Ceres, the brain in a jar

Ceres was awake.  It was harder and harder to tell which were the dreams and which the waking world.  He was tormented by terrible nightmares.  Things that were, and things that should never be.  Soon he would be free. Soon he would be in a body with a beating heart, breathing lungs.  Soon!  He extended his awareness, and woke the vampire.  He felt its hunger.  It was slight, not overpowering, but in a few days, it would be quite different.

Selva came over to the tank and injected nutrients.  Ceres felt stronger after a few minutes.  A synthesized voice said,
"It will be time soon, Selva. I'll have my own body, and I can hold you again.  Oh how I've missed that,"

Selva couldn't hide the sadness in her voice.  Surely Ceres could sense it.  She could hide none of her feelings from him, even if she said nothing.
"Yes, Ceres.  I hope so, too,"

She went into the other room, got dressed, and headed for work.  The rest of their time together was silent.

Ceres brought the vampire into the control room.  He had him read some documents, and then sent him on his way.  It was more difficult to control the vampire from a great distance, so Ceres often had himself driven a few blocks near the targets.  Today it was a graveyard.  Ceres hoped to exhume the remains of a possible ancestor of the vampire.  Strange that he was buried in a church yard.  Ceres imagined the response of the undead to sacred symbols was a purely psychosomatic response, but he would not risk it if it were not urgent.

Ceres dreaded the cycle of sleep again. He fought it as long as he could, but it always returned.
This is how the incident at the graveyard began, and how those deluded heroes attempted to thwart the greatest psychic the world had ever known.