The Physiology of Riceonian vampires: a theory
Transcript of presentation by Dr. Amborella Glendon before the International Society of Vampirologists, St. Piro, Transylvania, Sept. 24, 2024
Esteemed colleagues:
Science has long sought to explain the vampire. With so many variants to species Homo nosferatu, however, seeking one unifying theory for all seems to me counter-productive. So my talk tonight focuses on the sub-species documented by the late researcher Dr. Anne O'Brien Rice, whose work will be cited.
Let us begin.
What color is blood? Red, yes? Why? Blood is red because it contains iron, iron bound in a flat, circular arrangement of nitrogen, carbon and hydro-carbons called a porphyrin ring:
Now, every vampirologist present knows this, but here's the bit you may have missed: that virtually the only other place in nature one finds a porphyrin ring, with magnesium at its center instead of iron, is here:
This is chlorophyll. What's chlorophyll? Stuff in plants. What does it do, in plants? It photosynthesizes.
Or in other words, it reacts to the light of the sun.
Can you think of anything else, my respected colleagues in vampirology, that reacts to the light of the sun?
Science, of course, has known of the similarity of these structures for over a century. It is only when one steps into the world of vampires they become interesting, and when reads Rice, they become astounding. When creature called Khayman, in describing his ability to explode others of his own kind, says: "Out of him a power seemed to leap...it penetrated the hindmost of the fleeing trio, the female.and her body burst into flame...[He] had kindled the powerful combustible blood he and she had in common...invading the marrow of her bones, it had caused her to explode....Going out again, he tried this new found force upon animals...not the same. He killed these creatures but they didn't catch fire...the natural blood in them, it wasn't combustible. (Rice, The Queen of the Damned, 1988)
And when another of these creatures, in describing similar explosions outside a concert venue in 1984 says (emphasis mine): "But a preternatural screech cut through the cacophony as in a blinding flash the vampire male burst into flames...There came that ghastly preternatural scream again and the blinding combustion..."(Rice, The Vampire Lestat, 1984.)
One thinks: Some component of vampire blood, not found in mortal blood, which is combustible, and burns with a blinding flash.
The central atom in hemoglobin is iron. The central atom in chlorophyll is magnesium. Ever see magnesium burn?
Magnesium burns, and it burns with a blinding flash.
In July of this year, cross-sections of the glassy patches in the parking lot outside the 1984 concert venue, where the asphalt had melted and re-solidified, were taken into the laboratory of the Institute of Vampirology for testing. The average depth of the melting was found to be 1.674 cm, and the heat needed to melt asphalt to that temperature was found to be 2500 degrees Fahrenheit. The temperature at which magnesium burns.
You may think, colleagues, that this alone would suffice for a testable hypothesis, i.e. the combustible component of vampire blood is magnesium, but I am going to beg your participation in my thought experiment a bit farther, because what if it is? What if, we obtain a sample of vampire blood, run it through a mass spectrometer, and discover an abnormally high level of magnesium, possibly even still bound in the porphyrin-ring stucture?
Human blood contains no magnesium. These creatures once were human, and their blood contained no magnesium. Then they underwent a vampiric transformation, and from that moment on have consumed nothing but mammalian blood...which contains no magnesium. So if their blood now contains enough magnesium to--under certain provocation--go off like a Roman candle, one must ask oneself, where did it come from?
To put it another way, if they start with these:
And end up with these:
Then the inescapable conclusion is that their bodies are making magnesium out of iron. They are turning an element with twenty-six protons into an element with twelve. They are splitting atomic nuclei. That's nuclear fission.
"Davis was a Black Dead Guy and one damned good-looking Dead Guy, as Baby Jenks saw it.His skin had a glow to it, the Dead glow, which in the case of White Dead Guys made them look like they were standing in fluorescent lights all the time." (Rice, The Queen of the Damned, 1988.)
Colleagues? Why are they glowing? (Laughs) Yes, I see the hands. The energy released by fission is not a smooth, ever-upwardly projecting exponential curve. There is a point where it takes more energy to split an atom than can be released by that atom, and that point is...exactly. Iron. It takes just as much energy to split an atom of iron as you would get out of it. That is 100% correct, my learned colleagues.
Just as it is also 100% true that twenty-six divided by two is not twelve.
We have two unaccounted-for hydrogen nuclei, don't we, two single-proton hydrogens. And while you can't split them again, what you can do is smash them together, a process that releases on average 1000 times the energy as fission, that powers the H-Bomb and the very sun. My hypothesis is that the Riceonian vampires are the first case known to science of biological nuclear fusion.
(Rice documents these creature's ability to fly, the so called "cloud gift" and a recent television adaptation is insistent the gift is not flying but floating. I posit they are right, these TV writers. It is microscopic bubbles of helium forming in their blood from the fusing of hydrogen nuclei until critical mass is overcome.) Speaking of the sun: As you know, what we call visible light is in actuality less than 2% of a much larger continuum called the electro-magnetic spectrum:
All nuclear reaction occur at a given rate. Exceed that safe rate, by say, removing graphite control rods in a nuclear reactor, and a controlled reaction becomes an uncontrolled reaction, or "meltdown," like Chernobyl or Fukashima. I posit that what was being 'beamed' that night in San Francisco in 1984, what 'leapt' out of Khayman, was invisible electro-magnetic radiation, possibly in the X-Ray range, which caused the rate of fisson/fusion to exceed safe levels until the magnesium levels in their blood ignited. And if they can do it, so can mortals. Radio-active objects can be tracked. They can be tracked by helicopters, aircraft and drones. They can be tracked by satellites. And if a vampire's radiation signature is as distinct as a fingerprint, then once those signatures have been uploaded to the global positioning satellites, there would be no where on Earth they could hide.
All electro-magnetic radiation, regardless of frequency, gravels at the same speed: 186,821 miles pr second. They are fast, vampires. Are they faster than light?
There is, right now, in Japan, a multi-billion dollar facility of mind-boggling complexity created to produce a magnetic field capable of containing a plasma burning at 200 million degrees centigrade, all to coax hydrogen nuclei into fusing into helium for a billionth of a second so mortals an harvest the energy given off multiplied by centillions of reactions. And vampires are just walking around?
It would seem that the first corporation to harness this natural resource would stand to reap trillions in profits as they solve humanity's need for clean energy. It might not be very pleasant for the vampire--incarcerated by a multi-national energy company, caged in a web of radiation, being bled like a horse-shoe crab for the remainder of their protracted, unnatural lives--but then they are serial killers, are they not.
Of course, the missing data, the Holy Grail as it were, is a viable sample of vampire blood, and they do tend to be very cautious, circumspect creatures. What a great boon to science it would be should one of them to, say, publish a novel telling mortals exactly where they live. But then, who would be foolish enough to do that?
Thank you for your attention. I will take questions in the lounge.
