Also, re: my headcanon that Blindsight vampires don't experience fear, anger, pain, or bloodlust as pushing them away from rational thought, and actually get smarter in those states because the usual energy-conservation limiters on their brain activity are overridden: dialogue from a more present day-ish Blindsight fanfic probably never to be written:
*The scene: three or four scientists and one security guy huddling in a lab somewhere, talking to each other in the low-volume voices of people afraid to make any loud sound, occasionally glancing anxiously at a reinforced door. Distant screams and gunfire can occasionally be heard. A vampire has gone rogue, escaped containment, and is moving through the facility, leaving a trail of corpses as it goes.*
"Janiczek's exercise probably overstimulated it..."
"I told him it was a bad idea! War game against a deliberately enraged vampire in a locked maze, whatever smarmy reassurances they gave about 'proper precautions' I fucking knew that was playing with fire! And for what, some stupid adolescent Battle Royale shit? What's that even prove, anyway? I think he just wanted to beat it so he could stroke off his ego with being able to say he'd done it!"
"Oh, God..."
"I want to know how it figured out the passcode. It couldn't before!"
"Have you considered that maybe it held back during the passcode security test cause it was planning to escape? You know, like a smart person would?"
"Security isn't that stupid. The test presented it with a situation in which it was in its genuine best interests to make a sincere best effort to figure out the code. It's a bit over my head, I'm just a goon, but I'm told the game theory logic was impeccable, and it got a thorough tire-kicking by five very high IQ human prodigies."
"Who aren't as smart as a vamp. If they were, we wouldn't need vamps."
"Vamp's smarter than one of them, but probably not five times smarter."
"Yeah, that wasn't the problem. I think I know what happened. Problem was the test conditions."
"What do you mean?"
"I've looked at the test records. Whoever designed it clearly didn't understand vampires very well. They had it in a nice, quiet room, sitting in front of a computer terminal typing in answers, like... like Spock in that Star Trek movie, the one with the whales! That's not how you get a vampire to think at full capacity! Look, almost everything about a vampire is set up to keep its metabolism as low as possible, to conserve those precious protocadherins. That means a vampire's intelligence is usually limited by energy conservation. But if it's in danger, those limiters get overridden! You don't pinch calories if it's an open question whether you'll survive the next five minutes! Now think of what this vampire's going through. Natural born killer, yeah, but it's never been in a fight before! It's spent most of its life in a nice, comfortable, safe round room! It's not used to violence! And then, oh, Janiczek wanted to really test vampire combat capabilities, so of course he had it goaded like a Spanish bull, teased and tormented it so it'd be nice and angry when it was time to wave that red flag and bring in the matador! It's got very little emotional resources to handle an experience like that! Can you imagine how scared and angry it is? Vampires don't experience fear and anger and pain the way we do, those feelings don't push them away from rational thought, they take the calorie-pinching shackles off their intellect! It's blood-crazy, metabolism running hot..."
"... That'd make it smarter! Shit..."
