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To the Historians, tools existed for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treated nature as an enemy, they were by definition a rebellion against the way things were.
until my own mother packed herself away like a larva in honeycomb, softened by machinery, robbed of incentive by her own contentment.
history never said that everyone had to stop where we did. It only suggested that those who had stopped no longer struggled for existence.
Ultimately, the only enemy that mattered was an intelligent one.
and if you wanted flying chandeliers and alien messiahs, you could build them to order in Heaven.
you wanted testosterone and target practice you could choose an afterlife chockfull of nasty alien monsters with really bad aim.
It was all there, just the other side of a fifteen-minute splice job and a cervical socket.
Why endure the cramped and smelly confines of real-life space travel to go visit pond scum on Europa?
so, inevitably, a fourth tribe arose, a Heavenly host that triumphed over all: the Tribe That Just Didn’t Give a Shit. They didn’t know w...
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The math was irrefutable: The one winning strategy was concealment. Only fools revealed their birthdays.
“Man’s instincts tell him to keep quiet around prey. Every time he opens his mouth, every time he lets us see him, he’s fighting his own brain stem. Maybe we shouldn’t be too harsh on the ol’ guy just because he’s not the world’s best motivational speaker, eh?”
“I’ve got no problem if Sarasti wants to run the occasional briefing from his quarters. But the moment we stop seeing him altogether? That’s when you start watching your back.”
As a social necessity it was all but obsolete, fading into irrelevance along with two-party nonvirtual sex pairing.
Maybe she honestly didn’t know that we were evolutionary enemies, that all relationships were doomed to failure.
then I recited my story just as we were about to fuck. To this day, I still don’t know what went wrong.
Something was hiding down there, in plain sight.
A segment nine kilometers long. “It’s cloaked,” Sascha said, impressed.
Hohmann transfers;
Susan James was back in the driver’s seat.
RORSCHACH TO VESSEL APPROACHING 116°AZ–23°DEC REL. HELLO THESEUS. RORSCHACH TO VESSEL APPROACHING 116°AZ–23°DEC REL. HELLO THESEUS. RORSCHACH TO VESSEL APPROACHI … She’d decoded the damn thing. Already. She was even answering it:
Or rather, they’d had less than three minutes: four fully-conscious hub personalities and a few dozen unconscious semiotic modules, all working in parallel, all exquisitely carved from the same lump of gray matter. I could almost see why someone would do such deliberate violence to their own minds, if it resulted in this kind of performance.
Of course I couldn’t resist. “Anytime between friends, right? Are you here for the celebration?” English. The voice was Human, male. Old. “We are here to explore,” replied the Gang, although their voice was pure Theseus. “Request dialogue with agents who sent objects into near-solar space.”
“This is Susan James. I am a—” “You wouldn’t be happy here, Susan. Fetishistic religious beliefs involved. There are dangerous observances.”
“Request clarification. Is it the observances that are dangerous, or the low-orbit environment?” “The environment of the disturbances. You should pay attention, Susan. Inattention connotes indifference,” Rorschach said. “Or disrespect,” it added after a moment.
James shook her head. Szpindel filled me in: “There’s a syndrome you might have heard about, eh? Fast-talkers, no conscience, tend to malapropism and self-contradiction. No emotional affect.” “We’re not talking about Human beings here,” James said again, softly. “But if we were,” Szpindel added, “we might call Rorschach a clinical sociopath.”
that Jukka Sarasti was a sociopath, of course. Most of us just didn’t mention it in polite company.
This man, so massively interfaced with machinery that his own motor skills had degraded for want of proper care and feeding; this man who heard X-rays and saw in shades of ultrasound, so corrupted by retrofits he could no longer even feel his own fingertips without assistance—this man could pity anyone else, let alone an infra-eyed predator built to murder without the slightest twitch of remorse?
Just a bunch of obligate cannibals with a consistent set of deformities.”
“You think we should’ve repaired the Crucifix glitch?” Everyone knew why we hadn’t. Only a fool would resurrect a monster without safeguards in place.
without his anti-Euclideans Sarasti would go grand mal the first time he caught close sight of a four-panel window frame.
the magical hominid brain protein that vampires had never been able to synthesize. The reason they hadn’t just switched to zebras or warthogs once denied Human prey, why our discovery of the terrible secret of the right angle had spelled their doom.
“Plage
Oasa
torus
apical
“So why don’t you just suck my big fat hairy dick?” The drum fell instantly silent. Bates and Szpindel stared, open-mouthed. Sascha killed the channel and turned to face us, grinning so widely I thought the top of her head would fall off. “Sascha,” Bates breathed. “Are you crazy?” “So what if I am? Doesn’t matter to that thing. It doesn’t have a clue what I’m saying.” “What?” “It doesn’t even have a clue what it’s saying back,” she added. “Wait a minute. You said—Susan said they weren’t parrots. They knew the rules.” And there Susan was, melting to the fore: “I did, and they do. But
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“You’re saying whatever we’re talking to—it’s not even intelligent?” “Oh, it could be intelligent, certainly. But we’re not talking to it in any meaningful sense.” “So what is it? Voice mail?” “Actually,” Szpindel said slowly, “I think they call it a Chinese Room…” About bloody time, I thought.
knew all about Chinese Rooms. I was one. I didn’t even keep it a secret, I told anyone who was interested enough to ask.
“It’s not my job to understand them. If I could, they wouldn’t be very bleeding edge in the first place. I’m just a, you know, a conduit.”
“Exactly. Point being you can use basic pattern-matching algorithms to participate in a conversation without having any idea what you’re saying. Depending on how good your rules are, you can pass a Turing test. You can be a wit and raconteur in a language you don’t even speak.” “That’s Synthesis?” “Only the part that involves downscaling semiotic protocols. And only in principle. And I’m actually getting my input in Cantonese and replying in German, because I’m more of a conduit than a conversant. But you get the idea.”
“The system understands. The whole Room, with all its parts. The guy who does the scribbling is just one component. You wouldn’t expect a single neuron in your head to understand English, would you?”
wound
“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.”
baud.
“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.
ConSensus showed us a strobe-lit hellscape, huge and dark and twisted. The composites had lied. It was not the least bit beautiful.
“Of course they called her by name,” Szpindel was saying. “That was the only name they had. She told them, remember?” “Yes.” Michelle didn’t seem reassured. “Hey, it was you guys said we were talking to a Chinese Room. You saying you were wrong?” “We—no. Of course not.”
Rorschach resembled nothing so much as a nest of half-naked cyclotrons, tangled one with another.
They don’t trust us to speak for ourselves, she wouldn’t say. No matter how qualified we are, no matter how far ahead of the pack. Maybe even because of that. We’re contaminated. We’re subjective. So they send Siri Keeton to tell them what we really mean.
“As an observer only. Perfection’s unattainable but it isn’t unapproachable, you know? I don’t play a role in decision making or research, I don’t interfere in any aspect of the mission that I’m assigned to study. But of course I ask questions. The more information I have, the better my analysis.”
