Peter Watts - Blindsight

A sea of tortured faces, rotating in slow orbits around my vampire commander.

“My God, what is this?”

“Statistics.” Sarasti seemed focused on a flayed Asian child. “ Rorschach ’s growth allometry over a two-week period.”

“They’re faces …”

He nodded, turning his attention to a woman with no eyes. “Skull diameter scales to total mass. Mandible length scales to EM transparency at one Angstrom. One hundred thirteen facial dimensions, each presenting a different variable. Principle-component combinations present as multifeature aspect ratios.” He turned to face me, his naked gleaming eyes just slightly sidecast. “You’d be surprised how much gray matter is dedicated to the analysis of facial imagery. Shame to waste it on anything as — counterintuitive as residual plots or contingency tables.”

I felt my jaw clenching. “And the expressions ? What do they represent?”

“Software customizes output for user.”

An agonized gallery pled for mercy on all sides.

“I am wired for hunting,” he reminded gently .

“And you think I don’t know that,” I said after a moment.

He shrugged, disconcertingly human. “You ask.”

“Why am I here, Jukka? You want to teach me another object lesson ?”

“To discuss our next move.”

“What move? We can’t even run away.”

“No.” He shook his head, baring filed teeth in something approaching regret.

“Why did we wait so long?” Suddenly my sullen defiance had evaporated. I sounded like a child, frightened and pleading. “Why didn’t we just take it on when we first got here, when it was weaker …?”

“We need to learn things. For next time.”

“Next time? I thought Rorschach was a dandelion seed. I thought it just — washed up here—”

“By chance. But every dandelion is a clone. Their seeds are legion.” Another smile, not remotely convincing — “And maybe it takes more than one try for the placental mammals to conquer Australia.”

“It’ll annihilate us. It doesn’t even need those spitballs, it could pulverize us with one of those scramjets. In an instant.”

“It doesn’t want to.”

“How do you know ?”

“They need to learn things too. They want us intact. Improves our odds.”

“Not enough. We can’t win.”

This was his cue. This was the point at which Uncle Predator would smile at my naiveté, and take me into his confidence. Of course we’re armed to the teeth , he would say. Do you think we’d come all this way, face such a vast unknown, without the means to defend ourselves? Now, at last, I can reveal that shielding and weaponry account for over half the ship’s mass…

It was his cue .

“No,” he said. “We can’t win.”

“So we just sit here. We just wait to die for the next — the next sixty-eight minutes…”

Sarasti shook his head. “No.”

“But—” I began.

“Oh,” I finished.

Because of course, we had just topped up our antimatter reserves. Theseus was not equipped with weapons. Theseus was the weapon. And we were, in fact, going to sit here for the next sixty-eight minutes, waiting to die.

But we were going to take Rorschach with us when we did.

Sarasti said nothing. I wondered what he saw, looking at me. I wondered if there actually was a Jukka Sarasti behind those eyes to see, if his insights — always ten steps ahead of our own — hailed not so much from superior analytical facilities as from the timeworn truth that it takes one to know one .

Whose side, I wondered, would an automaton take?

“You have other things to worry about,” he said.

He moved towards me; I swear, all those agonized faces followed him with their eyes. He studied me for a moment, the flesh crinkling around his eyes. Or maybe some mindless algorithm merely processed visual input, correlated aspect ratios and facial tics, fed everything to some output subroutine with no more awareness than a stats program. Maybe there was no more spark in this creature’s face than there was in all the others, silently screaming in his wake.

“Is Susan afraid of you?” the thing before me asked.

“Su — why should she be?”

“She has four conscious entities in her head. She’s four times more sentient than you. Doesn’t that make you a threat?”

“No, of course not.”

“Then why should you feel threatened by me?”

And suddenly I didn’t care any more. I laughed out loud, with minutes to live and nothing to lose. “ Why ? Maybe because you’re my natural enemy, you fucker. Maybe because I know you, and you can’t even look at one of us without flexing your claws. Maybe because you nearly ripped my fucking hand off and raped me for no good reason—”

“I can imagine what it’s like,” he said quietly. “Please don’t make me do it again.”

I fell instantly silent.

“I know your race and mine are never on the best of terms.” There was a cold smile in his voice if not on his face. “But I do only what you force me to. You rationalize , Keeton. You defend . You reject unpalatable truths, and if you can’t reject them outright you trivialize them. Incremental evidence is never enough for you. You hear rumors of Holocaust; you dismiss them. You see evidence of genocide; you insist it can’t be so bad. Temperatures rise, glaciers melt — species die — and you blame sunspots and volcanoes. Everyone is like this, but you most of all. You and your Chinese Room. You turn incomprehension into mathematics, you reject the truth without even knowing what it is.”

“It served me well enough.” I wondered at the ease with which I had put my life into the past tense.

“Yes, if your purpose is only to transmit . Now you have to convince . You have to believe .”

There were implications there I didn’t dare to hope for. “Are you saying—”

“Can’t afford to let the truth trickle through. Can’t give you the chance to shore up your rationales and your defenses. They must fall completely. You must be inundated . Shattered. Genocide’s impossible to deny when you’re buried up to your neck in dismembered bodies.”

He’d played me. All this time. Preconditioning me, turning my topology inside-out.

I’d known something was going on. I just hadn’t understood what .

“I’d have seen right through it,” I said, “if you hadn’t made me get involved.”

“You might even read it off me directly.”

“ That’s why you—” I shook my head. “I thought that was because we were meat .”

“That too,” Sarasti admitted, and looked right at me.

For the first time, I looked right back. And felt a shock of recognition.

I still wonder why I never saw it before. For all those years I remembered the thoughts and feelings of some different, younger person, some remnant of the boy my parents had hacked out of my head to make room for me. He’d been alive . His world had been vibrant. And though I could call up the memories of that other consciousness, I could barely feel anything within the constraints of my own.

Perhaps dreamstate wasn’t such a bad word for it…

“Like to hear a vampire folk tale?” Sarasti asked.

“Vampires have folk tales?”

He took it for a yes . “A laser is assigned to find the darkness. Since it lives in a room without doors, or windows, or any other source of light, it thinks this will be easy. But everywhere it turns it sees brightness. Every wall, every piece of furniture it points at is brightly lit. Eventually it concludes there is no darkness, that light is everywhere.”