Peter Watts - Blindsight

“Can you explain Siri’s blindness to it?” Sarasti said.

“I can’t,” Cunningham admitted. “It’s beyond ordinary crypsis. But Rorschach makes you see all sorts of things that aren’t there. Not seeing something that is there might come down to essentially the same thing.”

“Another hallucination?” I asked.

Another shrug while Cunningham sucked smoke. “There are many ways to fool the human visual system. It’s interesting that the illusion failed when multiple witnesses were present, but if you want a definitive mechanism you’ll have to give me more to work with than that .” He stabbed his cigarette hand at the crisped remains.

“But—” James took a breath, bracing herself — “We’re talking about something… sophisticated, at least. Something very complex. A great deal of processing power.”

Cunningham nodded again. “I’d estimate nervous tissue accounts for about thirty percent of body mass.”

“So it’s intelligent.” Her voice was almost a whisper.

“Not remotely.”

“But — thirty percent—”

“Thirty percent motor and sensory wiring.” Another drag. “Much like an octopus; an enormous number of neurons, but half of them get used up running the suckers.”

“My understanding is that octopi are quite intelligent,” James said.

“By molluscan standards, certainly. But do you have any idea how much extra cabling you’d need if the photoreceptors in your eye were spread across your entire body? You’d need about three hundred million extension cords to begin with, ranging from half a millimeter to two meters long. Which means all your signals are staggered and out of synch, which means billions of additional logic gates to cohere the input. And that just gets you a single static image, with no filtering, no interpretation, no time-series integration at all.” Shiver. Drag. “Now multiply that by all the extra wiring needed to focus all those eyespots on an object, or to send all that information back to individual chromatophores, and then add in the processing power you need to drive those chromatophores one at a time. Thirty percent might do all that, but I strongly doubt you’d have much left over for philosophy and science.” He waved his hand in the general direction of the hold. “That — that—”

“ Scrambler, ” James suggested.

Cunningham rolled his tongue around it. “Very well. That scrambler is an absolute miracle of evolutionary engineering. It’s also dumb as a stick.”

A moment’s silence.

“So what is it?” James asked at last. “Somebody’s pet?”

“Canary in a coal mine,” Bates suggested.

“Perhaps not even that,” Cunningham said. “Perhaps no more than a white blood cell with waldoes. Maintenance bot, maybe. Teleoperated, or instinct-driven. But people, we’re ignoring far greater questions here. How could an anaerobe even develop complex multicellular anatomy, much less move as fast as this thing did? That level of activity burns a great deal of ATP.”

“Maybe they don’t use ATP,” Bates said as I thumbnailed: adenosine triphosphate . Cellular energy source.

“It was crammed with ATP,” Cunningham told her. “You can tell that much even with these remains. The question is, how can it synthesize the stuff fast enough to keep up with demand. Purely anaerobic pathways wouldn’t suffice.”

Nobody offered any suggestions.

“Anyway,” he said, “So endeth the lesson. If you want gory details, check ConSensus.” He wiggled the fingers of his free hand: the spectral dissection vanished. “I’ll keep working, but if you want any real answers go get me a live one.” He butted out his cigarette against the bulkhead and stared defiantly around the drum.

The others hardly reacted; their topologies still sparkled from the revelations of a few minutes before. Perhaps Cunningam’s pet peeve was more important to the Big Picture; perhaps, in a reductionist universe, biochemical basics should always take priority over the finer points of ETI and interspecies etiquette. But Bates and the Gang were time-lagged, processing earlier revelations. Not just processing , either: wallowing. They clung to Cunningham’s findings like convicted felons who’d just discovered they might be freed on a technicality.

Because the scrambler was dead at our hands, no doubt about it. But it wasn’t an alien , not really. It wasn’t intelligent . It was just a blood cell with waldoes. It was dumb as a stick.

And property damage is so much easier to live with than murder.

Robert Paglino had set me up with Chelsea in the first place. Maybe he felt responsible when the relationship started jumping the rails. Or maybe Chelsea, Madam Fix-It that she was, had approached him for an intervention. For whatever reason, it was obvious the moment we took our seats at QuBit’s that his invitation had not been entirely social.

He went for some neurotrope cocktail on the rocks. I stuck with Rickard’s.

“Still old-school,” Pag said.

“Still into foreplay,” I observed.

“That obvious, huh?” He took a sip. “That’ll teach me to try the subtle approach with a professional jargonaut.”

“Jargonaut’s got nothing to do with it. You wouldn’t have fooled a border collie.” Truth be told, Pag’s topology never really told me much that I didn’t already know. I never really had much of an edge in reading him. Maybe we just knew each other too well.

“So,” he said, “spill.”

“Nothing to spill. She just got to know the real me.”

“That is bad.”

“What’d she tell you?”

“Me? Nothing at all.”

I gave him a look over the top of my glass.

He sighed. “She knows you’re cheating on her.”

“I’m what?”

“Cheating. With the skin.”

“It’s based on her !”

“But it isn’t her.”

“No it isn’t. It doesn’t fart or fight or break into tears every time you don’t want to be dragged off to meet its family. Look, I love the woman dearly, but come on . When was the last time you tried first-person fucking?”

“Seventy-four,” he said.

“You’re kidding.” I’d have guessed never .

“Did some third-world medical missionary work between gigs. They still bump and grind in Texas.” Pag swigged his trope. “Actually, I thought it was alright.”

“The novelty wears off.”

“Evidently.”

“And it’s not like I’m doing anything unusual here, Pag. She’s the one with the kink. And it’s not just the sex. She keeps asking about — she keeps wanting to know things.”

“Like what?”

“Irrelevant stuff. My life as a kid. My family. Nobody’s fucking business.”

“She’s just taking an interest. Not everyone considers childhood memories off-limits, you know.”

“Thanks for the insight.” As if people had never taken an interest before. As if Helen hadn’t taken an interest when she went through my drawers and filtered my mail and followed me from room to room, asking the drapes and the furniture why I was always so sullen and withdrawn. She’d taken such an interest that she wouldn’t let me out the door until I confided in her. At twelve I’d been stupid enough to throw myself on her mercy, It’s personal, Mom. I’d just rather not talk about it. Then I’d made my escape into the bathroom when she demanded to know if it was trouble online, trouble at school, was it a girl, was it a — a boy , what was it and why couldn’t I just trust my own mother , don’t I know I can trust her with anything ? I waited out the persistent knocking and the insistent concerned voice through the door and the final, grudging silence that followed. I waited until I was absolutely sure she’d gone away, I waited for five fucking hours before I came out and there she was, arms folded in the hall, eyes brimming with reproach and disappointment. That night she took the lock off the bathroom door because family should never shut each other out . Still taking an interest.