Blindsight (Firefall, #1)

by Peter Watts

So I survived that and a million other childhood experiences. I grew up and I got along. I learned to fit in. I observed, recorded, derived the algorithms and mimicked appropriate behaviors. Not much of it was … heartfelt, I guess the word is. I had friends and enemies, like everyone else. I chose them by running through checklists of behaviors and circumstances compiled from years of observation.

But that, that distance—that chronic sense of being an alien among your own kind—it’s not entirely a bad thing. It came in especially handy when the real aliens came calling.

Nobody gets past Jupiter without becoming part vampire.

I’d spent my whole life as a sort of alien ethologist in my own right, watching the world behave, gleaning patterns and protocols, learning the rules that allowed me to infiltrate Human society. It had always worked before. Somehow, though, the presence of real aliens had changed the dynamics of the equation. Mere observation didn’t satisfy anymore. It was as though the presence of this new out-group had forced me back into the clade whether I liked it or not; the distance between myself and the world suddenly seemed forced and faintly ridiculous. Yet I couldn’t, for my life, figure out how to let it go.

Sarasti could have fed the information directly to our inlays—the whole briefing could have gone through ConSensus, without the need to assemble physically in the same place—but if you want to be sure everyone’s paying attention, you bring them together.

This meeting could have been an email

“Well it’s not like anyone talks about it now. People were fucking barbarians about multicores back then—called it a disorder, treated it like some kind of disease. And their idea of a cure was to keep one of the cores and murder all the others. Not that they called it murder, of course. They called it integration or some shit. That’s what people did back then: created other people to suck up all the abuse and torture, then got rid of them when they weren’t needed anymore.”

Alter carried baggage over a century old, ConSensus told me. Sascha was right; there’d been a time when MCC was MPD, a disorder rather than a complex, and it had never been induced deliberately. According to the experts of that time, multiple personalities arose spontaneously from unimaginable cauldrons of abuse—fragmentary personae offered up to suffer rapes and beatings while the child behind took to some unknowable sanctuary in the folds of the brain. It was both survival strategy and ritual self-sacrifice: powerless souls hacking themselves to pieces, offering up quivering chunks of self in the desperate hope that the vengeful gods called Mom or Dad might not be insatiable. None of it had been real, as it turned out. Or at least, none of it had been confirmed. The experts of the day had been little more than witch doctors dancing through improvised rituals: meandering free-form interviews full of leading questions and nonverbal cues, scavenger hunts through regurgitated childhoods. Sometimes a shot of lithium or haloperidol when the beads and rattles didn’t work. The technology to map minds was barely off the ground; the technology to edit them was years away. So the therapists and psychiatrists poked at their victims and invented names for things they didn’t understand, and argued over the shrines of Freud and Klein and the old Astrologers, doing their very best to sound like practitioners of Science.

Inevitably, it was Science that turned them all into roadkill; MPD was a half-forgotten fad even before the advent of synaptic rewiring. But alter was a word from that time, and its resonance had persisted. Among those who remembered the tale, alter was codespeak for betrayal and Human sacrifice. Alter meant cannon fodder.

“Now keep in mind, memories aren’t historical archives. They’re—improvisations, really. A lot of the stuff you associate with a particular event might be factually wrong, no matter how clearly you remember it. The brain has a funny habit of building composites. Inserting details after the fact. But that’s not to say your memories aren’t true, okay? They’re an honest reflection of how you saw the world, and every one of them went into shaping how you see it. But they’re not photographs. More like impressionist paintings. Okay?”

I went to sleep a dead man. I had only theory and the assurances of fellow machinery that I would ever be born again.

went to ConSensus for enlightenment and found a whole other self buried below the limbic system, below the hindbrain, below even the cerebellum. It lived in the brain stem and it was older than the vertebrates themselves. It was self-contained: it heard and saw and felt, independent of all those other parts layered over top like evolutionary afterthoughts. It dwelt on nothing but its own survival. It had no time for planning or abstract analysis, spared effort for only the most rudimentary sensory processing. But it was fast, and it was dedicated, and it could react to threats in a fraction of the time it took its smarter roommates to even become aware of them.

First-person sex—real sex, as Chelsea insisted on calling it—was an acquired taste: jagged breathing, the raw slap and stink of sweaty skin full of pores and blemishes, a whole other person with a whole other set of demands and dislikes. There was definite animal appeal, no doubt about it. This was, after all, how we’d done it for millions of years. But this, this third-world carnality had always carried an element of struggle, of asynchronous patterns in conflict. There was no convergence here. There was only the rhythm of bodies in collision, a struggle for dominance, each trying to force the other into sync. Chelsea regarded it as love in its purest form. I came to think of it as hand-to-hand combat.

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.”

“Are scramblers even alive?” I asked. “What kind of question is that?” “You think Rorschach grows them on some kind of assembly line. You can’t find any genes. Maybe they’re just biomechanical machines.” “That’s what life is, Keeton. That’s what you are.” Another hit of nicotine, another storm of numbers, another sample. “Life isn’t either/or. It’s a matter of degree.” “What I’m asking is, are they natural? Could they be constructs?” “Is a termite mound a construct? Beaver dam? Spaceship? Of course. Were they built by naturally evolved organisms, acting naturally? They were. So tell me how anything in the whole deep multiverse can ever be anything but natural?”

“Vision’s mostly a lie anyway,” he continued. “We don’t really see anything except a few hi-res degrees where the eye focuses. Everything else is just peripheral blur, just … light and motion. Motion draws the focus. And your eyes jiggle all the time, did you know that, Keeton? Saccades, they’re called. Blurs the image, the movement’s way too fast for the brain to integrate so your eye just … shuts down between pauses. It only grabs these isolated freeze-frames, but your brain edits out the blanks and stitches an … an illusion of continuity into your head.” He turned to face me. “And you know what’s really amazing? If something only moves during the gaps, your brain just … ignores it. It’s invisible.”

You invest so much in it, don’t you? It’s what elevates you above the beasts of the field, it’s what makes you special. Homo sapiens, you call yourself. Wise Man. Do you even know what it is, this consciousness you cite in your own exaltation? Do you even know what it’s for? Maybe you think it gives you free will. Maybe you’ve forgotten that sleepwalkers converse, drive vehicles, commit crimes and clean up afterward, unconscious the whole time. Maybe nobody’s told you that even waking souls are only slaves in denial.

Make a conscious choice. Decide to move your index finger. Too late! The electricity’s already halfway down your arm. Your body began to act a full half-second before your conscious self “chose” to, for the self chose nothing; something else set your body in motion, sent an executive summary—almost an afterthought—to the homunculus behind your eyes. That little man, that arrogant subroutine that thinks of itself as the person, mistakes correlation for causality: It reads the summary and it sees the hand move, and it thinks that one drove the other. But it’s not in charge. You’re not in charge. If free will even exists, it doesn’t share living space with the likes of you.

Maybe that’s what sentience would be for—if scientific breakthroughs didn’t spring fully formed from the subconscious mind, manifest themselves in dreams, as full-blown insights after a deep night’s sleep. It’s the most basic rule of the stymied researcher: stop thinking about the problem. Do something else. It will come to you if you just stop being conscious of it. Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of any manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.