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Peter Watts 309 Blindsight
Notes and References
References and remarks, to try and convince you all I'm not
crazy (or, failing that, to simply intimidate you into shutting up
about it). Read for extra credit.
A Brief Primer on Vampire Biology
I'm hardly the first author to take a stab at rationalising
vampirism in purely biological terms. Richard Matheson did it
before I was born, and if the grapevine's right that damn Butler
woman's latest novel will be all over the same territory before you
even read this. I bet I'm the first to come up with the Crucifix
Glitch to explain the aversion to crosses, though— and once struck
by that bit of inspiration, everything else followed.
Vampires were accidentally rediscovered when a form of
experimental gene therapy went curiously awry, kick-starting longdormant
genes in an autistic child and provoking a series of
(ultimately fatal) physical and neurological changes. The company
responsible for this discovery presented its findings after extensive
follow-up studies on inmates of the Texas penal system; a
recording of that talk, complete with visual aids, is available
online 1 ; curious readers with half an hour to kill are refered there
for details not only on vampire biology, but on the research,
funding, and "ethical and political concerns" regarding vampire
domestication (not to mention the ill-fated "Taming Yesterday's
Nightmares For A Brighter Tomorrow" campaign). The following
(much briefer) synopsis restricts itself to a few biological
characteristics of the ancestral organism:
1
http://www.rifters.com/blindsight/vampires.htm