Rifters 4 - Blindsight (44 page)

The usual gang of fellow writers critiqued the first few chapters of this book and sent me whimpering back to the drawing board: Michael Carr, Laurie Channer, Cory Doctorow, Rebecca Maines, David Nickle, John McDaid, Steve Samenski, Rob Stauffer and the late Pat York. All offered valuable insights and criticisms at our annual island getaway; Dave Nickle gets singled out for special mention thanks to additional insights offered throughout the year, generally at ungodly hours. By the same token, Dave is exempted from the familiar any-errors-are-entirely-mine schtick that we authors boilerplate onto our Acknowledgements. At least some of the mistakes contained herein are probably Dave's fault.

Profs. Dan Brooks and Deborah MacLennan, both of the University of Toronto, provided the intellectual stimulation of an academic environment without any of the political and bureaucratic bullshit that usually goes along with it. I am indebted to them for litres of alcohol and hours of discussion on a number of the issues presented herein, and for other things that are none of your fucking business. Also in the too-diverse-to-itemise category, André Breault provided a west-coast refuge in which I completed the first draft. Isaac Szpindel—the
real
one— helped out, as usual, with various neurophys details, and Susan James (who also really exists, albeit in a slightly more coherent format) told me how linguists might approach a First Contact scenario. Lisa Beaton pointed me to relevant papers in a forlorn attempt to atone for whoring her soul to Big Pharma. Laurie Channer acted as general sounding board, and, well, put up with me. For a while, anyway. Thanks also to Karl Schroeder, with whom I batted around a number of ideas in the arena of sentience-vs.-intelligence. Parts of
Blindsight
can be thought of as a rejoinder to arguments presented in Karl's novel
Permanence
; I disagree with his reasoning at almost every step, and am still trying to figure out how we arrived at the same general endpoint.

Notes and References

References and remarks, to try and convince you all I'm not crazy (or, failing that, to simply intimidate you into shutting up about it). Read for extra credit.

A Brief Primer on Vampire Biology

I'm hardly the first author to take a stab at rationalising vampirism in purely biological terms. Richard Matheson did it before I was born, and if the grapevine's right that damn Butler woman's latest novel will be all over the same territory before you even read this. I bet I'm the first to come up with the Crucifix Glitch to explain the aversion to crosses, though— and once struck by that bit of inspiration, everything else followed.

Vampires were accidentally rediscovered when a form of experimental gene therapy went curiously awry, kick-starting long-dormant genes in an autistic child and provoking a series of (ultimately fatal) physical and neurological changes. The company responsible for this discovery presented its findings after extensive follow-up studies on inmates of the Texas penal system; a recording of that talk, complete with visual aids, is available online
¹
; curious readers with half an hour to kill are refered there for details not only on vampire biology, but on the research, funding, and "ethical and political concerns" regarding vampire domestication (not to mention the ill-fated "Taming Yesterday's Nightmares For A Brighter Tomorrow" campaign). The following (much briefer) synopsis restricts itself to a few biological characteristics of the ancestral organism:

Homo sapiens vampiris
was a short-lived Human subspecies which diverged from the ancestral line between 800,000 and 500,000 year BP. More gracile than either
neandertal
or
sapiens
, gross physical divergence from
sapiens
included slight elongation of canines, mandibles, and long bones in service of an increasingly predatory lifestyle. Due to the relatively brief lifespan of this lineage, these changes were not extensive and overlapped considerably with conspecific allometries; differences become diagnostically significant only at large sample sizes (N>130).

However, while virtually identical to modern humans in terms of gross physical morphology,
vampiris
was radically divergent from
sapiens
on the biochemical, neurological, and soft-tissue levels. The GI tract was foreshortened and secreted a distinct range of enzymes more suited to a carnivorous diet. Since cannibalism carries with it a high risk of prionic infection
²
, the vampire immune system displayed great resistance to prion diseases
³
, as well as to a variety of helminth and anasakid parasites.
Vampiris
hearing and vision were superior to that of
sapiens
; vampire retinas were quadrochromatic (containing four types of cones, compared to only three among baseline humans); the fourth cone type, common to nocturnal predators ranging from cats to snakes, was tuned to near-infrared. Vampire grey matter was "underconnected" compared to Human norms due to a relative lack of interstitial white matter; this forced isolated cortical modules to become self-contained and hypereffective, leading to omnisavantic pattern-matching and analytical skills
⁴
.

Virtually all of these adaptations are cascade effects that— while resulting from a variety of proximate causes— can ultimately be traced back to a paracentric inversion mutation on the Xq21.3 block of the X-chromosome
⁵
. This resulted in functional changes to genes coding for protocadherins (proteins that play a critical role in brain and central nervous system development). While this provoked radical neurological and behavioral changes, significant
physical
changes were limited to soft tissue and microstructures that do not fossilise. This, coupled with extremely low numbers of vampire even at peak population levels (existing as they did at the tip of the trophic pyramid) explains their virtual absence from the fossil record.

Significant deleterious effects also resulted from this cascade. For example, vampires lost the ability to code for -Protocadherin Y, whose genes are found exclusively on the hominid Y chromosome
⁶
. Unable to synthesise this vital protein themselves, vampires had to obtain it from their food. Human prey thus comprised an essential component of their diet, but a relatively slow-breeding one (a unique situation, since prey usually outproduce their predators by at least an order of magnitude). Normally this dynamic would be utterly unsustainable: vampires would predate humans to extinction, and then die off themselves for lack of essential nutrients.

Extended periods of lungfish-like dormancy
⁷
(the so-called "undead" state)—and the consequent drastic reduction in vampire energetic needs— developed as a means of redressing this imbalance. To this end vampires produced elevated levels of endogenous Ala-(D) Leuenkephalin (a mammalian hibernation-inducing peptide
⁸
) and dobutamine, which strengthens the heart muscle during periods on inactivity
⁹
.

Another deleterious cascade effect was the so-called "Crucifix Glitch"— a cross-wiring of normally-distinct receptor arrays in the visual cortex
¹⁰
, resulting in
grand mal
-like feedback siezures whenever the arrays processing vertical and horizontal stimuli fired simultaneously across a sufficiently large arc of the visual field. Since intersecting right angles are virtually nonexistent in nature, natural selection did not weed out the Glitch until
H. sapiens sapiens
developed Euclidean architecture; by then, the trait had become fixed across
H. sapiens vampiris
via genetic drift, and—suddenly denied access to its prey—the entire subspecies went extinct shortly after the dawn of recorded history.

You'll have noticed that Jukka Sarasti, like all reconstructed vampires, sometimes
clicked
to himself when thinking. This is thought to hail from an ancestral language, which was hardwired into a click-speech mode more than 50,000 years BP. Click-based speech is especially suited to predators stalking prey on savannah grasslands (the clicks mimic the rustling of grasses, allowing communication without spooking quarry)
¹¹
. The Human language most closely akin to Old Vampire is Hadzane
¹²
.

Sleight of Mind

The Human sensorium is remarkably easy to hack; our visual system has been described as an improvised "bag of tricks"
¹³
at best. Our sense organs acquire such fragmentary, imperfect input that the brain has to interpret their data using rules of probability rather than direct perception
¹⁴
. It doesn't so much
see
the world as make an educated guess about it. As a result, "improbable" stimuli tends to go unprocessed at the conscious level, no matter how strong the input. We tend to simply
ignore
sights and sound that don't fit with our worldview.

Sarasti was right:
Rorschach
wouldn't do anything to you that you don't already do to yourself.

For example, the invisibility trick of that young, dumb scrambler— the one who restricted its movement to the gaps in Human vision— occured to me while reading about something called
inattentional blindness
. A Russian guy called Yarbus was the first to figure out the whole saccadal glitch in Human vision, back in the nineteen sixties
¹⁵
. Since then, a variety of researchers have made objects pop in and out of the visual field unnoticed, conducted conversations with hapless subjects who never realised that their conversational partner had changed halfway through the interview, and generally proven that the Human brain just
fails to notice
an awful lot of what's going on around it
^16
,
17
,
18
. Check out the demos at the website of the Visual Cognition Lab at the University of Illinois
¹⁹
and you'll see what I mean. This really is rather mind-blowing, people. There could be Scientologists walking among us right now and if they moved just right, we'd
never even see them
.

Most of the psychoses, syndromes, and hallucinations described herein are real, and are described in detail by Metzinger
²⁰
, Wegner
²¹
, and/or Saks
²²
(see also
Sentience/Intelligence,
below
)
. Others (
e.g.
Grey Syndrome) have not yet made their way into the DSM
²³
—truth be told, I invented a couple— but are nonetheless based on actual experimental evidence. Depending upon whom you believe, the judicious application of magnetic fields to the brain can provoke everything from religious rapture
²⁴
to a sense of being abducted by aliens
²⁵
. Transcranial magnetic stimulation can change mood, induce blindness
²⁶
, or target the speech centers (making one unable to pronounce verbs, for example, while leaving the nouns unimpaired)
²⁷
. Memory and learning can be enhanced (or impaired), and the US Government is presently funding research into wearable TMS gear for—you guessed it— military purposes
²⁸
.