Rifters 4 - Blindsight (38 page)

I explored it all.

Wegner thought it was an executive summary. Penrose heard it in the singing of caged electrons. Nirretranders said it was a fraud; Kazim called it leakage from a parallel universe. Metzinger wouldn't even admit it existed. The AIs claimed to have worked it out, then announced they couldn't explain it to us. Gödel was right after all: no system can fully understand itself.

Not even the synthesists had been able to rotate it down. The load-bearing beams just couldn't take the strain.

All of them, I began to realize, had missed the point. All those theories, all those drugdreams and experiments and models trying to prove what consciousness
was
: none to explain what it was
good
for. None needed: obviously, consciousness makes us what we are. It lets us see the beauty and the ugliness. It elevates us into the exalted realm of the spiritual. Oh, a few outsiders—Dawkins, Keogh, the occasional writer of hackwork fiction who barely achieved obscurity—wondered briefly at the why of it: why
not
soft computers, and no more? Why should nonsentient systems be inherently inferior? But they never really raised their voices above the crowd. The value of what we are was too trivially self-evident to ever call into serious question.

Yet the questions persisted, in the minds of the laureates, in the angst of every horny fifteen-year-old on the planet. Am I nothing but sparking chemistry? Am I a magnet in the ether? I am more than my eyes, my ears, my tongue; I am the little thing
behind
those things, the thing looking out from inside. But who looks out from
its
eyes? What does it reduce to? Who am I? Who am I?
Who am I?

What a stupid fucking question. I could have answered it in a second, if Sarasti hadn't forced me to understand it first.

"Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves."

—
Thoreau

The shame had scoured me and left me hollow. I didn't care who saw me. I didn't care what state they saw me in. For days I'd floated in my tent, curled into a ball and breathing my own stink while the others made whatever preparations my tormentor had laid out for them. Amanda Bates was the only one who'd raised even a token protest over what Sarasti had done to me. The others kept their eyes down and their mouths shut and did what he told them to— whether from fear or indifference I couldn't tell.

It was something else I'd stopped caring about.

Sometime during that span the cast on my arm cracked open like a shucked clam. I upped the lumens long enough to assess its handiwork; my repaired palm itched and glistened in twilight, a longer, deeper Fate line running from heel to web. Then back to darkness, and the blind unconvincing illusion of safety.

Sarasti wanted me to believe. Somehow he must have thought that brutalising and humiliating me would accomplish that—that broken and drained, I would become an empty vessel to fill as he saw fit. Wasn't it a classic brainwashing technique—to shatter your victim and then glue the pieces back together in according to specs of your own choosing? Maybe he was expecting some kind of Stockholm Syndrome to set in, or maybe his actions followed some agenda incomprehensible to mere meat.

Maybe he'd simply gone insane.

He had broken me. He had presented his arguments. I had followed his trail of bread crumbs though ConSensus, through
Theseus
. And now, only nine days from graduation, I knew one thing for sure: Sarasti was wrong. He had to be. I couldn't see
how
, but I knew it just the same. He was wrong.

Somehow, absurdly, that had become the one thing I
did
care about.

*

No one in the spine. Only Cunningham visible in BioMed, poring over digital dissections, pretending to kill time. I floated above him, my rebuilt hand clinging to the top of the nearest stairwell; it dragged me in a slow, small circle as the Drum turned. Even from up there I could see the tension in the set of his shoulders: a system stuck in a holding pattern, corroding through the long hours as fate advanced with all the time in the world.

He looked up. "Ah. It lives."

I fought the urge to retreat.
Just a conversation, for God's sake. It's just two people talking. People do it all the time without your tools. You can do this. You can do this.

Just try
.

So I forced one foot after another down the stairs, weight and apprehension rising in lockstep. I tried to read Cunningham's topology through the haze. Maybe I saw a facade, only microns deep. Maybe he would welcome almost any distraction, even if he wouldn't admit it.

Or maybe I was just imagining it.

"How are you doing?" he asked as I reached the deck.

I shrugged.

"Hand all better, I see."

"No thanks to you."

I'd tried to stop that from coming out. Really.

Cunningham struck a cigarette. "Actually, I
was
the one who fixed you up."

"You also sat there and watched while he took me apart."

"I wasn't even there." And then, after a moment: "But you may be right. I might very well have sat it out in any event. Amanda and the Gang
did
try to intervene on your behalf, from what I hear. Didn't do a lot of good for anyone."

"So you wouldn't even try."

"Would you, if the sitution were reversed? Go up unarmed against a vampire?"

I said nothing. Cunningham regarded me for a long moment, dragging on his cigarette. "He really got to you, didn't he?" he said at last.

"You're wrong," I said.

"Am I."

"I don't
play
people
."

"Mmmm." He seemed to consider the proposition. "What word would you prefer, then?"

"I
observe
."

"That you do. Some might even call it
surveillance
."

"I—I read body language." Hoping that that was all he was talking about.

"It's a matter of degree and you know it. Even in a crowd there's a certain expectation of privacy. People aren't prepared to have their minds read off every twitch of the eyeball." He stabbed at the air with his cigarette. "And you. You're a shapeshifter. You present a different face to every one of us, and I'll wager none of them is real. The
real
you, if it even exists, is invisible..."

Something knotted below my diaphragm. "Who isn't? Who doesn't—try to fit in, who doesn't want to get along? There's nothing
malicious
about that. I'm a synthesist, for God's sake! I
never
manipulate the variables."

"Well you see, that's the problem. It's not just
variables
you're manipulating."

Smoke writhed between us.

"But I guess you can't really understand that, can you." He stood and waved a hand. ConSensus windows imploded at his side. "Not your fault, really. You can't blame someone for the way they're wired."

"Give me a fucking break," I snarled.

His dead face showed nothing.

That, too, had slipped out before I could stop it—and after that came the flood: "You put so much
fucking
stock in that. You and your
empathy
. And maybe I
am
just some kind of imposter but most people would swear I'd worn their very souls. I don't
need
that shit, you don't have to
feel
motives to deduce them, it's better if you
can't
, it keeps you—"

"Dispassionate?" Cunningham smiled faintly.

"Maybe your
empathy
's just a comforting lie, you ever think of that? Maybe you
think
you know how the other person feels but you're only feeling
yourself
, maybe you're even worse than me. Or maybe we're all just guessing. Maybe the only difference is that I don't lie to myself about it."

"Do they look the way you imagined?" he asked.

"What? What are you talking about?"

"The scramblers.
Multijointed arms from a central mass
. Sounds rather similar to me."

He'd been into Szpindel's archives.

"I—Not really," I said. "The arms are more—flexible, in real life. More segmented. And I never really got a look at the body. What does that have to do with—"

"Close, though, wasn't it? Same size, same general body plan."

"So
what
?"

"Why didn't you report it?"

"I did. Isaac said it was just TMS. From
Rorschach
."

"You saw them before
Rorschach
. Or at least," he continued, "you saw
something
that scared you into blowing your cover, back when you were spying on Isaac and Michelle."

My rage dissipated like air through a breach. "They—they knew?"

"Only Isaac, I think. And it kept it between it and the logs. I suspect it didn't want to interfere with your
noninterference
protocols—although I'll wager that was the last time you ever caught the two of them in private, yes?"

I didn't say anything.

"Did you think the official observer was somehow exempt from observation?" Cunningham asked after a while.

"No," I said softly. "I suppose not.""

He nodded. "Have you seen any since? I'm not talking about run-of-the-mill TMS hallucinations. I mean scramblers. Have you hallucinated any since you actually saw one in the flesh, since you
knew
what they looked like?"

I thought about it. "No."

He shook his head, some new opinion confirmed. "You really are something, Keeton, you know that? You don't lie to yourself? Even now, you don't know what you know."

"What are you talking about?"

"You
figured it out
. From
Rorschach
's architecture, probably—form follows function, yes? Somehow you pieced together a fairly good idea of what a scrambler looked like before anyone ever laid eyes on them. Or at least—" He drew a breath; his cigarette flared like an LED— "part of you did. Some collection of unconscious modules working their asses off on your behalf. But they can't show their work, can they? You don't have conscious access to those levels. So one part of the brain tries to tell another any way it can. Passes notes under the table."

"Blindsight," I murmered.
You just get a feeling of where to reach...

"More like schizophrenia, except you saw pictures instead of hearing voices. You saw
pictures
. And you
still
didn't understand."

I blinked. "But how would I—I mean—"

"What did you think, that
Theseus
was haunted? That the scramblers were communing with you telepathically? What you do—it
matters
, Keeton. They told you you were nothing but their stenographer and they hammered all those layers of hands-off passivity into you but you just had to take some initiative anyway, didn't you? Had to work the problem on your own. The only thing you couldn't do was admit it to yourself." Cunningham shook his head. "Siri Keeton. See what they've done to you."

He touched his face.

"See what they've done to us all," he whispered.

*

I found the Gang floating in the center of the darkened observation blister. She made room as I joined her, pushed to one side and anchored herself to a bit of webbing.

"Susan?" I asked. I honestly couldn't tell any more.

"I'll get her," Michelle said.

"No, that's all right. I'd like to speak to all of—"

But Michelle had already fled. The half-lit figure changed before me, and said, "She'd rather be alone right now."

I nodded. "You?"

James shrugged. "I don't mind talking. Although I'm surprised you're still doing your reports, after...."

"I'm—not, exactly. This isn't for Earth."

I looked around. Not much to see. Faraday mesh coated the inside of the dome like a gray film, dimming and graining the view beyond. Ben hung like a black malignancy across half the sky. I could make out a dozen dim contrails against vague bands of cloud, in reds so deep they bordered on black. The sun winked past James's shoulder,
our
sun, a bright dot that diffracted into faint splintered rainbows when I moved my head. That was pretty much it: starlight didn't penetrate the mesh, nor did the larger, dimmer particles of the accretion belt. The myriad dim pinpoints of shovelnosed machinery were lost utterly.

Which might be a comfort to some, I supposed.

"Shitty view," I remarked.
Theseus
could have projected crisp first-person vistas across the dome in an instant, more real than real.

"Michelle likes it," James said. "The way it feels. And Cruncher likes the diffraction effects, he likes— interference patterns."

We watched nothing for a while, by the dim half-light filtering out from the spine. It brushed the edges of James' profile.

"You set me up," I said at last.

She looked at me. "What do you mean?"

"You were talking around me all along, weren't you? All of you. You didn't bring me in until I'd been—" How had she put it? "—
preconditioned
. The whole thing was planned to throw me off-balance. And then Sarasti— attacks me out of nowhere, and—"

"We didn't know about that. Not until the alarm went off."

"Alarm?"

"When he changed the gas mix. You must have heard it. Isn't that why you were there?"

"He called me to his tent. He told me to watch."

She regarded me from a face full of shadow. "You didn't try to stop him?"

I couldn't answer the accusation in her voice. "I just—observe," I said weakly.

"I thought you were trying to stop him from—" She shook her head. "
That's
why I thought he was attacking you."

"You're saying that wasn't an act? You weren't in on it?" I didn't believe it.

But I could tell she did.

"I thought you were trying to
protect
them." She snorted a soft, humorless laugh at her own mistake and looked away. "I guess I should have known better."