Reality Hack by Niall Teasdale Read Free Book Online Page B

the man. ‘Right, back to the conference room. It’s time to introduce you to esoteric zoology.’
    The TV screen was there for presentations, not watching the football at weekends. Kellog even had a little remote control gizmo which seemed to drive a computer somewhere, and that had been set up with a slide presentation on the basic types of entities XC had to deal with. The first slide showed an upside-down tree structure with ‘Bugs’ written above it, branching down to five types: Daath Beings/Glitches, Fairies, Skinchangers, Spirits, and Vampires. Spirits was further divided into Demons, Elementals, Ghosts, and Other.
    ‘Daath Beings?’ Nisa asked.
    ‘All in good time,’ Kellog replied.
    ‘Okay… Fairies? Seriously?’
    Kellog clicked a button and the slide changed to one headed ‘Fairies.’ ‘Actually, most of them dislike the term. Don’t use it to their faces.’
    There were, apparently, a number of subdivisions. Trooping fairies liked company, but others were solitary. There were Seelie and Unseelie, which was not the same as good and evil, but the Unseelie were generally more malign.
    ‘The ones we see these days are almost universally small,’ Kellog told her. ‘They still get the odd Redcap in the Scottish border regions, but you won’t normally see anything bigger than a cat.’
    ‘Are there any in London?’ Nisa asked.
    ‘We get fairies around the parks. What you’d think of as fairies: small, winged. If you get acorns thrown at you from a tree, it probably isn’t squirrels.’
    The next slide skipped on to Skinchangers which were generally not , as Nisa had expected, werewolves. Werewolves and other such legends tended to be the result of magicians using charmed animal pelts to change shape. The practice went back so far no one knew when it had started. It was one of the primary indications that, while magic was not normal to The System, it was also not entirely unplanned. People had to have been doing ritualised magic when The System began, likely a holdover from previous iterations where it had featured more strongly.
    Skinchangers were entities able to shift their forms without spells. There was evidence to suggest they had also been around since the beginning, though some were newer.
    ‘The most dangerous of them, the Skin walkers , were once magicians,’ Kellog informed her. ‘The type name is a generalisation of that name. Somehow they internalised both the magic of the pelts they used and the spirit of the hunt they were meant to reinforce with their rituals. The result is an undead monster, able to steal the skin of anything and use it to change into that form. That includes replacing real people. They’re sadistic and they enjoy killing. Modern technology has just made them more dangerous too.’
    ‘Uh, how?’
    ‘Refrigeration. The skin they wear won’t rot, but they couldn’t easily store extras until we invented freezers. Now the damn things can swap forms whenever they want.’
    Spirits was a long subject. There were the defined ones: ghosts, elementals, and demons. Ghosts were the spirits of dead people, obviously. The theory was that a program was composed of two primary components, one directing the other. When the subsystem representing the body shut down, the mental, directing, component could remain active if there was a bug in its code.
    ‘Personally I think that’s not quite right,’ Kellog said. ‘I think the continued existence is intended, but they aren’t supposed to stay within this part of The System.’
    ‘So where are they supposed to go?’
    ‘Some form of limbo or purgatory. We know the essential components get recycled. Reincarnated, if you like. That doesn’t happen immediately so there’s a storage facility.’
    ‘You know this?’ Nisa had never really believed in anything beyond death. All that ‘past life experience’ stuff was hogwash and she certainly did not believe in Heaven.
    ‘Every spirit carries pointers to previous