Vampires, and the Paleolithic Age. Oh, and running from Zombies!

Vampires, and the Paleolithic Age. Oh, and running from Zombies!

Jonas St. Juste

June 5, 2022

Peter Watt’s vampires still lingers in my head. In his Blindsight/Echopraxia sci-fi universe, Watts invents a premise for his world where vampires truly existed, as an evolutionary offshoot from early Homo sapiens, and also went extinct by the time we invented architecture. Geometric structures with 90 degrees, perpendicular lines — and BANG! Crucifix Glitch, their visual cortexes fry like a circuit in a shitstorm… Watts’s words.

No part in his books takes place in the Paleolithic Age, which left me frustratingly thinking more about how these speculative hominids would have existed. Or any of other human cousins. Or how we existed back then.

What if any our cousins existed to this day?

Did they have what we call consciousness?

And if any of them didn’t, what would that be like to witness them?

I want to feel that connection with these ancestors.

I told Christina that I wanted to make things from scratch. I wanted something feel better suited to forge my path in life. I wanted a piece of humanity that I considered a birthright.

We made a date of it, traveled to Marine Park, and learned about stone knapping by the shore of Jamaica Bay.

Earth Science class started to feel really familiar again.

Igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rocks. Which one did obsidian belong to? Conchoidal fractures… I need you so much!

And I recently joined Zombies, Run! and caught the runner bug. It’s a really cool audio adventure where you can walk, jog, and run as you complete story missions, collect supplies, and evade zombies. I’m also thinking of it as remembering how to run from predators or angry large animals. There also happen to be some Stone Age story modes I haven’t checked out yet.