Body Surfing

fact. We have no reason to believe Methuselah didn’t live every bit as long as is recorded, with the assistance of a demon inside him.”
    “Yeah, whatever. I didn’t survive being possessed, not to mention getting my skull smashed in by some crazy Croatian bitch, so I could go back to school. You were telling me about Ileana’s partner.”
    The doctor wondered if the teenager had a crush on the huntress. She was the perfect transitional figure to ease his grief over his dead girlfriend—older, wiser, and dedicated to destroying the thing that had killed the Patel girl, as well as his best friend.
    “Alec was a remarkable man. Most hunters are either killed or retire after just two or three years. Alec lasted nearly two decades, during which time he eliminated seventeen Mogran, with only three collateral fatalities—most of which, it must be noted, were probably attributable to Ileana. They were a team unlike any other.”
    “Were they a couple?”
    The doctor let several hundred feet of rolling countryside pass by the Pierce-Arrow’s windows before answering.
    “For a full decade their fates were yoked together. To the eyes ofthe authorities, they were serial killers, and their crimes spanned more than a dozen countries. At one point Alec cracked the top ten of Interpol’s most wanted, before the Legion orchestrated a convincing masquerade of his death. In addition to living outside the law, they pursued—and were occasionally pursued by—the most devious, most cleverly disguised opponent the world has ever known. How does your generation put it? They were on each other’s backs. But their relationship was never sexual.”
    “Yeah, right. If I was with Ileana 24/7, I don’t think I’d be able to keep my hands to myself. Especially if I’d had to spend sixty-seven years being celibate.”
    “Trust me on this one. Their relationship was strictly platonic.”
    Q. must have heard something in the doctor’s voice, because he shot him a look. “Is there like a rule or something?”
    “Not exactly. Did she by any chance tell you about the sigil?”
    “You don’t mean your necklace?”
    The doctor tapped his chest, shook his head. “That’s where the name comes from, but the hunter’s sigil is rather different. You know how demons exit their hosts, yes?”
    “You mean sex?”
    “The hunters prefer the word breed. What the demons are doing is enacting the biological procedure by which the flesh communicates to the spirit that it has fulfilled its purpose. Unfortunately, the spirit is not quite as cognizant of its physical domicile as you might think. It cannot tell the difference between actual breeding and mere conjunction. So long as there are two bodies involved, and, shall we say, fruition, the body ejects the alien spiritual matter. Yet how is it that a being that can see the inner workings of each and every cell in its body can’t tell the difference between a vagina and another, shall we say, less fertile orifice?”
    Q. made a face. “Yeah, you don’t need to get too specific. But, well, how does that happen?”
    Again the doctor paused, considering. How much to tell the boy? Finally he decided to go for it.
    “You study physics, do you not?”
    “Yeah. Why?”
    “Earlier today, before Ileana assaulted you, I mentioned that some members of the Legion believe the Mogran aren’t supernatural beings at all, but merely electronic entities.”
    “Electricity that thinks?”
    The doctor chuckled. “I know the idea sounds farfetched—”
    “I’d’ve said stupid myself.”
    “—but is it any more farfetched than thinking that the souls of virgins come back to possess the living?”
    “You got me there.”
    “If we rule out the intervention of a divine entity in the creation process, then we’re left with the fairly straightforward assertion that consciousness is essentially an electrical current acting on a closed system.” The doctor tapped his head. “The brain is a bit like a home appliance: unplugged, it’s no more animate than a computer or a toaster. But introduce an electronic current and it is suddenly capable of the most remarkable feats of cognition. We know also that electromagnetic energy is capable of containing enormous amounts of data, and, as well, that electricity doesn’t sit still in space, but, rather, moves rapidly between poles of differing charges.”
    “Yeah, this is all first-year stuff. What’s your point exactly?”
    “Simply this: when you