Requiem for the Vampire
From PlotBunnies
This one may be an RPG; I might run it in spring, if anyone is interested. Or maybe it would make a nice story. I'm not sure.
[edit] World / Prologue
A group of powerful vampires treks to a remote castle in the kingdom of Wallachia. They are strong, and fast. They command the fear of the peasant people. But they want more - they want political power, they want authority. The one thing they can't just take, the one thing that beings who can't demonstrate their lineage can never have. So they go to the voivod, the prince, and make an offer. Immortality, in exchange for a permanent place in the Wallachian nobility.
But in the royal court, things don't go all their way. For this prince was described by his contemporaries "And he hated evil in his country so much that, if anyone committed some harm, theft or robbery or lies and injustice, none of those remained alive. Even if he was a great noble or a merchant, or a priest or a monk or an ordinary man, or even if he had a great fortune, he couldn't pay himself from death." The prince heard their explanation, of all the supernatural powers at their disposal, and the small number of means to bring about the final death of a vampire. And on hearing this, the prince seized a spear from his bodyguard, and thrust it through the heart of the leader of the undead, and through its head.
"This evil, to drain the very life of my subjects, I will not tolerate. Send out a message, that my men will be eternally vigilant for these abominations. That wherever a man of wealth or strength or fear uses his power to cowe the people of the villages, he shall be executed thus: A wooden stake through his entire body, through head and heart, such that if that criminal be undead, he shall not rise again."
And so it was done. Throughout Wallachia, and into the Ottoman empire, the soldiers of voivod Vlad III hunted and killed the vampire in all its guises. But within a generation, most forgot the great service that this prince, son of the dragon, had done for them. History was twisted by his enemies, and they only remembered the cruelty he had shown, impaling his enemies on a wooden spike. History remembers him now as a sadist, Vlad the Impaler, and not why such a thing had to be done. But still, the descendants of the order he created go through history, hunting the monster in secret.
Seven hundred years passed.
The Knights Țepeș are extinct or scattered. Maybe some family line still passes down the ancient duty in some remote village. But every knight now is a warrior alone. Untrusted by the authorities, and with no resources but his own blade and his own courage. And in modern days, it is harder for the killing of a monster to go unnoticed.
In the year 2034, the last countries joined the party, implementing biometric and genetic records of all their citizens. That was worrying to the vampires who remained. Their secret is threatened.
In 2046, the records will go one step further. Every record will be merged, under the authority of representatives from every country. The ancestry of every man, woman and child will be drawn together in a single database. Even if you could obtain a false ID, there would be no way to escape from your crimes. The interrelations of the entire human race are now known.
But it isn't being completed yet. There's a small technical problem, delaying the launch of the Human Identity Super System. There are a few people on record whose genetic record - compared to those of their brothers, or cousins - simply does not add up. They could not be the children of their declared parents. Well, that's only to be expected. They must be false identities, which the new system can now prove invalid. But ... some of these false identities can be extrapolated back, from the genetic records of their children. Even from the old samples taken when modern forensic science was in its infancy. There are people with false parents on the official documents, identifiable all the way back to the previous century. And these are the same people.
A man who managed to obtain a false passport in Hannover in 2041, who got a work visa in Rio in 2029 by claiming his parents were poor Polish farmers, who emigrated from Brazil to Kenya in 2017, from Belgium to Antigua in 2012, from Poland to Canada in 2006, from England to Portugal in 1952.
Every time, his papers were in order, and his parents existed on the records of the country he came from. But now, with the genomes integrated, those people were not his parents. And this mysterious character with a dozen names, has the same genetic fingerprint in 22 different intelligence systems around the world. HISS cannot be fully implemented until the special taskforce - that's you - can explain a man who appears in so many places, with the same genetic code, and never grows any older.
It must be some kind of computer error. Right?
