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.)
By now you might be wondering why vampires didn’t simply resort to nonhuman prey. It’s not as though Humans were the only available prey species on the planet; why go to all the trouble of evolving these radical, freakish adaptations to keep eating us when they could have just switched to warthogs or zebras? They may well have done so; but the fact that they went to such extreme lengths to accommodate human meat in the diet can only mean that they got something from us that wasn’t available from other species, something essential to their survival. We actually lost a fair number of inmates finding out what it was—you may remember a year or so ago when Amnesty International put out a press release praising Texas for going a whole two months without executing anyone? What they didn’t realise was that a hiatus in executions didn’t necessarily mean a hiatus in mortality. We basically used up death row that year.
And this is what we found: a secondary loss of the ability to synthesize PCDH-Y, a protein responsible for certain aspects of central nervous system development. Since this protein occurs only in other hominids, human prey was an essential component of the vampire diet.
So. What we have here is a very rare subspecies, forced to prey upon its closest kin, which themselves were quite rare (being also near the apex of the pyramid). They were forced to commit a number of evolutionary backflips just to stay in the game. They were easily smart enough to outmaneuver us, but we weren’t their biggest problem. Their biggest problem was just as smart as they were, and just as dependent on the limited supply of human prey. Their biggest problem was other vampires.
This is what happens when you put two vampires in the same room:
Competition for prey evidently ensured that vampires were solitary, very territorial, and mutually antagonistic. Our marketting people had entertained thoughts of teams of vampires working together to solve the world’s ills, but apparently natural selection never taught them to play nicely together. This picture was taken after an early attempt at marketing the cooperative angle, an avenue that we abandoned shortly afterwards