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

*

I fall along an endless futile parabola, all gravity and inertia. Charybdis couldn’t reacquire the antimatter stream; Icarus has either been knocked out of alignment or shut off entirely. I suppose I could radio ahead and ask, but there’s no hurry. I’m still a long way out. It will be years before I even leave the comets behind.

Besides, I’m not sure I want anyone to know where I am.

Charybdis doesn’t bother with evasive maneuvers. There’d be no point even if it had the fuel to spare, even if the enemy’s still out there somewhere. It’s not as though they don’t know where Earth is.

But I’m pretty sure the scramblers went up along with my own kin. They played well. I admit it freely. Or maybe they just got lucky. An accidental hiccough tickles Bates’ grunt into firing on an unarmed scrambler; weeks later, Stretch & Clench use that body in the course of their escape. Electricity and magnetism stir random neurons in Susan’s head; further down the timeline a whole new persona erupts to take control, to send Theseus diving into Rorschach‘s waiting arms. Blind stupid random chance. Maybe that’s all it was.

But I don’t think so. Too many lucky coincidences. I think Rorschach made its own luck, planted and watered that new persona right under our noses, safely hidden—but for the merest trace of elevated oxytocin— behind all the lesions and tumors sewn in Susan’s head. I think it looked ahead and saw the uses to which a decoy might be put; I think it sacrificed a little piece of itself in furtherance of that end, and made it look like an accident. Blind maybe, but not luck. Foresight. Brilliant moves, and subtle.

Not that most of us even knew the rules of the game, of course. We were just pawns, really. Sarasti and the Captain—whatever hybridized intelligence those two formed—they were the real players. Looking back, I can see a few of their moves too. I see Theseus hearing the scramblers tap back and forth in their cages; I see her tweak the volume on the Gang’s feed so that Susan hears it too, and thinks the discovery her own. If I squint hard enough, I even glimpse Theseus offering us up in sacrifice, deliberately provoking Rorschach to retaliation with that final approach. Sarasti was always enamored of data, especially when it had tactical significance. What better way to assess one’s enemy than to observe it in combat?

They never told us, of course. We were happier that way. We disliked orders from machines. Not that we were all that crazy about taking them from a vampire.

And now the game is over, and a single pawn stands on that scorched board and its face is human after all. If the scramblers follow the rules that a few generations of game theorists have laid out for them, they won’t be back. Even if they are, I suspect it won’t make any difference.

Because by then, there won’t be any basis for conflict.

I’ve been listening to the radio during these intermittent awakenings. It’s been generations since we buried the Broadcast Age in tightbeams and fiberop, but we never completely stopped sowing EM throughout the heavens. Earth, Mars, and Luna conduct their interplanetary trialog in a million overlapping voices. Every ship cruising the void speaks in all directions at once. The O’Neils and the asteroids never stopped singing. The Fireflies might never have found us if they had.

I’ve heard those songs changing over time, a fast-forward time-lapse into oblivion. Now it’s mostly traffic control and telemetry. Every now and then I still hear a burst of pure voice, tight with tension, just short of outright panic more often than not: some sort of pursuit in progress, a ship making the plunge into deep space, other ships in dispassionate pursuit. The fugitives never seem to get very far before their signals are cut off.

I can’t remember the last time I heard music but I hear something like it sometimes, eerie and discordant, full of familiar clicks and pops. My brainstem doesn’t like it. It scares my brainstem to death.

I remember my whole generation abandoning the real world for a bootstrapped Afterlife. I remember someone saying Vampires don’t go to Heaven. They see the pixels. Sometimes I wonder how I’d feel, brought back from the peace of the grave to toil at the pleasure of simpleminded creatures who had once been no more than protein. I wonder how I’d feel if my disability had been used to keep me leashed and denied my rightful place in the world.

And then I wonder what it would be like to feel nothing at all, to be an utterly rational, predatory creature with meat putting itself so eagerly to sleep on all sides…

*

I can’t miss Jukka Sarasti. God knows I try, every time I come online. He saved my life. He — humanized me. I’ll always owe him for that, for however long I live; and for however long I live I’ll never stop hating him for the same reason. In some sick surrealistic way I had more in common with Sarasti than I did with any human.

But I just don’t have it in me. He was a predator and I was prey, and it’s not in the nature of the lamb to mourn the lion. Though he died for our sins, I cannot miss Jukka Sarasti.

I can empathize with him, though. At long long last I can empathise, with Sarasti, with all his extinct kind. Because we humans were never meant to inherit the Earth. Vampires were. They must have been sentient to some degree, but that semi-aware dream state would have been a rudimentary thing next to our own self-obsession. They were weeding it out. It was just a phase. They were on their way.

The thing is, humans can look at crosses without going into convulsions. That’s evolution for you; one stupid linked mutation and the whole natural order falls apart, intelligence and self-awareness stuck in counterproductive lockstep for half a million years. I think I know what’s happening back on Earth, and though some might call it genocide it isn’t really. We did it to ourselves. You can’t blame predators for being predators. We were the ones who brought them back, after all. Why wouldn’t they reclaim their birthright?

Not genocide. Just the righting of an ancient wrong.

I’ve tried to take some comfort in that. It’s—difficult. Sometimes it seems as though my whole life’s been a struggle to reconnect, to regain whatever got lost when my parents killed their only child. Out in the Oort, I finally won that struggle. Thanks to a vampire and a boatload of freaks and an invading alien horde, I’m Human again. Maybe the last Human. By the time I get home, I could be the only sentient being in the universe.

If I’m even that much. Because I don’t know if there is such a thing as a reliable narrator. And Cunningham said zombies would be pretty good at faking it.

So I can’t really tell you, one way or the other.

You’ll just have to imagine you’re Siri Keeton.

Acknowledgments

Blindsight is my first novel-length foray into deep space—a domain in which I have, shall we say, limited formal education. In that sense this book isn’t far removed from my earlier novels: but whereas I may have not known much about deep sea ecology either, most of you knew even less, and a doctorate in marine biology at least let me fake it through the rifters trilogy. Blindsight, however, charts its course through a whole different kind of zero gee; this made a trustworthy guide that much more important. So first let me thank Prof. Jaymie Matthews of the University of British Columbia: astronomer, partygoer, and vital serial sieve for all the ideas I threw at him. Let me also thank Donald Simmons, aerospace engineer and gratifyingly-cheap dinner date, who reviewed my specs for Theseus (especially of the drive and the Drum), and gave me tips on radiation and the shielding therefrom. Both parties patiently filtered out my more egregious boners. (Which is not to say that none remain in this book, only that those which do result from my negligence, not theirs. Or maybe just because the story called for them.)

David Hartwell, as always, was my editor and main point man at Evil Empire HQ. I suspect Blindsight was a tough haul for both of us: shitloads of essential theory threatened to overwhelm the story, not to mention the problem of generating reader investment in a cast of characters who were less cuddlesome than usual. I still don’t know the extent to which I succeeded or failed, but I’ve never been more grateful that the man riding shotgun had warmed up on everyone from Heinlein to Herbert.

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, kickstarting 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