Transient (A Blindsight Fanfic - one shot) by Memphet'ran
Words: 2k+
Link: https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/transient-a-blindsight-fanfic-one-shot.148242/
( My attempt at a short fanfic about Blindsight vampires, as I think it's one of the most awesome treatments of the vampire legend ever. I just my writing's OK. Enjoy (hopefully) )
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Southern Africa, Last Glacial Maximum
He has no word for himself or for those like him. He has never needed either. The people he kills have many words for those like him. Most of those words are some variation on demon or killer or monster, but the one which will be remembered the longest is vampire.
He huddles in a dark, wet crevice in the rock, waiting for the sunset. He is tall and yellow skinned. Long black hair spills down his shoulders, but his face is as smooth as a child's. His face is grotesque, with prominent sharp cheekbones and a long narrow jaw. His limbs are long, spider-like. He is naked, save for a piece of antelope hide tied around his waist in which he keeps a knife of chipped stone, which he has sunk into a haft or carved wood and secured with rawhide.
He is hungry. He is badly deficient in a vital protein. His nervous system is beginning to fail. He does not know this. He does not even really know that he is dying, as he has only a sketchy concept of what it is to live. But he does know what he must do. He must wander the grasslands until he finds other people. He must follow them, taking care that he is never seen or heard by them. He must wait for an opportunity: a careless child that wanders too far from the camp perhaps, or a woman who goes out to look for roots with fewer companions than is wise, or a man who makes the same mistake on the hunt, or a watcher who surrenders to sleep in the night and leaves the tribe unprotected. He must kill this person with his spear, or slit their throat with his stone knife, and then he must drag them away and eat their flesh. He does not know that this will replenish the protocadherin proteins his body desperately needs, but he does know that it will make the hunger ease. When he has done this a few times he will be able to go back to the oblivion of the long sleep, until hunger wakes him once again.
The sun begins to die. He waits for it to be night. If he had a conception of friend, he might call the night that. It is a great friend to all those like him. It smothers the eyes of his victims, but his own eyes drink the starlight and are satisfied.
He sets out across the savannah. He sniffs for the scent of people and looks for the signs of their passage with an expertise that would shame any woodsman, and he moves with stealth that no human could ever dream of. He does all this instinctively, with no more awareness than he has of putting one foot in front of another or expanding and contracting his chest to breathe. His mind is much more compartmentalized than those of the people he kills. Almost everything happens in the dark machinery of conditioned reflex. There is little need for I or you in the solitary, silent lives of those like him, and so evolution is doing away with those things.
He does not find people that night. He finds an antelope. His spear is still in good condition. Sometimes the wood rots while he is in the long sleep and he has to make a new one. He throws the spear between the antelope's ribs and into its heart with a precision no human could possibly have matched. It takes him no conscious effort. He throws it like a man in a dream, with no control over his own body. He eats ravenously. The bloody meat fills his stomach, but he knows he needs something it does not have.
He has wandered too far from his hole in the rock to hide out the daylight hours there. He hides in a clump of bush and trees, covering himself so expertly that even at close range he might be missed. He does not sleep. There are too many predators and scavengers that might be tempted by a still, unaware body. He sets out again with the end of the light, and this time he does find traces of people. He follows the trail until the sun forces him to stop again. He finds a hollow between rocks where he can wedge himself to wait out the light, and he picks up the trail again when darkness comes back.
This time he finds them before dawn. Hide tents set up in a rough circle. Six men sit around a flickering fire in the center. Night watchmen, watching for things like him. He can smell the people. It stirs his hunger, but he waits. He is an ambush predator: he will wait until he can catch one unaware and alone.
The light comes back. The people begin to move. The light is their friend, just as the darkness is his. Women go off to look for roots and leaves, fruit and nuts. Old people and children stay behind. Men stand watch. There seem to be a few too men; the rest are probably hunting.
He catches the smell of one of the young women. It touches things in his mind. He is no longer now. He is in many thens, catching the smell of a woman like himself and avoiding her. And he is then and then and then, approaching such a woman, lying on her, entering her, her smell filling his nostrils. This woman smells a little like the people around her, but she smells a little like those women too. He can see things about her too. The long face that looks carved from angles, the arms and legs that are just a little longer than everyone around her, the yellow-brown skin.
Now he is then, in another place that is not here and another time that is not now. He sees a woman who has come too close to the hole in the rock where he will spend the long sleep. He runs from his hiding place, tackles her. She doesn't have time to do anything but look surprised before he is on her and she is on the ground. He is not hungry. He is young. It has not been many whens since his body began to ripen with puberty and he and his mother began to look at look at other as intruders. He has never been with a woman. This is not a woman of his own kind, but she will be less risky than one of his own kind, who might attack him for coming too close to her. She is weak. He easily forces her legs open and pushes himself into her. He watches her run away. He hides in the hole in the rock and the long sleep takes him. Hunger drives him from the long sleep four times before he sees her again, and she is with a young woman, and the young woman smells like him. This is the only child he knows he has. He has been with three women like himself, but he has never seen any of them again. If he smells them he avoids them.
This woman he smells now is not his daughter. His daughter is an old woman with white hair now, or was the last time he saw her, and he has fallen into the long sleep three times since then. She does not eat the flesh of people and she is blind in the dark and she does not sleep the long sleep, and so she has burned away her life while he lies in hidden caves and crevices with his blood and water pooled around his organs and his outer tissues turned to parchment.
This woman he will eat if he gets the chance.
That night he enters the camp. The watchmen are there, but they are sleepy. Crypsis is as natural and unconscious to him as blinking; he avoids their dull awareness without being aware of what he is doing. He finds an old woman and drives his knife into the back of her brain. She is a good choice. She is too old to have any more children; her loss will not hurt the tribe's reproductive potential, and it is important that the tribe survives because if people like him were to kill all the tribes they would soon die too. He leaves just as he enters; instinctively concealing his movements with a skill that would have made any Special Forces soldier envious. The tribe will awake to simply find her gone. He carries her away, and when he thinks he has reached a minimum safe distance he begins to feed.
The next night the watchmen are more alert. He waits a few nights, then enters the camp again and kills another old woman. A few nights later, he takes a child, and another child a few days after that. His hunger fades. He looks for a place to return to the long sleep. He finds a cave, hidden in a crevice in the rock. The lower brain decides that it would be nearly impossible to see for someone without his pattern-matching skills. It passes to the shriveled stump of what humans call the person the message that this place feels safe. His body begins preparing for the long sleep. Like so much else, it is a process completed without consulting him. The lower brain flips the switch and the body begins to cycle first into deep sleep and then into almost-death. Blood is pulled into the body core. The outer flesh dries like a prune. When something in the deep hindbrain decides that hunger has become unbearable blood will be allowed to flow back into it and it will revive. For now, he has the appearance of a withered mummy. By the time his long sleep ends the tribe he has visited should have had a chance to make new children to replace the people he has taken from them.
***
A young girl walks across the grasslands. Ten young men walk with her. They carry spears.
The cave is well hidden. A normal person would not have found it. But this girl is not normal. You can see it in her face, which looks like it was carved from brown wood with quick, broad strokes, leaving a sculpture with too many angles. You can see it in the length of her limbs. It's not immediately obvious, which was why she hadn't had her throat cut at birth or in early childhood. Her mother never told anyone else of the way she had once been defiled by a night-killer.
The critical development genes are recessive. She should have been human neurotypical. But somewhere deep in her line there was another mating with a night-killer. Her mother had passed on to her a handful of strings of enemy code, one of which was a recessive gene that influenced spatial perception. She knows nothing of genes, of course, but she knows that she can see the land in a way that nobody else among her people can. She can see it as a night-killer sees it.
She can see the night-killer's cave. The safe refuge that no human should have been able to find.
The entrance is so narrow she can barely squeeze through it. She takes a torch from one of the hunters and goes in. She knows if the night-killer is there and awake she will be dead. She is gambling that it will be in its death sleep. Nothing attacks her. The hunters follow her into the cave. They find a dry yellow mummy curled up on the cave floor. One of the hunters thrusts a spear through its chest. Dark blood flows. They shudder at the unnaturalness of that wet blood flowing from within the withered husk and tear it apart.
The almost-death is a beautifully intricate adaptation, but it has downsides. It leaves one vulnerable. Metabolic reactivation is too slow to let you fight back when somebody stabs a spear through your heart. You have to find a well-hidden place to sleep away the years and hope nobody else finds it.
There are always downsides.
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NOTES
1) For anybody curious about this universe, the story can be found here ( http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm ) and a neat explanatory video on Blindsight vampires is available here. ( https://youtu.be/wEOUaJW05bU?si=_52MD06GtQxkKAjR ) I've taken some creative license with what the ancient vampires were like, of course, but I've tried to be faithful to the radically awesome original material. I think my portrayal of the vampire is pretty faithful to what the background material suggests: a sociopathic, territorial loner.
2) I similarly took some creative license with vampire physical appearance. Most of it is pretty faithful to Watts's descriptions, but the skin color is my own conjecture – I figure that they would have started out as dark skinned, like early humans, and become somewhat lighter due to both nocturnal habits and the "vampire pallor" caused by the way they keep blood in their body cores. I doubt they would have looked like Donny Mas in the video, or at any rate African vampires certainly shouldn't have – they would have had to move around at least a little during the day to follow human bands, which in equatorial areas should have kept them from becoming too light skinned. The beardlessness is also my own supposition, based on the idea that if you lived on raw meat having a giant mop around your face would really suck.
3) Vampire brains are described as more compartmentalized than ours, and their intelligence is said to be similar to autistic savantism. Hence the basis of my portrayal of them. I have to admit this was a rather challenging – but enjoyable – project, given how alien their thought processes supposedly are. Finally, Siri Keaton's description of vampire existence as a dreamstate (this was inference, mind you) gave me the inspiration for the spear-throwing bit. I considered portraying the vampire's existence as being really dreamlike, where he'd basically be a prisoner inside his own body in the same way people often describe being in nightmares, but I decided this would make for a rather one-dimensional characterization as it means he could never actually do anything.
4) In Blindsight vampires are described as not being able to use the past tense, as they simply do not parse past-present-future in the same way we do. I have to admit I had to take some liberties here. Think of the limited use of past tense as something imposed by the necessity of translating the vampire's experiences to something that would make sense to us. I have tried to convey the sense that vampires remember the past not so much by recollecting it as by reliving it – sort of like a post-traumatic flashback, only obviously it's not traumatic for them. Hence why the part where he meets the half-vampire woman is so odd sounding – I was trying to give the impression of a series of flashbacks rather than memories as we normally experience them.
5) We know that vampires could interbreed with humans, and apparently did so fairly often, judging by the amount of vampire genes that seems to be present in modern human populations according to the background material. The idea that such interbreeding was usually the result of vampire on human rape is my own supposition, but seems reasonable given descriptions of the vampire character in Blindsight: he is described as being extremely creepy to the human characters; I have a very hard time envisioning many humans willingly having sexual intercourse with such a creature.
6) The suggestion that the critical vampire genes were recessive is my own, but I think quite logical. Firstly, because the human traits that in Blindsight are partially the result of ancient vampire genes, such as autistic savantism, do not seem to be passed straightforwardly from parent to child. This fits with the genes being recessive. Second, I doubt a child that manifested obvious vampire traits like extreme pallor, glowing eyes, elongated canines, sociopathy, and need to drink human blood or eat human flesh would do very well at all in early human societies. Such a child would almost certainly be considered an abomination or demon in primitive early human societies and likely killed at birth or in early childhood, or at least ostracized. Given the amount of vampire DNA that seems to have made it into the modern human gene pool I think the idea that hybrids had predominantly human traits and could pass for normal human children is extremely plausible.
7) Transient is a reference to a conversation in Blindsight