Blindsight (Firefall, #1)

by Peter Watts

In the end, propaganda worked where empathy failed. Back then I didn’t so much think as observe, didn’t deduce so much as remember—

Every twitch of the phenotype cried aloud to anyone who knew the language.

Buckles clicked faintly in the breeze like impoverished wind chimes.

In normal light her blood-red skin would doubtless shift down to the fashionable butterscotch of the unrepentant mongrel.

She leaned forward, not coy, not coquettish, not breaking eye contact for an instant in the longwave gloom. I could smell the lemony tang of pheromones and synthetics mingling on her skin.

My nightly constitutional up the spine: glorious dreamy flight along a single degree of freedom. I sailed through hatches and corridors, threw my arms wide and spun in the gentle cyclonic breezes of the drum. Bates ran circles around me, bouncing her ball against bins and bulkheads, stretching to field each curving rebound in the torqued pseudograv. The toy ricocheted off a stairwell and out of reach as I passed; the Major’s curses followed me through the needle’s eye from crypt to bridge.

I brought her flowers one dusky Tuesday evening when the light was perfect. I pointed out the irony of that romantic old tradition—the severed genitalia of another species, offered as a precopulatory bribe—

“Given that it picked up the language entirely via passive eavesdropping, it’s remarkably fluent. In fact, from what I can tell they’re more efficient at processing speech than we are.” “Gotta be efficient at a language if you’re going to be so evasive in it, eh?” “If they were Human I might agree with you,” James replied. “But what appears to us as evasion or deceit could just as easily be explained by a reliance on smaller conceptual units.” “Conceptual units?” Bates, I was beginning to realize, never pulled up a subtitle if she could help it. James nodded. “Like processing a line of text word by word, instead of looking at complete phrases. The smaller the units, the faster they can be reconfigured; it gives you very fast semantic reflexes. The downside is that it’s difficult to maintain the same level of logical consistency, since the patterns within the larger structure are more likely to get shuffled.”

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—

Szpindel shrugged like a marionette.

Nine tesla, and the ghosts were everywhere. I smelled asphalt and honeysuckle.

I looked further and found God Itself in the meat of the brain, found the static that had sent Bates into rapture and Michelle into convulsions. I tracked Grey syndrome to its headwaters in the temporal lobe. I heard voices ranting in the brains of schizophrenics. I found cortical infarcts that inspired people to reject their own limbs, imagined the magnetic fields that must have acted in their stead when Cruncher tried to dismember himself. And off in some half-forgotten pesthole of twentieth-century case studies—filed under Cotard’s syndrome—I found Amanda Bates and others of her kind, their brains torqued into denial of the very self. “I used to have a heart,” one of them said listlessly from the archives. “Now I have something that beats in its place.”

PROBLEMS CANNOT BE SOLVED AT THE SAME LEVEL OF AWARENESS THAT CREATED THEM. —Albert Einstein

Cunningham’s eyes were bright manic points blazing in an expressionless mask. He raised them to the center of the drum, and didn’t raise his voice a decibel. “Isn’t that right, Jukka?” I checked ConSensus for active channels. “I don’t think he’s listening, Robert.” Cunningham’s mouth moved in something that would have been a pitying smile if the rest of his face had been able to join in. “He doesn’t have to listen, Keeton. He doesn’t have to spy on us. He just knows.” Ventilators, breathing. The almost subliminal hum of bearings in motion. Then Sarasti’s disembodied voice rang forth through the drum. “Everyone to Commons. Robert wants to share.”

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. Everyone is like this, but you most of all. You and your Chinese Room. You turn incomprehension into mathematics, you reject the truth without even hearing it first.”