13 Ways to Detect Vampires Online

Luc Reid () is a Writers of the Future winner, the founder of Codex Writers' Group, a third degree black belt, an organic gardener, a Zen Buddhist, and an energetic advocate for carbon footprint reduction (www.faceclimatechange.com, www.sustainablewilliston.org). His prior publications include stories like "When a Bunch of People, Including Raymond, Got Superpowers" (Daily Science Fiction) and "Ways to Enjoy Nutrient Blend 14" (Nature) as well as plays, articles, the flash fiction collection Bam! 172 Hellaciously Quick Stories (lucreid.com/bam) and the non-fiction book Talk the Talk: The Slang of 67 Subcultures (Writers Digest Books, 2006; expanded and revised edition 2014 - lucreid.com/ttt). Luc lives near Burlington, Vermont with his wife, kids, and compulsively disobedient garden.

I admit this piece is fluff. My fond hope is that you find it to be entertaining fluff. Either way, it's fluff frolicking on the surface of a much more substantial issue, which is that increasingly, a lot of what we do happens online, in forms that can be saved, viewed, and analyzed. If there really were vampires among us, I think they would be having an increasingly hard time keeping a low profile, as uncountable multitudes of tiny facts gradually coalesce into neon signs pointing out our deepest secrets. Then again, we live in a world where people can watch horrors march past and terrible things be done and put them all in a fake context that makes them seem acceptable. Let's hope we eventually lose our stomach for that particular way of dealing with the ever-rising tide of information in our world.