"Yeah. And then I wouldn't have been at all freaked out. Wonderful, isn't it."

"...well just a little, before you died or went vamp."

"Oh, I wasn't even thinking about how I'd be if I'd gone vamp. Actually, that sounds like a wonderful proposition – can you imagine that? A psychopath me, running around and chewing on people?"

"You wouldn't last the week," she grins. "Not with me around. I'd seduce you and then stake you."

"Well no, I wouldn't if I'd turned then, but imagine if I turned now-ish. I'd probably be really wary of you and stay far, far away, maybe eating people in LA or something."

"LA's not good, lots of vampire hunters there."

"Oh, okay," he says, rolling his eyes a little. "I'll keep that in mind for if I ever become a vampire, so I know where to stay alive the longest."

"I'd recommend a big city, but not too big. Seattle, for example."

He tilts his head and raises an eyebrow. "If you say so." Then he smirks. "Hey, actually! If we become vampires together, we can go traumatize the world together. That sounds like fun."

"Uh, yeah, no, if I become a vampire I'll be a good vampire."

"… How do you plan on guaranteeing that? Like, isn't their whole shtick 'I am evil' or whatever?"

"Their whole schtick is 'I don't have a soul' which apparently removes empathy but I'm not moved by empathy, so."

"… What are you moved by, then?"

"A rationally built moral system of human worth. Nothing has intrinsic value, so we value what we choose to, and I choose to value human values."

"But why do you choose to value human values? What about them, intrinsically, makes you value them?"

"It's absolutely arbitrary. I actually don't mean just humans, I mean sapients, and sapients are the only things that value things. If there were no sapients there'd be no one valuing things, therefore the only things that are valuable are things valued by things who value them, so they're the value-producing things."

"Okay, but you could decide that people would produce more value by being tortured in inspiring new ways and seeing how they respond to such situations, because that allows you to gather data, generate and test hypotheses, and extend these results to produce other effects relating to the human race. Or am I misunderstanding?"

"But who values that? If value depends on the valuing person, someone would need to value that for that to be valuable."

"You're still around to value things, and the people being tortured haven't been ended, so they can still value things, and there's also everybody else around who can value it. Not necessarily positively, but they'd still value it."

"Sure but my torturing them doesn't actualize any values so there's no reason why I'd do it."

He shrugs. "I'm sure I could work out some value that it actualizes, such as the continual thirst for knowledge or something like that, but sure."

"Well but if you only pick and choose values arbitrarily you won't be picking out everything that's valuable!"

"… Yes, but I'm not really sure why a vampire-you would necessarily decide to value the same things as you, especially if you originally picked them arbitrarily – if you really wanted to bite on a human, I'm sure vampire-you could decide that they actually didn't much care about humans?"

"But that's not what's missing from vampires, it's empathy, and I don't use empathy when making moral decisions, so I don't see why its lack would change anything."

"So… you think most people, with a lack of empathy, just resort to killing people when they're hungry? I guess they might? I mean, I get that you say you don't use empathy when making the decisions, but without the empathy you might be more inclined towards some decisions you would usually just discard? I mean, I don't get the impression that vampires care much about morality as a general, either."