The Vampires
David Barringer

Vampires incorporate. Their myths are abandoned in favor of performance incentives and productivity ethic. Normal people come to be called, and to call each other, "mortals," defining themselves by their weakness. Mortals, to their credit, are no longer squeamish about vampire habits. Many mortals choose to become vampires for the perk of immortality, which, it turns out, is relative, limited by immunological health, grievous injury, and the lifespan of the host planet. Many mortals, however, refuse to change. They decline the privilege because they don't want the responsibility. The state of the economy, in particular, is blamed on the vampires, since they are thought to be in a better position to think long-term. This is probably more true than not. They have a unique perspective on time. Immortals procrastinate. They can always wait until tomorrow. They suffer no penalties, lose no advantage. So they don't respond well to performance incentives, even to ones they devise. They don't take to the productivity ethic, either, despite their sincerity in claiming its virtues. They stay very still, immobilized, for months, and their repose looks suspiciously like sleep or death. It's neither.

There are histories the vampires have always been meaning to write. They feel especially suited to the job. Many have lived in the divided cities and border towns and coastal villages in which great historic events have taken place. Among them are those who have lived for centuries in Egypt, China, Africa, Greece, Russia, England, Germany, France, Italy, the Americas, the polar regions, the Balkans, Iceland, and so on. Such a perfect match between creator and creation eroticizes the atmosphere in the conference rooms in which they discuss the possible composition of these "Histories to End All Histories." But they haven't begun these histories. They haven't even taken notes. They feel there is no rush. The task is grand; the motive, noble. After years of living with the vampires in a "bicultural," if not "biethical," society, the impatiently curious wonder whether the immortals mustn't, at some time, get going on these histories, and whether that time mightn't be, after all, now. The volumes of that history will be immense. As chronicles of human endeavor, folly, and rectitude, they will be unprecedented. They will deliver eyewitness reports no one had ever thought retrievable without the invention of time travel. But memory fades, even vampire memory, based, as it is, on the peculiar anatomy of the human brain. The "elders" can't be expected to remember every detail indefinitely. Just because one has lived during, say, the French Revolution doesn't mean one knows everything that went on in Europe and the rest of the inhabited world at that time. And what alien impulse is there that might compel a citizen of perpetuity to pay attention to world events to whose influence the immortal stands inured and whose significance the immortal will surely outlast?

Defensive about their apparent apathy, the vampires say, "Our history is our future, too. We have a lot of histories to choose from, and no one to be responsible to, not even posterity. We are posterity."

Since the last international investment-group meeting, held in Washington, D.C., the subject of the "Histories to End All Histories" has been, effectively, dropped.

Vampires are discovered, belatedly, to be expensive. So much of the valuation of human life is based on longevity and such time-dependent characteristics as "earning power" that vampires easily outpace their mortal counterparts. Unspoken is the worry that the inequivalence between mortal and immortal life cannot easily, if ever, be overcome, and that the failures to establish commensurate means of valuation between the two states of being pose, to civil harmony, a threat greater than lifespan disparity in the first place. Many mortals are energized rather than daunted by the specter of impossibility. The socially optimistic among them make efforts, take bold strides into darkness, the fog of mistake, the unknown. New indices are formulated. New protocols are established. Vampire longevity has repercussions when determining wrongful-death compensations. Cutting short an immortal's life deprives that individual not of years or decades but of all time remaining on Earth, at least until the planet's environment grows too hostile and extreme to sustain life (interplanetary travel as a means for extending immortal life beyond Earth's habitability is discounted for being too speculative). Causing the death of a single immortal would incur a cost so devastating that it would put out of business not only companies but cities, states, entire countries. So compromises are made. The immortals receive, in exchange for capitulations, partnership in the social contract.

The same goes for sentences for crimes such as homicide and manslaughter. A life sentence is surely too much for an immortal to pay for taking the life of a mortal. Yet what number of incarcerated years would an immortal find more than merely inconvenient? Again, a compromise, and in this case a rather arbitrary one. In the reverse scenario, what sufficient punishment could be imposed upon a mortal for the killing of an immortal? A mortal cannot offer a reciprocity of years, suffering, or life. The most that can be recognized is an equivalence of subjective experience: one life, whether to mortal or immortal, is still that individual's one and only life, his or her unique untransferable gift. Execution must suffice.

The insurance industry gets to work and discovers, much to their pride, that insurance matrices are remarkably flexible and can accommodate several of the trickier consequences of immortality. Vampires are not, as mortals presumed, immutable. They can deteriorate, become depressed. Some of those tempted to commit suicide, in order to achieve the one experience denied them, succeed, releasing insurance companies from significant contractual obligations. Still, the insurance matrices can't do everything. The cost of certain insurance would be prohibitively expensive for vampires were they not sitting on the boards of the insurance companies and able to artificially depress their premiums and lift the caps on disbursements. Vampires qua vampires are no more inclined to restrain their self-interests than any other corruptible (i.e. human-based) agents.

Valued more highly than mortal employees, vampires are, eventually, resented. The culture experiences a backlash so severe that some worry civil war is imminent. Vampires at every socioeconomic level protest being made the targets of resentment. They say it's unfair. They are being made into scapegoats. They cite a double standard, then quickly drop this complaint, snickering behind pale fingers. They argue that they are working very hard when they don't really need to. It's not like hard work is as pleasurable in and of itself as sexual conquest, interior design, or flight, or that it is otherwise in their interest. Any advance achieved through the bestial slog of coerced labor cannot "benefit" them in any practical way. And, besides, they were given a pretty sorry political economy to begin with. Even after a generation, their reforms have yet to be fully accepted and implemented, and they cannot be faulted for mortal intransigence (this inflammatory comment does not help matters any).

It is not long before the vampires read the scroll of public mood and realize they are, once again, in a precarious position. It tends to happen to them, this recurrence. Vampires resent being resented. Some go out stalking victims again, like in the old days, rather than adhering to the regulated diet of vacuum-sealed meal packets, delivered daily from processing plants. Rejuvenated by their transgressions, some sleeve blood from their mouths and say to hell with the mortals. Let them run their own world. What do we care anyway? We're going back to the way it was. This is what some say in the corporate hallways. Discontent spreads to the streets and lobbies, the parks and retail districts. But there are so many vampires now of diverse origins and competing social groups that internecine battles break out, and some vampires kill each other, which is tricky if you don't know what you're doing, but always possible.

Notably, many vampires became vampires at various stages of human evolution and cannot be said to be true contemporaries. They are contemporaries only in the limited sense of being presently undead. Because they became vampires at different points during the vast course of historic time, they vary greatly in their genotypes and phenotypes. There are Ice Age vampires, medieval vampires, Reformation, Renaissance, and Reconstruction vampires. Some, arguably, are of different species. A rare few of the original protovampires persist, but they are stupid, awkward, primitive by definition, though through no fault of their own, and, after so many centuries of abuse, neglect, and enslavement at the calloused hands of the "advanced" vampires, most have deteriorated to a level of profound physical decay. Their unique state of threshold animation inspires the new category of "deadish." Class segmentation among vampires, incidentally, does not operate on the basis of evolutionary status. Instead, it operates according to a more sophisticated and complex set of social and cultural factors, including, but not limited to, intelligence, beauty, strength, affability, power, wealth, bloodlust, genealogy, business acumen, patience, neutrality, virility, and the ability to shapechange.

During the Great Resentment, thousands of vampires are killed by mortals, and only a small troop of vampires survive. Of this group, a subset flourish in adversity, which is typical. They retreat and conceal their activities. They conduct a modified requiescat for their dead. The neoterists among them try to start new myths.

The fingernail of a vampire contains restorative properties, extractable in gaseous form through the application of heat. A vampire never stalks on the third Thursday of the month. Dogs can smell freshly initiated vampires, never executive officers, whose mental perfumes mask their true natures.

None stick. No one has the heart to promote, let alone obey, false customs, especially when the surviving vampires still feel grateful to have eluded the mobs and their gory frenzies. There is a phase of falling into old, comfortable habits. There descends a smoky radiance, a fraternal intimacy, a renewed commitment to tradition. But it is all too familiar-too sentimental, ethereal, and bloodless-and this phase doesn't last either.

The night acquires a freshness. Other rediscoveries of personal and environmental phenomena are greeted with relief: the pleasant rigor of conversation, the maintenance of orchards, the revelations of melancholy. Legend is understood to be "tolerable" but not important. The logistics of space travel are considered. Following the final resolutions of the decadent stage, a new, one might call "post-mature," stage appears. It is in this latter stage of the recurrence that industries fragment, grow bolder, more innovative. Libraries restore power, their lights twitching to life. Museums reopen.

© David Barringer