Peter Watts - Blindsight

“You have a naïve understanding of evolutionary processes. There’s no such thing as survival of the fittest . Survival of the most adequate , maybe. It doesn’t matter whether a solution’s optimal. All that matters is whether it beats the alternatives.”

I knew that voice too. It belonged to a demon.

“Well, we damn well beat the alternatives .” Some subtle overdubbed harmonic in James’ voice suggested a chorus: the whole Gang, rising as one in opposition.

I couldn’t believe it. I’d just been mutilated, beaten before their eyes — and they were talking about biology ?

Maybe she’s afraid to talk about anything else , I thought. Maybe she’s afraid she might be next.

Or maybe she just couldn’t care less what happens to me.

“It’s true,” Sarasti told her, “that your intellect makes up for your self-awareness to some extent. But you’re flightless birds on a remote island. You’re not so much successful as isolated from any real competition.”

No more clipped speech patterns. No more terse phrasing. The transient had made his kill, found his release. Now he didn’t care who knew he was around.

“You?” Michelle whispered. “Not we ?”

“ We stop racing long ago,” the demon said at last. “It’s not our fault you don’t leave it at that.”

“Ah.” Cunningham again. “Welcome back. Did you look in on Ke—”

“No.” Bates said.

“Satisfied?” the demon asked.

“If you mean the grunts, I’m satisfied you’re out of them,” Bates said. “If you mean — it was completely unwarranted, Jukka.”

“It isn’t.”

“You assaulted a crewmember. If we had a brig you’d be in it for the rest of the trip.”

“This isn’t a military vessel, Major. You’re not in charge.”

I didn’t need a visual feed to know what Bates thought of that. But there was something else in her silence, something that made me bring the drum camera back online. I squinted against the corrosive light, brought down the brightness until all that remained was a faint whisper of pastels.

Yes. Bates. Stepping off the stairway onto the deck.

“Grab a chair,” Cunningham said from his seat in the Commons. “It’s golden oldies time.”

There was something about her.

“I’m sick of that song,” Bates said. “We’ve played it to death.”

Even now, my tools chipped and battered, my perceptions barely more than baseline, I could see the change. This torture of prisoners, this assault upon crew, had crossed a line in her head. The others wouldn’t see it. The lid on her affect was tight as a boilerplate. But even through the dim shadows of my window the topology glowed around her like neon.

Amanda Bates was no longer merely considering a change of command. Now it was only a matter of when.

The universe was closed and concentric.

My tiny refuge lay in its center. Outside that shell was another, ruled by a monster, patrolled by his lackeys. Beyond that was another still, containing something even more monstrous and incomprehensible, something that might soon devour us all.

There was nothing else. Earth was a vague hypothesis, irrelevant to this pocket cosmos. I saw no place into which it might fit.

I stayed in the center of the universe for a long time, hiding. I kept the lights off. I didn’t eat. I crept from my tent only to piss or shit in the cramped head down at Fab, and only when the spine was deserted. A field of painful blisters rose across my flash-burned back, as densely packed as kernels on a corncob. The slightest abrasion tore them open.

Nobody tapped at my door, nobody called my name through ConSensus. I wouldn’t have answered if they had. Maybe they knew that, somehow. Maybe they kept their distance out of respect for my privacy and my disgrace.

Maybe they just didn’t give a shit.

I peeked outside now and then, kept an eye on Tactical. I saw Scylla and Charybdis climb into the accretion belt and return towing captured reaction mass in a great distended mesh between them. I watched our ampsat reach its destination in the middle of nowhere, saw antimatter’s quantum blueprints stream down into Theseus ’s buffers. Mass and specs combined in Fab, topped up our reserves, forged the tools that Jukka Sarasti needed for his master plan, whatever that was.

Maybe he’d lose. Maybe Rorschach would kill us all, but not before it had played with Sarasti the way Sarasti had played with me. That would almost make it worthwhile. Or maybe Bates’ mutiny would come first, and succeed. Maybe she would slay the monster, and commandeer the ship, and take us all to safety.

But then I remembered: the universe was closed, and so very small. There was really nowhere else to go.

I put my ear to feeds throughout the ship. I heard routine instructions from the predator, murmured conversations among the prey. I took in only sound, never sight; a video feed would have spilled light into my tent, left me naked and exposed. So I listened in the darkness as the others spoke among themselves. It didn’t happen often any more. Perhaps too much had been said already, perhaps there was nothing left to do but mind the countdown. Sometimes hours would pass with no more than a cough or a grunt.

When they did speak, they never mentioned my name. Only once did I hear any of them even hint at my existence.

That was Cunningham, talking to Sascha about zombies. I heard them in the galley over breakfast, unusually talkative. Sascha hadn’t been let out for a while, and was making up for lost time. Cunningham let her, for reasons of his own. Maybe his fears had been soothed somehow, maybe Sarasti had revealed his master plan. Or maybe Cunningham simply craved distraction from the imminence of the enemy.

“It doesn’t bug you?” Sascha was saying. “Thinking that your mind, the very thing that makes you you , is nothing but some kind of parasite?”

“Forget about minds ,” he told her. “Say you’ve got a device designed to monitor — oh, cosmic rays, say. What happens when you turn its sensor around so it’s not pointing at the sky anymore, but at its own guts?” He answered himself before she could: “It does what it’s built to. It measures cosmic rays, even though it’s not looking at them any more. It parses its own circuitry in terms of cosmic-ray metaphors, because those feel right, because they feel natural, because it can’t look at things any other way. But it’s the wrong metaphor . So the system misunderstands everything about itself. Maybe that’s not a grand and glorious evolutionary leap after all. Maybe it’s just a design flaw.”

“But you’re the biologist. You know Mom was right better’n anyone. Brain’s a big glucose hog. Everything it does costs through the nose.”

“True enough,” Cunningham admitted.

“So sentience has gotta be good for something, then. Because it’s expensive , and if it sucks up energy without doing anything useful then evolution’s gonna weed it out just like that .”

“Maybe it did.” He paused long enough to chew food or suck smoke. “Chimpanzees are smarter than Orangutans, did you know that? Higher encephalisation quotient. Yet they can’t always recognize themselves in a mirror. Orangs can.”

“So what’s your point? Smarter animal, less self-awareness? Chimpanzees are becoming nonsentient?”

“Or they were, before we stopped everything in its tracks.”

“So why didn’t that happen to us?”

“What makes you think it didn’t?”