And let’s not forget those aspects of vampire lore that are, without question, biologically true: their predatory habits, their speed and strength, their undeath and long lives. And, of course, the crucifix glitch, which spelled the end of the vampire lineage— although they obviously persisted long enough to embed themselves in our cultural mythology, the book is pretty much closed on the biological organism[1].
Or is it?
You’ll recognise these figures; a Necker Cube and a Rubin’s Vase, popular examples of the so called ambiguous illusion. Sometimes you see two faces, sometimes a vase. Sometimes the the shaded panel seems to be behind, sometimes up front; your perspective flips back and forth, you can see it one way, then another.
Vampires can see it both ways at once. They don’t have to flip back and forth: they can do something that’s neurologically impossible for us, they can hold simultaneous multiple worldviews. This allows them to instantly grasp things that to us seem plagued by contradictions, to see things we have to work out step-by-step. Take quantum physics. We humans have to be dragged kicking and screaming below the Planck length, we need complex math and numbers to force the truth onto us, and even then the truth makes no sense: Nothing is real until someone observes it? Effect before cause? A cat in a box, simultaneously dead and alive in some discorporeal state? The math forces us to accept the conclusion, but it violates everything we know about reality. But vampires understand quantum physics, right down in the gut. It makes sense to them.
Think of the ways we could benefit from a creature. How many problems— political, environmental, technological, even philosophical— intractable to the human mind, might prove trivially simple to such a creature? Not even computers offer such problem-solving potential—because no matter how many computers you network together, no matter how many quantum or classical elements you plug in, you’re still dealing with a machine that was ultimately designed by humans and which therefore reflect the limitations and constraints of a human mindset. In contrast, we would not be designing vampires at all—evolution has done that for us. We would merely be resurrecting them.
Some might question whether vampires could ever fit in to modern society. But remember that modern sociopaths are, in effect, fragments of vampirekind, manifesting in a human body. And sociopaths are among the most successful players in business, industry, and medicine; ruthless pragmatism, lack of conscience, and freedom from fuzzy touchy-feely emotions like empathy are prerequisites of success in today’s corporate environment. In fact, corporations themselves, as legal entities, meet all the diagnostic criteria for clinical sociopathy under the DSM-IV. We know vampires could prosper in such an environment because, in a very real way, they already do.
The other question that arises is, even if they could solve all our problems, why would they? These are, after all, creatures that evolved to eat us, not give us a hand with our homework — and the usual alarmists from Greenpeace or the Sierra Club have already begun spreading doomsday scenarios in which we resurrect the vampires back only to have them wipe us out. And I’m the first to admit that you certainly wouldn’t want to bring these creatures back without some kind of safeguards in place.
But even here, the vampires prove to be our biggest ally—because vampires come with their own safeguards built right in! The crucifix glitch did them in once already, and it would kill them off even faster nowadays, in our right-angle-filled urban environments. In fact, the only way we were able to keep them from going into convulsions at the drop of a hat—and I’m revealling a bit of a trade secret here, but we’ve already patented the molecule—was by keeping them on a strict regimen of what we call antiEuclidean Neurotropes. We have developed a drug that suppresses the seizures resulting from the crucifix glitch, a drug which allows vampires to function normally in metropolitan settings; and without this drug they will die. We have them on a very short and unbreakable leash, and they are more than intelligent enough to realise that serving our interests in in their best interest.
Certain people who place emotion above intellect have called what happened to Donnie Maass a crime. They are wrong. What happened to Donnie was only a tragedy, and it was a tragedy with a silver lining. The real crime would be if we let squeamishness prevail, if we turned our back on this opportunity to make the world a richer, better —yes, even a safer place. Donnie would want us to push on, and it is for Donnie—and for all the children of the world — that our first commercial batch of vampires is gestating even as we speak. We anticipate FDA approval within the month; and in the very unlikely event that that doesn’t happen, a number of third-world countries have already offered to host our research under very favourable tax and regulatory conditions. The potential benefits to mankind are incalculable—and with the proper safeguards in place, we can virtually guarantee that nothing will go wrong.
Thank you.
1
In fact, their extinction may have released the so-called