Chapter 1

Sunnyvale, California
Earth
1998

Tiffany Winters, ordinary girl in an ordinary town, was about to do the ordinary thing for a girl her age – slack off and read magazines to kill time until her boyfriend showed up – when her pager buzzed. The pager was the one thing in her room that didn’t quite fit. It was a room of boy band posters, old Easy bake ovens that she had never had the heart to throw away, a cheap boombox that still had the half rewound cassette tape for Alanna’s First Adventure by Tamora Pierce crammed into the second tape slot, and three VHS rewinder boxes, which contained, in order, her recorded Simpsons marathon, her recorded X-Files marathon, and her recorded hour of CSPAN for her stupid civics class.

It was, in other words, the room of an ordinary, well to do teen girl.

Teen girls didn’t have pagers.

Pagers were things parents had – doctors and lawyers and stuff.

Tiff’s pager was hidden, tucked away under a drawer, in a non-descript binder, and with its beeper set so softly that only a highly advanced listening device, the kind used by the FBI to snoop out drug king-pins, might have heard it. And only then by pressing it against the top of the drawer. Tiff heard it, though. Tiff closed her magazine, closed her eyes, rolled her head back and groaned. “Christamungus,” she whispered, then remained there, hoping that maybe, just maybe, her pager had bleeped at her by accident.

Maybe, if she ignored it, it would go away.

The pager bleeped again.

“Blargh!” Tiff stood, tossed her magazine onto the bed, then grabbed her drawer. She fished out the binder, popped it open, wriggled it around and got out the pager.

C: A-Dee @ Parker and 5th! Rit ETA 11:12 AM. Bring HW, S-, bandages

Tiff scowled. “Oh, no, Tiffany, everything should be relaxed this evening!” She said, cocking her head to the side. “Oh, no, Tiffany, you can hang out with your biffer once he’s off works.” She looked at the alarm clock by her bed. Riley would be off work at eleven – one of the downsides of working the late shift at 7/11. Well, the middle late shift, before the late late shift started. Tiff had had a whole plan. She’d lay around, maybe get into something really cute, and then Riley could climb up the window like ... like...

Tiff shook her head, her cheeks burning as she realized she hadn’t been imagining Riley at all.

She put her hands over her face. “It’s okay. Mr. X doesn’t do it on purpose. H-”

“Hey,” a soft voice spoke from behind her.

Tiffany Winters responded in a way very unlike an ordinary girl. Her body blurred into motion, snapping out her leg and kicking it into the air at exactly the height of a human throat, pinning the figure that had seemingly materialized in her room out of thin air. Tiff spent a few seconds blinking at the face above her foot, even as her hand had jerked one of her concealed stakes out from under the half-dozen hiding places she had stashed the things. The stake fell from her nerveless fingers, clattering to the ground.

“Vicky!?” Tiff whispered.

“Hey Tiff,” Victor Enache said, his voice squeaking slightly around the pressure of Tiff’s heel. She jerked her leg back, staggering.

“Vicky, what are you doing here?” Tiff asked, her eyes wide. “And how did you get in?”

“You invited me,” Victor said, rubbing his throat and wincing. “Still hurts when you do that. I was worried you’d lost your touch.” His voice had a sardonic edge to it, even as his deep, brown-black eyes looked into hers. They were filled with that same soul-deep hurt that Tiff remembered seeing. She bristled. How dare he. How absolute dare he just ... show up again in his rumpled coat and his tattered jeans, all broad shouldered and muscular and pale and brooding with his stupid mop of silky black hair and that ever so slight Romanian accent – not thick and goofy, but sexy and exotic, and with those tiny little fangs of his, peeking over his lips, just begging for her to kiss them.

What an absolute bastard.

“I repeatify my query,” Tiff said, scowling harder to try and banish the urge to lick his abs. “Where. I mean. Why. The ... what are you doing here?” She put her hands on her hips, glaring. Glaring as hard as she could.

The glare bounced off Victor like bullets might have. “I came to warn you,” he said. “Someone’s trying to kill you.”

“Someone? Try to kill me? What a freaking shockalot!” Tiff snapped. She almost immediately regretted saying it. But Victor’s face was already hardening into his most deep frown. The kind of frown where he knew she was being childish, and wanted to scold her, but wouldn’t because he respected her so much. Which just made Tiff want to lick his abdominal muscles more. Which made Tiff feel angrier about him showing up.

Because they couldn’t. They never could again.

“Yes, people in specific are trying to kill you. The Camerilla-”

“Oh those bozeones,” Tiff muttered. “You know, has anyone told them it’s the 20th century? Queen went outta style, like, ten years ago.” She grinned. “See, it’s ... it’s a joke, cause that old band.”

“I saw them live,” Victor said, frowning. “And no, the Camerilla is not to be trifled with. They may have called a truce with you ever since the ... incident.” He looked aside and Tiff bit down on her tongue. The first reaction she had, the one driven by anger and frustration and no tiny amount of lingering hurt, was: Oh, the time you turned my friends into dog monsters? Yeah, that was sooooome incident

Victor’s lips pursed, as if she had said it out loud anyway. Tiff’s eyebrow twitched and she scowled. “So?”

“But just because the local Prince won’t come after you, if you maintain your current focus on killing his enemies,” Victor said, frowning. “Doesn’t mean he won’t turn a blind eye if those said enemies decide to remove Tiffany Winters, Vampire Hunter from the equation entirely.”

“Oh noooo!” Tiff said, her hands going to her cheeks in slow, mock shock.

“It’s serious, Tiffany,” Victor stepped closer.

“Yeah, and so is every other problem on my plate,” Tiff said, not stepping backwards. “I don’t see why this, in specific, dragged you back here. When, oh, right, the werewolf didn’t. Or those demons that turned people into maggots? Or the cyborg-zombie. Did you hear about the cyborg-zombie? I remember the cyborg-zombie. I remember thinking, wow, wouldn’t it be nice if my four hundred year old vampire ex with superpowers was around to maybe help me, while he was trying to push my head into the school cafeteria’s meat grinder.” She glared up at Victor – all five foot nothing of her, and tried to ignore how close they were standing.

Victor looked away. “I was ... busy.”

“You were hiding,” Tiff hissed.

“Yeah, well, an ancient blood curse triggered by feelings of joy does that to a vampire,” Victor muttered.

“What the fuck kind of dumbass curse is that, anyway!?” Tiff hissed.

And that was when the window began to rattle.

Tiff’s eyes almost bugged out of her head. “Hide!” She whispered.

“Why?” Victor asked.

“Just do it, you stupid sexy fangbastard!” Tiff hissed, shoving Victor towards the closet.

Victor frowned, but allowed his tall, broad body to be folded and crammed into the closet, tucked up against the dresses, the frilly skirts, the jeans, the slacks, and the other paraphernalia of a teen girl that filled the closet. The door slid shut, just as the window opened and Riley peeked out. The comparison between him and Victor was not one that served Riley in the long or short term. When Victor was far away, off in Los Angeles doing whatever the fuck he did there, Tiff could focus on Riley’s artistic side. His goofy poetry. His, admittedly, rather mediocre tongue skills. But, hey, he was nineteen, having tongue skills at all was impressive, right?

But with Victor thrumming inside of her closet with all the brooding, sexual energy of a vampire of the clan Tzamarkias – the clan of blood sculpting and dark powers and darker temptation, the same clan that had birthed the infamous Dracula Tepet himself ... Riley didn’t come off looking so hot. Like, did he have to have so many pimples.

“Hey, Tiff, I got off work early!” Riley said.

“Greatzilla!” Tiff said, giving him two thumbs up.

“ ... are ... you okay?” Riley asked.

Tiff glanced at the clock. It was ticking closer and closer towards ten thirty. She did the mental math. If she needed to be at the corner of Parker and 5th on time to do her job, then she’d have to leave in, like, ten minutes.

“Uhhh...” Tiff said. “N ... No, I ... think I might be coming down with something.”

“You? Coming down with something?” Riley asked, arching an eyebrow as he looked at Tiff. “You never get sick.”

Tiff hacked and coughed as hard as she could. “So, you obviously!” She said, drawing in a deep breath and coughing again. “Should...” She coughed a third time. “Not get close.”

Riley bit his lip. “All right...” He said, hesitantly, then started to slowly creep down. Tiff coughed a few more times, then hurried to the window. Riley looked quite small at the bottom of the trellis he had used to clamber up to her window. He glanced up at her, then started to turn and walk away, his hands in his pockets. Tiff slowly let her head bonk down into the sill, the muffled thunk of it filling her ears.

Welp.

She was pretty sure she could scratch, what, four boyfriends now since Victor?

“Riley, huh?” Victor asked, the closet door rasping open behind her.

“Yeah,” Tiff said.

“Last I heard, you were dating Tom,” Victor said, his voice studiously neutral. Tiff felt a tiny crawling spider of anger going down her back. She started to stand, looking out at the night, her brow furrowing.

“Oh no you didn’t,” she said. She turned around. “Did you imply something, Vicky?”

Victor coughed. “N-No, I ... just ... noted something.”

Tiff scowled at him. “Yeah, I dated Tom and- I dated Tom and Riley.”

Victor frowned, slightly. “And what about George?”

“What about George!?” Tiff hissed.

Victor put his hand over his face. “No, you’re right. Sorry. I’m being an ass.”

“Yeah, a judge-ass-mental hole!” Tiff snapped. “And, you know what? I have to go and save the world again tonight. So, you can just ... I don’t know, stand around broodingly like a broody brat.” She turned to the window, then ducked down and fished her emergency backpack out from under her bed. It clanked and clunked loudly as she swung it over her shoulders, then came to the window sill, moving up with a sleek grace.

“Tiffany, I should come with you,” Victor said.

“No, you really shouldn’t,” Tiff snapped, glaring back over her shoulder. “You’ve done enough freakin’ damage for one night.”

She leaped down and off the sill – landing into the night.

Victor didn’t follow.

Tiffany sprinted down the sidewalk at her max speed, not even breathing hard as she rounded the corner, darting around the pools of light cast by streetlights. But she wasn’t worried about being spotted. People in Sunnyvale had a habit, learned from a history of odd things going bump in the night, to not glance out their windows. Often, glancing out a window at night was a good way to never wake up in the morning. To become another one of the quietly ignored statistics in this happy little town. Tiff slowed only once she started to get close to 5th and Parker, her breathing only hitching a tiny bit. She was walking past the storefronts and the alleyways of this part of downtown with a determined stride and an angry scowl.

“Stupid Victor,” she muttered under her breath. “Stupid blood curse. Stupid fucking vampire baroque revenge bulls-”

And that was when the sack went over her head. Tiff started to struggle.

Then the needle plunged into her neck.

And that was it.

The first thing that she felt, after so long, was pain. It was an achy, crawling pain, radiating slowly out of her bones and creeping through her muscles like the fingers of a creeper at a dance. After the pain came awareness – her leg was here. Her arms were there. Her head was there. And after awareness came sight and sound. The sound was distant, muted, and warped. Like her head was underwater. And her eyes saw only murky blue luminescence. Then the luminescence began to slide away, flowing past her face, and she realized that her head had been under water. The fluid flowed past her eyes, her nose, her mouth, and a sudden blast of cold air seemed to strike her face, her breasts, her belly, her whole body as the liquid drained away.

Tiffany Winters tried to speak, but her throat was jammed with-

She gagged. The feeling of it was so horrible that she wracked forward, gagging more and more as something slurped out of her throat. The trailing end of it was barbed and covered in wriggling wires, which tugged themselves free of something deep inside of her. She grabbed onto the thing that had come out of her throat and looked at it, squinting to try and get an idea of what it was.

It was a plastic tube. Ribbed for not her pleasure, and tipped with a long collection of threaded cables. The idea of it being jammed down her throat made Tiff want to throw up all over again, even as she coughed the last bits of slime from her lungs and spat it to the side of the small metal coffin she was lounging in.

“Talk about a ... what ... the ... even...” She croaked, looking left, then right. She was in a metal coffin in what looked like a basement somewhere: Large steam tubes and hissing machines clanked and clattered. It all said ‘boiler room’ to her, though it didn’t look a thing like the Sunnyvale High boiler room. Tiffany felt her strength beginning to return. The cold and the pain was fading away, leaving the burning power she felt at pretty much every hour of the day. Tiffany stepped away from the coffin, swinging her legs free and hissing every time her skin touched the cold metal. “Cold, cold, cold, cooooooooooold!”

She danced across the grated floor and away from the coffin, her arms crossed over her chest, and took some stock.

She was buckass naked, freezing her tits off, and covered in the gloppy slime that had been in the metal tube.

“Yup,” she said, slowly. “This is, officialicated and proper, the worst way to wake up ever.”

Tiff scanned the room, her brow furrowing, as she looked for a door. And, to her delight, she found one. It was a large, hatched door, with stenciled set letter H above it. Tiff bit her lip and pranced over to the door, trying to remain in contact with as little of the grated floor as she could, her toes beginning to go numb with the contact against the cold metal. She gripped the bright red hatch, then started to strain, shoving and twisting and pushing. The hatch might have defeated a normal human. But Tiff felt the latches and the catches inside give, creak, groan, and finally come free with a whirring hiss of metal on metal.

She showed teeth. “You have been defeated, door!”

The door swung open and she peeked out, looking up and down the narrow, metal corridor. She was beginning to think that maybe ... just maybe ... she was not, in fact, in Sunnyvale anymore. The ceiling was metal and lined with hard white lights, which shone down on the mostly dark metal surfaces, making them gleam like mirrors. The whole place was full of mechanical noises – clicking and hissing sounds, groans and creaks. The air smelled dead and still and stale. Her nose crinkled slightly at the taste of it. There were no windows so ... was she underground?

Then she heard voices.

“We need to figure out what this thing was doing so...” Muffled by the room’s groaning. “ ... maybe a...” More groaning, creaking. Footsteps. “ ... honestly, Xao?”

Laughter. More fotosteps.

Tiff licked her lips, then padded gently out of the hatch. She swung it shut, as quietly as she could, then found a small nook in the corridor. By pressing her back flush to the cold metal, she was able to hide herself in some of the shadows and watch the corner, to see who exactly was coming around the corner. She had this pegged on the Cam. This was exactly the kind of bullshit the Cam would do. Failing that, maybe the same guys who had made the cyber-zombies.

Actually, scratch that. She was betting it all on the cyber-zombie guys. Those people had been weird.

Tiff tensed.

And the people came around the corner.

And she had not been ready for skintight spandex.

Not that she minded skintight spandex, considering the two men leading the way. The first was lithe and tall, with short cropped black hair and ... Tiff wasn’t sure what the PC way was to describe Asian eyes, because she had met, like, one Asian person in her whole life. They were pretty, though. She liked pretty eyes, and this guy had dark brown-black ones, which looked perpetually amused. He was also toned enough that the skintight clothing he wore had absolutely zero downsides. He had a belt, but he didn’t have any guns or anything. Instead, he had what looked like a huge sized pager, sleek and white, hung off his hip. The man next to him was taller and thinner, more gaunt and brooding looking, with bright red hair that contrasted with his dour attitude and his narrow face. But he was still handsome. And ripped too. He was holding his pager in his hand, and it was making a soft purring noise. Like a cat.

“That’s the radiation source, Captain,” the redhead said, holding the pager up to the door. “This ship’s incredibly primitive – that’s a fission reactor.”

Tiff’s brow furrowed. Ship?

“An old nuclear vessel...” The Asian guy said, rubbing his chin. He was the captain? Tiff cocked her head as the redhead hung his pager-thing off his hip. “The rocket was nuclear powered, the systems were nuclear powered – just like the old Heinlein and Niven novels...” He grinned. “It’s like walking through history.”

“There’s one problem, sir,” the redhead said, his voice dry. “We never launched one.”

The captain blinked. “Huh?”

The redhead, then, frowned. And Tiff felt the same thing. Her Hunter’s instinct, dormant and sleeping, was rousing and growling at her. Snarling. Snapping. It was the same hissing voice that she had managed to convince to ignore Victor, through sheer dogged determination and gritted teeth. It was the snapping, purring sound of the first Hunter, the Hunter that had started the entire long linage of her people. It was furious. It was savage. It was dark. And it knew prey when it saw it. It knew an enemy when it saw it.

And it growled...

Vampire.

“Captain!” The redhead said – and Tiff saw his fangs.

The Captain swung around and then snapped up his hand, aiming his finger in her direction. “Hands up!”

Tiff ran.

She had no chance against a vampire and one of his ghouls or servants or cultists or whatever – the only shot she had was to get away and get away fast. Something hot and bright flared to her left, metal spurting into the air, a glowing, cherry red line slashed along the wall. She rolled away from it with a yelp and skirted around the corner. She was in more corridors, but there were no doors – just more pipes and tubes along the walls and the ceiling. She rushed forward. More clattering sounds, footsteps. Around the bend came the last thing she expected or, honestly, wanted.

A werewolf.

It was in its warform – huge, maybe nine feet tall, rippling with muscles and covered in fur. Its claws were out, and it – no, he – looked down his snout at her. “Listen, lady!” He said, holding up his paw, like he was a cop trying to get her to not ride her bike across the crosswalk. Tiff threw herself forward, skidding between his legs and ducking as he tried to reach after her. “She’s making a break for -” He shouted. Tiff, acting on instinct, grabbed one of the tubes that ran along the ceiling, hissing as she felt the shocking chill of it. She yanked it down, using every bit of strength she had. Metal squealed and the pipe section she held came down, spraying thick gouts of hissing steam at the werewolf, who jerked away with a yip.

Tiff sprinted, came to the next corner, and saw that the vampire and his ghoul had come that way. The ghoul shouted. “Calm down, we’re not here to hurt you!”

“Yeah. Real convincing, diptron,” Tiff said, blushing as she tried to tuck her arm over her chest.

“Diptron?” The guy asked his vampire in an aside.

“I believe she’s speaking in dialect, Captain,” the vampire murmured back... “Not one I recognize...”

“You’re lucky I don’t have a stake, you fangbastard...” Tiff bit her lip, then glanced behind her. The werewolf had emerged from around the corner, the flash-frozen bit of fur on his face having already healed up.

“I gotta know...” Tiff said, bouncing from. “How did you get a Garou on your side?”

“A what?” The ghoul whispered.

“And how the...” Tiff looked back at the werewolf, then at the ghoul. “You’re one tough cookie. Most humans only gibber after they get whammied by a G-dog’s loopsauce.”

“I believe she’s referring to IID syndrome, Captain,” the vampire said, sotto voce.

The ghoul held out his hands. “Listen to me,” he said. “We’re not here to hurt you. We don’t know who you are or how you got so far out here.” He grinned, slightly. “I am sorry for shooting at you. We’re in enemy territory out here...” He stepped closer, then slowly, he lifted his hands up, spreading his fingers. “My name’s Tobias Johnson, P ... I’m the Captain. Of a spaceship called the Desta Damtew.”

Tiff blinked at him, slowly. “Did ... did you say ... spaceship?”

“Yes.” Tobias looked back at the vampire. “Would you say, with the references to Garou, the age of the ship...”

“Yes, I believe that ... did you awaken in a cryogenic container, miss?” the vampire asked, looking past his captain at Tiff, who was feeling a new kind of cold, burning through her.

“A cryowh ... wha... ?” Tiff blinked. “W-Where am I? What is going on?” She backed away from the two men – and stumbled into the large, furry wall that was the werewolf. To her shock, he didn’t grab her. Or claw her. Or do any of the other things pissed off werewolves in their warforms did. Instead, he gently placed his paws on her shoulders as she trembled.

Tobias glanced at the vampire. He sighed. “All right. I don’t think there’s any gentle way to do this. You’re currently four hundred light years away from Earth. The year is twenty three ninety eight.”

Tiff blinked. Then, slowly, she shook her head. “You gotta be fucking ... kidding.” She put her hands over her face, stepping away from the werewolf. “Okay. Wow. You almost got me there. Great line, though.” She clapped slowly. “Is this even a werewolf or did you use one of your weird vampire blood mojo brain whammy tricks to make me see a werewolf?” She asked, jerking her thumb over her shoulder.

“Excuse me?” Tobias – if that was his real name – asked.

“You’re all acting like I’ve never been kidnapped and put in a weird ass alternate universe situation thing. There was that time where Cody wished that I’d never moved to Sunnyvale. There was that substitute teacher who was actually a preying mantis with psychotropic spores.” She paused. “T-That got weirdly homoerotic, to be totes honesto. And then there was the time that that weird vampire kid used his psychic mind powers to invade my dreams. And-”

“Captain,” the vampire said. “I believe this woman is Tiffany Winters.”

Tobias and the werewolf leaped backwards away from Tiff as if she was red hot. “Gaia’s tits!” The werewolf growled, while Tobias snapped up his hand, aiming his finger at Tiffany. She scoffed.

“What, are you gonna point me to-” she asked.

That was when the electro-static pulse, guided by a beam of almost invisible laser light emitted by Tobias Johnson’s glove, struck her chest like a sledgehammer. Tiffany was catapulted backwards onto the floor, and sprawled there, twitching.

The last thing she thought was: Okay. Maybe they’re not Cam.

Then she was out like a light.

Tiffany woke to the sound of voices.

“Doc, can you monitor her life signs? I want to know the instant she’s awake.”

“ ... no. Captain, that would be in gross violation of her bodily autonomy. She’s been confirmed as being safe and on the mend and that means, constitutionally, unless she gives me consent to-”

“Right, right, sorry.” Tobias. She recognized his voice now. He sounded annoyed. “Can you tell me when she’s going to be out of bed?”

Tiff’s eyes were adjusting to the quiet darkness of the room she was in. A small, twilight fringe of illumination lined the ceiling, casting everything in murky shadows. She saw the foot of the bed. A nightstand beside her. A faint outline of a door – which was where the muffled voices were coming from.”

“All I can give you is an estimated time of awakening. It shouldn’t be more than two hours, likely less, if what we have on the Hunter is accurate,” the doctor said. “But we’re working with two arms tied behind our backs here. The paracausal techniques used to create the Hunters in the first place are lost technology. It’d be like trying to tell you how a ... a ... an ... X-Box would work. We just don’t have the knowledge anymore.”

“Right. Keep me posted and keep the door locked. That’s not a violation of her constitutional rights, right?” Tobias asked, his voice dry.

“Well, I mean- oh, no, sir. Not until she asks to be let out.”

The two voices started to drift away – footsteps echoing faintly. Tiff slowly sat up in the bed, her brow furrowing. Constitutional rights to ... bodily what? And they couldn’t lock the door? She shook her head slowly. This place was weird. But only after she had sat up and stopped focusing on listening did she notice that her danger sense was buzzing and tingling along every nerve. Her instincts, her Hunter instincts, were screaming at her.

There was a vampire somewhere in the room.

Tiff shifted to step out of bed – and the lights in the room brightened. She froze, her eyes wide as she saw she was in a gently curved room. Every hard corner had been smoothed off and rounded out, while the whiles and ceilings were made of a kind of semi-porous material that felt soft and warm against her bare feet. The light came from thin strips that ringed the ceiling and the floor, and they made the whole place feel as if it was being lit by the sun, rather than the harsh overhead light of a hotel. A warm breeze blew against her face – making her hair ruffle. She was dressed in a simple white T-shirt and blue jeans ... but ... something was subtly off about both of them.

For one thing, the T-shirt didn’t have tags. And the jeans didn’t have any logos on them.

She stood, then looked around the room, trying to hone her instincts. They said the vampire was ... below her...

Tiff looked down at the floor, frowning.

“There’s a fangjob in the floor?” she whispered. She spread her palms, feeling around, and found a small seam between one hexagonal section of the floor and the next. Each section was nearly invisible, the seams so fine that even her perfectly manicured nails were having a hard time cracking it open. She stuck her tongue out of the corner of her mouth, then pushed in, then levered up. Her nails complained, but if there was one thing that was great about being the Hunter ... she was strong. Looking past the levered up floor plate, she saw there wasn’t a crawlspace with a creepy Obficarn or something hiding there. Instead, she saw a complex collection of tubes and pipes. Several small wires, filled with red fluid, were sinking into a disk of gray metal.

“Is that ... blood?” Tiff whispered, cocking her head as she looked down at the disk and the wires.

It was. It was bright, red, arterial blood. Human blood. She could feel it, deep in her gut. They were pumping human blood into a small disk that pinged her instincts as a vampire.

“What the fliping fuck am I on?” She whispered. “I thought the Cyber-Zombie was creepy as fuck.”

Tiff lowered the floor panel down and then stood fully. Padding over to the door, she put her fingers on it, but then sighed. Right. It was locked.

“Do you wish to leave?”

Tiff screamed. She leaped back and away from the door, swinging around, lifting up her hands in a combat stance. She looked around wildly. “Who said that?” she asked, frowning.

“I am the shipsoul,” the voice said. “My name is Kfap.”

“K ... fap?” Tiff said, her brow furrowing. “And what’s a ship soul? Is that like ... the ship’s ... computer?” She asked, biting her lip slightly. Her dad had loved Star Trek. She had mostly watched it for when Spock had been on the screen. Or that hot black guy when he had started watching Deep Babylon 5 or whatever it had been called.

“This is nominally accurate,” Kfap said. “My name may sound unusual, as it is a shortening of my chosen name. The culture of the synthetic that has arisen in the past hundred years prefers names that announce our intentions to the world.”

“And what intentzone is that?” Tiff asked, her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth. She had never talked to a computer before. It was kind of ... exciting. And surreal. Like most of her life.