Imagine that an esteemed journalist published a book profiling a real-life vampire, and then that vampire’s twisted soulmate—also a vampire—started a rock band. If this were 1985, when Anne Rice ’s novel The Vampire Lestat came out, you could expect such a revelation to upend human society. But in today’s United States, an aspiring tech dystopia where the news can be weirder than the conspiracy theories ? You’d get hours of social media chaos, days of cable-news hysteria, and then, most likely, everyone who didn’t already believe in lizard people would write off the author as a scammer and the rocker as a fraud.…