PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 111 Blindsight
It wasn't just Sarasti. They all hid from us, even when they had
the upper hand. They always stayed just the other side of myth.
It started pretty much the same way it did for anything else;
vampires were far from the first to learn the virtues of energy
conservation. Shrews and hummingbirds, saddled with tiny bodies
and overclocked metabolic engines, would have starved to death
overnight if not for the torpor that overtook them at sundown.
Comatose elephant seals lurked breathless at the bottom of the sea,
rousing only for passing prey or redline lactate levels. Bears and
chipmunks cut costs by sleeping away the impoverished winter
months, and lungfish—Devonian black belts in the art of estivation
—could curl up and die for years, waiting for the rains.
With vampires it was a little different. It wasn't shortness of
breath, or metabolic overdrive, or some blanket of snow that
locked the pantry every winter. The problem wasn't so much a lack
of prey as a lack of difference from it; vampires were such a recent
split from the ancestral baseline that the reproductive rates hadn't
diverged. This was no woodland-variety lynx-hare dynamic, where
prey outnumbered predators a hundred to one. Vampires fed on
things that bred barely faster than they did. They would have
wiped out their own food supply in no time if they hadn't learned
how to ease off on the throttle.
By the time they went extinct they'd learned to shut down for
decades.
It made two kinds of sense. It not only slashed their metabolic
needs while prey bred itself back to harvestable levels, it gave us
time to forget that we were prey. We were so smart by the
Pleistocene, smart enough for easy 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 mother's mother?
It was murder on our ancestors, even if those same enemy genes
—co-opted now—served us so well when we left the sun a halfmillion
years later. But it was almost—heartening, I guess—to
think that maybe Sarasti felt the tug of other genes, some aversion
to prolonged visibility shaped by generations of natural selection.
Maybe he spent every moment in our company fighting voices that