Rifters 4 - Blindsight (27 page)

"As you can see, the background doesn't match the pattern," Cunningham said. "It's not even close."

"Can you explain Siri's blindness to it?" Sarasti said.

"I can't," Cunningham admitted. "It's beyond ordinary crypsis. But
Rorschach
makes you see all sorts of things that aren't there. Not seeing something that
is
there might come down to essentially the same thing."

"Another hallucination?" I asked.

Another shrug while Cunningham sucked smoke. "There are many ways to fool the human visual system. It's interesting that the illusion failed when multiple witnesses were present, but if you want a definitive mechanism you'll have to give me more to work with than
that
." He stabbed his cigarette hand at the crisped remains.

"But—" James took a breath, bracing herself— "We're talking about something... sophisticated, at least. Something very complex. A great deal of processing power."

Cunningham nodded again. "I'd estimate nervous tissue accounts for about thirty percent of body mass."

"So it's intelligent." Her voice was almost a whisper.

"Not remotely."

"But—thirty percent—"

"Thirty percent
motor and sensory
wiring." Another drag. "Much like an octopus; an enormous number of neurons, but half of them get used up running the suckers."

"My understanding is that octopi are quite intelligent," James said.

"By molluscan standards, certainly. But do you have any
idea
how much extra cabling you'd need if the photoreceptors in your eye were spread across your entire body? You'd need about three hundred million extension cords to begin with, ranging from half a millimeter to two meters long. Which means all your signals are staggered and out of synch, which means billions of additional logic gates to cohere the input. And that just gets you a single static image, with no filtering, no interpretation, no time-series integration at all." Shiver. Drag. "Now multiply that by all the extra wiring needed to
focus
all those eyespots on an object, or to send all that information back to individual chromatophores, and then add in the processing power you need to
drive
those chromatophores one at a time. Thirty percent might do all that, but I strongly doubt you'd have much left over for philosophy and science." He waved his hand in the general direction of the hold. "That—that—"

"
Scrambler,
" James suggested.

Cunningham rolled his tongue around it. "Very well. That
scrambler
is an absolute miracle of evolutionary engineering. It's also dumb as a stick."

A moment's silence.

"So what
is
it?" James asked at last. "Somebody's pet?"

"Canary in a coal mine," Bates suggested.

"Perhaps not even that," Cunningham said. "Perhaps no more than a white blood cell with waldoes. Maintenance bot, maybe. Teleoperated, or instinct-driven. But people, we're ignoring far greater questions here. How could an anaerobe even develop complex multicellular anatomy, much less move as
fast
as this thing did? That level of activity burns a great deal of ATP."

"Maybe they don't use ATP," Bates said as I thumbnailed:
adenosine triphosphate
. Cellular energy source.

"It was
crammed
with ATP," Cunningham told her. "You can tell that much even with
these
remains. The question is, how can it synthesize the stuff fast enough to keep up with demand. Purely anaerobic pathways wouldn't suffice."

Nobody offered any suggestions.

"Anyway," he said, "So endeth the lesson. If you want gory details, check ConSensus." He wiggled the fingers of his free hand: the spectral dissection vanished. "I'll keep working, but if you want any real answers go get me a live one." He butted out his cigarette against the bulkhead and stared defiantly around the drum.

The others hardly reacted; their topologies still sparkled from the revelations of a few minutes before. Perhaps Cunningam's pet peeve
was
more important to the Big Picture; perhaps, in a reductionist universe, biochemical basics should always take priority over the finer points of ETI and interspecies etiquette. But Bates and the Gang were time-lagged, processing earlier revelations. Not just
processing
, either: wallowing. They clung to Cunningham's findings like convicted felons who'd just discovered they might be freed on a technicality.

Because the scrambler was dead at our hands, no doubt about it. But it wasn't an
alien
, not really. It wasn't
intelligent
. It was just a blood cell with waldoes. It was dumb as a stick.

And property damage is so much easier to live with than murder.

"Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them"

—
Einstein

Robert Paglino had set me up with Chelsea in the first place. Maybe he felt responsible when the relationship started jumping the rails. Or maybe Chelsea, Madam Fix-It that she was, had approached him for an intervention. For whatever reason, it was obvious the moment we took our seats at QuBit's that his invitation had not been entirely social.

He went for some neurotrope cocktail on the rocks. I stuck with Rickard's.

"Still old-school," Pag said.

"Still into foreplay," I observed.

"That obvious, huh?" He took a sip. "That'll teach me to try the subtle approach with a professional jargonaut."

"Jargonaut's got nothing to do with it. You wouldn't have fooled a border collie." Truth be told, Pag's topology never really told me much that I didn't already know. I never really had much of an edge in reading him. Maybe we just knew each other too well.

"So," he said, "spill."

"Nothing to spill. She just got to know the real me."

"That
is
bad."

"What'd she tell you?"

"Me? Nothing at all."

I gave him a look over the top of my glass.

He sighed. "She knows you're cheating on her."

"I'm what?"

"Cheating. With the skin."

"It's based on
her
!"

"But it
isn't
her."

"No it isn't. It doesn't fart or fight or break into tears every time you don't want to be dragged off to meet its family. Look, I love the woman dearly, but come
on
. When was the last time
you
tried first-person fucking?"

"Seventy-four," he said.

"You're kidding." I'd have guessed
never
.

"Did some third-world medical missionary work between gigs. They still bump and grind in Texas." Pag swigged his trope. "Actually, I thought it was alright."

"The novelty wears off."

"Evidently."

"And it's not like I'm doing anything unusual here, Pag.
She's
the one with the kink. And it's not just the sex. She keeps
asking
about—she keeps wanting to
know
things."

"Like what?"

"Irrelevant stuff. My life as a kid. My family. Nobody's fucking business."

"She's just taking an interest. Not everyone considers childhood memories off-limits, you know."

"Thanks for the insight." As if people had never
taken an interest
before. As if Helen hadn't
taken an interest
when she went through my drawers and filtered my mail and followed me from room to room, asking the drapes and the furniture why I was always so sullen and withdrawn. She'd taken such an interest that she wouldn't let me out the door until I confided in her. At twelve I'd been stupid enough to throw myself on her mercy,
It's personal, Mom. I'd just rather not talk about it.
Then I'd made my escape into the bathroom when she demanded to know if
it
was trouble online, trouble at school, was it a girl, was it a—a
boy
, what
was
it and why couldn't I just
trust
my
own mother
, don't I know I can trust her with
anything
? I waited out the persistent knocking and the insistent concerned voice through the door and the final, grudging silence that followed. I waited until I was absolutely sure she'd gone away, I waited for five fucking
hours
before I came out and there she was, arms folded in the hall, eyes brimming with reproach and disappointment. That night she took the lock off the bathroom door because
family should never shut each other out
. Still taking an interest.

"Siri," Pag said quietly.

I slowed my breathing, tried again: "She doesn't just want to
talk
about family. She wants to
meet
them. She keeps trying to drag me to meet
hers
. I thought I was hooking up with
Chelsea
, you know, nobody ever told me I'd have to share airspace with..."

"You do it?"

"Once." Reaching, grasping things, feigning acceptance, feigning
friendship
. "It was great, if you like being ritually pawed by a bunch of play-acting strangers who can't stand the sight of you and don't have the guts to admit it."

Pag shrugged, unsympathetic. "Sounds like typical old-school family. You're a synthesist, man. You deal with way wonkier dynamics than
that
."

"I deal with
other people's
information. I don't vomit my own personal life into the public sphere. Whatever hybrids and the constructs I work with, they don't—"

—
touch—

"Interrogate," I finished.

"You knew Chelse was an old-fashioned girl right off the top."

"Yeah, when it suits her." I gulped ale. "But she's cutting-edge when she's got a splicer in her hand. Which isn't to say that her strategies couldn't use some work."

"Strategies."

It's not a
strategy
, for God's sake! Can't you see I'm
hurting
? I'm on the fucking
floor
, Siri, I'm curled up in a ball because I'm hurting so much and all you can do is criticize my
tactics
? What do I have to do, slash my goddamn
wrists?

I'd shrugged and turned away.
Nature's trick
.

"She
cries
," I said now. "High blood-lactate levels, makes it easy for her. It's just chemistry but she holds it up like it was some kind of IOU."

Pag pursed his lips. "Doesn't mean it's an act."

"Everything's an act. Everything's strategy. You know that." I snorted. "And
she's
miffed because
I
base a skin on her?"

"I don't think it's so much the actual skin as the fact that you didn't tell her. You know how she feels about honesty in relationships."

"Sure. She doesn't want any."

He looked at me.

"Give me some credit, Pag. You think I should tell her that sometimes the sight of her makes me shudder?"

The system called Robert Paglino sat quietly, and sipped his drugs, and set the things he was about to say in order. He took a breath.

"I can't believe you could be so fucking dumb," he said.

"Yeah? Enlighten me."

"Of
course
she wants you to tell her you only have eyes for her, you love her pores and her morning breath, and why stop at one tweak how about ten. But that doesn't mean she wants you to
lie
, you idiot. She wants all that stuff to be
true
. And—well, why
can't
it be?"

"It isn't," I said.

"
Jesus
, Siri. People aren't
rational
.
You
aren't rational. We're not thinking machines, we're—we're feeling machines that happen to think." He took a breath, and another hit. "And you already know that, or you couldn't do your job. Or at least—" He grimaced— "the system knows."

"The system."

Me and my protocols, he meant. My
Chinese Room
.

I took a breath. "It doesn't work with everyone, you know."

"So I've noticed. Can't read systems you're too entangled with, right? Observer effect."

I shrugged.

"Just as well," he said. "I don't think I'd like you all that much in that
room
of yours."

It came out before I could stop it: "Chelse says she'd prefer a
real
one."

He raised his eyebrows. "Real what?"

"Chinese Room. She says it would have better comprehension."

The Qube murmured and clattered around us for a few moments.

"I can see why she'd say that," Pag said at last. "But you— you did okay, Pod-man."

"I dunno."

He nodded, emphatic. "You know what they say about the road less traveled? Well, you carved your
own
road. I don't know why. It's like learning calligraphy using your toes, you know? Or proprioceptive polyneuropathy. It's amazing you can do it at all; it's
mindboggling
that you actually got
good
at it."

I squinted at him. "Proprio—"

"There used to be people without any sense of—well, of themselves, physically. They couldn't feel their bodies in space, had no idea how their own limbs were arranged or even if they
had
limbs. Some of them said they felt
pithed
. Disembodied. They'd send a motor signal to the hand and just have to take it on faith that it arrived. So they'd use vision to compensate; they couldn't feel where the hand was so they'd
look
at it while it moved, use sight as a substitute for the normal force-feedback you and I take for granted. They could walk, if they kept their eyes focused on their legs and concentrated on every step. They'd get pretty good at it. But even after years of practice, if you distracted them in mid-step they'd go over like a beanstalk without a counterweight."

"You're saying I'm like that?"

"You use your
Chinese room
the way they used vision. You've reinvented empathy, almost from scratch, and in some ways—not
all
obviously, or I wouldn't have to tell you this—but in some ways yours is better than the original. It's why you're so good at synthesis."