Blindsight

Theseus growled, giving us more attitude. The plating trembled to stern; another piece of local debris, no longer in our path. We were angling towards an equatorial orbit just a few miniscule kilometers above the artefact; insanely, the approach curved right through the accretion belt.

It didn’t bother the others. “Like surviving traffic in a high speed lane,” Sascha had said, disdainful of my misgivings. “Try creeping across and you’re road kill. Gotta speed up, go with the flow.” But the flow was turbulent; we hadn’t gone five minutes without a course correction since Rorschach had stopped talking to us.

“So, do you buy it?” I asked. “Pattern-matching, empty threats? Nothing to worry about?”

“Nobody’s fired on us yet,” she said. Meaning: Not for a second.

“What’s your take on Susan’s argument? Different niches, no reason for conflict?”

“Makes sense, I guess.” Utter bullshit.

“Can you think of any reason why something with such different needs would attack us?”

“That depends,” she said, “on whether the fact that we are different is reason enough.”

I saw playground battlefields reflected in her topology. I remembered my own, and wondered if there were any other kind.

Then again, that only proved the point. Humans didn’t really fight over skin tone or ideology; those were just handy cues for kin-selection purposes. Ultimately it always came down to bloodlines and limited resources.

“I think Isaac would say this is different,” I said.

“I guess.” Bates sent one grunt humming off to the hold; two more emerged in formation, spinelight glinting off their armor.

“How many of these are you making, anyway?”

“We’re breaking and entering, Siri. Not wise to leave our own house unguarded.”

I inspected her surfaces as she inspected theirs. Doubt and resentment simmered just beneath.

“You’re in a tough spot,” I remarked.

“We all are.”

“But you’re responsible for defending us, against something we don’t know anything about. We’re only guessing that—”

“Sarasti doesn’t guess,” Bates said. “The man’s in charge for a reason. Doesn’t make much sense to question his orders, given we’re all about a hundred IQ points short of understanding the answer anyway.”

“And yet he’s also got that whole predatory side nobody talks about,” I remarked. “It must be difficult for him, all that intellect coexisting with so much instinctive aggression. Making sure the right part wins.”

She wondered in that instant whether Sarasti might be listening in. She decided in the next that it didn’t matter: why should he care what the cattle thought, as long as they did what they were told?

All she said was, “I thought you jargonauts weren’t supposed to have opinions.”

“That wasn’t mine.”

Bates paused. Returned to her inspection.

“You do know what I do,” I said.

“Uh huh.” The first of the current pair passed muster and hummed off up the spine. She turned to the second. “You simplify things. So the folks back home can understand what the specialists are up to.”

“That’s part of it.”

“I don’t need a translator, Siri. I’m just a consultant, assuming things go well. A bodyguard if they don’t.”

“You’re an officer and a military expert. I’d say that makes you more than qualified when it comes to assessing Rorschach’s threat potential.”

“I’m muscle. Shouldn’t you be simplifying Jukka or Isaac?”

“That’s exactly what I’m doing.”

She looked at me.

“You interact,” I said. “Every component of the system affects every other. Processing Sarasti without factoring you in would be like trying to calculate acceleration while ignoring mass.”

She turned back to her brood. Another robot passed muster.

She didn’t hate me. What she hated was what my presence implied.

They don’t trust us to speak for ourselves, she wouldn’t say. No matter how qualified we are, no matter how far ahead of the pack. Maybe even because of that. We’re contaminated. We’re subjective. So they send Siri Keeton to tell them what we really mean.

“I get it,” I said after a moment.

“Do you.”

“It’s not about trust, Major. It’s about location. Nobody gets a good view of a system from the inside, no matter who they are. The view’s distorted.”

“And yours isn’t.”

“I’m outside the system.”

“You’re interacting with me now.”

“As an observer only. Perfection’s unattainable but it isn’t unapproachable, you know? I don’t play a role in decision-making or research, I don’t interfere in any aspect of the mission that I’m assigned to study. But of course I ask questions. The more information I have, the better my analysis.”

“I thought you didn’t have to ask. I thought you guys could just, read the signs or something.”

“Every bit helps. It all goes into the mix.”

“You doing it now? Synthesizing?”

I nodded.