Blindsight, Peter Watts [books under 200 pages TXT] 📗

deck like a pebble in a cement mixer.

He stood still as stone for the rest of the session, face motionless, eyes hidden behind his onyx visor. When Rorschach‘s signal faded in midsentence he assembled us around the Commons table with a gesture.

“It talks,” he said.

James nodded. “It doesn’t say much, except for asking us to keep our distance. So far the voice has manifested as adult male, although the apparent age changed a few times.”

He’d heard all that. “Structure?”

“The ship-to-ship protocols are perfect. Its vocabulary is far greater than you could derive from standard nav chatter between a few ships, so they’ve been listening to all our insystem traffic—I’d say for several years at least. On the other hand, the vocabulary doesn’t have anywhere near the range you’d get by monitoring entertainment multimede, so they probably arrived after the Broadcast Age.”

“How well do they use the vocabulary they have?”

“They’re using phrase-structure grammar, long-distance dependencies. FLN recursion, at least four levels deep and I see no reason why it won’t go deeper with continued contact. They’re not parrots, Jukka. They know the rules. That name, for example—”

“Rorschach,” Bates murmered, knuckles cracking as she squeezed her pet ball. “Interesting choice.”

“I checked the registry. There’s an I-CAN freighter called Rorschach on the Martian Loop. Whoever we’re talking to must regard their own platform the way we’d regard a ship, and picked one of our names to fit.”

Szpindel dropped into the chair beside me, fresh from a galley run. A bulb of coffee glistened like gelatin in his hand. “That name, out of all the ships in the innersys? Seems way too symbolic for a random choice.”

“I don’t think it was random. Unusual ship names provoke comment; Rorschach‘s pilot goes ship-to-ship with some other vessel, the other vessel comes back with oh Grandma, what an unusual name you have, Rorschach replies with some off-the-cuff comment about nomenclatural origins and it all goes out in the EM. Someone listening to all that chatter not only figures out the name and the thing it applies to, but can get some sense of meaning from the context. Our alien friends probably eavesdropped on half the registry and deduced that Rorschach would be a better tag for something unfamiliar than, say, the_ SS Jaymie Matthews_.”

“Territorial and smart.” Szpindel grimaced, conjuring a mug from beneath his chair. “Wonderful.”

Bates shrugged. “Territorial, maybe. Not necessarily aggressive. In fact, I wonder if they could hurt us even if they wanted to.”

“I don’t,” Szpindel said. “Those skimmers—”

The major waved a dismissive hand. “Big ships turn slowly. If they were setting up to snooker us we’d see it well in advance.” She looked around the table. “Look, am I the only one who finds this odd? An interstellar technology that redecorates superJovians and lines up meteoroids like elephants on parade, and they were hiding? From us?”

“Unless there’s someone else out here,” James suggested uneasily.

Bates shook her head. “The cloak was directional. It was aimed at us and no one else.”

“And even we saw through it,” Szpindel added.

“Exactly. So they go to Plan B, which so far amounts to nothing but bluster and vague warnings. I’m just saying, they’re not acting like giants. Rorschach‘s behavior feels—improvised. I don’t think they expected us.”

“‘Course not. Burns-Caulfield was—”

“I don’t think they expected us yet.”

“Um,” Szpindel said, digesting it.

The major ran one hand over her naked scalp. “Why would they expect us to just give up after we learned we’d been sniped? Of course we’d look elsewhere. Burns-Caulfield could only have been intended as a delaying action; if I was them, I’d plan on us getting out here eventually. But I think they miscalculated somehow. We got out here sooner than they expected and caught them with their pants down.”

Szpindel split the bulb and emptied it into his mug. “Pretty large miscalculation for something so smart, eh?” A hologram bloomed on contact with the steaming liquid, glowing in soft commemoration of the Gaza Glasslands. The scent of plasticised coffee flooded the Commons. “Especially after they’d surveilled us down to the square meter,” he added.

“And what did they see? I-CANNs. Solar sails. Ships that take years to reach the Kuiper, and don’t have the reserves to go anywhere else afterwards. Telematter didn’t exist beyond Boeing’s simulators and a half-dozen protypes back then. Easy to miss. They must’ve figured one decoy would buy them all the time they needed.”

“To do what?” James wondered.

“Whatever it is,” Bates said, “We’re ringside.”

Szpindel raised his mug with an infirm hand and sipped. The coffee trembled in its prison, the surface wobbling and blobbing in the drum’s half-hearted gravity. James pursed her lips in faint disapproval. Open-topped containers for liquids were technically verboten in variable-gravity environments, even for people without Szpindel’s dexterity issues.

“So they’re bluffing,” Szpindel said at last.

Bates nodded. “That’s my guess. Rorschach‘s still under construction. We could be dealing with an automated system of some kind.”

“So we can ignore the keep-off-the-grass signs, eh? Walk right in.”

“We can afford to bide our time. We can afford to not push it.”

“Ah. So even though we could maybe handle it now, you want to wait until it graduates from covert to invulnerable.” Szpindel shuddered, set down his coffee. “Where’d you get your military training again? Sporting Chance Academy?”

Bates ignored the jibe. “The fact that Rorschach‘s still growing may be the best reason to leave it alone for a while. We don’t have any idea what the—mature, I guess—what the mature form of this artefact might be. Sure, it hid. Lots of animals take cover from predators without being predators, especially young ones. Sure, it’s—evasive. Doesn’t give us the answers we want. But maybe it doesn’t know them, did you consider that? How much luck would you have interrogating a Human embryo? Adult could be a whole different animal.”

“Adult could put our asses through a meatgrinder.”

“So could the embryo for all we know.” Bates rolled her eyes. “Jesus, Isaac, you’re the biologist. I shouldn’t have to tell you how many shy reclusive critters pack a punch when they’re cornered. Porcupine doesn’t want any trouble, but he’ll still give you a faceful of quills if you ignore the warning.”

Szpindel said nothing. He slid his coffee sideways along the concave tabletop, to the very limit of his reach. The liquid sat there in its mug, a dark circle perfectly parallel to the rim but canted slightly towards us. I even thought I could make out the merest convexity in the surface itself.

Szpindel smiled faintly at the effect.

James cleared her throat. “Not to downplay your concerns, Isaac, but we’ve hardly exhausted the diplomatic route. And at least it’s willing to talk, even if it’s not as forthcoming as we’d like.”

“Sure it talks,” Szpindel said, eyes still on the leaning mug. “Not like us.”

“Well, no. There’s some—”

“It’s not just slippery, it’s downright dyslexic sometimes, you noticed? And it mixes up its pronouns.”

“Given that it picked up the language entirely via passive eavesdropping, it’s remarkably fluent. In fact, from what I can tell they’re more efficient at processing speech than we are.”

“Gotta be efficient at a language if you’re going to be so evasive in it, eh?”

“If they were human I might agree with you,” James replied. “But what appears to us as evasion or deceit could just as easily be explained by a reliance on smaller conceptual units.”

“Conceptual units?” Bates, I was beginning to realize, never pulled up a subtitle if she could help it.

James nodded. “Like processing a line of text word by word, instead of looking at complete phrases. The smaller the units, the faster they can be reconfigured; it gives you very fast semantic reflexes. The down side is that it’s difficult to maintain the same level of logical consistency, since the patterns within the larger structure are more likely to get shuffled.”

“Whoa.” Szpindel straightened, all thoughts of liquids and centipetal force forgotten.

“All I’m saying is, we aren’t necessarily dealing with deliberate deception here. An entity who parses information at one scale might not be aware of inconsistencies on another; it might not even have conscious access to that level.”

“That’s not all you’re saying.”

“Isaac, you can’t apply Human norms to a—”

“I wondered what you were up to.” Szpindel dove into the transcripts. A moment later he dredged up an excerpt:

Request information on environments you consider lethal. Request information on your response to the prospect of imminent exposure to lethal environments.

Glad to comply. But your lethal is different from us. there are many migrating circumstances.

“You were testing it!” Szpindel crowed. He smacked his lips; his jaw ticced. You were looking for an emotional response!”

“It was just a thought. It didn’t prove anything.”

“Was there a difference? In the response time?”

James hesitated, then shook her head. “But it was a stupid idea. There are so many variables, we have no idea how they—I mean, they’re alien…”

“The pathology’s classic.”

“What pathology?” I asked.

“It doesn’t mean anything except that they’re different from the Human baseline,” James insisted. “Which is not something anyone here can look down their nose about.”

I tried again: “What pathology?”

James shook her head. Szpindel filled me in: “There’s a syndrome you might have heard about, eh? Fast talkers, no conscience, tend to malapropism and self-contradiction. No emotional affect.”

“We’re not talking about human beings here,” James said again, softly.

“But if we were,” Szpindel added, “we might call Rorschach a clinical sociopath.”

Sarasti had said nothing during this entire exchange. Now, with the word hanging out in the open, I noticed that nobody else would look at him.

*

We all knew that Jukka Sarasti was a sociopath, of course. Most of us just didn’t mention it in polite company.

Szpindel was never that polite. Or maybe it was just that he seemed to almost understand Sarasti; he could look behind the monster and regard the organism, no less a product of natural selection for all the human flesh it had devoured in eons past. That perspective calmed him, somehow. He could watch Sarasti watching him, and not flinch.

“I feel sorry for the poor son of a bitch,” he said once, back in training.

Some would have thought that absurd. This man, so massively interfaced with machinery that his own motor skills had degraded for want of proper care and feeding; this man who heard x-rays and saw in shades of ultrasound, so corrupted by retrofits he could no longer even feel his own fingertips without assistance—this man could pity anyone else, let alone an infra-eyed predator built to murder without the slightest twitch of remorse?

“Empathy for sociopaths isn’t common,” I remarked.

“Maybe it should be. We, at least—” he waved an arm; some remote-linked sensor cluster across the simulator whirred and torqued reflexively— “chose the add-ons. Vampires had to be sociopaths. They’re too much like their own prey—a lot of taxonomists don’t even consider them a subspecies, you know that? Never diverged far enough for complete reproductive isolation. So maybe they’re more syndrome than race. Just a bunch of obligate cannibals with a consistent set of deformities.”

“And how does that make—”

“If the only thing you can eat is your own kind, empathy is gonna be the first thing that goes. Psychopathy’s no disorder in those shoes, eh? Just a survival strategy. But they still make our skin crawl, so we—chain ‘em up.”

“You think we should’ve repaired the Crucifix glitch?” Everyone knew why we hadn’t. Only a fool would resurrect a monster without