Creating the World

When I set out to create the world of the Hypernaturals, my original intent was to take all the standard vampire tropes and re-create them as possible things. Things that technically could happen, however unlikely. I researched things. Animal models. I wanted every single feature of a vampire possible to be recreated with something that could evolve, and that could be created by re-writing the genetic code via an infectious agent.

The core idea was the genes are selfish and try to conserve themselves, so an infectious agent is ‘trying’ to preserve itself into the future.

Skin Color

One of the things I wrote into all four of the original novels in 2010 is that all Vampires are pale. Alopecia is a thing: skin color is just about melanin. To have a pale vampire just meant they lost their Melanin.

So: In the original version of Naked Came the Vampire, Jessica shows up at the nude beach just coated in sunscreen. When Adrian visits Dede to get his temporary bridge in Siren Song, he realizes Dede is from the Carabean islands, but pale now. Etc.

I HATED it.

I decided slavishly recreating ALL the characteristics of Vampire tropes is stupid, and that I wanted my Vampires to be multicultural, multi-ethnic. A core theme of all my books is that people are just people, and there I was undoing that with that stupid idea. The concept of ‘Race’ is dumb. It is ‘The Human race’. Everyone who is a human is a human, and ethnically they might be all sorts of colors, but they are all the same because they are all human. That gets ever more important as the books go on in many subtle ways. Pale Vasmpires had to go.

Before I published any of that dreck, I went back through every book sequentially (only the first four existed at that time) and wrote all that garbage back out. Dede was beautiful once again. Jessica was a proud Hispanic and looked like she had a father from old Mexico. Helen is still white as hell. Ethnicity and origin controlled once again, and it is so much better.

The Problem with Vampire Healing

One of the things I researched was how aging works in humans (to the degree that we even know…). Cellular repair. Telomeres. Different animals that live much longer, like Sharks that never get cancer and are five hundred years old.

It seemed like the animal models were there, but that what the new genetic codes laid down by the virus needed was a way to enforce their changes. Human cells have a double check to make it so that a replicated cell is correctly replicated. There is an error rate the accumulates over time. This is more or less the same thing as a digital code that is copied from place to place. Without Error Checking and Correcting, bits are dropped. Errors enter. Perhaps not as bad as analog recordings used to degrade as they were copied, but entropy is still the law. There is no such things a perfect copy all the time.

If a human can, in theory, live to be about a maximum of 120 with two checks, what does adding a third check do? If its standard binary, then now they can be 240. Another check makes that 480, another around a thousand, and another ten thousand. go from 2 checks to five, and you can live a very long time it seems. You can not get infinitely old. The earth is going to burn up from the Sun turning red and expanding in a few billion years. Humans will have turned Earth to Venus long before that at the current course and speed.

I had a way to make humans last a long time, and I also had animal models for other things, like replacing parts of their bodies that are damaged. You can not live thousands of years and not be able to do that. Your teeth wear out, as hard as they are and no matter what they are made of. Still, if you assume that all these checks are here, then adding on organ replacement and such is a logical extension, so I went that way with it. It does no good to look twenty-five your whole life if your teeth are gone after a century or so.

omewhere down the line (when I was writing the conversation between Jessica and Adrian about tattoos), I realized I had created a problem. Damage is always repaired. Things are always replaced. So now any body modification ever made for whatever reason is undone at the cellular level.

Crap.

I tried to think my way out of that, but so far I have not been able to. Tattoos are undone, Breast implants rejected, chin implants. The worst part (to my way of thinking) was that someone who is sexually the wrong gender at birth and has gone through all the pain and suffering to get that repaired now gets that un-repaired.

I have not introduced a trans character yet, but I have been thinking about that. What would it be like to have that undone or better, what if the Vampire virus understands that? More on that next section.

More Women than Men / Women the Strongest.

The core idea of the Vampirophage mostly modifying women evolved from a couple of things.

• Women have a raw deal in this world. Most human men are complete shitheads. It would be nice to have a world where the women were in charge.
• Women are physically stronger than men. Not in terms of lifting power at the gym so much as resilence. Living longer. Better able to deal with pain and stress. Etc.
• The Y chromosome is the shortest chromosome. It is degenerating.
• Some things are sex-linked. A calico cat is female. A male Calico can occur, but they are usually weaker. Smaller. less healthy.
  

• It USED to be that being an orange tabby was a male trait, but recently there has been a huge uptick in female orange tabby’s.
• In the animal kingdom, there are numerous models for men as the sex object and women as the main worker / provider. Female peacocks don’t mess around with all the plumage. They have things to do. Males are completely disposable in many cases. Male lions are lazy assholes. Male elephants are driven from the herd at a certain age because they get too destructive. Thereafter, all they are good for is mating.

I liked the idea that Adrian would come over and have his world turned upside-down. That he would be the weaker sex, a sex object, and not at all trusted by his new species. It was so fun. When the male Sirens came along, even they had women really running things and keeping the species going (an unsubtle analog to humans: We would not be here and in one piece as a species but for women.).

So: The Vampirophage targets women, and when it infects a male, it is a mistake. Here is where I wonder about the idea of being born the wrong sex. What if you are a born male, and are really a woman? Could the Phage re-write everything and make that a genetic reality as well? I like this idea, but I am not sure if I can make the science of that work yet.

Why a Male Narrator?

So many reasons.

• I wrote a superhero story. Working title ‘Powered Up’ but will probably just be called ‘Power’. The protagonist is a woman named Heather Adams, and she receives a gift she does NOT want. Multi-Universe beings decided to procreate and sent off a spark. It landed in our universe, and in her. The patterns of her energy in her brain were a match, and it merged with her to create a baby new being. A baby that can control all forms of energy in this particular Universe. She is just a baby: to move to other universes when she is all grown up takes starting here.
  • Here you can see the nut of the Hypernaturals. I wanted a super-hero creation story that made some kind of sense in a physics-based world. To do that required leaving this universe for the multi-verse. I had just finished reading a few books about string theory when I wrote it…
• I wrote it in first person as an experiment. A friend read it and said it needed to be in third person because, well, parts of it were not the way a girl would think about things. Ouch.
• Since males are the underdogs in the Hypernaturals, it is more fun to tell the story from the underdog point of view. Sidebar: The Morgan Olsen ‘Lonely Dancer’ novel has always been in third person.

Conclaves, The Hot Tub Parties and Sexual / Moral Behavior

My wife tolerates me. She is a whole lot smarter than I am (and I am not stupid…). One of the early things we did was go to Mensa parties, and in particular, an activity called the ‘RG’ or Regional Gathering. It is no mistake the RG and Orgy rhyme.

During the day, there were sessions about things, from the latest in physics to learning crafts. You name it. 

At night, a subset of people ended up in the hot tub. If you were a woman in that hot tub, you were surrounded by horny intelligent nerds who did not have the first clue about women. Mostly.

One of the interesting things about many Mensan’s was a general rejection of commonly accepted things. Moral behaviors for one are re-examined and often found wanting. Things needed to be explained in intellectually satisfying ways and if they weren’t they were tossed out of hand. This is not to say that there were no morals. Just that they had to make sense. Killing is bad. Treating each other well is good. These things can be explained. 

When I was thinking about how isolated the Vampires would be from one another by their need to stay hidden, I realized they needed Conclaves. A chance to get together with others of their species and let their hair down. They even have the hot tub parties. The main difference is that instead of being full of horny nerds, it’s full of horny Vampires.

This is in the books, but it bears repeating here: Humans have trouble being married for life, and we barely live a century, if that. The reasons we get married are varied, but one of them is to provide a stable situation for our children. Another is just to demonstrate, in a very palpable way, our commitment.

But what happens when:

• You are always physically twenty-five?
• You cannot (in theory) have children?
• You can live for ten thousand years?

Many Vampire romance writers put in a mate-for-life trope. There are animal models for that, to be sure. Those animals don’t have any of the things Vampires do, like multi-century lives. For animals and for people, it is always about caring for the offspring.

I think that if you are going to live that long and be that physically young, Poly is how you end up. It’s an opinion, but most humans are already serially monogamous. That’s a bit like serially Poly. You date, you have sex with someone, you break up, repeat. Marry, divorce, marry. In most cases many times. Even inside of marriage, infidelity is rampant. Studies say 25% but that is surely low since you are being asked to talk about if you ‘cheat’.

These days, as children become less ‘required’ for many people, the reasons to marry are also reduced.

On the other hand, same sex couples marry and adopt or find volunteers or surrogates. I was once asked to help a lesbian couple have a child. Ultimately they broke up because one was Bi, and one was Lesbian, and it led to irreconcilable differences. Lori, in the books, is based partly on that experience.

When I wrote these books to be matriarchal in nature, I also had in mind a chapter from the first Freakonomics book, and the general idea that the law of unintended consequences operates over long periods of time. In particular, women’s access to birth control and owning their own bodies led to increasing their children’s college completion, increases in labor force participation, higher wages (though still not equal…), and increased family incomes. The entire two income family and what it has made possible for the middle class goes back to birth control in the 1960s!

Put all that into a blender, set on ‘Frappe’, and long-lived Vampires, mostly female, which would magnify all these things.

If we have learned anything in the early 21st century, it is that love is love. In the same way that a parent will love all their kids, you can love more than one other person romantically. 

Why Twenty Five?

When I was thinking about how to create long lives, I realized that it meant they were going to look young for a very long time. There is a place in the mid-twenties where you (as a human) quit growing and start dying. It varies by individual when you cross over to that. I made it twenty five as an average because in part, I needed them to look like they had at least graduated from College and had a little experience out there to be believable to the humans.

This had the side effect of leaving all Vampire in their sexual prime, and further, powered up to Vampire levels. Another reason why the hot tub parties at the Conclaves are epic.

Have a Type?

Most people have a type. In some cases that type runs against the type of person they should be with. I play with that a lot in the books.

I am not talking here about sexual preference. Just other things. Adrian thinks a great deal about how Jessica was designed by nature to match his preferences. I based his preferences in part on my son. He always has dated Hispanic women with long black hair. I myself have a strong preference for intelligent women, as in really smart. The woman I wanted to marry in high school was straight ‘A”, went to Rice University, multi-lingual, and did summer studies at UTMB on pain and nervous systems structures. 

I know a man that married a smart woman, divorced her and dated a series of other smart women. Ultimately he realized he wanted a woman that would just listen to him as the authority on stuff and never challenge that. It would be fair to say we have pretty much the opposite taste in women.

Tall, short, round, skinny, muscular, etc. Everyone has a type. A thing that is what they look for in a lover. It does not always work out. One woman I was serious about in my twenties said we would never work because I wanted kids and she did not. I never once mentioned wanting kids, and have no idea where she got that, but it turned out to be true. She married a guy that she never had kids with, so I guess we both got what we wanted out of that. Somehow.

When Jessica has a type and finds Adrian a century down the road, she is working against type. She has learned that what she looked for in a man was not healthy for her. Again, based on people that I know, and what they did to fix their relationship issues (after MUCH experimenting).

I find the idea of types interesting and I wonder where they come from? I know a small blonde white woman that only dates tall muscular bodybuilders who are black. She won’t even look at anyone else. It’s interesting. People coming and going all day, and when that one type goes by, her head turns.

Whatever that underlying programming is, be it genetic or some thing that happened along the way that influenced their preference, it’s great fun to play with. Helen is NOT Adrian’s physical type, yet they figure out how to make it work.