Quote Originally Posted by Grognaurd View Post
The strangest part of that scene is Michael yells Randy! Not Randy? Maybe the next part is too much on my part, but I think Randy responds. There is a distinct growl. Is there enough of his mind left to recognize it? There are two aspects to that.
1) Is there recognition of a "self"? The biters are not mindless, but would they recognize themselves in a mirror?

2) Cognitive ability. Some of the first changes are intellectual. Is there a Tower of Babel aspect? Maybe they no longer understand English, but when Michael yells Randy, Randy might go [biter] holy shit did he just say Randy or did he just bark at me like he rabid dogs they are [/biter]

I have always attributed strong foreshadowing to Michael's comment, "Now, that Riley warned them in their own language. They probably understood that shit" from Chapter 1.

Compared to the biters, the humans seem more like the Romero-style Zombies. They are slower, weaker and their flesh is softer as if it is rotten. It works physically, but the intellectual aspects breaks down because the humans are certainly making much better use of tools...
I like the turned-tables of humans-as-zombies from the zombies point of view. I've said as much in other threads and others have too: It's a story of survival not a zombie story. Both sides are trying to survive against an antagonist that appears to want to wipe them off the face of the Earth.

As for the self and cognitive abilities - I think it depends on the Smart One aspect. How smart is smart? And how smart does one have to be to retain "self" are make reasoned decisions. We have some zombies, normal and otherwise, that make self preservation decisions (hide behind something, protect your weak spots). Then we have tool usage, possible language abilities (spoken and reading), and complex task completion. And that's before we get to all the things Ink has pulled off in the biochemistry department!

Anyway, I think the smartest of the Smart Ones benefit from something related to Ink. Maybe he has some sort of cocktail to help get their minds into a more usable state or maybe they are able to do it themselves. But there are definitely big differences in the cognitive abilities of Ink, Randy, and at least some of the Little Ones....