Erasure and Affirmation (Hypernaturals 11)

What We Do Next

Mom waited patiently. When the room was ready, she continued. "As you all are aware, Vampires know nothing about themselves. No records. Keeping the Secret is all. This ignorance meant that DNA was sequenced, studied, but the records never kept. Progress slow. You cannot keep everything you need to know about how Vampire DNA is modified in one's head. Not even the smartest person I know, my granddaughter Laura could do that."

Behind mom, DNA sequencing appeared on the screens.

"The Sirens have no need of that. They could sequence away and store the data. That is what the lab did. They studied Melissa. They knew exactly how her DNA diverged from human.."

The screen split, and there were two DNAs, one left, one right.

"Look at that! On the left, part of the genes that code for the eyes. On the right, a human woman's eyes. Sirens in this lab knew the difference! We... Vampires and the humans that love them did not."

The screen changed to an outline of a body, with tags and sequence numbers. "They had a map. What evolved over millions of years, laid out. Every change the Vampirophage made, documented. There: the sequences for metal tolerance. There, the sequences for metal deposition. There, part of the sequences for the polymerization of muscles. All of it. The entire dance of DNA, RNA, and expression. The complex relationships between things that are not single codons, but long sequences related to hundreds of other places on the genome. If you want to know how far back Vampires evolved? You could infer it from this type of data. With only the quick looks I have had time for on this project, I see it spanning millions of years."

Mom turned away from the screen. "The amount of work that went into just that is phenomenal. They thought they had time to do this right. If they had more time, they might have. As Denise mentioned, they rushed their timetable. The people that wanted results now rather than waiting for the science. Their own conservative factions and the need to see results for money sooner rather than later. With this map, they went to work creating a recombinant Virus. A Virus that would undo all the changes. Re-baseline Vampires back to human."

Bomb dropped.

Mom leaned against the table and looked around the room as she waited. She smiled at me, sitting with my family. Angel and Vera, holding hands. Jessica, Helen, and Morgan. Rachel and Helen, shoulder to shoulder. Nakoma sitting forward and paying attention. Dad had the young kids back int their RV. Marvin and Skye are here and were sitting with mom before she stood.

"Rushed as they were, they focused on particular Vampire advantages they wanted to delete. Hearing and strength. They wanted to be able to win in a fight, and they wanted to be able to sing to a former Vampire and have her succumb. Strip off during song night and lay on the table awaiting their pleasure."

That caused enough outrage that Denise stood up. "People: If Sally has to keep waiting for you to calm down, she is going to be up here until next Tuesday."

Denise telling off the Council. Love it.

The room calmed. Mom went on. "As you are aware, the Siren's used their bioweapon on Adrian. Field test. It made him very sick. It did not kill him. The reasons are many. I have gone through all their data with Jessica, and I see the outlines of their errors and assumptions. They are, in order, first and foremost that they captured and sampled a female Vampire, and tested on a male one."

Mom overrode the wave this time. She kept talking. "This led to basic site errors. They assumed XX, they attacked XY, and so there were transcription errors in a few places. Second: They attacked a male Vampire, but not a baseline one. A different one. A mutant, if you will, although it remains to be seen if it is mutancy or only genetic variance that is normal for males. They attacked a male that never had aggression. Has hyper-senses relative to the norm. Is a fertile male. On and on. Using the lab equipment and looking at some of the same sites in Helen, Jessica, and Morgan, they were all different enough it would have worked better on Helen, less so Jessica, and not at all on Morgan. In that one family genetic line, I see evolutionary progressions and mutations. There are other 'line' issues that make me doubt this would have worked on Helen. Whoever is Melissa's Vampire progenitor, they are far enough back evolutionarily speaking that they differ from Helen in significant ways."