[Milliways] OOM: Just like home
Nikola likes it here.
It’s different from Graz. He wasn’t learning anything there. It was useless, a waste of his time, and the lecturers only told him things he already knew or could have discovered for himself.
It’s different from Prague as well. He had felt…out of place there. Still younger than the other students but with more practical experience, he was looked down upon, sneered at behind his back.
There is, of course, some of that here as well. Druitt calls him all sorts of names behind his back. Nikola can hear him whispering to James on the far side of the room. James shakes his head and tries to calm Druitt, looks on Nikola with pity.
That is not why Nikola likes it here.
Nigel...Nigel mostly stays out of Nikola’s way. He stays out of everyone’s way, in actuality. Nikola is never quite sure why Nigel even joined their little group. He seems always to want to hide in a corner, stow himself out of sight, as though he would make himself invisible if such a thing were possible.
He’s brilliant, though. They all are.
James with his quiet observation, seeing everything around him, drinking it in. James can tell you what you had for breakfast last Wednesday even if you don’t remember it yourself and he wasn’t there with you.
Nigel has a gift with photography, and Nikola thinks someday he’ll revolutionize the field. He does things with light that Nikola didn’t realize were possible.
And Druitt…
Nikola would like to say that he doesn’t know why they allow Druitt to even be a part of this. He’s crude, cruel, crass. But he is also brilliant in his own way. He can see straight to the heart of a problem, often suggesting solutions Nikola himself had not thought of.
And then there’s Helen.
Nikola would not be here if it had not been for her. From the day he started at Oxford she has intrigued him.
He stepped into a hall to hear a lecture on the future of electricity (electricity!) in British industry, and there amongst the sea of dark suits and serious faces sat Helen, like an angel among dogs. Her blonde curls and cream blouse practically shining in the midst of them.
There are other women at Oxford, of course. Not many, and not enrolled, but a few audit courses as Helen does.
None have Helen’s fire, her thirst for knowledge.
(Later that same day, the first day he’d seen her, she had been in the corridor outside the lecturer’s office, berating him soundly for not marking her paper simply because she was a woman.)
Nikola used to tease her about it, about secretly wanting to be a man, about having misplaced her paintbrush or having a strange notion of how to catch a husband.
And she’d snap at him, fire sparking in her eyes only serving to make him laugh. And then she’d laugh, and he’d tell her she was brilliant. Truly brilliant.
And he’d mean it.
It was Helen’s idea, this gathering of minds. James was a friend of her father’s, still young enough to be part of the group without feeling like a chaperone, but old enough to make Nikola sometimes feel like a child. Druitt was, of course, attempting to court Helen, a fact which made Nikola’s blood boil and gave him strange, violent urges such as he’d never felt before. Nigel…well, Nikola isn’t sure where Helen picked him up. In a lecture hall, he supposes, just as she had Nikola.
They’re a motley crew, and they all know it. Brought together by genius rather than any sort of affinity for one another.
But Nikola feels…at home here, in a way he never has before. They have a common goal, a shared curiosity, a mutual desire to push the boundaries of what they know. James tells them the world is changing, and they believe him, not only because James is usually right about these things, but because they can feel it themselves, see it all around them. Big changes are coming, and they all want to be at the forefront, championing it, ushering in this brand new world, whatever it may bring.
Nikola outright loves it here.
***
Helen’s father works with those he’s dubbed ‘Abnormals’. Creatures, people pushing the boundaries of physical possibility. A glimpse into the evolutionary future of the human race.
And he’s discovered something so incredible it makes Nikola’s heart race just to think of it.
He has a vial of pure, undiluted vampire blood. The Source, he calls it, collected before the purges, before the last remaining vampires were beaten back, slaughtered, sterilized.
Nikola doesn’t know what the Source can do, but he wants to. He needs to. They all do.
He can see the looks in the other men’s eyes when they talk about it, see the hunger, the ambition, the greed. They don’t understand why he doesn’t have the same look in his eyes.
They don’t, but Helen does.
Because Helen sees the Source the same way Nikola does. For her, for them both, it is the Source of Pure Knowledge. They could learn things no one else ever has.
The ancient vampires were brilliant on a level Nikola can only begin to dream of. They ruled the world, and they did it through knowledge, through technology. If they can use the Source to alter their own genetic structure…think of the knowledge they will gain.
It has become their pet project, and they spend nearly every waking hour working on it, their studies all but forgotten. James has begun to refer to them as “The Five,” and for the first time in his life, Nikola feels as though he is part of something bigger than himself.