Питер Уоттс - Vampire Domestication - Taming Yesterday’s Nightmares for a Better Tomorrow

Motor nerve axons almost twice as thick as those of conventional humans; hence, faster signal transmission, faster reflexes. A vampire could literally snatch a speck out of your eye before you had time to blink.

Here we’re getting into the central nervous system, and this is where the real differences show up. The corpus callusum is twenty percent larger in vampires than in humans, resulting in high-speed broadband communication between hemispheres. Interneuron density, cortical folding and lamination way above normal, particularly in the visual cortex; these creatures have pattern-matching skills far in excess of the human norm. You may remember the "savantes" from movies like Rain Man and Oliver Saks' books: they can play complex piano arrangements after a single listening, or predict the day of the week that your birthday will fall on, every year for the next thousand years. Any of us could perform those calculations if we had to—painstakingly referring to our calendars and correcting for leapyears and working out each year in turn—and you might think that savantes simply do that faster than we do. No: savantes don’t do those calculations at all. There is no process by which they "work out" these solutions:they simply see them, fully formed, laid out instantly. They don’t even have to think about it consciously.

You can do the same thing, in a very limited sense. If I show you one marble, you don’t have to count it to know how many there are. Two or three marbles, same thing; you don’t have to count, you see. You just know. But if I showed you ten or twenty marbles, you’d have to consciously tally them up. Savantes don’t. When they’re in their groove, they "see" everything; days of the week, ten-digit primes, you name it. Instantly.

Savantes generally manifest broken, barely functional fragments of the vampire genotype, so most of them can only do this for one or two splinter skills. Real vampires were omnisavantes; their groove extended to pretty much every logical and patternmatching dimension known to man, and more besides. These creatures are insanely smart by human standards—and this leads to some very intriguing commercial appplications which I’ll mention a bit further on.

When you think about it, vampires pretty much have be smarter than people, because they hunted people for a living. (Lions are smarter than gazelles for pretty much the same reason.) By the same token, something else vampires have to be is clinically sociopathic. Among our own kind, a lack of conscience, of empathy for one’s fellow human beings, is considered a pathology outside of corporate circles; we grow out of it after the age of about two (all small children are clinical sociopaths). Among vampires, though, sociopathy is an essential survival trait that persists into adulthood (much as it does in cats). If you felt empathy for your prey, you’d starve to death. Natural selection would have weeded "moral" vampires out of the gene pool faster than you could say Steven Jay Gould.

Here’s another prey-related problem vampires face: the predator- prey ratio. In most every case where one species eats another, the prey species is at least an order of magnitude more numerous than the predator, and breeds faster. The reasons for this are obvious: the transfer of food energy between trophic levels is very inefficient. Cows have to eat ten kilograms of grass to make one kilogram of cow; it takes ten kilograms of cow to make one kilogram of human; and of course, it takes ten kilograms of human to make one kilogram of vampire. So at any given level, you better make damn sure that the level below outproduces you by at least ten to one, or you’ll exterminate your own food supply.

Vampires were therefore caught between a rock and a hard place; their metabolic and reproductive rates were pretty much the same as ours. Nor was there much wiggle room to change this; it takes a certain nonnegotiable amount of energy for any warm-blooded creature to reach a certain size and maintain a certain level of activity, and you can’t cheat the laws of physics.

What you can do, though, is cut back on your activity levels. I mentioned earlier that Donnie’s blood showed elevated levels of Leuenkephalin, the hibernation peptide. It turns out that vampires conserve energy—and their food supply—by extended periods of hibernation. As you know, suspended animation is not uncommon even among higher animals like birds and mammals. Shrews and hummingbirds have very high active metabolic rates, and would starve to death if they didn’t shut down overnight. Elephant seals maximise their breath-holding time on the sea floor by going into deep torpor while waiting for prey to happen by. Bears and chipmunks cut costs by sleeping out winter food shortages, and this lungfish can curl up and die for four to seven years, waiting for the rains to return.

Vampires were able to shut themselves down for decades, dessicating down to this beef-jerky condition and entering what’s commonly known as an undead state. This works in three ways: firstly, it drastically reduces their energetic needs, redressing the original imbalance between prey production and predator consumption. Secondly, it gives the prey population time to recover in the event that it had been severely hammered by predation, and lets the vampires wait out food shortages. And thirdly, it’s possible that these extended leaves-of-absence might give us time forget that we were prey. Humans had, after all, grown pretty smart by the Pleistocene; we were smart enough to pass information from generation to generation, but we were also smart enough for skepticism. If you haven’t seen any night- stalking demons in all your years on the savannah, why should you believe some senile campfire ramblings passed down by your grandmother? We were likely to get careless after a few decades with no vampires on the horizon.

This last point remains controversial. In order for this strategy to work, vampires would have all clock out together—implying a level of cooperation that might be unlikely, given how solitary and competitive these creatures were. More on that later.

At any rate, we believe that this is where the blood-pooling strategy got started; part of being undead involved sequestering blood around the vital organs and letting the peripheral tissues starve, much the way seals and whales triage their oxygen supply when cut off from the air. This proved so effective that over time, it became a normal state of affairs even among active vampires; the ghastly white pallor of these things is actually a strategy for increasing their gas mileage. When lactate levels in the surface tissues get too high — or when vampires are feeding—blood is redirected to the skin and the complexion flushes (the moral being, if you’re next to a vampire and he starts looking embarrassed, run!). But this only happens occasionally and doesn’t last long. (Incidentally, if you’re wondering why there is no ghastly white pallor on this fellow, it’s because— like so many of our captive subjects — he was of African-American descent.)