Blindsight (Firefall, #1)

by Peter Watts

“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 ...