Rifters 4 - Blindsight (39 page)

She should have. She should have known that taking orders is one thing; taking
sides
would have done nothing but compromise my integrity.

And I should have been used to it by now.

I forged on. "It was some kind of object lesson. A, a
tutorial
. You can't torture the nonsentient or something, and — and I
heard
you, Susan. It wasn't news to you, it wasn't news to anyone except
me
, and..."

And you hid it from me. You all did. You and your whole gang and Amanda too. You've been hashing this out for days and you went out of your way to cover it up.

How did I miss it? How did I miss it?

"Jukka told us not to discuss it with you," Susan admitted.

"Why? This is exactly the kind of thing I'm
out
here for!"

"He said you'd—resist. Unless it was handled properly."

"Handled—Susan, he
assaulted
me! You
saw
what he—"

"We didn't know he was going to do that. None of us did."

"And he did it why? To win an argument?"

"That's what he says."

"Do you believe him?"

"Probably." After a moment she shrugged. "Who knows? He's a vampire. He's—opaque."

"But his record—I mean, he's, he's never resorted to overt violence before—"

She shook her head. "Why should he? He doesn't have to convince the
rest
of us of anything. We have to follow his orders regardless."

"So do I," I reminded her.

"He's not trying to convince
you
, Siri."

Ah.

I was only a conduit, after all. Sarasti hadn't been making his case to me at all; he'd been making it
through
me, and—

—and he was planning for a second round. Why go to such extremes to present a case to Earth, if Earth was irrelevant? Sarasti didn't expect the game to end out here. He expected Earth to
do
something in light of his—perspective.

"But what difference does it make?" I wondered aloud.

She just looked at me.

"Even if he's right, how does it change anything? How does
this
—" I raised my repaired hand—"change anything? Scramblers are intelligent, whether they're sentient or not. They're a potential threat either way. We still don't know. So what difference does it make? Why did he
do
this to me? How does it
matter
?"

Susan raised her face to Big Ben and didn't answer.

Sascha returned her face to me, and tried to.

"It matters," she said, "because it means we attacked them before
Theseus
launched. Before Firefall, even."

"
We
attacked the—"

"You don't get it, do you? You don't." Sascha snorted softly. "If that isn't the fucking funniest thing I've heard in my whole short life."

She leaned forward, bright-eyed. "Imagine you're a scrambler, and you encounter a human signal for the very first time."

Her stare was almost predatory. I resisted the urge to back away.

"It should be so easy for you, Keeton. It should be the easiest gig you've ever had. Aren't you the user interface, aren't you the Chinese Room? Aren't you the one who never has to look inside, never has to walk a mile in anyone's shoes, because you figure everyone out from their
surfaces
?"

She stared at Ben's dark smoldering disk. "Well, there's your dream date. There's a whole race of nothing
but
surfaces. There's no
inside
to figure out. All the rules are right up front. So go to work, Siri Keeton. Make us proud."

There was no contempt in Sascha's voice, no disdain. There wasn't even anger, not in her voice, not in her eyes.

There was pleading. There were
tears
.

"Imagine you're a scrambler," she whispered again, as they floated like tiny perfect beads before her face.

*

Imagine you're a scrambler.

Imagine you have intellect but no insight, agendas but no
awareness
. Your circuitry hums with strategies for survival and persistence, flexible, intelligent, even technological—but no other circuitry monitors it. You can think of anything, yet are conscious of nothing.

You can't imagine such a being, can you? The term
being
doesn't even seem to apply, in some fundamental way you can't quite put your finger on.

Try.

Imagine that you encounter a signal. It is structured, and dense with information. It meets all the criteria of an intelligent transmission. Evolution and experience offer a variety of paths to follow, branch-points in the flowcharts that handle such input. Sometimes these signals come from conspecifics who have useful information to share, whose lives you'll defend according to the rules of kin selection. Sometimes they come from competitors or predators or other inimical entities that must be avoided or destroyed; in those cases, the information may prove of significant tactical value. Some signals may even arise from entities which, while not kin, can still serve as allies or symbionts in mutually beneficial pursuits. You can derive appropriate responses for any of these eventualities, and many others.

You decode the signals, and stumble:

I had a great time. I really enjoyed him. Even if he cost twice as much as any other hooker in the dome—

To fully appreciate Kesey's Quartet—

They hate us for our freedom—

Pay attention, now—

Understand.

There are no meaningful translations for these terms. They are needlessly recursive. They contain no usable intelligence, yet they are structured intelligently; there is no chance they could have arisen
by
chance.

The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message; only after wasting time and effort does the deception becomes apparent. The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. The signal is a virus.

Viruses do not arise from kin, symbionts, or other allies.

The signal is an attack.

And it's coming from right about
there
.

*

"Now you get it," Sascha said.

I shook my head, trying to wrap it around that insane, impossible conclusion. "They're not even
hostile
." Not even capable of hostility. Just so profoundly alien that they couldn't help but treat human language itself as a form of combat.

How do you say
We come in peace
when the very words are an act of war?

"That's why they won't talk to us," I realized.

"Only if Jukka's right. He may not be." It was James again, still quietly resisting, still unwilling to concede a point that even her other selves had accepted. I could see why. Because if Sarasti was right, scramblers were the
norm
: evolution across the universe was nothing but the endless proliferation of automatic, organized complexity, a vast arid Turing machine full of self-replicating machinery forever unaware of its own existence. And we—we were the flukes and the fossils. We were the flightless birds lauding our own mastery over some remote island while serpents and carnivores washed up on our shores. Susan James could not bring herself to concede that point—because Susan James, her multiple lives built on the faith that communication resolves all conflict, would then be forced to admit the lie. If Sarasti was right, there was no hope of reconciliation.

A memory rose into my mind and stuck there: a man in motion, head bent, mouth twisted into an unrelenting grimace. His eyes focused on one foot, then the other. His legs moved stiffly, carefully. His arms moved not at all. He lurched like a zombie in thrall to rigor mortis.

I knew what it was. Proprioreceptive polyneuropathy, a case study I'd encountered in ConSensus back before Szpindel had died. This was what Pag had once compared me to; a man who had lost his mind. Only self-awareness remained. Deprived of the unconscious sense and subroutines he had always taken for granted, he'd had to focus on each and every step across the room. His body no longer knew where its limbs were or what they were doing. To move at all, to even remain upright, he had to bear constant witness.

There'd been no sound when I'd played that file. There was none now in its recollection. But I swore I could feel Sarasti at my shoulder, peering into my memories. I swore I heard him speak in my mind like a schizophrenic hallucination:

This is the best that consciousness can do,
when left on its own.

"Right answer," I murmured. "Wrong
question
."

"What?"

"Stretch, remember? When you asked it which objects were in the window."

"And it missed the scrambler." James nodded. "So?"

"It didn't miss the scrambler. You thought you were asking about the things it
saw
, the things that
existed
on the board. Stretch thought you were asking about—"

"The things it was
aware
of," she finished.

"He's right," I whispered. "Oh God. I think he's right."

"Hey," James said. "Did you see
tha—
"

But I never saw what she was pointing at.
Theseus
slammed its eyelids shut and started howling.

*

Graduation came nine days early.

We didn't see the shot. Whatever gun port
Rorschach
had opened was precisely eclipsed on three fronts: the lab-hab hid it from
Theseus
, and two gnarled extrusions of the artefact itself hid it from each of the gun emplacements. A bolus of incendiary plasma shot from that blind spot like a thrown punch; it had split the inflatable wide open before the first alarm went up.

Alarms chased us aft. We launched ourselves down the spine through the bridge, through the crypt, past hatches and crawlspaces, fleeing the surface for any refuge with more than a hand's-breadth between skin and sky. Burrowing. ConSensus followed us back, its windows warping and sliding across struts and conduits and the concave tunnel of the spine itself. I paid no attention until we were back in the drum, deep in
Theseus
' belly. Where we could pretend we were safer.

Down on the turning deck Bates erupted from the head, tactical windows swirling like ballroom dancers around her. Our own window came to rest on the Commons bulkhead. The hab expanded across that display like a cheap optical illusion: both swelling and shrinking in our sights, that smooth surface billowing towards us while collapsing in on itself. It took me a moment to reconcile the contradiction: something had kicked the hab hard from its far side, sent it careening toward us in a slow, majestic tumble. Something had
opened
the hab, spilled its atmosphere and left its elastic skin drawing in on itself like a deflating balloon. The impact site swung into view as we watched, a scorched flaccid mouth trailing tenuous wisps of frozen spittle.

Our guns were firing. They shot nonconducting slugs that would not be turned aside by electromagnetic trickery—invisibly dark and distant to human eyes but I saw them through the tactical crosshairs of the firing robots, watched them sew twin dotted blackbodied arcs across the heavens. The streams converged as the guns tracked their targets, closed on two attenuate throwing stars fleeing spread-eagled through the void, their faces turned to
Rorschach
like flowers to the sun.

The guns cut them to pieces before they'd even made it half way.

But those shredded pieces kept falling, and suddenly the ground beneath was alive with motion. I zoomed the view: scramblers surged across
Rorschach
's hull like an orgy of snakes, naked to space. Some linked arms, one to another to another, built squirming vertebral daisy-chains anchored at one end. They lifted from the hull, waved through the radioactive vacuum like fronds of articulated kelp, reaching—grasping—

Neither Bates nor her machines were stupid. They targeted the interlinked scramblers as ruthlessly as they'd gone after the escapees, and with a much higher total score. But there were simply too many targets, too many fragments snatched in passing. Twice I saw dismembered bits of Stretch and Clench caught by their brethren.

The ruptured hab loomed across ConSensus like a great torn leukocyte. Another alarm buzzed somewhere nearby: proximity alert. Cunningham shot into the drum from somewhere astern, bounced off a cluster of pipes and conduits, grabbed for support. "Holy
shit—
we are leaving, aren't we? Amanda?"

"No," Sarasti answered from everywhere.

"What—"
does it fucking
take? I caught myself. "Amanda, what if it fires on the ship?"

"It won't." She didn't take her eyes from her windows.

"How do you—"

"It can't. If it had spring-loaded any more firepower we'd have seen a change in thermal
and
microallometry." A false-color landscape rotated between us, its latitudes measured in time, its longitudes in delta-mass. Kilotons rose from that terrain like a range of red mountains. "Huh. Came in just under the noise lim—"

Sarasti cut her off. "Robert. Susan. EVA."

James blanched. "
What
?" Cunningham cried.

"Lab module's about to impact," the vampire said. "Salvage the samples.
Now
." He killed the channel before anyone could argue.

But Cunningham wasn't about to argue. He'd just seen our death sentence commuted: why would Sarasti care about retrieving biopsy samples if he didn't think we stood a chance of escaping with them? The biologist steadied himself, braced towards the forward hatch. "I'm
there
," he said, shooting into the bow.

I had to admit it. Sarasti's psychology was getting better.

It wasn't working on James, though, or Michelle, or—I couldn't quite tell who was on top. "I can't go out there, Siri, it's—
I can't go out there
…"