Blindsight

I put my ear to feeds throughout the ship. I heard routine instructions from the predator, murmured conversations among the prey. I took in only sound, never sight; a video feed would have spilled light into my tent, left me naked and exposed. So I listened in the darkness as the others spoke among themselves. It didn’t happen often any more. Perhaps too much had been said already, perhaps there was nothing left to do but mind the countdown. Sometimes hours would pass with no more than a cough or a grunt.

When they did speak, they never mentioned my name. Only once did I hear any of them even hint at my existence.

That was Cunningham, talking to Sascha about zombies. I heard them in the galley over breakfast, unusually talkative. Sascha hadn’t been let out for a while, and was making up for lost time. Cunningham let her, for reasons of his own. Maybe his fears had been soothed somehow, maybe Sarasti had revealed his master plan. Or maybe Cunningham simply craved distraction from the imminence of the enemy.

“It doesn’t bug you?” Sascha was saying. “Thinking that your mind, the very thing that makes you you, is nothing but some kind of parasite?”

“Forget about minds,” he told her. “Say you’ve got a device designed to monitor — oh, cosmic rays, say. What happens when you turn its sensor around so it’s not pointing at the sky anymore, but at its own guts?” He answered himself before she could: “It does what it’s built to. It measures cosmic rays, even though it’s not looking at them any more. It parses its own circuitry in terms of cosmic-ray metaphors, because those feel right, because they feel natural, because it can’t look at things any other way. But it’s the wrong metaphor. So the system misunderstands everything about itself. Maybe that’s not a grand and glorious evolutionary leap after all. Maybe it’s just a design flaw.”

“But you’re the biologist. You know Mom was right better’n anyone. Brain’s a big glucose hog. Everything it does costs through the nose.”

“True enough,” Cunningham admitted.

“So sentience has gotta be good for something, then. Because it’s expensive, and if it sucks up energy without doing anything useful then evolution’s gonna weed it out just like that.”

“Maybe it did.” He paused long enough to chew food or suck smoke. “Chimpanzees are smarter than Orangutans, did you know that? Higher encephalisation quotient. Yet they can’t always recognize themselves in a mirror. Orangs can.”

“So what’s your point? Smarter animal, less self-awareness? Chimpanzees are becoming nonsentient?”

“Or they were, before we stopped everything in its tracks.”

“So why didn’t that happen to us?”

“What makes you think it didn’t?”

It was such an obviously stupid question that Sascha didn’t have an answer for it. I could imagine her gaping in the silence.

“You’re not thinking this through,” Cunningham said. “We’re not talking about some kind of zombie lurching around with its arms stretched out, spouting mathematical theorems. A smart automaton would blend in. It would observe those around it, mimic their behavior, act just like everyone else. All the while completely unaware of what it was doing. Unaware even of its own existence.”

“Why would it bother? What would motivate it?”

“As long as you pull your hand away from an open flame, who cares whether you do it because it hurts or because some feedback algorithm says withdraw if heat flux exceeds critical T? Natural selection doesn’t care about motives. If impersonating something increases fitness, then nature will select good impersonators over bad ones. Keep it up long enough and no conscious being would be able to pick your zombie out of a crowd.” Another silence; I could hear him chewing through it. “It’ll even be able to participate in a conversation like this one. It could write letters home, impersonate real human feelings, without having the slightest awareness of its own existence.”

“I dunno, Rob. It just seems—”

“Oh, it might not be perfect. It might be a bit redundant, or resort to the occasional expository infodump. But even real people do that, don’t they?”

“And eventually, there aren’t any real people left. Just robots pretending to give a shit.”

“Perhaps. Depends on the population dynamics, among other things. But I’d guess that at least one thing an automaton lacks is empathy; if you can’t feel, you can’t really relate to something that does, even if you act as though you do. Which makes it interesting to note how many sociopaths show up in the world’s upper echelons, hmm? How ruthlessness and bottom-line self-interest are so lauded up in the stratosphere, while anyone showing those traits at ground level gets carted off into detention with the Realists. Almost as if society itself is being reshaped from the inside out.”

“Oh, come on. Society was always pretty — wait, you’re saying the world’s corporate elite are nonsentient?”