Blindsight (Firefall, #1)

by Peter Watts

Chelsea had always said that telepresence emptied the Humanity from Human interaction. “They say it’s indistinguishable,” she told me once, “just like having your family right there, snuggled up so you can see them and feel them and smell them next to you. But it’s not. It’s just shadows on the cave wall. I mean, sure, the shadows come in three-D color with force-feedback tactile interactivity. They’re good enough to fool the civilized brain. But your gut knows those aren’t people, even if it can’t put its finger on how it knows. They just don’t feel real. Know what I mean?” I didn’t. Back then I’d had no clue what she was talking about. But now we were all cavemen again, huddling beneath some overhang while lightning split the heavens and vast formless monsters, barely glimpsed in bright strobe-frozen instants, roared and clashed in the darkness on all sides. There was no comfort in solitude. You couldn’t get it from interactive shadows. You needed someone real at your side, someone to hold on to, someone to share your airspace along with your fear and hope and uncertainty.

I was the only pure spectator. They all performed what duties they could. Szpindel ran Sarasti’s sketchy silhouette through a series of filters, perchance to squeeze a bit of biology from engineering. Bates compared morphometrics between the cloaked artifact and the skimmers. Sarasti watched us all from overhead and thought vampire thoughts deeper than anything we could aspire to. But it was all just make-work. The Gang of Four was on center stage, under the capable direction of Susan James.

“Oh, right,” Rorschach said suddenly. “We get it now. You don’t think there’s anyone here, do you? You’ve got some high-priced consultant telling you there’s nothing to worry about.” Jack was deep in the forest. We’d lost most of the tactical overlays to reduced baud. In dim visible light Rorschach’s great ridged spines, each the size of a skyscraper, hashed a nightmare view on all sides. The feed stuttered as Bates struggled to keep the beam aligned. ConSensus painted walls and airspace with arcane telemetry. I had no idea what any of it meant. “You think we’re nothing but a Chinese Room,” Rorschach sneered. Jack stumbled toward collision, grasping for something to hang on to. “Your mistake, Theseus.” It hit something. It stuck. And suddenly Rorschach snapped into view—no refractory composites, no profiles or simulations in false color. There it was at last, naked even to Human eyes. Imagine a crown of thorns, twisted, dark and unreflective, grown too thickly tangled to ever rest on any Human head. Put it in orbit around a failed star whose own reflected half-light does little more than throw its satellites into silhouette. Occasional bloody highlights glinted like dim embers from its twists and crannies; they only emphasized the darkness everywhere else. Imagine an artifact that embodies the very notion of torture, something so wrenched and disfigured that even across uncounted light-years and unimaginable differences in biology and outlook, you can’t help but feel that ...

Szpindel was right: The ghosts followed us back. We began to hear voices other than Sarasti’s, whispering up the spine. Sometimes even the brightly lit wraparound world of the drum would warp and jiggle from the corner of my eye—and more than once I saw boney headless phantoms with too many arms, nested in the scaffolding. They seemed solid enough from the corner of my eye but any spot I focused on faded to shadow, to a dark translucent stain against the background. They were so very fragile, these ghosts. The mere act of observation drilled holes through them.

I 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. And even when it couldn’t—when the obstinate, unyielding neocortex refused to let it off the leash—still it tried to pass on what it saw, and Isaac Szpindel experienced an ineffable sense of where to reach. In a way, he had a stripped-down version of the Gang in his head. Everyone did. I looked further and found God Itself in the meat of the brain, found the static that had sent Bates into rapture and Michelle into convulsions. I tracked Grey syndrome to its headwaters in the temporal lobe. I heard voices ranting in the brains of schizophrenics. I found cortical infarcts that inspired people to reject their own limbs, imagined the magnetic fields that must have acted in their stead when Cruncher tried to dismember himself. And off in some half-forgotten pesthole of twentieth-century case studies—filed under Cotard...

PROBLEMS CANNOT BE SOLVED AT THE SAME LEVEL OF AWARENESS THAT CREATED THEM. —Albert Einstein

“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 mind-boggling 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 obvious, 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 th...

“Didn’t it change you?” His body dragged on the cigarette. Targeted ventilation sucked away the smoke before it reached me. “That’s the whole point.” “Surely you were affected personally, though. Surely—” “Ah.” He nodded; at the far end of shared motor nerves, teleops jiggled in sympathy. “Change the eyes that look at the world, change the me that does the looking?” “Something like that.”

WHY SHOULD MAN EXPECT HIS PRAYER FOR MERCY TO BE HEARD BY WHAT IS ABOVE HIM WHEN HE SHOWS NO MERCY TO WHAT IS UNDER HIM? —Pierre Troubetzkoy

“I’ll do it now,” I said. “I’ll get the tweaks. If it’s that important to you. I’ll do it now.” “It’s too late, Siri. I’m used up.” Maybe she wanted me to call her back. All these words ending in question marks, all these significant silences. Maybe she was giving me the opportunity to plead my case, to beg for another chance. Maybe she wanted a reason to change her mind. I could have tried. Please don’t, I could have said. I’m begging you. I never meant to drive you away completely, just a little, just to a safer distance. Please. In thirty long years the only time I haven’t felt worthless was when we were together. But when I looked up again the butterfly was gone and so was she, taking all baggage with her. She carried doubt, and guilt for having led me on. She left believing that our incompatibility was no one’s fault, that she’d tried as hard as she could, even that I had under the tragic weight of all my issues. She left, and maybe she didn’t even blame me, and I never even knew who’d made that final decision. I was good at what I did. I was so damned good, I did it without even meaning to.

Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains—cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes evermore computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I.

IF THE HUMAN BRAIN WERE SO SIMPLE THAT WE COULD UNDERSTAND IT, WE WOULD BE SO SIMPLE THAT WE COULDN’T. —Emerson M. Pugh

Imagine you have intellect but no insight, agendas but no awareness. Your circuitry hums with strategies for survival and persistence, flexible, intelligent, even technological—but no other circuitry monitors it. You can think of anything, yet are conscious of nothing. You can’t imagine such a being, can you? The term being doesn’t even seem to apply, in some fundamental way you can’t quite put your finger on. Try. Imagine that you encounter a signal. It is structured, and dense with information. It meets all the criteria of an intelligent transmission. Evolution and experience offer a variety of paths to follow, branch points in the flowcharts that handle such input. Sometimes these signals come from conspecifics who have useful information to share, whose lives you’ll defend according to the rules of kin selection. Sometimes they come from competitors or predators or other inimical entities that must be avoided or destroyed; in those cases, the information may prove of significant tactical value. Some signals may even arise from entities that, while not kin, can still serve as allies or symbionts in mutually beneficial pursuits. You can derive appropriate responses for any of these eventualities, and many others. You decode the signals, and stumble: I had a great time. I really enjoyed him. Even if he cost twice as much as any other hooker in the dome— To fully appreciate Kesey’s Quartet— They hate us for our freedom— Pay attention, now— Understand. There are no meaningf...

YOU CANNOT PREVENT AND PREPARE FOR WAR AT THE SAME TIME —Albert Einstein