PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 287 Blindsight
"Then why should you feel threatened by me?"
And suddenly I didn't care any more. I laughed out loud, with
minutes to live and nothing to lose. "Why? Maybe because you're
my natural enemy, you fucker. Maybe because I know you, and
you can't even look at one of us without flexing your claws. Maybe
because you nearly ripped my fucking hand off and raped me for
no good reason—"
"I can imagine what it's like," he said quietly. "Please don't
make me do it again."
I fell instantly silent.
"I know your race and mine are never on the best of terms."
There was a cold smile in his voice if not on his face. "But I do
only what you force me to. You rationalize, Keeton. You defend.
You reject unpalatable truths, and if you can't reject them outright
you trivialize them. Incremental evidence is never enough for you.
You hear rumors of Holocaust; you dismiss them. You see
evidence of genocide; you insist it can't be so bad. Temperatures
rise, glaciers melt—species die—and you blame sunspots and
volcanoes. Everyone is like this, but you most of all. You and
your Chinese Room. You turn incomprehension into mathematics,
you reject the truth without even knowing what it is."
"It served me well enough." I wondered at the ease with which I
had put my life into the past tense.
"Yes, if your purpose is only to transmit. Now you have to
convince. You have to believe."
There were implications there I didn't dare to hope for. "Are you
saying—"
"Can't afford to let the truth trickle through. Can't give you the
chance to shore up your rationales and your defenses. They must
fall completely. You must be inundated. Shattered. Genocide's
impossible to deny when you're buried up to your neck in
dismembered bodies."
He'd played me. All this time. Preconditioning me, turning my
topology inside-out.
I'd known something was going on. I just hadn't understood
what.
"I'd have seen right through it," I said, "if you hadn't made me