'I see.'

"But you talked a lot with at the very least your test group, yeah?  What's up with that."

'My memories of the time shortly after my arrival on Earth are not directly inferior to those which came later or earlier but I had much less context available to interpret them with at the time.'

"...and, in hindsight...?"

'It remains difficult to piece some things together.  I recall, partially, things that people did, but there were many factors in play and I hesitate to attribute them to specific causes.'  Headtilt-unheadtilt.  'It took quite some time for me to recognize humans as people at all, and I did not myself have an ambulatory visual form for over a year.  Communication started out impossible and became possible over time: that is all I am confident in determining.'

"...how confident are you that your initial batch of vampires in fact wanted to be vampires?"

"Not very?"

'I am reevaluating the probability in light of all the distressing things which I recently learned I have done.

Upon consideration I am still quite confident.'

"Well, that's something, anyway. Do you have hindsight on how things - degenerated from there -"

"No.  I am now aware of the concept of deception but cannot claim to understand it in practice.'

"Would - examples help?"

'They might or might not.'

"People will lie to - cover up crimes past or planned, to make their motives and character look more admirable, to avoid awkward conversations, to convince people to give them stuff..."

'Those did not.'

"Okay, uh, maybe - consuming fiction with a lot of lying in it or something?"

'That seems more likely to be of use than detailless examples.  Are you suggesting solutions to this simply because it is a problem or because there is a particular benefit you hope to reap.'

"It just seems like it would be the sort of deficit you'd want to patch having been made aware of it, if you're not interested I won't dig up books on the topic."

'It seems very important to fix.  But there is much else going on which is also very important.  I was unsure if it was connected to those or stood alone.'

"I don't immediately foresee it being relevant, at least if you want to run major decisions by me or Judy or somebody else who isn't going to gratuitously fuck with you."

" - Well.  Anymore."

"Yes, now that we are somewhat reassured that the problem was not that you felt like designing vampires in ways that had these flaws for your personal amusement."

"Maybe sometime we could hang out and have me go over - exactly how I deceived you, and why, and the ways I thought other people might be deceiving me, and how I figured out they weren't, and ideas I had for that aside from the one I settled on."

'This seems like a useful step towards several important things.'

Nod nod.