Peter Watts - Blindsight

“Siri,” Pag said quietly.

I slowed my breathing, tried again: “She doesn’t just want to talk about family. She wants to meet them. She keeps trying to drag me to meet hers . I thought I was hooking up with Chelsea , you know, nobody ever told me I’d have to share airspace with…”

“You do it?”

“Once.” Reaching, grasping things, feigning acceptance, feigning friendship . “It was great, if you like being ritually pawed by a bunch of play-acting strangers who can’t stand the sight of you and don’t have the guts to admit it.”

Pag shrugged, unsympathetic. “Sounds like typical old-school family. You’re a synthesist, man. You deal with way wonkier dynamics than that .”

“I deal with other people’s information. I don’t vomit my own personal life into the public sphere. Whatever hybrids and the constructs I work with, they don’t—”

— touch—

“Interrogate,” I finished.

“You knew Chelse was an old-fashioned girl right off the top.”

“Yeah, when it suits her.” I gulped ale. “But she’s cutting-edge when she’s got a splicer in her hand. Which isn’t to say that her strategies couldn’t use some work.”

“Strategies.”

It’s not a strategy , for God’s sake! Can’t you see I’m hurting ? I’m on the fucking floor , Siri, I’m curled up in a ball because I’m hurting so much and all you can do is criticize my tactics ? What do I have to do, slash my goddamn wrists?

I’d shrugged and turned away. Nature’s trick .

“She cries ,” I said now. “High blood-lactate levels, makes it easy for her. It’s just chemistry but she holds it up like it was some kind of IOU.”

Pag pursed his lips. “Doesn’t mean it’s an act.”

“Everything’s an act. Everything’s strategy. You know that.” I snorted. “And she’s miffed because I base a skin on her?”

“I don’t think it’s so much the actual skin as the fact that you didn’t tell her. You know how she feels about honesty in relationships.”

“Sure. She doesn’t want any.”

He looked at me.

“Give me some credit, Pag. You think I should tell her that sometimes the sight of her makes me shudder?”

The system called Robert Paglino sat quietly, and sipped his drugs, and set the things he was about to say in order. He took a breath.

“I can’t believe you could be so fucking dumb,” he said.

“Yeah? Enlighten me.”

“Of course she wants you to tell her you only have eyes for her, you love her pores and her morning breath, and why stop at one tweak how about ten. But that doesn’t mean she wants you to lie , you idiot. She wants all that stuff to be true . And — well, why can’t it be?”

“It isn’t,” I said.

“ Jesus , Siri. People aren’t rational . You aren’t rational. We’re not thinking machines, we’re — we’re feeling machines that happen to think.” He took a breath, and another hit. “And you already know that, or you couldn’t do your job. Or at least—” He grimaced — “the system knows.”

“The system.”

Me and my protocols, he meant. My Chinese Room .

I took a breath. “It doesn’t work with everyone, you know.”

“So I’ve noticed. Can’t read systems you’re too entangled with, right? Observer effect.”

I shrugged.

“Just as well,” he said. “I don’t think I’d like you all that much in that room of yours.”

It came out before I could stop it: “Chelse says she’d prefer a real one.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Real what?”

“Chinese Room. She says it would have better comprehension.”

The Qube murmured and clattered around us for a few moments.

“I can see why she’d say that,” Pag said at last. “But you — you did okay, Pod-man.”

“I dunno.”

He nodded, emphatic. “You know what they say about the road less traveled? Well, you carved your own road. I don’t know why. It’s like learning calligraphy using your toes, you know? Or proprioceptive polyneuropathy. It’s amazing you can do it at all; it’s mindboggling that you actually got good at it.”

I squinted at him. “Proprio—”

“There used to be people without any sense of — well, of themselves, physically. They couldn’t feel their bodies in space, had no idea how their own limbs were arranged or even if they had limbs. Some of them said they felt pithed . Disembodied. They’d send a motor signal to the hand and just have to take it on faith that it arrived. So they’d use vision to compensate; they couldn’t feel where the hand was so they’d look at it while it moved, use sight as a substitute for the normal force-feedback you and I take for granted. They could walk, if they kept their eyes focused on their legs and concentrated on every step. They’d get pretty good at it. But even after years of practice, if you distracted them in mid-step they’d go over like a beanstalk without a counterweight.”

“You’re saying I’m like that?”

“You use your Chinese room the way they used vision. You’ve reinvented empathy, almost from scratch, and in some ways — not all obviously, or I wouldn’t have to tell you this — but in some ways yours is better than the original. It’s why you’re so good at synthesis.”

I shook my head. “I just observe, that’s all. I watch what people do, and then I imagine what would make them do that.”

“Sounds like empathy to me.”

“It’s not. Empathy’s not so much about imagining how the other guy feels. It’s more about imagining how you’d feel in the same place, right?”

Pag frowned. “So?”

“So what if you don’t know how you’d feel?”

He looked at me, and his surfaces were serious and completely transparent. “You’re better than that, friend. You may not always act like it, but — I know you. I knew you before .”

“You knew someone else. I’m Pod-man , remember?”

“Yeah, that was someone else. And maybe I remember him better than you do. But I’ll tell you one thing.” He leaned forward. “ Both of you would’ve helped me out that day. And maybe he would’ve got there with good ol’-fashioned empathy while you had to cobble together some kind of improvised flowchart out of surplus parts, but that just makes your accomplishment all the greater. Which is why I continue to stick it out with you, old buddy. Even though you have a rod up your ass the size of the Rio Spire.”

He held out his glass. Dutifully, I clinked it against my own. We drank.

“I don’t remember him,” I said after a while.

“What, the other Siri? Pre-Pod Siri?”

I nodded.

“Nothing at all?”

I thought back. “Well, he was wracked by convulsions all the time, right? There’d be constant pain. I don’t remember any pain.” My glass was almost empty; I sipped to make it last. “I — I dream about him sometimes, though. About — being him.”

“What’s it like?”

“It was — colorful. Everything was more saturated, you know? Sounds, smells. Richer than life.”

“And now?”

I looked at him.

“You said it was colorful. What changed?”

“I don’t know. Maybe nothing. I just — I don’t actually remember the dreams when I wake up any more.”

“So how do you know you still have them?” Pag asked.

Fuck it I thought, and tipped back the last of my pint in a single gulp. “I know.”