Blindsight (Firefall, #1)

by Peter Watts

Chelsea had always said that telepresence emptied the Humanity from Human interaction.

In a world in which Humanity had become redundant in unprecedented numbers, we’d both retained the status of another age: working professional.

LEADERS ARE VISIONARIES WITH A POORLY DEVELOPED SENSE OF FEAR AND NO CONCEPT OF THE ODDS AGAINST THEM. —Robert Jarvik

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?

There could be other, more hellish worlds where the best Human technology would crumble, where the environment was still the enemy, where the only survivors were those who fought back with sharper tools and stronger empires.

No, the only environmental factors that continued to matter were those that fought back, that countered new strategies with newer ones, that forced their enemies to scale ever-greater heights just to stay alive.

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—

Humans didn’t really fight over skin tone or ideology; those were just handy cues for kin-selection purposes. Ultimately it always came down to bloodlines and limited resources.

Then we would collapse into ourselves, rotted from the inside out. We would bleed from our eyes and mouths and assholes, and if any god was merciful we would die before splitting open like rotten fruit.

“If you’re going to be surrounded by a swarm of killer robots, maybe—” “Yeah, people keep saying that. Can’t trust the machines. Luddites love to go on about computer malfunctions, and how many accidental wars we might have prevented because a Human had the final say. But funny thing, commissar; nobody talks about how many intentional wars got started for the same reason. You’re still writing those postcards to posterity?”

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.

It’s what they’d always done. There was nothing polite about war, no honorable code beyond the chain of command and the circling of wagons. Deal with indiscretions if you must; punish the guilty if you have to, for appearance if nothing else. But for God’s sake close the doors first. Never give your enemy the satisfaction of seeing discord in the ranks, show them nothing but unity and flinty-eyed resolve. There may be murderers and rapists in our midst, but by God they’re our murderers and rapists.

When the fate of the world hangs in the balance, you want to keep an eye on anyone whose career-defining moment involves consorting with the enemy.

The more people Sarasti kept in the field, the greater the odds that at least one of them would be halfway functional at any given moment.

“I used to have a heart,” one of them said listlessly from the archives. “Now I have something that beats in its place.”

Gauges in the head, Szpindel had called them. But there were other things in there, too. There was a model of the world, and we didn’t look outward at all; our conscious selves saw only the simulation in our heads, an interpretation of reality, endlessly refreshed by input from the senses.

Maybe I wasn’t so afraid of ghosts because this time we were after monsters.

But ten seconds later we were weightless again, and nothing had torn us open.

You are a little bit scared of your own power. You are a little bit scared of the things you’ve already done with it.

Killing innocents is the least of the risks you’re running; you’re gambling with the fate of worlds, provoking conflict with a star faring technology whose sole offence was to take your picture without permission.

Some creatures may be invulnerable to blowtorches and grenades, but shriek in terror at the threat of ultrasonic sound. You have to experiment; and when you discover just the right stimulus, the optimum balance between pain and injury, you must inflict it without the remorse.

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.

I don’t think he ever aspired to such a state. Looking back, I see radiant self-loathing on every remembered surface. 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.

Bad eyes are only one bane of clear vision: bad assumptions can be just as blinding,

“Vision’s mostly a lie anyway,” he continued. “We don’t really see anything except a few hi-res degrees where the eye focuses. Everything else is just peripheral blur, just … light and motion. Motion draws the focus. And your eyes jiggle all the time, did you know that, Keeton? Saccades, they’re called. Blurs the image, the movement’s way too fast for the brain to integrate so your eye just … shuts down between pauses. It only grabs these isolated freeze-frames, but your brain edits out the blanks and stitches an … an illusion of continuity into your head.”

“And you know what’s really amazing? If something only moves during the gaps, your brain just … ignores it. It’s invisible.”

Cunningham shook his head. Something that sounded disturbingly like a giggle escaped his mouth. “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. All in the time it would take a mammalian nerve impulse to make it halfway from your shoulder to your elbow.

“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.”

I think we’re dealing with a species so far beyond us that even their retarded children can rewire our brains on the fly, and I can’t tell you how fucking scared that should make you.”

Cunningham looked at her and snorted. “You think you’d be able to fight the strings? You think you’d even feel them? I could apply a transcranial magnet to your head right now and you’d raise your middle finger or wiggle your toes or kick Siri here in the sack and then swear on your sainted mother’s grave that you only did it because you wanted to. You’d dance like a puppet and all the time swear you were doing it of your own free will, and that’s just me, that’s just some borderline OCD with a couple of magnets and an MRI helmet.”

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 whispered something into the dead air. I don’t even remember what. I really wanted to talk to her. I just couldn’t find an algorithm that fit.

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.

Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains—cheat.

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.

They travel between the stars. This is what intelligence can do, unhampered by self-awareness. I is not the working mind, you see. For Amanda Bates to say “I do not exist” would be nonsense; but when the processes beneath say the same thing, they are merely reporting that the parasites have died. They are only saying that they are free.

“It’s true,” Sarasti told her, “that your intellect makes up for your self-awareness to some extent. But you’re flightless birds on a remote island. You’re not so much successful as isolated from any real competition.”

“It doesn’t bug you?” Sascha was saying. “Thinking that your mind, the very thing that makes you you, is nothing but some kind of parasite?”

Natural selection doesn’t care about motives. If impersonating something increases fitness, then nature will select good impersonators over bad ones. Keep it up long enough and no conscious being would be able to pick your zombie out of a crowd.”

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

“We could engineer ourselves back into nonsentience, perhaps. Might improve our odds in the long run.” She looked at me, a rueful sort of half-smile at the corner of her mouth. “But 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?”

You turn incomprehension into mathematics, you reject the truth without even hearing it first.”

“Can’t afford to let the truth trickle through. Can’t give you the chance to shore up your rationales and your defenses. They must fall completely. You must be inundated. Shattered. Genocide’s impossible to deny when you’re buried up to your neck in dismembered bodies.”

The Human sensorium is remarkably easy to hack. Our eyes acquire such fragmentary input that the brain doesn’t so much see the world as make an educated guess about it.

It’s telling to note that the nonconscious mind usually works so well on its own that it actually employs a gatekeeper to prevent the conscious self from interfering in daily operations.

It feels good, and it fulfills us, and it makes life worth living. But it also turns us inward and distracts us. Those rats back in the sixties, the ones that learned to stimulate their own pleasure centers by pressing a lever: remember them? They pressed those levers with such addictive zeal that they forgot to eat. They starved to death. They died happy, but they died, without issue. Their fitness went to Zero. Aesthetics. Sentience. Extinction.