are other ways to have fun together.”

I pulled up the list of attractions within Trans-Sylvania on my phone and showed them.

“I’m new enough here that I haven’t done a lot of these myself, but I’m sure you can find something here you’ll both enjoy.”

Anna added, “If you do want to dance, but just need practice, there are dance lessons offered twice a week, and the rest of the time, you can reserve sections of the dance practice room to practice privately.”

By the end of the meal, we got Steve and Carrie to exchange numbers, sign up for dance practice, and come with us to the game room where they found some fun they could do together while standing still.

The Head Librarian

Anna and I kept doing this, alone or together, sometimes helping one or two couples a night to get together, and sometimes working on cases like Phil who needed multiple sessions of help.

On Sunday, a week and a half after Kelly sent off my scanning proposal, I was invited to a meeting with the head librarian, Martina.

“I like the two-stage idea, and I’ve ordered the equipment and software. We have some tech people around here who should be able to set up the server. If you’re up for it, I’m going to hire you to start the scanning process.”

“That sounds good.”

“I’ll want you to do two things. First, actually scan some books yourself and get a feel for how it works and how much time it takes. After you have had some practice with that, I’d like you to try to write up some documents about it, a general how-to and any troubleshooting guides, tips, and whatever else will help people do it, so we can train the numbers of people we will need to actually get the job done. If necessary, we can have someone else edit your documents to make them read well. And I’m going to get someone to help set up a tracking system to help them find shelves of books that have not been done yet.”

“Wow, it sounds like you have really thought this through.”

“It’s going to take a lot of work, but I think I can convince people of the value of the project and get enough people assigned to the job to make it a reality. And while the first group works on getting a lot of books scanned, I’ll also try to get started on checking the scans and running OCR. We want to check to make sure the scans are readable, because if vampires cannot read them, the OCR software won’t be able to, either. We also want to run some checks to make sure that you don’t miss pages or anything like that. Finally, there will be some people to check the OCR, correct non-words and wrong words, which will usually be detectable regardless of the language of the person checking because they just won’t make any sense.”

“What about the older, handwritten works?”

“Those will have to be transcribed by hand, so it will be slower, but we can do the same checking on their work. I’ll probably try to work on the printed, OCR-capable books first.”

“And where are you going to find all the people to work on it?”

“There are always what you might call capital improvement projects around Trans-Sylvania. Jobs that last a limited time in order to create something new. My idea would be competing with others for getting a share of a couple hundred workers devoted to such projects. Not the same workers all the time, mind you, because different people are good at different things, but other people will get shifted around to make it work. There are always people looking for a change.”

I went ahead with my temp job at the gym that evening, but before my next such session Thursday, I was told I was no longer part of the temp service and I’d been hired by the library. Martina arranged a time Friday morning for me to meet with the tech who had set up the system to show me how to log on and how to start the scanning software. The rest was on me to figure out.

I was on my own to choose hours, initially, since there was nobody else using the equipment, but my logins and book uploads provided a check that I worked 8 hours each Sunday-to-Saturday week. Since I’d done a gym session already, the two hours Friday learning stuff and two hours afterward actually scanning counted as my time the first week.

I got the hang of it pretty quickly, and in my third week spent almost half my allotted time writing up procedures. Somebody edited those into a much nicer tutorial over the weekend than I could have written, and before the end of the fourth week there were two other people coming in to start scanning books.

Meanwhile, Anna and I kept our informal shy-people-help service running and on average got three couples together each week.

Enforcement

During my fifth week on the library job, I got a call from the official Enforcement account. But it wasn’t just to say that some people had been punished, but rather that they wanted more help from me. I was invited to a meeting with Alyssa, the head of the onboarding department, which was in charge of everything from identifying the humans to conversion to the end of the service by their host.

Alyssa explained, “It’s hard to monitor the hosts because it is always a temporary job, usually a single onboard per host. But failures in selecting people are entirely on me and my staff. Since you identified the problem, Brandy, I want to hire you to help me fix it.”

“How am I going to do that?”

“First off, I’m going to show you how we select people, or at least a part of that process. We basically spy on them in a special way with the powers all vampires have. I’m going to have you work directly with my selection staff, and ultimately I’m going to get your advice for how we can do a better job identifying candidates. Once you figure that out, I hope we can figure out how to better monitor the hosts.”

“This doesn’t sound quick.”

“No, it’s not. I’ll have to hire you on as a regular job, and it will take weeks just for you to learn how we currently operate. I understand you’ve only recently started a job as part of a new project, but I’d like to ask you to try to wrap up your involvement in that project and pass it on to someone else.”

“It’s kind of a shame to move on so quickly, but there are people there who understand the goal I set for them. I can do that.”

It was around the same time as this that Anna and I stopped helping shy or unprepared people in the clubs simply because we stopped seeing them. Some of the other people we’d talked to who didn’t actually need help were also helping, and we had such helpers in the other clubs, too, though they had never seemed to have the problem as much outside the straight club.

That’s not to say they all found partners, since people still came to the clubs, but at least they weren’t afraid to even speak to someone, or there were enough people reaching out to ensure that anybody, of any gender and sexual preference, would be approached by somebody.

I also can’t say anything about those not venturing into the clubs, but I’m not sure that I ever could, or maybe even should, attempt to do anything about that. It was a valid choice to be asexual as well, even if some people didn’t understand that. If they are shutting themselves off from the world so much that they don’t do their assigned job, Enforcement will find them.

Spying Like a Vampire

Martina understood about my need to move on, and for two more weeks before I changed jobs, I was training a steady stream of new book-scanning workers rather than doing any more scanning myself. I made some minor adjustments to the training documents after seeing how the first recruits to the scanning program were doing, and also wrote up some guidelines for the people who would be administering training.

Alyssa put me with Thaddeus, one of her head seekers, for me to understand how the spying works, for my first week’s sessions under her.

“You need to make a portal, but small. Not one for you to go through, but just to look through. Try making it up in one of the corners of your room.”

I made the portal, and it was a triangle about a foot on each side, with one edge on each of two walls and one on the ceiling of my room, though here it was just a hole in the middle of a wall. I pulled the weird triangular door open, and I could see in. Of course the room was empty; I wasn’t there because I was here.

“That’s a good start, but it needs to be much smaller than that. Let me demonstrate.”

To the right of my portal on the same wall, he made a portal that I could barely see. No door on his; it was just a tiny hole, and he invited me to look through it. And I saw it also went into my room. It was on a wall opposite to the portal I’d made, and I could see my portal up there in the corner of the room.

“You can make a portal into my room?”

“Yes, nothing is really private here.”

“Are there voyeurs watching me all the time?”

“No, most vampires have better things to do with their time, but yes, you are probably being watched, sometimes. Those who we teach this skill to are also taught to avoid using it for voyeurism, and those are really only the people in Enforcement and Onboarding. We use this ability to spy on people surreptitiously, but for other reasons.”

After a few more tries, I made a portal as small as his, up in the corner of the room, which let me look in just as well as his did. I could no longer see either portal through the other; they were too small to spot from across the room.

“Now you have the idea,” Thaddeus said. “But let me point something else out to you.”

From a desk nearby, he retrieved a small box, inside of which were several long stick-pins with round, colored heads. He took one of the pins from the box and put it up against the portal, where it stopped. I expected the pin to go through the portal and leave only the head on this side, but it did not go through at all. He then handed me the pin and I tried it myself. It would not enter his portal nor the latest one I had created.

“The portals are permeable in slightly different ways to light and to matter. At their minimum size, matter cannot go through. They also become one-way to light and sound; if we go over there, you won’t even be able to find the portal when you are looking right at it.”

“So they’re perfect spy cameras, completely undetectable,” I surmised.

“Yes. But when they are at this size, you can also direct them into the past.”

The lesson that followed was surreal, but in the same way that I could adjust the size, shape, orientation, and destination of a portal, when I reduced it to its minimum possible size, and then tried to make it even smaller, the other side of the portal seemed to go back in time. Thaddeus pushed his to the middle of last night, when I was sleeping in bed; I pushed mine all the way back to when Kelly was first explaining to me how things worked on my first day awake within Trans-Sylvania.

Thaddeus continued, “Those of us called seekers do this with portals into the human world. Decades ago we searched randomly to find people who fit ideals of good vampires. Now, we have people data-mining the human world, identifying people without strong contacts there, ones who wouldn’t leave too big a mark on the world if removed, and seekers spy on them in turn, looking for any hint that they might be transgender, or even just dissatisfied with their body. Anything that suggests they would respond favorably upon being converted to vampires of the opposite sex from how they were born as humans.”

Moving the portals to the human world wasn’t too hard, and to go somewhere I knew, I practiced by looking in on myself, on Brad, that is, when I first met Kelly at a club. Even further back, I saw my cross-dressed Halloween. I saw times Brad was alone, dressed in women’s clothing. All of this was there to be found, to any vampire who’d learned how.

Next we went on exploring other people’s history. I felt a little weird spying on Phil, but Thaddeus picked him as a candidate because I’d spent enough time with him to know him, and in particular I knew some of the events in his life before I’d met him. From his onboarding records, we learned where and when to look for him, or Phyllis, in the human world. I managed to find the original eggplant incident, and after I did, Thaddeus had me play it back so he could record the scene through a kind of camera he held up to my portal.

We also looked in on some people I didn’t know, but who’d had problems after coming here, and Thaddeus recorded some bits of their lives as well. I spent eight hours in four sessions of two hours each with Thaddeus doing this, and took all the recordings to Alyssa at the end of it.

Time Spy

The next week, Alyssa herself shared with me all the documents they use when training seekers and the guidelines they use for selecting candidates. There was also a list of questionable convertees.

“These aren’t all the vampires who aren’t comfortable in their lives here, but they are the worst of them. The ones who completely locked up, wouldn’t do jobs, and refused to interact with vampires at all. Some of them are no longer with us, and some are still here but stay in their rooms 24/7.”

“Good. I figured there must be vampires here like that and I am glad that somebody is trying to help them.”

“Yes, but don’t you try to help them, even though I know you enjoy that. They need a different kind of help and we have other people working on that. I want you to review their histories. You will have access to the records the seekers took, both notes and recordings, as well as data on their location so you can look back and see them yourself. Surely there are telltale signs that these aren’t good candidates for conversion, and I want you to find them. It won’t be easy, and I would expect you at most to get through two candidates per eight hour weekly job commitment. Don’t spend more than three hours in any one session. Manipulating portals so much is tiring, and you may find yourself both sleeping more and eating more as a result of it. You shouldn’t ignore your body if it is telling you you need more food or more sleep, especially if you exceed four hours.”

“So this is months of work,” I said, looking at the list of 20 or so vampires to investigate.

“Yes. Report to me after you have finished investigating each candidate with what you have found.”

So I started my career as a time spy.

I took a brief look through all the files. It was a pretty pathetic bunch. Three of them had withered away from not eating, and the rest never left their rooms but were apparently hanging on by converting the hand soap into food.

I started with a woman named Alice, originally Alvin or “Al” for short. Her report looked OK, but when I started looking back at her history, it didn’t match the report. Al hadn’t been transgender at all. He did have women’s clothes, but he seemed to only use them as a fetish; he dressed up a doll with them, rather than himself. Not only had he never worn female clothes in front of other people, he couldn’t even fit into the female clothes he owned. But his report claimed he was going out in full female guise and picking up men.

I reported the disturbing findings to Alyssa.

“Here’s the first one, Alice, formerly Al. There’s no hidden sign with this one; it’s really obvious. The entire report your team did is a pure fabrication. The one recorded scene that is supposed to be Al in drag picking up a man is somebody else, and I’ve captured where Al really was at that time in my report.”

Alyssa reviewed my captured video and skimmed the report immediately.

“Disturbing. All these people are supposed to have been re-checked already. It means there’s a serious problem among my ranks. People are actively sabotaging the program. Keep checking the others. The truth about them should help my investigation of what’s really going on.”

It turned out they weren’t all like that. In some cases, the report was accurate, as far as it went, anyway, and there were signs missed. One guy had only been dressing up female to satisfy his girlfriend. She had two friends who were lesbians, and when they brought their partners along, she felt left out having a guy with her, and the guy felt left out being the only guy there. He didn’t dress up female except as part of that group. That girlfriend died in a car accident, and this left him unattached in a way that made him at least show up as a candidate for the program. He had dressed in his female attire to attend the funeral with that group, but he didn’t intend to do that ever again, and they got him on his way home from the funeral. And he ended up looking like his dead girlfriend. The report showed him frequently dressing up female to go out with this group, but missed that he didn’t do it any other time. He was one of the ones who wasted away, never even attempting to eat once after he arrived here.

Alyssa was right that this was tiring, and I often went to bed early, and without any form of evening entertainment, on the nights after I spent time spying. I spread those out, three or even four sessions each week separated by a day I didn’t do any spying. Anna could tell even on the days I wasn’t spying that it was taking a toll on me, and did things for me to help me relax, sometimes bringing in Phil and Pam or others we had helped in the clubs and were grateful for what we’d done for them. They acted in several of the plays, with me in the audience together with whoever else showed up when they activated the stage. We played many of the games and explored other devices vampires had created. There was a truly amazing massage machine. And of course, there were nights Anna and I were alone, exploring ways to pleasure each other. It was amazing how many ways there were for two women to do that.

In the end, 10 of the 22 reports were flat-out lies. By the end of it, Alyssa determined three of her seekers were in cahoots to try to skate by on the minimum amount of work possible, not even investigating many of the people assigned to them and instead just ignoring details or outright making stuff up to make whoever they looked at first look like a candidate. They covered for each other, setting up the questionable ones so others from the group could approve them.

Alyssa had me look into other people the three had approved, and while some were actually OK, they included a number of the misfits from the club including several people Anna and I had helped who we knew had been wronged. So some of them didn’t actually require spying, or not nearly as much of it.

When I reported back about these people, I said, “This accounts for all the classes of misfits Anna and I met in the club except one: The leering monsters.”

After I confirmed the kind of people I was talking about, Alyssa explained, “Sorry. They are a mistake, but one I already know about.”

“A mistake?”

“Some humans found out the truth about vampires, and rather than use other techniques we have for making people forget about them, two rogue agents went in and converted the entire group. This went against multiple of our principles, including the population limit rule, and those agents have been punished. Those converted, though, changed into their impression of what vampires should be, rather than just the opposite sex. Some of them came out fine, or over time their ideal images became more typical, but there are five, all of whom you have noticed, who simply could not be swayed.”

“So they just hang out in the club and hope they find someone who really wants to date someone like that?”

“As I understand it, they do find people interested, sometimes. Just not anyone for the long-term. They’re people who want to try it once. As such, the monsters as you call them aren’t any different from some of the other misfits who get nothing but a series of one-night stands.”

“Oh, right. I have seen some of those in the anything goes club. But these only want women, so they are in the straight club.”

“Exactly.”

With this done, Alyssa had me start checking on hosts. Some of the people who had lesser problems in the club were probably fine candidates but poorly introduced to Trans-Sylvania by their hosts. This was hard to do anything about systematically, since each host usually only hosted one incoming vampire. But at least I could do spot checks, from the top down: What was expected of a host, in general; what was the host told to do and to pass on to the new vampire by the contact, what did the host actually do and pass on. I noticed a couple small lapses by the hosts, but nothing that looked worthy of punishment. The hosts were being told the right things. When I looked back at past hostings, there were major flaws, but it seemed like they had been addressed.

And all through this time, 6 months of spying on people all over, I only spent about 8 to 10 hours a week on it, so I had plenty of time to hang out with Anna and sometimes our friends.

At one point we discovered that, on the floor with the amusement area, but out beyond it, out past the footprint of the rooms on the usual floors, there was an abandoned amusement park. They had used the lack of other rooms overhead to hollow out a space 50 feet high, which allowed building some impressively tall structures. It didn’t have the massive roller coasters some parks did, though that theoretically could have been possible, but other kinds of rides were there, older stuff, like going back in time to amusement parks of the past. None of them functioned, though.

In the library I found some history about it. Some vampires built it in the 1950s. It was pretty popular in the 1960s, but popularity waned in the 1970s, for some reason, and the rides stopped being maintained. An accident on one of the rides in 1978 led to the whole place being closed down. Vampires’ abilities meant nobody was permanently hurt, but they still decided it was better to close it due to its lack of maintenance.

When we spread the word about it, we found lots of people willing to help bring it back to life, including some people with the mechanical engineering knowledge to know what was needed to support the structures. Because people were doing this on their own time, around work schedules, we couldn’t plan things in too much detail, but we worked out an overall list of jobs that needed to be done and we worked on one or two of them at a time. After a month we already had one functional ride, and by the end of my time officially spying on other vampires for Alyssa, we had a whole section of the park open and people were using it regularly while we worked on other areas.