Blindsight

Request information on environments you consider lethal. Request information on your response to the prospect of imminent exposure to lethal environments.

Glad to comply. But your lethal is different from us. there are many migrating circumstances.

“You were testing it!” Szpindel crowed. He smacked his lips; his jaw ticced. You were looking for an emotional response!”

“It was just a thought. It didn’t prove anything.”

“Was there a difference? In the response time?”

James hesitated, then shook her head. “But it was a stupid idea. There are so many variables, we have no idea how they — I mean, they’re alien…”

“The pathology’s classic.”

“What pathology?” I asked.

“It doesn’t mean anything except that they’re different from the Human baseline,” James insisted. “Which is not something anyone here can look down their nose about.”

I tried again: “What pathology?”

James shook her head. Szpindel filled me in: “There’s a syndrome you might have heard about, eh? Fast talkers, no conscience, tend to malapropism and self-contradiction. No emotional affect.”

“We’re not talking about human beings here,” James said again, softly.

“But if we were,” Szpindel added, “we might call Rorschach a clinical sociopath.”

Sarasti had said nothing during this entire exchange. Now, with the word hanging out in the open, I noticed that nobody else would look at him.

* * *

We all knew that Jukka Sarasti was a sociopath, of course. Most of us just didn’t mention it in polite company.

Szpindel was never that polite. Or maybe it was just that he seemed to almost understand Sarasti; he could look behind the monster and regard the organism, no less a product of natural selection for all the human flesh it had devoured in eons past. That perspective calmed him, somehow. He could watch Sarasti watching him, and not flinch.

“I feel sorry for the poor son of a bitch,” he said once, back in training.

Some would have thought that absurd. This man, so massively interfaced with machinery that his own motor skills had degraded for want of proper care and feeding; this man who heard x-rays and saw in shades of ultrasound, so corrupted by retrofits he could no longer even feel his own fingertips without assistance — this man could pity anyone else, let alone an infra-eyed predator built to murder without the slightest twitch of remorse?

“Empathy for sociopaths isn’t common,” I remarked.

“Maybe it should be. We, at least—” he waved an arm; some remote-linked sensor cluster across the simulator whirred and torqued reflexively — “chose the add-ons. Vampires had to be sociopaths. They’re too much like their own prey — a lot of taxonomists don’t even consider them a subspecies, you know that? Never diverged far enough for complete reproductive isolation. So maybe they’re more syndrome than race. Just a bunch of obligate cannibals with a consistent set of deformities.”

“And how does that make—”

“If the only thing you can eat is your own kind, empathy is gonna be the first thing that goes. Psychopathy’s no disorder in those shoes, eh? Just a survival strategy. But they still make our skin crawl, so we — chain ’em up.”

“You think we should’ve repaired the Crucifix glitch?” Everyone knew why we hadn’t. Only a fool would resurrect a monster without safeguards in place. Vampires came with theirs built in: without his antiEuclideans Sarasti would go grand mal the first time he caught close sight of a four-panel window frame.

But Szpindel was shaking his head. “We couldn’t have fixed it. Or we could have,” he amended, “but the glitch is in the visual cortex, eh? Linked to their omnisavantism. You fix it, you disable their pattern-matching skills, and then what’s the point in even bringing them back?”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Well, that’s the official story.” He fell silent a moment, cracked a crooked grin. “Then again, we didn’t have any trouble fixing the protocadherin pathways when it suited us.”

I subtitled. Context-sensitive, ConSensus served up protocadherin γ-Y: the magical hominid brain protein that vampires had never been able to synthesize. The reason they hadn’t just switched to zebras or warthogs once denied Human prey, why our discovery of the terrible secret of the Right Angle had spelled their doom.

“Anyway, I just think he’s — cut off.” A nervous tic tugged at the corner of Szpindel’s mouth. “Lone wolf, nothing but sheep for company. Wouldn’t you feel lonely?”