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Notes -
Re: Watts' vampires, they were boring. I did like the nod to "and this is why vampires are repelled by crucifixes" but the rest of it? Oooh they're scary dangerous predators that would murderise us all if they could. Yeah, and so could great white sharks, with their dead shoe-button eyes. We're not going to be murdered by sharks any time soon, and the sentimentality around the way some people treat them accords perfectly well with the stupidity of, as you point out, letting the vampires walk around unfettered. I can easily believe some people would be greedy and stupid enough to think they could make pets out of vampires and use them for PROFIT. But the vampires themselves? There's nothing there, they're just automata. Or sharks, perfect killing machines but no higher goal than that.
Eh, I have mixed feelings on the topic. Watts did his best to rationalize the concept with evobio, but that only gets you so far with vampires. It's kinda cool, but they're far from plausible organisms.
Unlike sharks, vampires are depicted as both amoral/murderous, and more intelligent than us silly humans.
The thing is, they don't roam around entirely unfettered! In-universe, they're recognized as highly dangerous, and mitigation measures are put in place:
The original vampires were highly territorial hypercarnioveres who couldn't stand competition. The resurrected ones had those tendencies ramped up, they were described as murdering each other if allowed to enter close proximity. Think shoving two male tigers into the same enclosure.
Their handlers thought that this instinctual intolerance of their own kind would prevent scheming and conniving. They were very, very wrong. The exact mechanisms by which the vampires coordinated their rebellion are excellent, probably one of the best depictions of the power of decision theories for modeling and coordination. They just imagined what they'd do if in the place of another vampire, and vice-versa, solved for the equilibrium, and acted, independently and simultaneously, without ever having to actively exchange information with their kin. Hats off.
The crucifix glitch was weaponized against them, the belief was that if they went off the reservation, they'd die painfully as soon as the drugs that stopped them from having painful and lethal seizures wore off.
The humans weren't entirely complacent, but they were still unforgivably insufficiently paranoid about creatures smarter than them, which they knew to be hostile by default. The Vampires consistently use their superior physical prowess to murder normal humans, not just their brains.
So why even let them have that physical prowess? It doesn't take a genius to say that "hey, maybe we should give them the grip strength of an obese 4channer". The Vamps were kept around for their brains, not their brawn. It added nothing while making them a greater threat. This is, as far as I'm concerned, giving the humans an idiot ball. The ways the vampires circumvented their other shackles is understandably hard to predict without the benefit of hindsight. Tearing people apart with their bare hands isn't.
The hyper-intelligence didn't really convince me, not as Watts tried to sell it. Sharks don't need to be hyper-intelligent, and neither do the vampires. They're apex predators. They were able to kill their way to dominance over the humans until humans figured out survival strategies. But Watts is the author, and what happens in a book is what the author wants to happen, and since Watts is all in on "humans are dumb and smelly and should all die, horribly if possible, and my wonderful no-consciousness hyper-intelligent murderbots will do that and take over from them, stupid dumb humans ha ha", then that is what we get.
"Imagining what another vampire would do" requires some degree of consciousness, I would argue. But Watts wants to eat his cake and have it, both. If I am imagining what another vampire would do, I first have to imagine that the other vampire also wants to rebel and escape. Maybe not all vampires want that? Okay, they hate humans and are murderbots, let's grant they all want to escape. After that, though: I instinctively know that my vampire-others will all be in places where they can do things in unison so the plan will come off with perfect timing. Well, that's convenient: no single one of the vampires is going to be held up in traffic, as it were? Nice things happen when the universe decides to drop the plot keys into your lap!
EDIT: I forget, how do vampires reproduce, if they can't be in proximity without ripping each other to shreds? Watts must have found some way around it, but I can't remember and can't be bothered to look it up. Hyper-intelligent murder machines that die out in one generation because they can't have offspring because they murder one another if close enough to mate aren't going far.
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