I learned early that eternity is not a gift; it is a contract written in ink that never dries.
The night I stopped aging, I was seventeen and convinced that hunger was a metaphor. Hunger for love, hunger for meaning, hunger for a future large enough to forgive my smallness. It took centuries for me to accept that hunger, like capital, is literal before it is poetic. When you live long enough, metaphors bleed.
I am a vampire. That sentence is supposed to explain everything—the teeth, the shadows, the rumors that trail behind me like cheap perfume. But the truth is more efficient. I am a vampire not merely because I drink blood, but because I learned how to make time itself work for me. I learned how to own nights like others own factories, how to extract from bodies and balances with equal precision. My fangs were only the beginning. The real transformation was bookkeeping.
I was turned in a port city that no longer exists under that name. Cities, like people, rebrand when the past becomes inconvenient. The man who turned me—my sponsor, since the language of business is kinder than that of violence—wore velvet gloves and spoke of rescue. He said he loved me. He said I would never be poor again. He said eternity would make everything fair.
He did not mention interest.
I remember the first lesson because it was framed as romance. We sat on a roof overlooking the harbor, ships creaking like old men with secrets. He told me immortality was a portfolio. Diversify your centuries, he said. Invest your affections wisely. Never love anyone who can die without you.
I loved him because I was young and because he said my name as if it were already a brand.
In those early decades, I drank sparingly. I was sentimental. I chose criminals, abusers, men who reminded me of my father's creditors. I believed I could moralize my appetite. This is a common error among the newly empowered. We mistake selectivity for justice.
The city taught me better.
Cities are excellent teachers because they repeat themselves. Markets open and close. Bodies arrive and depart. Promises are made at dusk and defaulted on by dawn. I watched merchants grow old and die while their companies inherited their faces. I watched banks survive revolutions by changing flags. I watched love become a subscription service.
I learned that exploitation prefers stability.
By my second century, I had stopped pretending that blood was my only currency. Blood is volatile; it spoils, it resists storage. Influence lasts longer. Ownership lasts longest of all. I bought a boarding house near the docks and learned the pleasure of rent. The building was narrow and tall, like a spine. The tenants were sailors, seamstresses, boys with names that changed weekly. I fed from them carefully, like a landlord raising rent in increments small enough to be called reasonable.
This is how vampirism modernized: we learned to take without leaving marks.
Do not misunderstand me. I still loved. Immortality does not cancel adolescence; it extends it. I fell in love with a poet who smelled of ink and salt, with a girl who danced herself into fever, with a boy who believed the future was a machine you could build by hand. They all died. I mourned them sincerely and then monetized the lessons they left behind.
Love teaches you leverage.
The poet taught me language. He believed words could free people. I watched him starve while publishers ate. When he died, I bought his letters and sold them back to the world as authenticity. People paid to feel poor with him. This was my first cultural investment.
The dancer taught me youth. She moved as if time were optional. Men paid to watch her defy gravity and then punished her for it with neglect. When she collapsed, I held her until the fever cooled and took from her what she would never miss. Later, I invested in theaters. I learned how to package rebellion into tickets.
The boy taught me hope. He wanted to organize the docks, to make work dignified. He kissed me with hands that shook. He died under a baton meant to correct inefficiency. I learned that hope is expensive to maintain and cheap to destroy. I invested in security.
By the time the twentieth century discovered itself, I was already bored with being seen. Visibility is a tax. I learned to be a shareholder instead of a spectacle. I learned to let others do the bleeding.
You may think this is where the satire ends, where I reveal myself as a villain and ask for your condemnation. But condemnation is a luxury product, and I have never trusted anything that feels so clean.
I did not invent these systems. I adapted to them. Vampires are nothing if not adaptive. We do not overthrow; we accumulate. We do not end history; we extend its worst habits.
It was during a war—there are always wars—that I met her.
She was not supposed to matter. She was young in the way that believes it is temporary. She worked in an archive requisitioned by the state, digitizing documents so the bombs would not erase the paperwork. Her hands were ink-stained. Her laughter was defiant, like a strike that has not yet been crushed.
I went to the archive to audit a donation. Paper is dangerous; it remembers. I prefer ledgers that update themselves.
She looked at me as if I were a question she was willing to fail.
Her name was Elise. Names matter when you plan to repeat them.
I did not feed from her. This was not morality; it was strategy. Desire complicates appetite. Instead, I spoke to her about youth, about the way time feels infinite until it becomes expensive. She spoke to me about love, about the way history erases women by calling them footnotes.
We were both lying, gently.
I watched her grow tired without growing old. I watched her believe in things long enough to be punished for it. I funded a scholarship she would never know was mine. I bought the company that would later fire her. This is how care functions at scale.
When she kissed me, it was awkward and earnest and smelled of dust. I almost told her the truth. Instead, I told her a better story.
Love, like labor, is most profitable when unpaid.
The nights with Elise reminded me of my first century: the foolishness, the hope, the belief that eternity could be personal. I wrote her letters I never sent. I imagined futures that required my disappearance. I am very good at imagining exits I never take.
She aged. I did not. This imbalance is the purest form of power.
When she began to notice, when her jokes turned sharp and her silences strategic, I knew the romance had reached its maturity phase. Love under capitalism follows a predictable arc. Infatuation, investment, extraction, obsolescence.
She accused me of being cold. I accused her of being impatient. We were both right.
The night she confronted me, the city was celebrating a minor economic recovery. Fireworks are the language of distraction. She held my face and asked me why I never seemed afraid. I told her fear requires deadlines.
I did not kill her. I did not turn her. I did something worse: I let her go with partial knowledge. She would spend the rest of her life circling the truth like a moth trained to avoid light.
Years later, I would read her memoir. It would be praised for its honesty and sold in airports. I would buy the distribution rights.
Do you see how this works?
Vampirism is not a species; it is a method. It is the decision to make survival someone else's problem. It is the confidence that time will forgive you because it has forgiven worse.
I am writing this now because eternity gets lonely in predictable ways. Because I am tired of pretending that my teeth are my secret. Because youth keeps finding me and asking for love, and I keep offering mentorship instead.
I am still hungry. Hunger is not cured by accumulation. It is refined.
Tonight, the city hums like a server farm. Data is the new blood. I own pieces of platforms that own people's attention. I drink from algorithms that never sleep. Somewhere, a girl is falling in love with an image I helped optimize. Somewhere, a boy is working three jobs to afford a future I have already mortgaged.
I tell myself I am only participating. I tell myself that if I did not do it, someone worse would. This is the prayer of every immortal system.
And yet—
Sometimes, at dawn, when the accounts reconcile themselves and the sun threatens to audit my skin, I remember being seventeen and believing hunger was a metaphor. I remember thinking love could interrupt history.
Perhaps this book is an attempt at inefficiency. A leak in the system. A confession that does not absolve.
If you are reading this, understand: I am not asking for forgiveness. I am offering continuity.
The ledger is open. The account does not close.
Tomorrow night, I will fall in love again. Or I will acquire something that feels like it.
The difference, after all these years, is mostly semantic.