Blindsight (Firefall, #1)

by Peter Watts

Pack animals always tear apart the weaklings in their midst. Every child knows that much instinctively.

There’s a reason they call it radical hemispherectomy: half the brain thrown out with yesterday’s krill, the remaining half press-ganged into double duty.

Nobody gets past Jupiter without becoming part vampire.

We’d revert to our old selves soon enough. Just add water.

It was easy to forget the Quantical AI at the heart of our ship. It stayed so discreetly in the background, nurtured and carried us and permeated our existence like an unobtrusive god; but like God, it never took your calls.

Theseus’s fabrication plant could build everything from cutlery to cockpits. Give it a big enough matter stockpile and it could have even built another Theseus, albeit in many small pieces and over a very long time. Some wondered if it could build another crew as well, although we’d all been assured that was impossible.

Hello, foreshadowing!

Perhaps, en route to our original destination, Theseus had seen something that scared her clear out of the solar system. More likely she hadn’t been running away from anything but to something else, something that hadn’t been discovered until we’d already died and gone from Heaven. In which case …

Siri can’t read an AI’s intentions.

Not even our shiny new post-scarcity economy could withstand such a seismic shift without lurching toward bankruptcy.

Not even the most heavily armed police state can exert brute force on all of its citizens all of the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives.

After four thousand years we can’t even prove that reality exists beyond the mind of the first-person dreamer. We have such need of intellects greater than our own.

She thought herself a natural girl because she’d stayed on chemical libidinals all these years, even though a synaptic edit would have been simpler.

The vampire summed it up for us, visual aids dancing on the table: “Von Neumann self-replicating r-selector. Seed washes up and sprouts skimmers, skimmers harvest raw materials from the accretion belt. Some perturbations in those orbits; belt’s still unsettled.”

“technology implies belligerence.”

What is Human history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots?

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. Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world that poses no threat?

The one winning strategy was concealment. Only fools revealed their birthdays.

Just a bunch of obligate cannibals with a consistent set of deformities.”

A nest of obsidian snakes and smoky crystal spines.

No plan ever survives contact with the enemy I remembered, but I didn’t know from where.

“Because you can’t protect your kids when they’re light-years away. They’re on their own, and it’s a big cold dangerous universe so most of them aren’t going to make it, eh? The most you can do is crank out millions of kids, take cold comfort in knowing that a few always luck out through random chance. It’s not a mammal mind-set, Meesh. You want an earthbound simile, think of dandelion seeds. Or, or herring.”

there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all survival strategy.

We all come into the story halfway through, we all catch up as best we can, and we’re all gonna die before it ends.”

But even back then people wanted to spend time with their families. Even if they couldn’t afford to. To, to choose to stay working when it isn’t even necessary, that’s—” She shattered and reassembled at my shoulder. “Yes, Siri. I believe that’s a kind of abuse. And if your father had been half as loyal to me as I’ve been to him all these years…”

Hey sounds like Running On Empty

“I’ve been tweaked plenty. Change one more synapse and I might turn into someone else.” “That’s ridiculous and you know it. Or every experience you had would turn you into a different person.” I thought about that. “Maybe it does.”

This exchange between Siri and Chelsea

She laid a fingertip across my lips. “Believe it or not, Cyggers, people sometimes choose to ignore even good memories. Like, say, if they enjoyed something they didn’t think they should. Or”—she kissed my forehead—“if they don’t think they deserve to be happy.”

There may be murderers and rapists in our midst, but by God they’re our murderers and rapists.

One part of my mind produced synopses and syntheses while another watched, incredulous and uncomprehending. Neither part could trace where those insights had come from.

The retros followed some preprogrammed algorithm that mated Newton with a roll of the dice.

It was the best available compromise in an environment without any optima.

Everything we did here was an act of faith: faith that the unifying principles of Rorschach’s internal architecture could be derived from the raw dimensions we’d grab on the run. Faith that Rorschach’s internal architecture even had unifying principles.

No visor this time, either. I knew he hadn’t lost it.

That second sentence being pretty ambiguous.

And property damage is so much easier to live with than murder.

“It was great, if you like being ritually pawed by a bunch of play-acting strangers who can’t stand the sight of you and don’t have the guts to admit it.”

Wherein Siri meets Chelsea's family

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

You had hoped that smarter creatures would be wiser ones.

“The ship grows its own crew.” “If it’s a ship.” James shrugged. “If they’re crew.”

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: You hurt it, and keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the speech from the screams.

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing—irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don’t experience the world as it exists at all. You experience a simulation built from assumptions. Shortcuts. Lies. Whole species is agnosiac by default. Rorschach does nothing to you that you don’t already do to yourselves.”

I really wanted to talk to her. I just couldn’t find an algorithm that fit.

If free will even exists, it doesn’t share living space with the likes of you.

You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.

“You have a naïve understanding of evolutionary processes. There’s no such thing as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe. It doesn’t matter whether a solution’s optimal. All that matters is whether it beats the alternatives.”

Oh, a few outsiders—Dawkins, Keogh, the occasional writer of hackwork fiction who barely achieved obscurity—wondered briefly at the why of it: why not soft computers, and no more?

LOL at the not-so-oblique self-deprecating self-own

Because if Sarasti was right, scramblers were the norm: Evolution across the universe was nothing but the endless proliferation of automatic, organized complexity, a vast arid Turing machine full of self-replicating machinery forever unaware of its own existence.

You can’t kill the thing under the bed. You can only keep it outside the covers.

What’s the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you’re alive?”

A magnetic cannon ten thousand times stronger than nature gave it any right to be.

So much power my father must have had, to be able to authorize such a broadcast and yet waste so much of it on feelings.

And now the game is over, and a single pawn stands on that scorched board and its face is Human after all.

Thanks to a vampire and a boatload of freaks and an invading alien horde, I’m Human again. Maybe the last Human. By the time I get home, I could be the only sentient being in the universe.