Rifters 4 - Blindsight (13 page)

"Please," Bates said softly. "Tell me that's not what it looks like."

Szpindel grinned. "Sporangium? Seed pod? Why not?"

Rorschach
may have been reproducing but beyond a doubt it was
growing
, fed by a steady trickle of infalling debris from Ben's accretion belt. We were close enough now to get a clear view of that procession: rocks and mountains and pebbles fell like sediment swirling around a drain. Particles that collided with the artefact simply
stuck
;
Rorschach
engulfed prey like some vast metastatic amoeba. The acquired mass was apparently processed internally and shunted to apical growth zones; judging by infinitesimal changes in the artefact's allometry, it grew from the tips of its branches.

The procession never stopped.
Rorschach
was insatiable.

It was a strange attractor in the interstellar gulf; the paths along which the rocks fell was precisely and utterly chaotic. It was as though some Keplerian Black Belt had set up the whole system like an astronomical wind-up toy, kicked everything into motion, and let inertia do the rest.

"Didn't think that was possible," Bates said.

Szpindel shrugged. "Hey, chaotic trajectories are just as deterministic as any other kind."

"That doesn't mean you can even
predict
them, let along set them up like that." Luminous intel reflected off the major's bald head. "You'd have to know the starting conditions of a million different variables to ten decimal places. Literally."

"Yup."

"
Vampires
can't even do that. Quanticle computers can't do that."

Szpindel shrugged like a marionette.

All the while the Gang had been slipping in and out of character, dancing with some unseen partner that—despite their best efforts— told us little beyond endless permutations of
You really wouldn't like it here
. Any interrogative it answered with another— yet somehow it always left the sense of questions answered.

"Did you send the Fireflies?" Sascha asked.

"We send many things many places,"
Rorschach
replied. "What do their specs show?"

"We do not know their specifications. The Fireflies burned up over Earth."

"Then shouldn't you be looking there? When our kids fly, they're on their own."

Sascha muted the channel. "You know who we're talking to? Jesus of fucking
Nazareth
, that's who."

Szpindel looked at Bates. Bates shrugged, palms up.

"You didn't get it?" Sascha shook her head. "That last exchange was the informational equivalent of
Should we render taxes unto Caesar
. Beat for beat."

"Thanks for casting us as the Pharisees," Szpindel grumbled.

"Hey, if the Jew fits..."

Szpindel rolled his eyes.

That was when I first noticed it: a tiny imperfection on Sascha's topology, a flyspeck of doubt marring one of her facets. "We're not getting anywhere," she said. "Let's try a side door." She winked out: Michelle reopened the outgoing line. "
Theseus
to
Rorschach
. Open to requests for information."

"Cultural exchange,"
Rorschach
said. "That works for me."

Bates's brow furrowed. "Is that wise?"

"If it's not inclined to give information, maybe it would rather get some. And we could learn a great deal from the kind of questions it asks."

"But—"

"Tell us about home,"
Rorschach
said.

Sascha resurfaced just long enough to say "Relax, Major. Nobody said we had to give it the right answers."

The stain on the Gang's topology had flickered when Michelle took over, but it hadn't disappeared. It grew slightly as Michelle described some hypothetical home town in careful terms that mentioned no object smaller than a meter across. (ConSensus confirmed my guess: the hypothetical limit of Firefly eyesight.) When Cruncher took a rare turn at the helm—

"We don't all of us have parents or cousins. Some never did. Some come from vats."

"I see. That's sad. Vats sounds so dehumanising."

—the stain darkened and spread across his surface like an oil slick.

"Takes too much on faith," Susan said a few moments later.

By the time Sascha had cycled back into Michelle it was more than doubt, stronger than suspicion; it had become an
insight
, a dark little meme infecting each of that body's minds in turn. The Gang was on the trail of something. They still weren't sure what.

I was.

"Tell me more about your cousins,"
Rorschach
sent.

"Our cousins lie about the family tree," Sascha replied, "with nieces and nephews and Neandertals. We do not like annoying cousins."

"We'd like to know about this tree."

Sascha muted the channel and gave us a look that said
Could it
be
any more obvious
? "It
couldn't
have parsed that. There were three linguistic ambiguities in there. It just ignored them."

"Well, it asked for clarification," Bates pointed out.

"It asked a follow-up question. Different thing entirely."

Bates was still out of the loop. Szpindel was starting to get it, though.. .

Subtle motion drew my eye. Sarasti was back, floating above the bright topography on the table. The light show squirmed across his visor as he moved his head. I could feel his eyes behind it.

And something else, behind
him
.

I couldn't tell what it was. I could point to nothing but a vague sense of something
out of place
, somewhere in the background. Something over on the far side of the drum wasn't quite right. No, that wasn't it; something
nearer
, something amiss somewhere along the drum's axis. But there was nothing there, nothing I could see—just the naked pipes and conduits of the spinal bundle, threading through empty space, and—

And suddenly, whatever had been wrong was right again. That was what finally locked my focus: the evaporation of some anomaly, a reversion to normalcy that caught my eye like a flicker of motion. I could see the exact spot along the bundle where the change had occured. There was nothing out of place there now—but there
had
been. It was in my head, barely subliminal, an
itch
so close to the surface that I knew I could bring it back if I just
concentrated.

Sascha was talking to some alien artefact at the end of a laser beam. She was going on about familial relationships, both evolutionary and domestic: Neandertal and Cro Magnon and mother's cousins twice removed. She'd been doing it for hours now and she had hours yet to go but right now her chatter was distracting me. I tried to block her out and concentrate on the half-perceived image teasing my memory. I'd
seen
something there, just a moment ago. One of the conduits had had—yes, too many joints on one of the pipes. Something that should have been straight and smooth but was somehow articulated instead. But not
one
of the pipes, I remembered: an
extra
pipe, an extra
something
anyway, something—

Boney
.

That was crazy. There was nothing there. We were half a light year from home talking to unseen aliens about family reunions, and my eyes were playing tricks on me.

Have to talk to Szpindel about that, if it happened again.

*

A lull in the background chatter brought me back. Sascha had stopped talking. Darkened facets hung around her like a thundercloud. I pulled back the last thing she had sent: "We usually find our nephews with telescopes. They are hard as Hobblinites."

More calculated ambiguity. And
Hobblinites
wasn't even a
word
.

Imminent decisions reflected in her eyes. Sascha was poised at the edge of a precipice, gauging the depth of dark waters below.

"You haven't mentioned your father at all,"
Rorschach
remarked.

"That's true,
Rorschach,
" Sascha admitted softly, taking a breath—

And stepping forward.

"So why don't you just
suck my big fat hairy dick
?"

The drum fell instantly silent. Bates and Szpindel stared, open-mouthed. Sascha killed the channel and turned to face us, grinning so widely I thought the top of her head would fall off.

"Sascha," Bates breathed. "Are you
crazy
?"

"So what if I am? Doesn't matter to that thing. It doesn't have a
clue
what I'm saying."

"What?"

"It doesn't even have a clue what it's saying
back
," she added.

"Wait a minute. You said—
Susan
said they weren't parrots. They knew the rules."

And there Susan was, melting to the fore: "I did, and they do. But pattern-matching doesn't equal comprehension."

Bates shook her head. "You're saying whatever we're talking to—it's not even intelligent?"

"Oh, it could be intelligent, certainly. But we're not
talking
to it in any meaningful sense."

"So what is it? Voicemail?"

"Actually," Szpindel said slowly, "I think they call it a
Chinese Room
..."

About bloody time
, I thought.

*

I knew all about Chinese Rooms. I was one. I didn't even keep it a secret, I told anyone who was interested enough to ask.

In hindsight, sometimes that was a mistake.

"How can you possibly tell the rest of us what your bleeding edge is up to if you don't understand it yourself?" Chelsea demanded back when things were good between us. Before she got to know me.

I shrugged. "It's not my
job
to understand them. If I could, they wouldn't be very bleeding-edge in the first place. I'm just a, you know, a conduit."

"Yeah, but how can you translate something if you
don't
understand it?"

A common cry, outside the field. People simply can't accept that patterns carry their own intelligence, quite apart from the semantic content that clings to their surfaces; if you manipulate the topology correctly, that content just—comes along for the ride.

"You ever hear of the Chinese Room?" I asked.

She shook her head. "Only vaguely. Really old, right?"

"Hundred years at least. It's a fallacy really, it's an argument that supposedly puts the lie to Turing tests. You stick some guy in a closed room. Sheets with strange squiggles come in through a slot in the wall. He's got access to this huge database of squiggles just like it, and a bunch of rules to tell him how to put those squiggles together."

"Grammar," Chelsea said. "Syntax."

I nodded. "The point is, though, he doesn't have any idea what the squiggles
are
, or what information they might contain. He only knows that when he encounters squiggle
delta
, say, he's supposed to extract the fifth and sixth squiggles from file
theta
and put them together with another squiggle from
gamma
. So he builds this response string, puts it on the sheet, slides it back out the slot and takes a nap until the next iteration. Repeat until the remains of the horse are well and thoroughly beaten."

"So he's carrying on a conversation," Chelsea said. "In Chinese, I assume, or they would have called it the Spanish Inquisition."

"Exactly. Point being you can use basic pattern-matching algorithms to participate in a conversation
without having any idea what you're saying
. Depending on how good your rules are, you can pass a Turing test. You can be a wit and raconteur in a language you don't even speak."

"That's synthesis?"

"Only the part that involves downscaling semiotic protocols. And only in principle. And I'm actually getting my input in Cantonese and replying in German, because I'm more of a conduit than a conversant. But you get the idea."

"How do you keep all the rules and protocols straight? There must be millions of them."

"It's like anything else. Once you learn the rules, you do it unconsciously. Like riding a bike, or pinging the noosphere. You don't actively think about the protocols at all, you just—
imagine
how your targets behave."

"Mmm." A subtle half-smile played at the corner of her mouth. "But—the argument's not really a fallacy then, is it? It's spot-on: you really
don't
understand Cantonese or German."

"The
system
understands. The whole Room, with all its parts. The guy who does the scribbling is just one component. You wouldn't expect a single neuron in your head to understand English, would you?"

"Sometimes one's all I can spare." Chelsea shook her head. She wasn't going to let it go. I could see her sorting questions in order of priority; I could see them getting increasingly—personal…

"To get back to the matter at hand," I said, preempting them all, "you were going to show me how to do that thing with the fingers…"

A wicked grin wiped the questions right off her face. "Oooh, that's
right
…"

It's risky, getting involved. Too many confounds. Every tool in the shed goes dull and rusty the moment you get entangled with the system you're observing.

Still serviceable in a pinch, though.

*

"It hides now," Sarasti said. "It's vulnerable now.

"Now we go in."

It wasn't news so much as review: we'd been straight-lining towards Ben for days now. But perhaps the Chinese Room Hypothesis had strengthened his resolve. At any rate, with
Rorschach
in eclipse once more, we prepared to take intrusiveness to the next level.

Theseus
was perpetually gravid; a generic probe incubated in her fabrication plant, its development arrested just short of birth in anticipation of unforeseen mission requirements. Sometime between briefings the Captain had brought it to parturition, customized for close contact and ground work. It burned down the well at high gee a good ten hours before
Rorschach
's next scheduled appearance, inserted itself into the rock stream, and went to sleep. If our calculations were in order, it would not be smashed by some errant piece of debris before it woke up again. If all went well, an intelligence that had precisely orchestrated a cast of millions would not notice one extra dancer on the floor. If we were just plain lucky, the myriad high-divers that happened to be line-of-sight at the time were not programmed as tattletales.