The Mortality of Immortality

Immortality isn’t what it used to be.

Take the vampire, that old cliché of eternal life. Say you were “born” in 1300 AD. Your first century or two was easy. Europe was a slow-motion soap opera of plagues, crusades, and candlelight. If a king died, you might hear about it next season, maybe in the form of a monk’s gossip while you drank his blood behind the abbey. Horses stayed horses, swords stayed swords. Fashion was a spectrum of “wool” to “slightly nicer wool.” It was the golden age of immortality.

Then, a little change here and there: the printing press. You learned to read. A hundred years later, maybe gunpowder. Irritating, but manageable—you just stopped biting soldiers. The Industrial Revolution was brisk, sure, but you could still lurk in gaslit alleys and whisper to yourself, Ah, the modern world. By the 19th century, the biggest threat to your peace was some Gothic novelist making you a sex symbol without your consent.

Fast forward to now. Immortality is a gig economy job with bad Wi-Fi. You’re hiding in a smart city, and even rats have tracking chips. No more disappearing into the mist; the mist has cameras. Crypts have been converted to Airbnbs. You wake up at night to feed, only to find that humans don’t carry blood—they carry oat milk lattes and wearable tech that notifies the police if their heart stops.

Alaric Veyl, whom I recently caught up with and spent time with, has been in a cave binge-hibernating since 1987. So, I’m very grateful he granted me an interview.

“Alaric, the real existential problem you, Nosferatu, LeStat, and others are facing now is that technology is moving faster than ever before. The internet must have been challenging, unless you were able to master it, but now everything is AI-generated. And with quantum computing on the way. How are you dealing with all of that?”

“It’s overwhelming. Try stalking prey when half the humans on the street are androids or augmented reality projections. You sink your teeth into a warm neck, and it says, Error 404: Jugular Not Found.”

Alaric laughed, but dark and hollow. He continued:

“And when you do find someone, yeah, blood isn’t what it was either. It’s all oat milk and antidepressants now, right? Bloody disgusting is what it is. Keto, vegan, microdosed on psilocybin. I drank from a tech bro last week, and he tasted like a mix of cold brew and battery acid. My fangs ache for the old days—farmers with iron in their blood and terror in their eyes. The warm, slow pulse of a life unpolluted by energy drinks.”

“The real question I want to get to is immortality itself. With everything that’s happened in the last, say, 30 years—do you ever consider throwing it all in?”

“I don’t want to sound egotistical, right? But seven hundred years ago, I was a god. A literal f*****g nightmare people prayed against. Okay? I mean, let’s just call it what it is! Villagers nailed garlic to their doors, and priests raised crucifixes like shields. It used to be that a villager would see my shadow on the wall and faint dead away. No b******t. Wooden stakes, holy water, the occasional mob with torches—I was somebody. Now? No one even knows the rules anymore. Wooden stake, silver bullet—who cares? People walk past me on dark streets like I don’t exist. Staring into their phones. So, yes, yes, of course, I am genuinely considering just going back to the coffin and letting the centuries roll over me in solitude. Eternal life used to feel like a privilege, it doesn’t anymore.”

“Right, right. Then there’s the problem if you do want to—let’s just say, for lack of a better word, die, right—who can you get to help you?”

“Right, I mean, you get it! I can’t die unless someone bothers to kill me. And who has time to hunt a vampire when there are emails to check and streaming shows to binge?”

“Well, thank you, Alaric Veyl, for taking the time today.”

“My pleasure. You wouldn’t happen to have vein popping in your neck for a quick in-and-out blood burger, would you?”

He’s survived plagues, swords, and the slow erosion of centuries, but now every year feels like a decade of noise: phones buzzing, drones whining, data flowing faster than blood. Even the act of feeding feels like a relic; everyone tastes of preservatives and Wi-Fi. Alaric Veyl no longer dreams of glory or fears a stake—he only dreads obsolescence. Still, he soldiers on, a pale silhouette against a future made of glass and screens, resigned to another century of dodging secur