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Peter Watts 230 Blindsight
drives over the spot you were standing. You knew it was coming,
somehow. You just don't know how you knew."
"It's wild," I agreed.
"These scramblers—they know the answers, Siri. They're
intelligent, we know they are. But it's almost as though they don't
know they know, unless you hurt them. As if they've got
blindsight spread over every sense."
I tried to imagine it: life without sensation, without any active
awareness of one's environment. I tried to imagine existing like
that without going mad. "Do you think that's possible"
"I don't know. It's just a—a metaphor, I guess." She didn't
believe that. Or she didn't know. Or she didn't want me to know.
I should have been able to tell. She should have been clear.
"At first I just thought they were resisting," she said, "but why
would they" She turned bright, begging eyes on me, pleading for
an answer.
I didn't have one. I didn't have a clue. I turned away from Susan
James, only to find myself facing Robert Cunningham:
Cunningham the mutterer, fingers tapping against tabletop
interfaces, inner eyes blinded, vision limited now to the pictures
ConSensus sketched in airspace or threw against flat surfaces for
everyone to see. His face remained as empty of feeling as it had
ever been; the rest of his body twitched like a bug in a spiderweb.
He might as well have been. We all might. Rorschach loomed
barely nine kilometers away now, so near it might have eclipsed
Ben itself if I'd been brave enough to look outside. We had closed
to this insane proximity and parked. Out there, Rorschach grew
like a live thing. In there, live things grew, budded like jellyfish
from some demonic mechanical substrate. Those lethal, vacant
corridors we'd crept along, frightened of the shadows planted in
our heads—they were probably filling with scramblers right now.
All those hundreds of kilometers of twisted tunnels and passages
and chambers. Filling with an army.
This was Sarasti's safer alternative. This was the path we'd
followed because it would have been too dangerous to release the
prisoners. We were so deep inside the bow shock that we'd had to
shut down our internal augments; while Rorschach's