Peter Watts - Blindsight

“Why do you think?” I asked, reflexively nondirective.

“I think that first one was — you know it was a juvenile, right? Maybe it was just inexperienced. Maybe it was stupid , and it made a bad decision. I think we’re dealing with a species so far beyond us that even their retarded children can rewire our brains on the fly, and I can’t tell you how fucking scared that should make you.”

I could see it in his topology. I could hear it in his voice. His nerveless face remained as calm as a corpse.

“We should just kill them now,” he said.

“Well, if they’re spies, they can’t have learned much. They’ve been in those cages the whole time, except—” for the way up . They’d been right next to us the whole trip back…

“These things live and breath EM. Even stunted, even isolated, who knows how much of our tech they could have just read through the walls ?”

“You’ve got to tell Sarasti,” I said.

“Oh, Sarasti knows. Why do you think he wouldn’t let them go?”

“He never said anything about—”

“He’d be crazy to fill us in. He keeps sending you down there, remember? Do you think for a second he’d tell you what he knows and then set you loose in a labyrinth full of mind-reading minotaurs? He knows, and he’s already got it factored a thousand ways to Sunday.” Keeton’s eyes were bright manic points blazing in an expressionless mask. He raised them to the center of the drum, and didn’t raise his voice a decibel. “Isn’t that right, Jukka?”

I checked ConSensus for active channels. “I don’t think he’s listening, Robert.”

Cunningham’s mouth moved in something that would have been a pitying smile if the rest of his face had been able to join in. “He doesn’t have to listen , Keeton. He doesn’t have to spy on us. He just knows .”

Ventilators, breathing. The almost-subliminal hum of bearings in motion. Then Sarasti’s disembodied voice rang forth through the drum.

“Everyone to Commons. Robert wants to share.”

Cunningham sat to my right, his plastic face lit from beneath by the conference table. He stared down into that light, rocking slightly. His lips went through the ongoing motions of some inaudible incantation. The Gang sat across from us. To my left Bates kept one eye on the proceedings and another on intelligence from the front lines.

Sarasti was with us only in spirit. His place at the head of the table remained empty. “Tell them,” he said.

“We have to get out of h—”

“From the beginning .”

Cunningham swallowed and started again. “Those frayed motor nerves I couldn’t figure out, those pointless cross-connections — they’re logic gates. Scramblers time-share . Their sensory and motor plexii double as associative neurons during idle time, so every part of the system can be used for cognition when it isn’t otherwise engaged. Nothing like it ever evolved on Earth. It means they can do a great deal of processing without a lot of dedicated associative mass, even for an individual.”

“So peripheral nerves can think?” Bates frowned. “Can they remember ?”

“Certainly. At least, I don’t see why not.” Cunningham pulled a cigarette from his pocket.

“So when they tore that scrambler apart—”

“Not civil war. Data dump. Passing information about us , most likely.”

“Pretty radical way to carry on a conversation,” Bates remarked.

“It wouldn’t be their first choice. I think each scrambler acts as a node in a distributed network, when they’re in Rorschach at least. But those fields would be configured down to the Angstrom, and when we go in with our tech and our shielding and blowing holes in their conductors — we bollocks up the network. Jam the local signal. So they resort to a sneakernet.”

He had not lit his cigarette. He rolled the filtered end between thumb and forefinger. His tongue flickered between his lips like a worm behind a mask.

Hidden in his tent, Sarasti took up the slack. “Scramblers also use Rorschach ’s EM for metabolic processes. Some pathways achieve proton transfer via heavy-atom tunneling. Perhaps the ambient radiation acts as a catalyst.”

“ Tunneling ?” Susan said. “As in quantum ?”

Cunningham nodded. “Which also explains your shielding problems. Partly, at least.”

“But is that even possible ? I mean, I thought those kind of effects only showed up under cryonic—”

“ Forget this,” Cunningham blurted. “We can debate the biochemistry later, if we’re still alive.”

“What do we debate instead, Robert?” Sarasti said smoothly.

“For starters, the dumbest of these things can look into your head and see what parts of your visual cortex are lighting up. And if there’s a difference between that and mind-reading, it’s not much of one.”

“As long as we stay out of Rorschach —”

“That ship has sailed . You people have already been there. Repeatedly. Who knows what you already did down there for no better reason than because Rorschach made you?”

“Wait a second,” Bates objected. “None of us were puppets down there. We hallucinated and we went blind and — and crazy even, but we were never possessed .”

Cunningham looked at her and snorted. “You think you’d be able to fight the strings? You think you’d even feel them? I could apply a transcranial magnet to your head right now and you’d raise your middle finger or wiggle your toes or kick Siri here in the sack and then swear on your sainted mother’s grave that you only did it because you wanted to. You’d dance like a puppet and all the time swear you were doing it of your own free will, and that’s just me , that’s just some borderline OCD with a couple of magnets and an MRI helmet.” He waved at the vast unknowable void beyond the bulkhead. Shreds of mangled cigarette floated sideways in front of him. “Do you want to guess what that can do? For all we know we’ve already given them Theseus ’ technical specs, warned them about the Icarus array, and then just decided of our own free will to forget it all.”

“ We can cause those effects,” Sarasti said coolly. “As you say. Strokes cause them. Tumors. Random accidents.”

“ Random? Those were experiments , people! That was vivisection ! They let you in so they could take you apart and see what made you tick and you never even knew it.”

“ So what ?” the vampire snapped invisibly. Something cold and hungry had edged into his voice. Human topologies shivered around the table, skittish.

“There’s a blind spot in the center of your visual field,” Sarasti pointed out. “You can’t see it. You can’t see the saccades in your visual timestream. Just two of the tricks you know about. Many others.”

Cunningham was nodding. “That’s my whole point . Rorschach could be—”

“Not talking about case studies. Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing — irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don’t experience the world as it exists at all. You experience a simulation built from assumptions. Shortcuts. Lies . Whole species is agnosiac by default. Rorschach does nothing to you that you don’t already do to yourselves.”

Nobody spoke. It was several silent seconds before I realized what had happened.