Rifters 4 - Blindsight (37 page)

You—

It wasn't even personal, was it? You don't even hate me. You were just sick of keeping it all in, sick of
restraining
yourself with all this meat, and nobody else could be spared from their jobs. This was
my
job, wasn't it? Not synthesist, not conduit. Not even cannon fodder or decoy duty. I'm just something disposable to sharpen your claws on.

I hurt so much. It hurt just to breathe.

I was so
alone
.

Webbing pressed against the curve of my back, bounced me forward gently as a breeze, caught me again. I was back in my tent. My right hand itched. I tried to flex the fingers, but they were embedded in amber. Left hand reached for right, and found a plastic carapace extending to the elbow.

I opened my eyes. Darkness. Meaningless numbers and a red LED twinkled from somewhere along my forearm.

I didn't remember coming here. I didn't remember anyone fixing me.

Breaking. Being broken. That's what I remembered. I wanted to die. I wanted to just stay curled up until I withered away.

After an age, I forced myself to uncoil. I steadied myself, let some miniscule inertia bump me against the taut insulated fabric of my tent. I waited for my breathing to steady. It seemed to take hours.

I called ConSensus to the wall, and a feed from the drum. Soft voices, harsh light flaring against the wall: hurting my eyes, peeling them raw. I killed visual, and listened to words in the darkness.

"—a phase?" someone asked.

Susan James, her personhood restored. I knew her again: not a meat sack, no longer a
thing
.

"We
have
been over this." That was Cunningham. I knew him too. I knew them all. Whatever Sarasti had done to me, however far he'd yanked me from my room, I'd somehow fallen back inside.

It should have mattered more.

"—because for one thing, if it were really so pernicious, natural selection would have weeded it out," James was saying.

"You have a naïve understanding of evolutionary processes. There's no such thing as
survival of the fittest
.
Survival of the most adequate
, maybe. It doesn't matter whether a solution's optimal. All that matters is whether it beats the alternatives."

I knew that voice too. It belonged to a demon.

"Well,
we
damn well
beat the alternatives
." Some subtle overdubbed harmonic in James' voice suggested a chorus: the whole Gang, rising as one in opposition.

I couldn't believe it. I'd just been mutilated, beaten before their eyes—and they were talking about
biology
?

Maybe she's afraid to talk about anything else
, I thought.
Maybe she's afraid she might be next.

Or maybe she just couldn't care less what happens to me.

"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."

No more clipped speech patterns. No more terse phrasing. The transient had made his kill, found his release. Now he didn't care
who
knew he was around.

"You?" Michelle whispered. "Not
we
?"

"
We
stop racing long ago," the demon said at last. "It's not our fault you don't leave it at that."

"Ah." Cunningham again. "Welcome back. Did you look in on Ke—"

"No." Bates said.

"Satisfied?" the demon asked.

"If you mean the grunts, I'm satisfied you're out of them," Bates said. "If you mean— it was completely unwarranted, Jukka."

"It isn't."

"You assaulted a crewmember. If we had a brig you'd be in it for the rest of the trip."

"This isn't a military vessel, Major. You're not in charge."

I didn't need a visual feed to know what Bates thought of that. But there was something else in her silence, something that made me bring the drum camera back online. I squinted against the corrosive light, brought down the brightness until all that remained was a faint whisper of pastels.

Yes. Bates. Stepping off the stairway onto the deck

"Grab a chair," Cunningham said from his seat in the Commons. "It's golden oldies time."

There was something about her.

"I'm sick of that song," Bates said. "We've played it to death."

Even now, my tools chipped and battered, my perceptions barely more than baseline, I could see the change. This torture of prisoners, this assault upon crew, had crossed a line in her head. The others wouldn't see it. The lid on her affect was tight as a boilerplate. But even through the dim shadows of my window the topology glowed around her like neon.

Amanda Bates was no longer merely
considering
a change of command. Now it was only a matter of when.

*

The universe was closed and concentric.

My tiny refuge lay in its center. Outside that shell was another, ruled by a monster, patrolled by his lackeys. Beyond that was another still, containing something even more monstrous and incomprehensible, something that might soon devour us all.

There was nothing else. Earth was a vague hypothesis, irrelevant to this pocket cosmos. I saw no place into which it might fit.

I stayed in the center of the universe for a long time, hiding. I kept the lights off. I didn't eat. I crept from my tent only to piss or shit in the cramped head down at Fab, and only when the spine was deserted. A field of painful blisters rose across my flash-burned back, as densely packed as kernels on a corncob. The slightest abrasion tore them open.

Nobody tapped at my door, nobody called my name through ConSensus. I wouldn't have answered if they had. Maybe they knew that, somehow. Maybe they kept their distance out of respect for my privacy and my disgrace.

Maybe they just didn't give a shit.

I peeked outside now and then, kept an eye on Tactical. I saw
Scylla
and
Charybdis
climb into the accretion belt and return towing captured reaction mass in a great distended mesh between them. I watched our ampsat reach its destination in the middle of nowhere, saw antimatter's quantum blueprints stream down into
Theseus
's buffers. Mass and specs combined in Fab, topped up our reserves, forged the tools that Jukka Sarasti needed for his master plan, whatever that was.

Maybe he'd lose. Maybe
Rorschach
would kill us all, but not before it had played with Sarasti the way Sarasti had played with me. That would almost make it worthwhile. Or maybe Bates' mutiny would come first, and succeed. Maybe she would slay the monster, and commandeer the ship, and take us all to safety.

But then I remembered: the universe was closed, and so very small. There was really nowhere else to go.

I put my ear to feeds throughout the ship. I heard routine instructions from the predator, murmured conversations among the prey. I took in only sound, never sight; a video feed would have spilled light into my tent, left me naked and exposed. So I listened in the darkness as the others spoke among themselves. It didn't happen often any more. Perhaps too much had been said already, perhaps there was nothing left to do but mind the countdown. Sometimes hours would pass with no more than a cough or a grunt.

When they did speak, they never mentioned my name. Only once did I hear any of them even hint at my existence.

That was Cunningham, talking to Sascha about zombies. I heard them in the galley over breakfast, unusually talkative. Sascha hadn't been let out for a while, and was making up for lost time. Cunningham let her, for reasons of his own. Maybe his fears had been soothed somehow, maybe Sarasti had revealed his master plan. Or maybe Cunningham simply craved distraction from the imminence of the enemy.

"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?"

"Forget about
minds
," he told her. "Say you've got a device designed to monitor—oh, cosmic rays, say. What happens when you turn its sensor around so it's not pointing at the sky anymore, but at its own guts?" He answered himself before she could: "It does what it's built to. It measures cosmic rays, even though it's not looking at them any more. It parses its own circuitry in terms of cosmic-ray metaphors, because those
feel
right, because they feel natural, because it can't look at things any other way. But it's the
wrong metaphor
. So the system misunderstands everything about itself. Maybe that's not a grand and glorious evolutionary leap after all. Maybe it's just a design flaw."

"But
you're
the biologist. You know Mom was right better'n anyone. Brain's a big glucose hog. Everything it does costs through the nose."

"True enough," Cunningham admitted.

"So sentience has gotta be
good
for something, then. Because it's
expensive
, and if it sucks up energy without doing anything useful then evolution's gonna weed it out just like
that
."

"Maybe it did." He paused long enough to chew food or suck smoke. "Chimpanzees are smarter than Orangutans, did you know that? Higher encephalisation quotient. Yet they can't always recognize themselves in a mirror. Orangs can."

"So what's your point? Smarter animal, less self-awareness? Chimpanzees are becoming nonsentient?"

"Or they were, before we stopped everything in its tracks."

"So why didn't that happen to us?"

"What makes you think it didn't?"

It was such an obviously stupid question that Sascha didn't have an answer for it. I could imagine her gaping in the silence.

"You're not thinking this through," Cunningham said. "We're not talking about some kind of zombie lurching around with its arms stretched out, spouting mathematical theorems. A smart automaton would
blend in
. It would observe those around it, mimic their behavior, act just like everyone else. All the while completely unaware of what it was doing. Unaware even of its own existence."

"Why would it bother? What would motivate it?"

"As long as you pull your hand away from an open flame, who cares whether you do it because it
hurts
or because some feedback algorithm says
withdraw if heat flux exceeds critical T
? 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." Another silence; I could hear him chewing through it. "It'll even be able to participate in a conversation like this one. It could write letters home, impersonate real human feelings, without having the slightest awareness of its own existence."

"I dunno, Rob. It just seems—"

"Oh, it might not be perfect. It might be a bit redundant, or resort to the occasional expository infodump. But even
real
people do that, don't they?"

"And eventually, there aren't any real people left. Just robots pretending to give a shit."

"Perhaps. Depends on the population dynamics, among other things. But I'd guess that at least one thing an automaton lacks is empathy; if you can't feel, you can't really relate to something that does, even if you
act
as though you do. Which makes it interesting to note how many sociopaths show up in the world's upper echelons, hmm? How ruthlessness and bottom-line self-interest are so lauded up in the stratosphere, while anyone showing those traits at ground level gets carted off into detention with the Realists. Almost as if society itself is being reshaped from the inside out."

"Oh, come on. Society was
always
pretty— wait, you're saying the world's corporate elite are
nonsentient
?"

"God, no. Not nearly. Maybe they're just starting down that road. Like chimpanzees."

"Yeah, but sociopaths don't blend in well."

"Maybe the ones that get diagnosed don't, but by definition they're the bottom of the class. The others are too smart to get caught, and
real
automatons would do even better. Besides, when you get powerful enough, you don't need to act like other people. Other people start acting like you."

Sascha whistled. "Wow. Perfect play-actor."

"Or not so perfect. Sound like anyone we know?"

They may have been talking about someone else entirely, I suppose. But that was as close to a direct reference to Siri Keeton that I heard in all my hours on the grapevine. Nobody else mentioned me, even in passing. That was statistically unlikely, given what I'd just endured in front of them all; someone should have said
something
. Perhaps Sarasti had ordered them not to discuss it. I didn't know why. But it was obvious by now that the vampire had been orchestrating their interactions with me for some time. Now I was in hiding, but he knew I'd listen in at some point. Maybe, for some reason, he didn't want my surveillance—contaminated…

He could have simply locked me out of ConSensus. He hadn't. Which meant he still wanted me in the loop.

Zombies. Automatons. Fucking sentience.

For once in your goddamned life,
understand
something.

He'd said that to me. Or something had. During the assault.

Understand that your life depends on it.

Almost as if he were doing me a
favor
.

Then he'd left me alone. And had evidently told the others to do the same.

Are you
listening
, Keeton?

And he hadn't locked me out of ConSensus.

*

Centuries of navel-gazing. Millennia of masturbation. Plato to Descartes to Dawkins to Rhanda. Souls and zombie agents and qualia. Kolmogorov complexity. Consciousness as Divine Spark. Consciousness as electromagnetic field. Consciousness as functional cluster.