Blindsight (Firefall, #1)

by Peter Watts

“You’re, you’re not the same,” Pag said from a safe distance. “You’re not even Siri anymore.” “I am too. Don’t be a fuckwad.” “They cut out your brain!” “Only half. For the ep—” “I know, for the epilepsy! You think I don’t know? But you were in that half—or, like, part of you was…” He struggled with the words, with the concept behind them. “And now you’re different. It’s like, your mom and dad murdered you—” “My mom and dad,” I said, suddenly quiet, “saved my life. I would have died.” “I think you did die,” said my best and only friend. “I think Siri died, they scooped him out and threw him away and you’re some whole other kid that just, just grew back out of what was left. You’re not the same. Ever since. You’re not the same.”

That was nothing new, as far as it went; I’d spent my whole life as a sort of alien ethologist in my own right, watching the world behave, gleaning patterns and protocols, learning the rules that allowed me to infiltrate Human society.

This is what my father could not unmake. This is what I am: I am the bridge between the bleeding edge and the dead center. I stand between the Wizard of Oz and the man behind the curtain. I am the curtain.

“What do you mean, strategy? It’s a birthday.” Chelsea had said exactly the same thing when I’d tried to explain it to her. Look, I’d said, say you tell everyone when it is and nothing happens. It’s kind of a slap in the face. Or suppose they throw you a party, Chelsea had replied. Then you don’t know whether they’re doing it sincerely, or if your earlier interaction just guilted them into observing an occasion they’d rather have ignored. But if you don’t tell anyone, and nobody commemorates the event, there’s no reason to feel badly because after all, nobody knew. And if someone does buy you a drink then you know it’s sincere because nobody would go to all the trouble of finding out when your birthday is—and then celebrating it—if they didn’t honestly like you.

“So he’s carrying on a conversation,” Chelsea said. “In Chinese, I assume, or they would have called it the Spanish Inquisition.” “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.”

Alter carried baggage over a century old, ConSensus told me. Sascha was right; there’d been a time when MCC was MPD, a disorder rather than a complex, and it had never been induced deliberately. According to the experts of that time, multiple personalities arose spontaneously from unimaginable cauldrons of abuse—fragmentary personae offered up to suffer rapes and beatings while the child behind took to some unknowable sanctuary in the folds of the brain. It was both survival strategy and ritual self-sacrifice: powerless souls hacking themselves to pieces, offering up quivering chunks of self in the desperate hope that the vengeful gods called Mom or Dad might not be insatiable. None of it had been real, as it turned out. Or at least, none of it had been confirmed. The experts of the day had been little more than witch doctors dancing through improvised rituals: meandering free-form interviews full of leading questions and nonverbal cues, scavenger hunts through regurgitated childhoods. Sometimes a shot of lithium or haloperidol when the beads and rattles didn’t work.

“I’m already pretty happy.” “I’ll make you happier. A TAT, on me.” “Tat?” “Transient Attitudinal Tweak. I’ve still got privileges at Sax.” “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.”

“You reached for it. You almost caught it. That wasn’t blind chance.” “Not blind chance. Blindsight. Amanda? Respond, please.” “Blindsight?” “Nothing wrong with the receptors,” he said distractedly. “Brain processes the image but it can’t access it. Brain stem takes over.” “Your brain stem can see but you can’t?” “Something like that. Shut up and let me— Amanda, can you hear me?”

“It’s an artifact of deep brain structure. Even congenitally blind people see them sometimes.” “None of us have seen them before. Ever.” “I believe you. But there’s no information there, eh? That wasn’t Rorschach talking, it was just … interference. Like everything else.” “But it was so vivid! Not that flickering corner-of-your-eye stuff we saw everywhere. This was solid. It was realer than real.” “That’s how you can tell it wasn’t. Since you don’t actually see it, there’s no messy eyeball optics to limit resolution.” “Oh,” James said, and then, softly: “Shit.” “Yeah. Sorry.” And then, “Any time you’re ready.” I looked

“I thought you valued honesty in relationships.” “What relationship? According to you there’s no such thing. This is just … mutual rape, or something.” “That’s what relationships are.” “Don’t pull that shit on me.” She sat up, swung her feet over the edge of the bed. Putting her back to me. “I know how I feel. If I know anything I know that much. And I only wanted to make you happy.” “I know you believe that,” I said gently. “I know it doesn’t feel like a strategy. Nothing does when it’s wired that deeply. It just feels right, it feels natural. It’s nature’s trick.” “It’s someone’s fucking trick.” I sat up next to her, let my shoulder brush hers. She leaned away.

“Of course she wants you to tell her you only have eyes for her, you love her pores and her morning breath, and why stop at one tweak, how about ten. But that doesn’t mean she wants you to lie, you idiot. She wants all that stuff to be true. And … well, why can’t it be?” “It isn’t,” I said. “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.” He took a breath, and another hit. “And you already know that, or you couldn’t do your job. Or at least”—he grimaced—“the system knows.” “The system.”

“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. It’s why you’re so good at Synthesis.”

Hmmm

I shook my head. “I just observe, that’s all. I watch what people do, and then I imagine what would make them do that.” “Sounds like empathy to me.” “It’s not. Empathy’s not so much about imagining how the other guy feels. It’s more about imagining how you’d feel in the same place, right?” Pag frowned. “So?” “So what if you don’t know how you’d feel?” He looked at me, and his surfaces were serious and completely transparent. “You’re better than that, friend. You may not always act like it, but—I know you. I knew you before.” “You knew someone else. I’m Pod-man, remember?” “Yeah, that was someone else. And maybe I remember him better than you do. But I’ll tell you one thing.” He leaned forward. “Both of you would’ve helped me out that day. And maybe he would’ve got there with good ol’ fashioned empathy while you had to cobble together some kind of improvised flowchart out of surplus parts, but that just makes your accomplishment all the greater. Which is why I continue to stick it out with you, old buddy. Even though you have a rod up your ass the size of the Rio Spire.”

WHY SHOULD MAN EXPECT HIS PRAYER FOR MERCY TO BE HEARD BY WHAT IS ABOVE HIM WHEN HE SHOWS NO MERCY TO WHAT IS UNDER HIM? —Pierre Troubetzkoy

“Not talking about case studies. 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.”

Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of any manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.

Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes evermore computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I.

You decode the signals, and stumble: I had a great time. I really enjoyed him. Even if he cost twice as much as any other hooker in the dome— To fully appreciate Kesey’s Quartet— They hate us for our freedom— Pay attention, now— Understand. There are no meaningful translations for these terms. They are needlessly recursive. They contain no usable intelligence, yet they are structured intelligently; there is no chance they could have arisen by chance. The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message; only after wasting time and effort does the deception becomes apparent. The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. The signal is a virus. Viruses do not arise from kin, symbionts, or other allies. The signal is an attack. And it’s coming from right about there.