Food would be scarce these days if there were more people that ate it. Some people I’ve met on the roads have told me that the human population has dropped to less than 25% of what it used to be. I don’t know where they got their information or how credible it is since we lost electricity years ago when the Blighted started taking over.
The Blighted are different from the vampires because even though they were once humans, often their bodies are badly wounded and they lack basic human functions of speech and feeling. They look like the vampires (and us, I guess), but they are empty inside. They don’t really have any form on consciousness that we know, aside from the urge to feed. They’re more like the zombies in old science fiction stories. I don’t know why "Blighted" became the term to describe them over zombies, since that seems more applicable to me. Maybe because it’s a less scary word? What we do know, however, is how they came about.
Years ago, scientists made a breakthrough in finding a cure for the vampires that would change their brains to no longer reject non-flesh food. It was supposed to be the end of the conflict; the vamps wouldn’t need to kill us and we wouldn’t have to live in fear that our neighbor was one of them without us knowing. The vampires were happy with this solution because it’s not like they really wanted to kill people, they’re just doing what they have to in order to survive. That’s what one of them told me a little after they went public and helped to find a cure. Things were supposed to go back to normal. Things got worse. Without getting into the specifics since I am not a scientist and don’t know everything about it, the brain function the scientists tampered with in a control group broke neural activity or something and shut down several nodes inside that are key in giving us our "human" aspects. These became the Blighted, the painless, the ever-hungry. While they retained the qualities of the vamps, they lost all ability to consciously communicate and became vessels with one thought on their mind (if they even have a mind): feeding. It was the antithesis of what the scientists were going for: instead of saving the consciousness and ridding the thirst for death, they killed the consciousness and enhanced the hunger.
The Blighted are different from the vampires because even though they were once humans, often their bodies are badly wounded and they lack basic human functions of speech and feeling. They look like the vampires (and us, I guess), but they are empty inside. They don’t really have any form on consciousness that we know, aside from the urge to feed. They’re more like the zombies in old science fiction stories. I don’t know why "Blighted" became the term to describe them over zombies, since that seems more applicable to me. Maybe because it’s a less scary word? What we do know, however, is how they came about.
Years ago, scientists made a breakthrough in finding a cure for the vampires that would change their brains to no longer reject non-flesh food. It was supposed to be the end of the conflict; the vamps wouldn’t need to kill us and we wouldn’t have to live in fear that our neighbor was one of them without us knowing. The vampires were happy with this solution because it’s not like they really wanted to kill people, they’re just doing what they have to in order to survive. That’s what one of them told me a little after they went public and helped to find a cure. Things were supposed to go back to normal. Things got worse. Without getting into the specifics since I am not a scientist and don’t know everything about it, the brain function the scientists tampered with in a control group broke neural activity or something and shut down several nodes inside that are key in giving us our "human" aspects. These became the Blighted, the painless, the ever-hungry. While they retained the qualities of the vamps, they lost all ability to consciously communicate and became vessels with one thought on their mind (if they even have a mind): feeding. It was the antithesis of what the scientists were going for: instead of saving the consciousness and ridding the thirst for death, they killed the consciousness and enhanced the hunger.
