Peter Watts - Firefall

“Dispassionate?” Cunningham smiled faintly.

“Maybe your empathy ’s just a comforting lie, you ever think of that? Maybe you think you know how the other person feels but you’re only feeling yourself , maybe you’re even worse than me. Or maybe we’re all just guessing. Maybe the only difference is that I don’t lie to myself about it.”

“Do they look the way you imagined?” he asked.

“What? What are you talking about?”

“The scramblers. Multijointed arms from a central mass . Sounds rather similar to me.”

He’d been into Szpindel’s archives.

“I—Not really,” I said. “The arms are more—flexible, in real life. More segmented. And I never really got a look at the body. What does that have to do with—”

“Close, though, wasn’t it? Same size, same general body plan.”

“So what ?”

“Why didn’t you report it?”

“I did. Isaac said it was just TMS. From Rorschach .”

“You saw them before Rorschach . Or at least,” he continued, “you saw something that scared you into blowing your cover, back when you were spying on Isaac and Michelle.”

My rage dissipated like air through a breach. “They—they knew?”

“Only Isaac, I think. And it kept it between it and the logs. I suspect it didn’t want to interfere with your noninterference protocols—although I’ll wager that was the last time you ever caught the two of them in private, yes?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Did you think the official observer was somehow exempt from observation?” Cunningham asked after a while.

“No,” I said softly. “I suppose not.”

He nodded. “Have you seen any since? I’m not talking about run-of-the-mill TMS hallucinations. I mean scramblers. Have you hallucinated any since you actually saw one in the flesh, since you knew what they looked like?”

I thought about it. “No.”

He shook his head, some new opinion confirmed. “You really are something, Keeton, you know that? You don’t lie to yourself? Even now, you don’t know what you know.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You figured it out . From Rorschach ’s architecture, probably—form follows function, yes? Somehow you pieced together a fairly good idea of what a scrambler looked like before anyone ever laid eyes on them. Or at least—” He drew a breath; his cigarette flared like an LED—“part of you did. Some collection of unconscious modules working their asses off on your behalf. But they can’t show their work, can they? You don’t have conscious access to those levels. So one part of the brain tries to tell another any way it can. Passes notes under the table.”

“Blindsight,” I murmered. You just get a feeling of where to reach…

“More like schizophrenia, except you saw pictures instead of hearing voices. You saw pictures . And you still didn’t understand.”

I blinked. “But how would I—I mean—”

“What did you think, that Theseus was haunted? That the scramblers were communing with you telepathically? What you do—it matters , Keeton. They told you you were nothing but their stenographer and they hammered all those layers of hands-off passivity into you but you just had to take some initiative anyway, didn’t you? Had to work the problem on your own. The only thing you couldn’t do was admit it to yourself.” Cunningham shook his head. “Siri Keeton. See what they’ve done to you.”

He touched his face.

“See what they’ve done to us all,” he whispered.

I found the Gang floating in the center of the darkened observation blister. She made room as I joined her, pushed to one side and anchored herself to a bit of webbing.

“Susan?” I asked. I honestly couldn’t tell any more.

“I’ll get her,” Michelle said.

“No, that’s all right. I’d like to speak to all of—”

But Michelle had already fled. The half-lit figure changed before me, and said, “She’d rather be alone right now.”

I nodded. “You?”

James shrugged. “I don’t mind talking. Although I’m surprised you’re still doing your reports, after….”

“I’m—not, exactly. This isn’t for Earth.”

I looked around. Not much to see. Faraday mesh coated the inside of the dome like a gray film, dimming and graining the view beyond. Ben hung like a black malignancy across half the sky. I could make out a dozen dim contrails against vague bands of cloud, in reds so deep they bordered on black. The sun winked past James’s shoulder, our sun, a bright dot that diffracted into faint splintered rainbows when I moved my head. That was pretty much it: starlight didn’t penetrate the mesh, nor did the larger, dimmer particles of the accretion belt. The myriad dim pinpoints of shovelnosed machinery were lost utterly.

Which might be a comfort to some, I supposed.

“Shitty view,” I remarked. Theseus could have projected crisp first-person vistas across the dome in an instant, more real than real.

“Michelle likes it,” James said. “The way it feels. And Cruncher likes the diffraction effects, he likes—interference patterns.”

We watched nothing for a while, by the dim half-light filtering out from the spine. It brushed the edges of James’ profile.

“You set me up,” I said at last.

She looked at me. “What do you mean?”

“You were talking around me all along, weren’t you? All of you. You didn’t bring me in until I’d been—” How had she put it? “— preconditioned . The whole thing was planned to throw me off-balance. And then Sarasti—attacks me out of nowhere, and—”

“We didn’t know about that. Not until the alarm went off.”

“Alarm?”

“When he changed the gas mix. You must have heard it. Isn’t that why you were there?”

“He called me to his tent. He told me to watch.”

She regarded me from a face full of shadow. “You didn’t try to stop him?”

I couldn’t answer the accusation in her voice. “I just—observe,” I said weakly.

“I thought you were trying to stop him from—” She shook her head. “ That’s why I thought he was attacking you.”

“You’re saying that wasn’t an act? You weren’t in on it?” I didn’t believe it.

But I could tell she did.

“I thought you were trying to protect them.” She snorted a soft, humorless laugh at her own mistake and looked away. “I guess I should have known better.”

She should have. She should have known that taking orders is one thing; taking sides would have done nothing but compromise my integrity.

And I should have been used to it by now.

I forged on. “It was some kind of object lesson. A, a tutorial . You can’t torture the nonsentient or something, and—and I heard you, Susan. It wasn’t news to you, it wasn’t news to anyone except me , and…”

And you hid it from me. You all did. You and your whole gang and Amanda too. You’ve been hashing this out for days and you went out of your way to cover it up.

How did I miss it? How did I miss it?

“Jukka told us not to discuss it with you,” Susan admitted.

“Why? This is exactly the kind of thing I’m out here for!”

“He said you’d—resist. Unless it was handled properly.”

“Handled—Susan, he assaulted me! You saw what he—”

“We didn’t know he was going to do that. None of us did.”

“And he did it why? To win an argument?”

“That’s what he says.”