#echopraxia
I think ancient Blindsight vampires would likely have had the same kind of problem with lack of genetic diversity as cheetahs.
Blampires have some very extreme adaptations (e.g. capacity to hibernate for decades), which suggests very strong selection pressure. A new mutation rises to fixation through the extinction of all lineages not descended from the first individual with the mutation and the extinction of all lineages that did not inherit the mutation. To get vampires out of Homo erectus you’d probably need that process to happen hundreds or thousands of times within less than a million years. There were probably a bunch of points in vampire history when their mitochondrial Eve and Y chromosomal Adam would have been only a few thousand years back. That would probably have been murder on the genetic diversity of a slow-breeding species which would never have gotten very numerous (a quick crude calculation suggests the vampire population was probably never more than a few hundred thousand worldwide). If they’ve managed to scrape together a collection of prehistoric vampire skulls by the 2080/90s and anybody’s looked for it, they’d probably notice the same trend of skull asymmetry cheetahs have.
If so, ancient vampires would have gotten a double-whammy of disease vulnerability from low genetic diversity and needing to eat a species that’s very closely related to them. I suspect the human transition to agriculture may have killed off vampires more by increased disease transmission than by inability to hunt. Like, even if vampires couldn’t go into built-up areas until very recently most humans would have been farmers who’d still need to go out into the fields to work and would have been vulnerable there, and if humans living in villages and towns was the only problem vampires should have been able to do OK in places like Australia and Siberia until, like, the nineteenth century. I think the bigger problem vampires may have had is coexisting with a much more numerous and more genetically diverse related species presents you with a challenging disease environment, especially if you also have to eat them. And a high death rate from disease would have further reduced their genetic diversity, creating a failure cycle.
One selection pressure driving the evolution of vampire sensory abilities may have been the need to avoid eating humans who were infected with something that might infect and kill or weaken the vampire (Valerie’s ability to taste cancer might be a side effect of this). I suspect, between high intelligence and this, ancient vampires may have precociously developed something like a functional equivalent of the germ theory of disease (an idea I have for my fanfic is this was more-or-less the closest thing old vampire culture had to religion; they deduced the functional nature of infectious diseases but didn’t have microscopes so they conceptualized them as invisible intangible parasites, i.e. as something a lot like an evil spirit).
If modern vampires mostly started out as fertilized human ova modified with vampire DNA or something like that, one major difference between ancient vampires and modern vampires might be modern vampires being a lot less inbred. Modern vampires would probably have much lower allostatic load too (a modern vampire gets fed instead of having to hunt, lives in a nice climate-controlled room instead of a tent/hide, gets much better medical care, etc.). So I think one major physical difference between modern vampires and ancient vampires might be modern vampires being healthier and taller/bigger.
Going with my idea for what Divide and Conquer actually is, I think an ancient vampire’s impression of a modern vampire might be “radiantly strong and healthy but spectacularly maladjusted feral child.”
It’s not a perfect analogy, but I think this post about owls would be good inspiration/reference for a “it’s a real organism, not a horror movie monster” take on Blindsight vampire behavior, and I’m definitely taking notes for my fanfic.
- The point about lower metabolism is a big one. Canonically, the most extreme and weirdest adaptations vampires have are about lowering their metabolic rate so they need less of that protein ancient vampires needed to get from eating people. It would make sense if their behavior is also very oriented toward keeping their metabolism as low as possible. So I think Blindsight vampires would be very lazy creatures, kind of like cats, and for similar reasons.
I think the different priorities this implies might explain a lot of the vampires being less conscious thing. Humans are smart omnivores and as a result of being smart and omnivorous we’re relatively food-secure by animal standards; we have surplus energy and surplus brain-power to play with, and we invest it in socialization and play (categories which, broadly defined, include activities like art, religion, science, philosophy, politics, and non-reproductive sexuality); we’re an energetic species with high enrichment needs. Vampires are smart but evolved for a much less nutrition-secure ecological niche, so they’re much more concerned with conserving their energy and have lower metabolisms, so they have different relationships with socialization, play, sexuality, and food. A vampire is never bored; they know exactly what to do with idle time: sleep. A vampire would never make a cave painting or carve a knife’s handle into the shape of a lion; they’d much rather take a nap.
I think it’d be very on-brand if vampires can do very shallow open-eye sleep like cats and spend much of their lives in that state.
Kind of funny to think about this in the concept of Blindsight’s cyberpunk dystopia sort of setting. Like, you know some corporate person is going to hear the basics of what vampires are like (more intelligent, less social, less conscious) and think “perfect worker who can be kept in a cell and made to write code or something for 15 hours a day,” but oh boy, they would not work like that. I mean, the cell part is right, they’d have very low enrichment needs compared to humans, but the tireless drone part would be so wrong. They evolved as food-insecure ambush predators of slow-breeding dangerous prey, that means short bursts of intense activity punctuating long periods of relative inactivity. Working long and hard is for seed eaters! Funny to imagine some rich corporate type needing to have this explained to them after angrily complaining that the vampire they were sold is a total slacker who spends literally twenty hours a day in bed.
Handshake meme of vampires and ADHD people shaking hands on “getting everything done in the last three hours before the deadline.”
- “Owls see with their ears, not their eyes” - not a perfect parallel to vampires, but for the fanfic I’m definitely going with the interpretation that vampires “see” with their ears and nose much more than humans do.
- “An owl is also an ambush hunter rather than pursuit, every part of their instinctual wiring is geared to ensure they are not seen. If they are not seen and if they are not heard, they are safe, and they can be fed and they can relax in their invisibility. … Owls are more complex because the idea of being paraded in front of a crowd of humans or hunting game your noisy feet will scare away are very disagreeable to the owl for good reason.”
THIS!
If you were a vampire in the ancestral environment, the most dangerous thing to be around would be a vampire not of your family/band, and the second most dangerous thing to be around would be a group of humans. Humans would be a terrifying species to have as an obligate prey item: we’re smart, we make and use weapons, we work in groups, and we hold grudges. I think logically vampire instincts would reflect this; they would instinctively want to hide from humans, and being in a room with a group of humans and no easy escape or in a crowd of humans would be a disagreeable experience to a vampire.
I think, given their highly sensitive senses and greater sensory processing requirements, vampires might also be vulnerable to sensory overload.
Going by this model, being in a bar and on crowded city streets was probably a pretty disagreeable experience for Valerie: lots of noise, lots of lights and movement, lots of humans, no easy concealment or escape.
I think there’s a lot of experiences vampires and autistic people might handshake meme on.
(I think it’d be very on-brand if vampires intuitively perceive eye contact as a threat display and do not like it).
I think it’d make a lot of sense if vampires are actually pretty nervous/fearful creatures, but it isn’t obvious to humans because they don’t express fear and distress the way a human would; they have very little fawn response, it’s mostly freeze/hide, flight, or fight with them; a vampire panic attack or sensory overstimulation melt-down is externally expressed as flight, hiding, or extreme aggression.
Basically:
“All of this is what makes owls incredibly unethical to keep as pets. … An owl is a wild animal misunderstood even by self-proclaimed experts and many of us in the field are only just recently actually seeing them. There are so many misconceptions about owls that lead to them being abused and traumatized by being treated by something they aren’t. … In many ways, an owl is very much a wise animal because they devote all their time to silently observing. What people mistake as the bird simply “zoning out” is actually the bird analyzing everything it’s hearing and seeing. They don’t need to look around to observe, their ears see even more than their very keen eyes. They make silent note of everything you do in their presence, and if you misstep and cross them, they will remember it.”
Yeah, that vibe.
Which, y'know, it is kind of interesting to think of Blindsight through the lens of, like…
OK, per this model, Jukka is a being who puts a high priority on conserving his energy, and who might experience a lot of built-for-humans environments as overtaxing his sensory processing resources.
Seems like the sort of being who might find that “Scramblers interpreted human signals as hostility because a lot of our conversations are about ‘useless’ non-survival-related stuff and Scramblers could only interpret that as an attempt to make them waste computational resources trying to analyze nonsense” idea truthy. He wouldn’t be the first neuroatypical person to project his own experiences onto the alien.
Ideas for Blindsight vampire physical appearance (I’m going to tag people I’ve seen doing Blindsight fan-art in case they find this interesting; @ryuki-draws,@wiltking,@brovitranduila):
I don’t remember much detailed description of what they actually look like in the books. My preferred interpretation is:
- They look weird; it is very visually obvious that they are closely related to humans but are not humans.
- They’re a sibling species of humans, not an offshoot. That is to say, vampires aren’t weird humans, vampires and humans are different variations of weird Homo erectus. So I like the idea that vampires have some “primitive” features retained from the last common ancestor species that humans lost.
So,Blindsight vampire physical trait ideas:
- Weird jaws and teeth. In Blindsight they’re described as being about as lupine as it’s possible for a hominid’s to be. My idea is vampires are more carnivory-inclined and more adapted toward eating raw meat than humans (that protein they needed to get from eating people would probably have been destroyed by denaturation, so they probably needed to eat the meat raw). So, compared to humans, vampires have a bigger jawbone, more powerful jaw muscles, and pronounced prognathism. They also have “chinless” faces like Neanderthals, because that’s an ancestral hominid trait. Vampire molars are similar to human molars (they are omnivores, so they do have a use for grinding teeth), but their premolars are “scissor” teeth for shredding raw meat, and their front teeth are “scary” carnivore teeth, sharp and able to bite through and tear raw meat with ease (as per expectations, they have large sharp canines - a vampire looks most obviously inhuman when they show their teeth). Possibly vampires fit some extra teeth into their longer jaws. Male vampires could pass for humans more easily than female vampires, because facial hair could hide the weird jaw somewhat.
- Bigger and more protruding earlobes than humans, to direct more sound toward the ear kind of like a parabolic antenna. Possibly the ears have some limited mobility; can be flicked a little, inclined a little in the direction of interesting sounds, etc.. Movement of the ears may have had some expressive/communicative functions in ancient vampire culture, and modern vampires may still make some of those expressions instinctively.
- Weird eyes, but not just in the way you’d think. Yes, they have cat pupils and “eyeshine,” but aside from that vampire eyes look like Homo erectus eyes, and Homo erectus eyes looked a lot like chimpanzee eyes. So vampire eyes look like chimpanzee eyes (so dark sclera and large sort of orange-brown irises) but with slit pupils and “eyeshine” in darkness. Human eyes are a whole different kind of weird.
- Edit: also, the books don’t mention this, but I think it would make a lot of sense (and be thematically appropriate) for vampires to have the same rapid eye movements as Echopraxia zombies, and for the same reason. Though I think in vampires it might be a behavior associated with hunting and other high-energy states, and most of the time they might conserve sensory processing resources by processing vision more like humans do and moving their eyes more like humans do. A vampire doing rapid eye movements might be the same kind of red flag that the “hunting flush” is.
Related to this: reading Echopraxia has given me inspiration for a fanfic exploring what prehistoric Blindsight vampires were like. I wrote a short fanfic about that years ago but I’m not satisfied with it and I think making a second attempt at the premise is going to be my first project when the repairs on my computer are finished (I’m told they should be done around May 10th).
I’ve actually got a halfway-solid plot for it by now. I may post a few mostly worldbuilding-related ideas and thoughts for it here over the next few days. I’ll be tagging them “project Blampire fanfic.”
Alsore:Blindsight/Echopraxia vampires having some capacity for affectionate relationships: Valerie’s behavior toward Bruks near the end of the book definitely reads to me as interpretable as affection. It can be interpreted as pure manipulation, and it’s not exactly warm, but… If Blampires have a love language, that’s what I’d expect it to look like in the context of a relationship with a human.
It’s pretty easy to imagine that if an ancient vampire saw that they’d be like, “aww, somebody has a crush!”
It makes me think of this: Valerie’s behavior in that section feels very catgirl gf in the catgirl gf with behavior extrapolated from actual cats sense.
I’ve finished Echopraxia. Validating to see Peter Watts noticed the same fridge logic issues with Blindsight vampires that I did:
“Pretty good hack right?” Admiration mingled with fear in Sengupta’s voice. “Can you imagine what those fuckers could do if they actually could stand to be in the same room together?”
He shook his head, amazed, trying to take it in. “That’s why we made sure they couldn’t.”
“Made? I thought they were just you know. Really territorial.”
“Nobody’sthat territorial. Someone must’ve amped their responses to keep them from ganging up on us.” Bruks shrugged. “Like the Crucifix Glitch, only - deliberate.”
“How do you know that I haven’t seen that anywhere.”
“Like you said, Rak: it’s the only model that fits. How do you think the line could even breed if their default response was to eviscerate each other on sight? Call it the, the Divide and Conquer Glitch.” He smiled bitterly. “Oh, we were good.” - Echopraxia.
Yeah, not just how they’d even breed if they were like that, but as I kind of touched on previously, “how did any vampires survive their childhoods?” is a huge fridge logic issue with the “vampires kill each other on sight” thing. It makes no sense for a highly intelligent hominid species to kill each other on sight because humans are possibly the most intensely K-strategist animals on the planet and we’re like that because we’re smart; human babies are extremely vulnerable and dependent because of the big infant head problem and human children need a long period of learning and lots of attention for that extended phenotype of culture to be passed on. Vampires would need a huge exception to the “totally selfish and super-aggressive toward each other” rule just to explain how any vampire survived their childhood, let alone to explain how they managed to develop and maintain any culture (like that click language they supposedly had), and having culture is one of the primary advantages of being smart. And if vampire children were at all like human children I can’t even really see it working with just a mother-child bond, for the first years at least there’s probably going to need to be at least one other “parent” (father, grandmother, aunt, whatever) to hunt while the mother is stuck with the extremely dependent young child, so that implies that cooperative relationships between adult vampires were possible and common.
Really, the implication is right there even in Blindsight itself, in the part where it speculates that ancient vampires had a language and specifically a language designed to imitate natural sounds so they could talk to each other while sneaking up on prey and you can hear traces of this in modern vampire vocal tics. That implies ancient vampires hunted cooperatively, talked to each other substantially, and had their own culture!
The book suggests this was a genetic tweak (the index mentions alterations to facial recognition mechanisms), but I think it would make a lot of sense if a lot has to do with differences in upbringing. This is the way Echopraxia describes the social environment modern vampires are kept in:
Every vampire ever brought back from the junkyard: scrupulously isolated from their own kind, every aspect of their environment regulated and monitored. Hemmed in by crosses and right angles, mortally dependent on precisely rationed drugs to keep them from seizing at the sight of a windowpane. Creatures that, for all their terrifying strength and intelligence, couldn’t even open their eyes on a city street without keeling over.
…
He shook his head. “They’d never have met. Vampires are hardly ever allowed in the same wing of a building at the same time, let alone the same room. And if they did meet they’d be more likely to tear out each other’s throats than draw up escape plans.”
So, modern vampires have been raised entirely by people with a radically different neurotype (humans) who have no idea what parenting styles a vampire child would respond well to, in total isolation from any members of their own species. This sounds to me like a recipe for profound social and psychological maladjustment.
Imagine you’re a member of a species with low-trust social intuitions and you’ve been raised by weak, slow, stupid, timid people you intuitively recognize as prey and who are very obviously afraid of you, and then you meet a member of your own kind; a stranger as fast and strong and smart and fierce as you who can credibly look at you and think “I can take them.” I bet you’d feel really threatened!
So, yeah, I think plausibly the primary reason ancient vampires weren’t so psychotically aggressive toward each other is they had their entire childhoods to get acclimatized to dealing with people with about the same capabilities and mindset as themselves and develop emotional and psychological resources for that.
I like the idea that, like, ancient vampires were profoundly not nice people (for one thing they literally ate people, for another thing given Siri’s emotional reaction to Jukka’s mannerisms I really doubt most of the ancient vampire DNA in humans got there consensually), but modern vampires are like a Flanderized parody of them with a lot of their worst traits amped up to eleven, because they’re kind of like feral children. Like, if an ancient vampire met Jukka or Valerie they’d be like “oh my God, you poor messed-up feral child, what happened to you?”
