Chapter 18 - A Brief Aside part 1

Please forgive me as I interrupt this narrative to speak directly to you, my precious readers. I know it is not the proper thing to do, according to your modern rules of literary etiquette. My only excuse is that I am a product of bygone days-- so many of those bygone days, in fact, that writing had not even been invented when I walked the earth a living man. I can only beg your indulgence of my lack of sophistication. Setting words to print is not a natural thing for me. Keep that in mind if you ever find my endeavors amateurish or trite. The closest I ever came to writing as a mortal man was drawing crude pictures in the dirt with a stick. And then I always erased my simple pictograms immediately afterward, out of some irrational fear that what I drew might be made real. It was one of my tribe's few superstitions. My people were not cave painters.

Apologies dispensed with, I think it is important, before I continue, for you to understand my nature... and the nature of creatures such as myself.

As I have said, I am the oldest living vampire... so far as I know. As this is a tell all book (yes, you may chuckle; it was meant to be humorous), I am eager to "spill the beans" about vampires.

The first thing you need to understand is this: there is nothing supernatural about my condition. No ravening spirit animates my undead flesh. I was not cursed by god or the devil, not that I am aware of, nor was I condemned to wander the benighted earth as a blood-craving revenant to atone for some moral transgression I might have committed while I was a living man. I was merely infected, I have come to believe, by some bizarre species of bacterial or viral organism.

Oh, I can feel your displeasure! You wanted gods and demons! You wanted magic and monsters!

Sorry to disappoint you.

Perhaps I can temper your frustration by explaining that, over the course of 30,000 years, I have come to the realization that nothing supernatural really exists at all. Is that, perhaps, the sort of revelation you were hoping to find within these pages? That all of these things, which you consider fantastic, are simply natural phenomenon we do not and may never understand.

Gods and demons and ghosts, and even immortal beings like myself... at their core, they are just weird natural phenomenon.

Once, I thought the stars were the spirits of my ancestors. Now I know that they are simply suns, just like our own warm and life-giving Sol. Countless suns, unimaginably far away, blazing amid vast wastelands of space, circled by their own attendant systems of planets and moons and comets and meteors.

Spirits?

The residual thought patterns of living intelligences that persist after physical death. Energy, according to your modern physics, cannot be destroyed.

If you would permit me to venture a conjecture, I believe the thought patterns of sentient beings do not willingly nor easily dissolve once self-awareness has been achieved, that the sentient mind, by virtue of its ability to govern itself, becomes a recursive system, a self-sustaining organism. I believe this because I have seen ghosts, and they have frightened me just as they have the power to frighten any mortal man or woman... but only because they are not completely understood. We all fear the unknown.

And gods?

I know nothing of gods. I have seen men-- and even vampires like myself-- who dared to advertise themselves as gods, to exalt themselves above their fellow man for selfish gain or out of some malady of the ego. I will even tell you, in future volumes of this saga, of one such cabal who did just that, but I have met no being of such all-encompassing power as to cause me to consider them truly godlike. I do, however, concede the possibility of gods. Or at least "intelligences", vast inhuman intellects of such scale and complexity we cannot hope to grasp their full form and nature with our limited senses.

Call them gods, angels, little green men... Call them anything you like. Do you actually believe that the infinitesimal grain of sand we call our home is the only world in the universe that has hosted self-awareness? Perhaps the galaxies are simply synapses in the mind of some unimaginable supreme being.

Even now, science peeks into the starry distances and discovers an abundance of alien worlds. Our count grows day by day. We spy upon natural wonders in the furthest depths of space of inestimable intricacy, collapsed stars of such density that not even light can escape them, stars so vast they could swallow a thousand of our suns, galactic clusters that stretch for billions upon billions of light years. Some learned men believe our universe is part of some greater omniverse, and that this overarching super-reality is a froth of multifarious universes, and each fragile bubble in this vast and viscid foam is its own self-contained cosmos.

Who can say then what other forms of intelligence have evolved in the infinite reaches of time and space, beings we comprehend no better than the microscopic bacteria that thrive in your gut can comprehend you in your totality? To the biota of your digestive tract, you are God.

The thought boggles the mind.

Or at least it boggles mine.

But I digress.

Suffice it to say, even though I am a natural creature, just like you and yours, I may still prove myself worthy of your interest. Isn't it enough to be so very long lived? What other being has withstood the grinding teeth of the ages so well as I? 30,000 years is not that impressive when measured against the lifespan of stars or galaxies or universes, but in this world, in comparison to the men and women who walk this planet Earth, I am a Methuselah among mayflies. All that is left of even the most well preserved of my contemporaries are grimy bones and broken crockery and a few frost burned corpses preserved in tundral wastes.

None such as I.

None that still think. None that still remember.