Rise Of The Immaterial Man

Across Town

When Sophia eventually re-emerged from her house she looked much more presentable. 

Gone was her strappy dress and high heels, instead she was wearing a black skirt and a white blouse with a pair of flats on her feet. 

It was an understated look but combined with her overwhelming natural elegance it was one that she managed to pull off with aplomb. 

She got back into the car and sat down, she had replaced her perfume with something that smelt much sweeter than whatever she had been wearing beforehand. 

“I still think this is incredibly risky,” The woman remarked, “I’m willing to let you go through with it, of course, but only to try and get a measure of the kind of Immateria you may end up becoming.” 

I put the car into first gear and pulled away from the side of the pavement. 

“I’ll be able to handle myself,” I said confidently, though I wasn’t sure if that would actually be the case or not. 

Over the course of the drive the burning thirst in my throat had been becoming progressively worse, and while it wasn’t unbearable yet I could definitely feel it going that way over time. 

I would need to hunt soon, to feed, as queasy as that made me feel. 

I didn’t want to feed on other humans, there had to be another solution out there. Raiding a blood bank, perhaps? That would be an easy way to get blood without hurting anyone directly. 

“That’s what they all say at first,” Sophia said, “In time most realise that’s not actually the case, there’s no avoiding the instinct forever. Not if you want to avoid becoming feral, that is.” 

I did want to avoid becoming feral. I wanted to avoid that more than anything else, because a feral Richard Parker could do the world untold harm, and there was no telling if anyone would be able to hold such an unbound intelligence back. 

“How often am I going to need to feed?” I asked, the idea of having to do it often was… distressing. 

“As a newborn Immateria? Fairly often,” Sophia replied, “Perhaps every couple of days, depending on the speed of your metabolism. Later on, though, some Immateria can go weeks if not months without tasting blood on their tongue.” 

I was hoping that was going to be my own fate. 

One of the first things I would do going forward, after everything in the immediate future had been dealt with, would be to make some kind of synthetic blood substitute to end my reliance on feeding off of the human race. 

I wondered if anyone had tried such a thing before and voiced the question to Sophia. 

She thought for a moment, then said, “I believe it has been tried, but not exhaustively,” She glanced at me, “Not by someone with your raw intelligence anyway.” 

I couldn’t help but preen under the compliment. 

It felt like being praised by a parent and appreciated by a lover at the same moment, a strange dissonance of emotion that wound up feeling confused but happy. 

“I wouldn’t advise it, though,” Sophia continued, “It would upset the balance of our world. What need would we have to keep hidden from humans if not to use them as our cattle? It would be bloodshed on a global scale.”

That was a point of view I hadn’t necessarily considered, and it was wrapped up in a bunch of implications that I really didn’t like the sound of. 

Cattle?

Was that all the human race was to the Immateria? 

I had to believe that wasn’t the case, but I wondered how long that hope would last before being snuffed out by dealing with Immateria society. I’d no doubt meet more Immateria in the future, and who knew what they would be like. 

Eventually, after being stuck in a few strings of traffic, we arrived at my office building at Canary Wharf. 

I pulled us into the Canada Square car park, a place where our company had a select area permanently reserved for cars owned by the executives of the company. 

I had wanted to buy the whole car park so that we could offer free parking to all of our employees but had been stopped by the London Mayor’s Office on account of the space being necessary for public operations in the area. 

Our parking spaces were tucked away on the ground floor of the building with easy access to the exits that led toward the rest of the Canary Wharf complex. 

With a flick of the key, I turned off the engine, got out of the car, and took a deep breath. 

I wasn’t scared, that was absolutely and completely the wrong way to describe the emotions that I was feeling, but I was worried. 

There were elements of the company that had wanted me gone for a while due to my views on things. 

Technically the company owned any and all IP that I had created, not that they’d ever been able to reverse engineer the key elements that I had designed to make the AR holo systems of the phone actually functional. 

They didn’t need to, though. 

They had the product and it was selling like hotcakes. 

Those rogue elements in the company would be clamouring to get rid of me now that I had, in their eyes, put a major step out of line. 

I wouldn’t let that happen so easily. 

“Stop being so scared,” Sophia said as she got out of the car, “I can smell your hormones from here, you’re spitting them out like a terrified skunk. The humans won’t be able to, but if they’re savvy enough they’ll spot the signs anyway.” 

I swallowed. 

Okay, maybe I was just a little bit scared about what was about to happen. 

As I had kept thinking about from the moment I’d discovered how long I had been out of action, I didn’t want them to take the company from me. 

It had suddenly become my biggest fear, and now was the time to face it.