Vampires

Vampires are the eleven former death-row inmates who survived Project NOAH’s later human trials after earlier subjects died. Their altered bodies glow in the dark and resist ordinary weapons, but their survival is not a cure or a controlled success: they remain frightening, hazardous test subjects whose possible vulnerability is still only a theory.

Origin and Creation

Project NOAH’s researchers pursued the possibility that a dormant power in human beings could be reactivated and brought under control. Jonas Abbott Lear and Cole’s beliefs led the project into the Bolivian jungle, where the expedition encountered people described as undead. The catastrophe there left Lear, Tim Fanning, a soldier, and graduate student Fortes among the survivors; the findings helped propel the research that followed.

Over five years, the project spent hundreds of millions and lost roughly three hundred monkeys, an unknown number of dogs and pigs, and several homeless human subjects. The first human trials killed their subjects within hours. The turning point came with Giles Babcock, a former death-row inmate who survived after the virus had been weakened through successive refinements so that the subjects’ bodies could fight it. Morrison, Chávez, Baffes, and others followed. Eleven inmates ultimately survived.

Physical Condition and Vulnerability

The surviving subjects glow in the dark, a visible sign of their transformation and a reason they are described as frightening to everyone around them. Richards privately accepts the word vampires for them, although Special Weapons avoided using it. He also calls them undead, a term that captures their condition without making their survival seem ordinary.

Their skin has become a protein-based exoskeleton so hard that, in Richards’s comparison, Kevlar seems soft. A roughly three-inch area over the breastbone is said to be thin enough to penetrate. But this is only a theory: Colonel Sykes admits uncertainty about whether the subjects can actually be killed without firing an RPG down their throats. The narrow supposed target does not amount to a reliable method of control.

Project Outcome and Significance

The eleven survivors represent a reversal in the experiments’ results: where the first human subjects died rapidly, later refinements enabled these inmates to endure the virus. Yet survival brought no assured practical benefit. Richards considers them of little use to anyone, and the extreme uncertainty surrounding their vulnerability makes them a liability as much as an apparent scientific breakthrough.

The term vampires joins a scientific experiment to a figure from folklore that Richards remembers from books and films. His recollection raises the possibility that the old stories register something deeper than fantasy, but the evidence does not settle that question. What the project has produced is more concrete and more troubling: human subjects transformed into luminous, extraordinarily resistant beings, with no dependable account of how to stop them.