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TL;DR

Main character’s family dies. He agrees to an experiment that he thinks will kill him. It doesn’t. Instead he’s alive and (more or less) well with may of the attributes of a Vampire. He ends up killing the scientists that did this to him. This may or may not be the end of the book, possibly just a plot arch.
I will alter theplot slightly to accommodate the person in which I am writing.





<----------------------------------- Longer Explanation --------------------------------------->




So...

This is going to be a Vampire story. This may astound you to learn. Science fiction Vampires.


Basically.... Damien is a normal person. Red hair, grey eyes, about six feet tall. He's fairly intelligent and physically fit. Those are both important, his physical appearance isn't as much. He's (most likely) male. He's twenty-two (which doesn't really matter) and he's in college (which tells you something about him.) The story begins when he finds out his parents and younger sister died in a car crash. Both his parents were only children who's parents had previously passed away. This is important. Damien is left alone in the world with no blood relatives. For reasons I may or may not make clear he doesn't have a lot of friends and/or feels he's not particularly close to them and even if he was he doesn't feel like they should count. He feels alone now.

His psychologist (maybe the grief counselor who tells him about the deaths?) for reasons of her own puts him in touch with some scientists who are looking for... someone. She tells him she thinks this could help him. He really doesn't care but doesn't feel like he has anything better to do and is desperate for something that will help so he goes to see them. They tell him they'll pay him X amount of money for answering some questions and doing a stress test. They don't tell him anything else up front. He agrees. Answers questions. Does the test. They send him home and contact him a while later and tell him he's the ideal candidate and they want him to come in to hear what they have to say.

I imagine this scene being seductive in a non-sexual way. They tell him everything he wants to hear to get him to agree to what they want to do. They have a contract drawn up to offer him money and compensation and whatever and they explain to him, in no technical detail, what they want to do. They explain the risks, that he might lose his memory or die and that even if he lives he'll be very different. They don't think he'll die but there's a possibility and he decides to agree because he's half-hoping it will kill him. Or- if it doesn't- he hopes he'll be so different it wont matter anymore.

The scientists take tissue and blood samples and it takes a little time (but not too much) before they're ready. Damien is still feeling distinctly depressed at this point. They have him in a hospital-like setting and they give him injections and an I.V. drip and for a while everything is normal. Then he gets a headache. Joint aches. Fever. Nausea. He's wracked with pain and is incoherent for over a month during which time he's kept alive the way they keep people in comas alive. Except he's obviously not a normal coma patient.

These scientists work in genomics. By this point stem-cell research and anything involving gene splicing into fetuses or genetic selection for anything other than children whom aren't predisposed to an unmanagleable or incurable disease have been outlawed. But at the same time people have continued to be fascinated with the idea of improving themselves on a genetic level. And that's exactly what these scientists have figured out how to do. They took Damien's DNA and created a recombinant which included genes or gene expressions or interactions that would change his body for the better. Instead of the stem-cell method of changing a skin cell into a stem cell, altering the DNA and putting it back in a place where it will hopefully figure out what to do they code his DNA into the RNA of a particularly nasty retrovirus that's had it's teeth pulled. They infect him with a massive amount of this virus by IV and injections. They don't expect it to infect every cell, just enough of them to have a selective advantage and take over over time.

The scientists had done tests on rats and other mammals and those had always turned out well. But this time not only were they working on a human but they didn't just try to give him one advantageous trait, they gave him dozens.

After over a month he first spikes a massive fever and then his body temperature starts to drop and his heart rate slows down. He is clinically dead for several minutes despite their attempts to recessitate him. The monitors go crazy and he wakes back up because obviously there would be no story if he didn't. His heart rate has gone up some but his temperature remains low. The next few weeks Damien is sickly and generally depressed but not usually coherent enough to wish he was dead. He complains constantly about how bright the lights are and is frequently lost in doing strange little things during this time. He attains lucidity after some time. According to the doctor's tests he is surprisingly, mostly made up of the altered set of DNA and his muscles and mind seem fine despite his lowered heart rate and body temperature. His eyes are extremely light-sensitive and his other senses, though not annoying in any way, seem to be sharpened as well.

It doesn’t take them long to realize that many of the changes they tried to make did take hold. Some didn’t seem to have and others... others they really couldn’t confirm for decades because they deal with preventing Alzheimer's and late-stage diseases that a man in his twenties wouldn’t have to worry about for at least forty years. And they realize almost immediately that some well-intended things had gone wrong and some things had changed that shouldn’t have changed at all.

There are two particularly obvious things that went wrong which are important to the story. The first being that the melanin in his skin (already at low levels due to his red hair and background) is expressed at very low levels. He appears to now without color or protection from the sun. Unlike an albino he still produces some melanin and doesn’t have (many) of the associated problems. His hair and eye color don’t really change (much) but only because there isn’t a lot of melanin produced in the hair/eyes of a red-haired grey/blue-eyed person to begin with. Not only does he find the brightness of the sun painful but it can now burn him even more easily. The second obvious thing is that his digestive system doesn’t really work. This is a physical problem on two levels- the first being a dysfunction with Damien’s body itself and the second is almost paradoxically a cause and result of the fact that his body temperature isn’t human normal and can’t support the nice cultures of buggies we have living in us to help digest our food.

His most important physical characteristics are that he is strong and fast, has heightened senses, burns in the sun and cannot digest food. Low body temperature, slow heart rate. He heals quickly and it will eventually become obvious that he doesn’t age.

I have to wonder if I needed to go into that much detail just now. He continues to survive on IV infusions and happily runs every test the scientists want to put him to in the desperate hope that soon something in his brain will click and he will no longer feel depressed. He battles constant hunger cravings and on several occasions makes himself sick by drinking or eating things his body can’t handle. His previous (current?) depression, the fact that he feels more and more like a rat in a cage, and thousands of years of evolution pressing him to consume food drive him mad. He ends up killing the scientists and makes the discovery that he can drink blood. He tries to destroy their work as well.

Even though the virus he is infected with is virulent it was based on his own DNA so the rate of transmission to other people would be extremely low if it worked at all. It’s possible it might mutate over time but I don’t expect to want to infect other people.

I cannot decide if that will be the whole book or if there will be more. Regardless, that’s enough.


If I end up writing it in second person he'll be more or less genderless with no detailed description. His appearance doesn't really matter anyway and I'd rather it be easier for the reader to imagine this was their life if I decide to write that way. There may even be some kind of explanation about why/how/the logistics of this being your life. You do eventually discover that you are not only the main character but also the narrator.

In first or traditional third he’ll be as I described.