In the continent of Africa, there lived a tribe of people called the Ampakra. They were primitive hunters and gatherers who lived in the wilderness around 10 000 B.C.
One day, one of the men of the tribe went hunting and did not return. His people thought he was dead. He was not. He had encountered a strange beast which had bitten him. The bite had changed him. It infected him with a virus. The virus caused him to have uncontrollable rage and lose all reason. He had become like an animal himself. The infected man came back and attacked his kin folk. They had no choice but to kill him but not before he infected a few others. The infected people began to multiply. The tribe feared them.
The infected were monstrously altered versions of the people they used to be. They were characterized by their glowing red eyes and their uncontrollable rage and animalistic fury. Also, they feared sunlight. They could not be reasoned with. They had become little more than animals. The infection spread and all over the continent of Africa, a battle broke out between the ordinary humans and the infected. The infected ones attacked by night. They were the scourge of anything that lived. Thousands of them roamed the wilderness, attacking animals as well as the humans they encountered. One bite from the infected could turn an ordinary human being into a bloodthirsty monster. The virus kept mutating. As time went by, it stabilized itself. It stopped mutating. The Virus had done something that thousands of years of evolution could not do. It created a schism in the human species. The originally infected humans were savage and bloodthirsty monsters that were completely mindless. They craved blood and had lost all semblance of what made humanity. They did not have sentience anymore. They were no different than beasts. These early monsters did not survive for long. After consuming all available human and animal life in their environment, they turned on each other. Still, some of them survived and spread and when the virus stopped mutation, a new species was born.
A species whose members looked like humans but were not at all human. Beings who craved blood, from whichever source was available. Creatures with an insatiable appetite for destruction and violence. Those creatures feared the light of day. They were the offspring of the virus. The twists of genetic fate. They were stronger than humans. Also, they were faster. Their bodies were more resilient. The only thing they feared was sunlight. It took away all power they had and rendered them helpless as it did their ancesters, thousands of years ago. These very real creatures are what popular fiction calls vampires. They are real. There's a lot about them that is the stuff of legend. They do reflect in mirrors. Silver, holy water and crucifixes have no effect on them. Garlic has no effect on them either. They cannot turn into bats or other animals. They cannot turn themselves into smoke, as popular fiction would have you believe. They are a living, breathing species no more supernatural than bats or spiders. They live longer than humans, but they don't live forever. They can live for thousands of years. They are not undead. A vampire male and a vampire female can have offspring. The result is a pure-blood offspring. A creature that will grow at a normal rate until it reaches adulthood by human standards, than stop visible aging altogether. Pure-bloods are not that uncommon. It takes pure-blood parents to have pure-blood progeny. Half-breeds are the most common of all vampires. When a vampire bites a human, the human becomes a vampire within three days. Half-breeds are not as strong as pure-bloods but they are nevertheless superior to humans in strength and speed.
The vampires are here. There are thousands of them on the planet. Most of them like to lead a hidden life. They obtain blood from slaughterhouses and blood banks. Most of them. Some still like to hunt. The vampires have gotten tired of being hunted down by the humans. Humanity has persecuted them for thousands of years. Most have adopted a sedentary lifestyle. They do not want to attract attention from humanity in the twenty first century. Their species had gone largely undected for centuries. If humans were to find out that they were real, the vampire species might become extinct. This was the general consensus among them. Over the millennia, the vampires have evolved into a society of sorts. They have judges and cops and lawyers. Matters of justice between vampires are settled before a court. The courts forbid vampires from killing humans, except in self-defense or to prevent humans from revealing the secret of the vampires to the world. This policy is loosely enforced. The Trackers are the vampiric society's "cops". They have international jurisdiction. They hunt the vampires who breaks their society's laws. The rules of the vampire society supercede those of the human world. Vampires are forbidden from making Half-breeds. They are considered to be somewhat taboo by the established rulers of the vampire society, made of pure-bloods. Half-breeds are made everyday.
The vampire community has its share of troubles. Still, something was happening that the vampires did not know about. A vampire named Paul Farrell contacted a human scientist named Georges Halston. Halston was a geneticist. Farrell wanted power. He did not like the current state of the affairs among the vampires. He feared that the humans were a threat to the vampire community and thought that the vampires had gotten too soft and complacent. He dreamed of a future when the humans would become the slaves of the vampires. Even though the vampires were a lot deadlier than the humans, the humans had the advantage of numbers. There were thousands of vampires on the planet, with hundreds more being made each day but there were billions of humans. Even if the vampires were to rise against the humans, humanity would exploit the vampire's weaknesses, mainly sunlight and effectively destroy them. Farrell thought that the only way that the vampires would have a chance was if they could be made immune to whatever weapons the humans might use against them. Since vampires could regenerate, they had little to fear in the way of injury. Farrell gave Halston billions of dollars in funding so that he could research a way to rid the vampires of their known weaknesses. Sunlight was a vampire's main weakness.
Halston busied himself doing research on vampire subjects provided by Farrell himself. Halston discovered slight differences between the pure-blood vampires and the hybridized Half-breeds. The pure-bloods were stronger and faster than the Half-breeds. The Half-breeds were weaker, mainly due to the fact that they were once human. Sunlight was lethal to both varities of vampires, though. Halston was given the keys to the kingdom by Farrell and the wealthy and powerful vampires who served him. He had the best scientists and the best labs to work with. Farrell spared no expense. Farrell did a lot of research on vampires and discovered that at some point, they were all human. They shared the same genetic ancestry as humans, with a difference that only appeared in their genetic makeup recently. He discovered that the vampires must be a mutated strand of humanity which later became a new species altogether. He was provided with access to the hidden archives of the vampire society. He learned all their secrets. Farrell funded expeditions around the world so that Halston could figure out the true origins of the vampire species.
