Blindsight (Firefall, #1)

by Peter Watts

They were trusted with the fate of the world. I was just a tattletale for small minds back home.

Still, Szpindel had only coined commissar half-jokingly.

“If you don’t reconfigure you can’t retrain.

“Didn’t it change you?”

“That’s the whole point.”

Chelsea

a basic cascade.

… it’s not so much that you don’t mean any of it. It’s more like you don’t know what any of it means.”

In thirty long years the only time I haven’t felt worthless was when we were together.

Stretch

Clench

Sarasti

Cunningham

Blindsighted

Stretch

His extended phenotype had been amputated; once the very ghost in the machine,

There had always been three, of course. Stretch, and Clench, and the half-forgotten microwaved remains of a scrambler killed by an uppity grunt—

Blood had been drawn, war declared. And Theseus was paralyzed from the waist down.

Rorschach’s parting shot had punched through the carapace at the base of the spine.

If it had been luck it would have been remarkable.

And now, its quarry disabled, Rorschach had vanished. It had everything it needed from us, for the moment at least.

It had information: all the experiences and insights encoded in the salvaged limb...

Susan.

Bates

They had finally noticed us.

Ben’s core

those vaster, deeper pressures that made iron and hydrogen run liquid.

of course, it would survive. You can’t kill the thing under the bed. You can only keep it outside the covers.

Big Ben,

VR doesn’t work on them, they … see the pixels, or something.”

“We could engineer ourselves back into nonsentience, perhaps. Might improve our odds in the long run.”

I guess that wouldn’t be much of a win, would it? What’s the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you’re alive?”

Her death would only let her troops off the leash. How much more deadly would those grunts be, once every battlefield reflex didn’t have to pass through some interminable job stack waiting for the rubber stamp?

No wonder she’d been so invested in peaceful alternatives.

“Rorschach wouldn’t have tried so hard to scare us off in the first place if we couldn’t touch it, right?” I swallowed. “Right.” “So there’s still a chance.” She nodded to herself. “There’s still a chance.”

The demon arranged his pieces for the end game.

did. I came on command, and saw that he had surrounded himself with faces. Every last one of them was screaming.

Sarasti

“Why didn’t we just

take it on when we first got here, when it was weaker…?” “We need to learn things. For next time.”

every dandelion is a clone. Their seeds are legion.”

“They need to learn things, too. They want us intact. Improves our odds.” “Not enough. We can’t win.”

Theseus was not equipped with weapons. Theseus was the weapon.

it takes one to know one.

Haha - aliens

Whose side, I wondered, would an automaton take?

You rationalize, Keeton. You defend. You reject unpalatable truths, and if you can’t reject them outright you trivialize them. Incremental evidence is never enough for you. You hear rumors of holocaust; you dismiss them. You see evidence of genocide; you insist it can’t be so bad. Temperatures rise, glaciers melt—species die—and you blame sunspots and volcanoes.

“Yes, if your purpose is only to transmit. Now you have to convince. You have to believe.”

“I’d have seen right through it,” I told him, “if you hadn’t made me get involved.”

Haha

hear a vampire folktale?”