Blindsight (Firefall, #1)

by Peter Watts

throw my own point of view away.

distance—that chronic sense of being an alien among your own kind—

Vampires did this all the time, you remember. It was normal for them,

that absurd aversion to right angles hadn’t done them in at the dawn of civilization.

voodoo of paleogenetics, stitched together from junk genes and fossil marrow steeped in the blood of sociopaths and high-functioning autistics.

undead for eighteen hundred days. You’ve overslept by almost five years.

Jukka Sarasti climbed into view like a long white spider.

the dark wraparound visor he wore in deference to Human skittishness.

I realized. My usefulness degraded with distance. And we were over half a light-year from home.

was 1035 Greenwich Mean Time, February 13, 2082.

Fireflies. A half hour after that, the first Fourier transforms appeared in the noosphere; to no one’s great surprise, the Fireflies had not wasted their dying breaths on static.

it’s not. It’s just shadows on the cave wall. I mean, sure, the shadows come in three-D color

It would spell the end of corporeal history, usher in a Singularity

wouldn’t even have the childish satisfaction of holding my breath and refusing to play—the will to resist is no less mechanical than the urge to breathe. Both can be subverted with the right neurochemical keys.

You hire people like me; the crossbred progeny of profilers and proof assistants and information theorists.

In formal settings you’d call me Synthesist. On the street you’d call me jargonaut or poppy. If you’re one of those savants whose hard-won truths are being bastardized and lobotomized for powerful know-nothings interested only in market share, you might call me a mole or a chaperone. If you were Isaac Szpindel you’d call me commissar, and while the jibe would be a friendly one, it would also be more than that.

about the rotational topology of information and the irrelevance of semantic comprehension.

Gods leave their algorithms carved into the mountainside but it’s just li’l ol’ me bringing the tablets down to the masses, and I don’t threaten anyone.

Isaac Szpindel, to study the aliens. The Gang of Four—Susan James and her secondary personae—to talk to them. Major Amanda Bates was here to fight, if necessary. And Jukka Sarasti to command us all, to move us like chess pieces on some multidimensional game board that only vampires could see.

On the display it was—nothing. Our apparent destination was a black disk, a round absence of stars. In real life it weighed in at over ten Jupiters and measured 20 percent wider at the belly.

For the longest time it hadn’t even been real: just a probabilistic ghost until Theseus got close enough to collapse the waveform. A quantum particle, heavy as ten Jupiters.

Theseus’s thin, infinitely attenuate fuel line reached all the way back to the sun; she could turn on the proverbial dime. We’d changed course in our sleep and the Icarus stream tracked our moves like a cat after prey, feeding us at light speed.

“We’re assuming the comet was a deliberate decoy, then.”

But Sascha had already fled. Her surfaces had scattered like a flock of panicked starlings, and the next time Susan James’s mouth opened, it was Susan James who spoke through it. “Sascha’s aware of the current paradigm, Jukka. She’s simply worried that it might be wrong.”

“Touché. But hey, not their fault neutral traits get fixed in small populations.” “I don’t know if I’d call the Crucifix glitch neutral

was at first. How many intersecting right angles do you see in nature?”

“Huh? Oh, that.” Pag nodded. “They never experience the past tense. It’s just another thread to them. They don’t remember stuff, they relive it.” “What, like a post-traumatic flashback?” “Not so traumatic.” He grimaced. “Not for them, at least.”

“Everyone’s got intimacy issues these days, in case you hadn’t noticed.” He must have; the population had been dropping for decades. “I was being euphemistic. I meant your aversion to general Human contact.”

In normal light her blood-red skin would doubtless shift down to the fashionable butterscotch of the unrepentant mongrel.

“Former neuroaestheticist, presently a parasite on the Body Economic thanks to genes and machines on the cutting edge.”

“Freelance Synthesist, indentured servant to the genes and machines that turned you into a parasite.”

“So. A Synthesist. Explaining the Incomprehensible to the Indifferent.”

She smiled back. “So how do you do it? All those optimized frontal lobes and refits—I mean, if they’re incomprehensible, how do you comprehend them?”

Changing taste in music or cuisine, you know, optimizing mate compatibility. It’s all completely reversible.”

“Yeah. Pag said you took your sex in the first person.” She nodded. “I’m very old school. You okay with that?” I wasn’t certain. I was a virgin in the real world, one of the few things I still had in common with the rest of civilized society. “In principle, I guess. It just seems … a lot of effort for not as much payoff, you know?”

Rayleigh limit.

Canis Major—a dismembered remnant of some long-lost galaxy that had drifted into ours and ended up as roadkill, uncounted billions of years ago. We were closing on something from outside the Milky Way.

They couldn’t take their eyes off the machines swinging around Big Ben.

Every perigee dipped briefly into atmosphere; there they burned, and slowed, and accelerated back into space, their anterior scoops glowing with residual heat.

We tracked nearly four hundred thousand in less than two days.

“Diver farts. Those bastards are dumping complex organics into the atmosphere.”

Those fuckers are turning the whole damn gas ball into a rice paddy bigger than Jupiter.”

“Von Neumann self-replicating r-selector. Seed washes up and sprouts skimmers, skimmers harvest raw materials from the accretion belt.

synesthete.

“technology implies belligerence.”

“Tit for tat’s the best strategy. They pinged us, we pinged back. Ball’s in their court now; we send another signal, we may give away too much.” “I know the rules, Amanda. They say if the other party never takes the initiative again, we ignore each other for the rest of the mission because game theory says you don’t want to look needy.”

piss off anything that hops between stars and terraforms superJovians for a living.

Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe crawling with gentle intelligence—spiritual brethren vaster and more enlightened than we, a great galactic siblinghood into whose ranks we would someday ascend. Surely, said the Optimists, space travel implies enlightenment, for it requires the control of great destructive energies. Any race that can’t rise above its own brutal instincts will wipe itself out long before it learns to bridge the interstellar gulf.

Optimists sat the Pessimists, who genuflected before graven images of St. Fermi and a host of lesser lightweights. The Pessimists envisioned a lonely universe full

two tribes sat the Historians. They didn’t have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials, but if there are any, they said, they’re not just going to be smart. They’re going to be mean.