Blindsight by Peter Watts (the unexpected everything TXT) đ
- Author: Peter Watts
- Performer: 0765312182
Book online «Blindsight by Peter Watts (the unexpected everything TXT) đ». Author Peter Watts
âI donât think they parse sight like we do.â Bates opened another window. Mundane graphs and contour plots sprang from the table. âThey donât even go to Heaven, from what I hear. VR doesnât work on them, theyâ see the pixels, or something.â
âWhat if heâs right?â I asked. I told myself that I was only looking for a tactical assessment, an official opinion for the official record. But my words came out doubtful and frightened.
She paused. For a moment I wondered if she, too, had finally lost patience with the sight of me. But she only looked up, and stared off into some enclosed distance.
âWhat if heâs right,â she repeated, and pondered the question that lay beneath: _what can we do?_
âWe could engineer ourselves back into nonsentience, perhaps. Might improve our odds in the long run.â She looked at me, a rueful sort of half-smile at the corner of her mouth. âBut I guess that wouldnât be much of a win, would it? Whatâs the difference between being dead, and just not knowing youâre alive?â
I finally saw it.
How long would it take an enemy tactician to discern Batesâ mind behind the actions of her troops on the battlefield? How long before the obvious logic came clear? In any combat situation, this woman would naturally draw the greatest amount of enemy fire: take off the head, kill the body. But Amanda Bates wasnât just a head: she was a bottleneck, and her body would not suffer from a decapitation strike. Her death would only let her troops off the leash. How much more deadly would those grunts be, once every battlefield reflex didnât have to pass through some interminable job stack waiting for the rubber stamp?
Szpindel had had it all wrong. Amanda Bates wasnât a sop to politics, her role didnât deny the obsolescence of Human oversight at all. Her role depended on it.
She was more cannon fodder than I. She always had been. And I had to admit: after generations of generals whoâd lived for the glory of the mushroom cloud, it was a pretty effective strategy for souring warmongers on gratuitous violence. In Amanda Batesâ army, picking a fight meant standing on the battlefield with a bullâs-eye on your chest.
No wonder sheâd been so invested in peaceful alternatives.
âIâm sorry,â I said softly.
She shrugged. âItâs not over yet. Just the first round.â She took a long, deep breath, and turned back to her study of slingshot mechanics. âRorschach wouldnât have tried so hard to scare us off in the first place if we couldnât touch it, right?â
I swallowed. âRight.â
âSo thereâs still a chance.â She nodded to herself. âThereâs still a chance.â
*
The demon arranged his pieces for the end game. He didnât have many left. The soldier he placed in the bridge. He packed obsolete linguists and diplomats back in their coffin, out of sight and out of the way.
He called the jargonaut to his quartersâ and although it would be the first time Iâd seen him since the attack, his summons carried not the slightest trace of doubt that I would obey. I did. I came on command, and saw that he had surrounded himself with faces.
Every last one of them was screaming.
There was no sound. The disembodied holograms floated in silent tiers around the bubble, each contorted into a different expression of pain. They were being tortured, these faces; half a dozen real ethnicities and twice as many hypothetical ones, skin tones ranging from charcoal to albino, brows high and slanted, noses splayed or pointed, jaws receding or prognathous. Sarasti had called the entire hominid tree into existence around him, astonishing in their range of features, terrifying in their consistency of expression.
A sea of tortured faces, rotating in slow orbits around my vampire commander.
âMy God, what is this?â
âStatistics.â Sarasti seemed focused on a flayed Asian child. âRorschachâs growth allometry over a two-week period.â
âTheyâre facesâŠâ
He nodded, turning his attention to a woman with no eyes. âSkull diameter scales to total mass. Mandible length scales to EM transparency at one Angstrom. One hundred thirteen facial dimensions, each presenting a different variable. Principle-component combinations present as multifeature aspect ratios.â He turned to face me, his naked gleaming eyes just slightly sidecast. âYouâd be surprised how much gray matter is dedicated to the analysis of facial imagery. Shame to waste it on anything asâcounterintuitive as residual plots or contingency tables.â
I felt my jaw clenching. âAnd the expressions? What do they represent?â
âSoftware customizes output for user.â
An agonized gallery pled for mercy on all sides.
âI am wired for hunting,â he reminded gently_._
âAnd you think I donât know that,â I said after a moment.
He shrugged, disconcertingly human. âYou ask.â
âWhy am I here, Jukka? You want to teach me another object lesson?â
âTo discuss our next move.â
âWhat move? We canât even run away.â
âNo.â He shook his head, baring filed teeth in something approaching regret.
âWhy did we wait so long?â Suddenly my sullen defiance had evaporated. I sounded like a child, frightened and pleading. âWhy didnât we just take it on when we first got here, when it was weakerâŠ?â
âWe need to learn things. For next time.â
âNext time? I thought Rorschach was a dandelion seed. I thought it justâwashed up hereââ
âBy chance. But every dandelion is a clone. Their seeds are legion.â Another smile, not remotely convincingâ âAnd maybe it takes more than one try for the placental mammals to conquer Australia.â
âItâll annihilate us. It doesnât even need those spitballs, it could pulverize us with one of those scramjets. In an instant.â
âIt doesnât want to.â
âHow do you know?â
âThey need to learn things too. They want us intact. Improves our odds.â
âNot enough. We canât win.â
This was his cue. This was the point at which Uncle Predator would smile at my naivetĂ©, and take me into his confidence. _Of course weâre armed to the teeth_, he would say. Do you think weâd come all this way, face such a vast unknown, without the means to defend ourselves? Now, at last, I can reveal that shielding and weaponry account for over half the shipâs massâŠ
It was his cue.
âNo,â he said. âWe canât win.â
âSo we just sit here. We just wait to die for the nextâthe next sixty-eight minutesâŠâ
Sarasti shook his head. âNo.â
âButââ I began.
âOh,â I finished.
Because of course, we had just topped up our antimatter reserves. Theseus was not equipped with weapons. Theseus was the weapon. And we were, in fact, going to sit here for the next sixty-eight minutes, waiting to die.
But we were going to take Rorschach with us when we did.
Sarasti said nothing. I wondered what he saw, looking at me. I wondered if there actually was a Jukka Sarasti behind those eyes to see, if his insightsâalways ten steps ahead of our ownâ hailed not so much from superior analytical facilities as from the timeworn truth that it takes one to know one.
Whose side, I wondered, would an automaton take?
âYou have other things to worry about,â he said.
He moved towards me; I swear, all those agonized faces followed him with their eyes. He studied me for a moment, the flesh crinkling around his eyes. Or maybe some mindless algorithm merely processed visual input, correlated aspect ratios and facial tics, fed everything to some output subroutine with no more awareness than a stats program. Maybe there was no more spark in this creatureâs face than there was in all the others, silently screaming in his wake.
âIs Susan afraid of you?â the thing before me asked.
âSuâwhy should she be?â
âShe has four conscious entities in her head. Sheâs four times more sentient than you. Doesnât that make you a threat?â
âNo, of course not.â
âThen why should you feel threatened by me?â
And suddenly I didnât care any more. I laughed out loud, with minutes to live and nothing to lose. âWhy? Maybe because youâre my natural enemy, you fucker. Maybe because I know you, and you canât even look at one of us without flexing your claws. Maybe because you nearly ripped my fucking hand off and raped me for no good reasonââ
âI can imagine what itâs like,â he said quietly. âPlease donât make me do it again.â
I fell instantly silent.
âI know your race and mine are never on the best of terms.â There was a cold smile in his voice if not on his face. âBut I do only what you force me to. You rationalize, Keeton. You defend. You reject unpalatable truths, and if you canât 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 canât be so bad. Temperatures rise, glaciers meltâspecies dieâand 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 knowing what it is.â
âIt served me well enough.â I wondered at the ease with which I had put my life into the past tense.
âYes, if your purpose is only to transmit. Now you have to convince. You have to believe.â
There were implications there I didnât dare to hope for. âAre you sayingââ
âCanât afford to let the truth trickle through. Canât give you the chance to shore up your rationales and your defenses. They must fall completely. You must be inundated. Shattered. Genocideâs impossible to deny when youâre buried up to your neck in dismembered bodies.â
Heâd played me. All this time. Preconditioning me, turning my topology inside-out.
Iâd known something was going on. I just hadnât understood what.
âIâd have seen right through it,â I said, âif you hadnât made me get involved.â
âYou might even read it off me directly.â
âThatâs why youââ I shook my head. âI thought that was because we were meat.â
âThat too,â Sarasti admitted, and looked right at me.
For the first time, I looked right back. And felt a shock of recognition.
I still wonder why I never saw it before. For all those years I remembered the thoughts and feelings of some different, younger person, some remnant of the boy my parents had hacked out of my head to make room for me. Heâd been alive. His world had been vibrant. And though I could call up the memories of that other consciousness, I could barely feel anything within the constraints of my own.
Perhaps dreamstate wasnât such a bad word for itâŠ
âLike to hear a vampire folk tale?â Sarasti asked.
âVampires have folk tales?â
He took it for a yes. âA laser is assigned to find the darkness. Since it lives in a room without doors, or windows, or any other source of light, it thinks this will be easy. But everywhere it turns it sees brightness. Every wall, every piece of furniture it points at is brightly lit. Eventually it concludes there is no darkness, that light is everywhere.â
âWhat the hell are you talking about?â
âAmanda is not planning a mutiny.â
âWhat? You know aboutââ
âShe doesnât even want to. Ask her if you like.â
âNoâIââ
âYou value objectivity.â
It was so obvious I didnât bother answering.
He nodded as if I had. âSynthesists canât have opinions of their own. So when you feel one, it
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