Episode 1: X = Vampires The Thing About X

Transcript:

Look. Vampires aren’t real. There’s no way there is an immortal subset of humanity that’s living in perpetual darkness and feeding on a new human every night. It’s absurd.

Let’s do the math.

Assume they feed 99% of the time, killing their victims. The other 1%, the lusty, buxom woman or lithe, sculpted man is too delectable to waste and gets turned so they can have fun for eternity or whatever. That means our vampire makes 3.65 new vampires per year. It follows that each of those new vampires would do the same. You can apply the compound interest formula (1+3.65)*[(3.65)^(x-1)], where x is years elapsed. After 5 years, 825 vampires. 10 years gets you 534,673. And that’s how many humans would be dying each day for the vampire population to survive, if it were real. It’s simply not sustainable. You can change the numbers if you want. Maybe only 1 in 1,000 gets turned, and maybe they only kill a human once a fortnight to feed. It slows the growth, but on the timeline of millennia there are just too many humans dying for vampires to be real. Immortal vampires means exponential growth.

Of course, you’ll remind me that there are vampire slayers to keep the numbers in check. They’re a secret cabal of highly trained, stealthy, disciplined, financially stable warriors who pass the secrets on, generation to generation. They keep the vampire population in check.

But it’s still a matter of numbers. How many vampires would have to exist in one place, terrorizing an area before the community would realize there was enough of a problem to create and learn these skills and pass them on? I can imagine a solitary, dumb vampire getting found out and killed. Maybe even a small coven of five or six. But would such an isolated incident inspire a secret society of slayers? No. The lucky ones who’d done the killing would tell the story at holidays and festivals. In a generation, they’d be the crazy claims of great uncle Jerry. You know, the one who claimed he killed a “vampyre”. Vampires are generally depicted as smart, powerful, and wealthy. If they suspected organized resistance, they would either wipe out the town completely or just leave and come back in a few generations when the knowledge of them had become less than even myths or whisperings. Vampires would always win the long game.

The thing about vampires is that if they’re real, they probably know all of this and wouldn’t be so short-sighted as to consume all their resources and starve their kind into extinction. They’d be able to look at the math and say, “Wow, at these rates. Even with a steadily increasing human population, I’m going to starve in 3,000 years.” That kind of knowledge would inspire some real lifestyle changes. Like, “oh, you’re a very voluptuous and lively brunette. Normally, I’d turn you into a vampire so we could have eternally good, sexy times, but I’d rather not starve to death, even if it’s amongst an insane orgy of a million other beautiful beings like us. Instead, after the outrageously good love-making, I will restrain myself from turning you and instead eat you with a very decent wine and ponder what could have been.” Or perhaps this vampire will see the light and kill every vampire who didn’t agree to keeping replacement-level population growth. It’d be a species-saving genocide. Because unlike human slayers, a vampire vampire-slayer would have far better luck. He wouldn’t get worse as he aged.

Speaking of aging, I can imagine a lot of vampires end it for themselves. Even if a lot of your buddies remember when long-form epic poetry was en vogue, or love the clothing from the 14th century Ottoman empire, just like you, you’ll have to change what you wear when you go out, and eventually tire of the same media and have to find new stuff like Baroque art and Gregorian chant. The cycle will repeat ad nauseum. Then there’s the evolving language. How successful could a vampire be if he s