Rifters 4 - Blindsight (34 page)

"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."

He turned to face me. "And you know what's
really
amazing? If something only moves during the gaps, your brain just—ignores it. It's invisible."

I glanced at his workspace. The usual splitscreen glowed to one side—realtime images of the scramblers in their pens—but Histology, ten thousand times larger than life, took center stage. The paradoxical neural architecture of
Stretch & Clench
glistened on the main window, flensed and labeled and overlaid by circuit diagrams a dozen layers thick. A dense, annotated forest of alien trunks and brambles. It looked a little like
Rorschach
itself.

I couldn't parse any of it.

"Are you listening, Keeton? Do you know what I'm saying?"

"You've figured out why I couldn't—you're saying these things can somehow tell when our eyes are offline, and..."

I didn't finish. It just didn't seem possible.

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. These things are
fast
, Keeton. Way faster than we could have guessed even from that high-speed whisper line they were using. They're bloody
superconductors
."

It took a conscious effort to keep from frowning. "Is that even possible?"

"Every nerve impulse generates an electromagnetic field. That makes it detectable."

"But
Rorschach
's EM fields are so—I mean, reading the firing of a single optic nerve through all that interference—"

"It's not
interference
. The fields are
part
of them, remember? That's probably how they
do
it."

"So they couldn't do that here."

"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
."

Stretch and Clench floated in splitscreen before us, arms swaying like undulating backbones. Cryptic patterns played slowly across their cuticles.

"Supposing it's just— instinct," I suggested. "Flounders hide against their background pretty well, but they don't
think
about it."

"Where are they going to get that instinct
from
, Keeton? How is it going to evolve? Saccades are an accidental glitch in mammalian vision. Where would scramblers have encountered them before now?" Cunningham shook his head. "That thing, that thing Amanda's robot fried— it developed that strategy on its own,
on the spot
. It
improvised
."

The word
intelligent
barely encompassed that kind of improvisation. But there was something else in Cunningham's face, some deeper distress nested inside what he'd already told me.

"What?" I asked.

"It was
stupid
," he said. "The things these creatures can do, it was just
dumb
."

"How do you mean?"

"Well it didn't work, did it? Couldn't keep it up in front of more than one or two of us."

Because people's eyes don't flicker in synch, I realized. Too many witnesses stripped it of cover.

"—many
other
things it could have done," Cunningham was saying. "They could've induced Anton's or, or an agnosia: then we could have tripped over a whole herd of scramblers and it wouldn't even register in our conscious minds. Agnosias happen by
accident
, for God's sake. If you've got the senses and reflexes to hide between someone's saccades, why stop there? Why not do something that
really
works?"

"Why do you think?" I asked, reflexively nondirective.

"I think that first one was—you know it was a juvenile, right? Maybe it was just inexperienced. Maybe it was
stupid
, and it made a bad decision. 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."

I could see it in his topology. I could hear it in his voice. His nerveless face remained as calm as a corpse.

"We should just kill them now," he said.

"Well, if they're spies, they can't have learned much. They've been in those cages the whole time, except—"
for the way up
. They'd been right next to us the whole trip back…

"These things live and breath EM. Even stunted, even isolated, who knows how much of our tech they could have just read through the
walls
?"

"You've got to tell Sarasti," I said.

"Oh, Sarasti knows. Why do you think he wouldn't let them go?"

"He never said anything about—"

"He'd be
crazy
to fill us in. He keeps sending you
down
there, remember? Do you think for a second he'd tell you what he knows and then set you loose in a labyrinth full of mind-reading minotaurs? He knows, and he's already got it factored a thousand ways to Sunday." Keeton's eyes were bright manic points blazing in an expressionless mask. He raised them to the center of the drum, and didn't raise his voice a decibel. "Isn't that right, Jukka?"

I checked ConSensus for active channels. "I don't think he's listening, Robert."

Cunningham's mouth moved in something that would have been a pitying smile if the rest of his face had been able to join in. "He doesn't have to
listen
, Keeton. He doesn't have to spy on us. He just
knows
."

Ventilators, breathing. The almost-subliminal hum of bearings in motion. Then Sarasti's disembodied voice rang forth through the drum.

"Everyone to Commons. Robert wants to share."

*

Cunningham sat to my right, his plastic face lit from beneath by the conference table. He stared down into that light, rocking slightly. His lips went through the ongoing motions of some inaudible incantation. The Gang sat across from us. To my left Bates kept one eye on the proceedings and another on intelligence from the front lines.

Sarasti was with us only in spirit. His place at the head of the table remained empty. "Tell them," he said.

"We have to get out of h—"

"From the
beginning
."

Cunningham swallowed and started again. "Those frayed motor nerves I couldn't figure out, those pointless cross-connections—they're logic gates. Scramblers
time-share
. Their sensory and motor plexii double as associative neurons during idle time, so every part of the system can be used for cognition when it isn't otherwise engaged. Nothing like it ever evolved on Earth. It means they can do a great deal of processing without a lot of dedicated associative mass, even for an individual."

"So peripheral nerves can think?" Bates frowned. "Can they
remember
?"

"Certainly. At least, I don't see why not." Cunningham pulled a cigarette from his pocket.

"So when they tore that scrambler apart—"

"Not civil war. Data dump. Passing information about
us
, most likely."

"Pretty radical way to carry on a conversation," Bates remarked.

"It wouldn't be their first choice. I think each scrambler acts as a node in a distributed network, when they're in
Rorschach
at least. But those fields would be configured down to the Angstrom, and when we go in with our tech and our shielding and blowing
holes
in their conductors—we bollocks up the network. Jam the local signal. So they resort to a sneakernet."

He had not lit his cigarette. He rolled the filtered end between thumb and forefinger. His tongue flickered between his lips like a worm behind a mask.

Hidden in his tent, Sarasti took up the slack. "Scramblers also use
Rorschach
's EM for metabolic processes. Some pathways achieve proton transfer via heavy-atom tunneling. Perhaps the ambient radiation acts as a catalyst."

"
Tunneling
?" Susan said. "As in
quantum
?"

Cunningham nodded. "Which also explains your shielding problems. Partly, at least."

"But is that even
possible
? I mean, I thought those kind of effects only showed up under cryonic—"

"
Forget
this," Cunningham blurted. "We can debate the biochemistry later, if we're still alive."

"What do we debate instead, Robert?" Sarasti said smoothly.

"For starters, the
dumbest
of these things can look into your head and see what parts of your visual cortex are lighting up. And if there's a difference between that and mind-reading, it's not much of one."

"As long as we stay out of
Rorschach
—"

"That ship has
sailed
. You people have already
been
there. Repeatedly. Who knows what you already did down there for no better reason than because
Rorschach
made
you?"

"Wait a second," Bates objected. "None of us were
puppets
down there. We hallucinated and we went blind and—and crazy even, but we were never
possessed
."

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." He waved at the vast unknowable void beyond the bulkhead. Shreds of mangled cigarette floated sideways in front of him. "Do you want to guess what
that
can do? For all we know we've already given them
Theseus
' technical specs, warned them about the Icarus array, and then just decided
of our own free will
to forget it all."

"
We
can cause those effects," Sarasti said coolly. "As you say. Strokes cause them. Tumors. Random accidents."

"
Random?
Those were
experiments
, people! That was
vivisection
! They let you in so they could take you apart and see what made you tick and you never even
knew
it."

"
So what
?" the vampire snapped invisibly. Something cold and hungry had edged into his voice. Human topologies shivered around the table, skittish.

"There's a blind spot in the center of your visual field," Sarasti pointed out. "You can't see it. You can't see the saccades in your visual timestream. Just two of the tricks you
know
about. Many others."

Cunningham was nodding. "That's my whole
point
.
Rorschach
could be—"

"Not talking about case studies. 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."

Nobody spoke. It was several silent seconds before I realized what had happened.

Jukka Sarasti had just given us a pep talk.

He could have shut down Cunningham's tirade—could have probably shut down a full-scale mutiny—by just sailing into our midst and baring his teeth. By
looking
at us. But he wasn't trying to frighten us into submission, we were already nervous enough. And he wasn't trying to educate us either, fight fear with fact; the more
facts
any sane person gathered about
Rorschach
, the more fearful they'd become. Sarasti was only trying to keep us
functional
, lost in space on the edge of our lives, facing down this monstrous enigma that might destroy us at any instant for any reason. Sarasti was trying to calm us down:
good meat, nice meat
. He was trying to keep us from falling apart.
There there.

Sarasti was practicing
psychology
.

I looked around the table. Bates and Cunningham and the Gang sat still and bloodless.

Sarasti sucked at it.

"We have to get out of here," Cunningham said. "These things are way beyond us."

"We've shown more aggression than they have," James said, but there was no confidence in her voice.

"
Rorschach
plays those rocks like marbles. We're sitting in the middle of a shooting gallery. Any time it feels like—"

"It's still growing. It's not finished."

"That's supposed to
reassure
me?"

"All I'm saying is, we don't
know
," James said. "We could have years yet. Centuries."