Blindsight (Firefall, #1)

by Peter Watts

“I’m as much of a specialist as you. I specialize in processing informational topologies.” “Without understanding their content.” “Understanding the shapes is enough.”

The problem wasn’t so much a lack of prey as a lack of difference from it; vampires were such a recent split from the ancestral baseline that the reproductive rates hadn’t diverged. This was no woodland-variety lynx-hare dynamic, where prey outnumbered predators a hundred to one. Vampires fed on things that bred barely faster than they did. They would have wiped out their own food supply in no time if they hadn’t learned how to ease off on the throttle.

Now it brought lasers to bear and started digging; if we’d read the vibrations right, the ground should be only thirty-four centimeters deep beneath its feet.

Szpindel grunted. “Reducing atmosphere. Pre-snowball.” He sounded disappointed.

synchrotron

“All agreed? You don’t have a working majority in there, Suze. Just because you cut your brain into pieces doesn’t mean they each get a vote.” “I don’t see why not. We’re each at least as sentient as you are.” “They’re all you. Just partitioned.”

“You reached for it. You almost caught it. That wasn’t blind chance.” “Not blind chance. Blindsight. Amanda? Respond, please.” “Blindsight?”

“How—how could she possibly believe she didn’t even exist?” Szpindel shook his head. “Didn’t believe it. Knew it. For a fact.”

“You’re saying the brain’s got some kind of existence gauge?” “Brain’s got all kinds of gauges. You can know you’re blind even when you’re not; you can know you can see, even when you’re blind. And yeah, you can know you don’t exist even when you do. It’s a long list, commissar. Cotard’s, Anton’s, Damascus disease. Just for starters.”

vampires back from the Pleistocene and Great Grieving Ganga did that ever turn the balance of power upside down. Those fuckers are always ten steps ahead. It only makes sense; after all, hunting people is what bloodsuckers evolved to do.

Predators run for their dinner, it goes. Prey run for their lives. The moral is supposed to be that on average, the hunted escape the hunters because they’re more motivated.

Doesn’t seem to hold when the strategy involves tactical foresight and double-reverse mind fucks, though. The vampires win every time.

“I’m not completely unsympathetic. My gut doesn’t much like the idea of swapping reality for simulation,

Under other circumstances, Lieutenant Amanda Bates would have been court-martialed and executed within the month. No matter that the four who’d died had been guilty of multiple counts of rape, torture, and homicide; that’s just what people did in wartime.

Still, it was hard to argue with results: a negotiated cease-fire with the third-largest Realist franchise in the hemisphere.

filed under Cotard’s syndrome—I found Amanda Bates and others of her kind, their brains torqued into denial of the very self.

It was barely even misdirection. They called it inattentional blindness,

been well-known for a century or more: a tendency for the eye to simply not notice things that evolutionary experience classed as unlikely. I found the opposite of Szpindel’s blindsight,

Appeals to logic fail utterly. How could you see the bird when there is no window? How do you decide where your seen half-world ends if you can’t see the other half to weigh it against? If you are dead, how can you smell your own corruption? If you do not exist, Amanda, what is talking to us now?

hemineglect

Against that conviction, what is reason? What is logic?

The hole behind, drilled neatly through his forehead, remained. The eyes beneath stared at infinity. “Well?” Bates asked. She could read his vitals as easily as I, but Theseus was capable of postmortem rebuilds. Barring brain damage. “No.”

“James?” Bates snapped. “James!” Not James. A little girl in a woman’s body in an armored space suit, scared out of her wits.

Isaac Szpindel hadn’t made the semifinals after all. Susan James came back to us on the way up. Isaac Szpindel did not.

Sarasti hadn’t wasted any time. Szpindel’s replacement met us as we emerged, freshly thawed, nicotine-scented. The rehydration of his flesh was ongoing—saline bladders clung to each thigh—although it would never entirely erase the sharpness of his features. His bones cracked when he moved. He looked past me and took the body. “Susan—Michelle … I—” The Gang turned away. He coughed, began fumbling a body condom over the corpse. “Sarasti wants everyone in the drum.”

“Shit,” Bates whispered. “There’s someone home.”

“I don’t see anything,” I said. But I did: I saw something reaching for me, in my pod back aboard Theseus. I saw something curled up motionless in the ship’s spine, watching as we laid our best plans. I saw Michelle the synesthesiac, curled into a fetal ball: You can’t see it … it’s in—visible

understandable artifact of fear and synesthesia. Rorschach was inhabited. Its inhabitants were invisible. Sometimes. Sort of. And, oh yeah. We’d just killed one.

“So it’s intelligent.” Her voice was almost a whisper. “Not remotely.” “But—thirty percent—” “Thirty percent motor and sensory wiring.” Another drag. “Much like an octopus; an enormous number of neurons, but half of them get used up running the suckers.”

“Jesus, Siri. People aren’t rational. You aren’t rational. We’re not thinking machines, we’re—we’re feeling machines that happen to think.”

“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.

“What’s your problem with me?” I asked. Stupid question, obvious question. Unworthy of any Synthesist to be so, so direct. His eyes glittered in that dead face. “Processing without comprehension. That’s what you do, isn’t it?” “That’s a colossal oversimplification.”

That’s why they built us.” “We’re all self-made. Nobody forced you to get the rewire.”

“No, nobody forced me to get the rewire. I could have just let them cut out my brain and pack it into Heaven, couldn’t I? That’s the choice we have. We can be utterly useless, or we can try and compete against the vampires and the constructs and the AIs. And perhaps you could tell me how to do that without turning into a—an utter freak.”

These people were the bleeding edge, the incandescent apex of hominid achievement.

Still, Szpindel had only coined commissar half-jokingly. Cunningham believed it, and didn’t laugh.

“It’s vital to keep current,” he said. “If you don’t reconfigure you can’t retrain. If you don’t retrain you’re obsolete inside a month, and then you’re not much good for anything except Heaven or dictation.”

“I’m surprised you’d have to ask,” the meat one said. “Doesn’t my body language tell you everything? Aren’t jargonauts supposed to read minds?”

It’s more like you don’t know what any of it means.”

“Jukka says—” Susan stopped, began again: “You know that blindsight we get sometimes, in Rorschach?”

“These scramblers—they know the answers, Siri. They’re intelligent, we know they are. But it’s almost as though they don’t know they know, unless you hurt them. As if they’ve got blindsight spread over every sense.”

He’d even shut down the anti-Euclidean pump in his own head, resorted to manual injections to keep himself from short-circuiting.

Stretch and Clench were even closer to Rorschach than we were. Cunningham’s lab had been kicked free of the ship; it floated now just a few kilometers from the artifact’s outermost spires, deep within the folds of its magnetic field. If the scramblers needed radioactive magnetite to function, this was the most they were going to get: a taste of the fields, but not of freedom.

Imagine you are a Synthesist. You deal in the behavior of systems at their surfaces, infer the machinery beneath from its reflections above. That is the secret of your success: You understand the system by understanding the boundaries that contain it.

But there in the waning years of the twenty-first century, the only alternative he could see was the life of a parasite. Cunningham merely chose the lesser evil.

Robert Cunningham was petrified.

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.”

“I’m saying these things can see your nerves firing from across the room, and integrate that into a crypsis strategy, and then send motor commands to act on that strategy, and then send other commands to stop the motion before your eyes come back online.

These things are fast, Keeton. Way faster than we could have guessed even from that high-speed whisper line they were using. They’re bloody superconductors.”

“You’re not listening. The trap you set wouldn’t have caught anything like that, not unless it wanted to be caught. We didn’t grab specimens at all. We grabbed spies.”