Blindsight

Cunningham zoomed the splitscreen. The huddled scrambler had remained motionless, except for the rippling of its cuticle and the undulation of its free arms. But before I’d only seen eight arms — and now I could make out the bony spur of a ninth peeking from behind the central mass. A ninth arm, curled up and hidden from view, tick tick ticking while another creature casually leaned against the other side of the wall…

Now, there was nothing. The floating scrambler had drifted aimlessly back to the center of its enclosure.

James’s eyes shone. “We’ve got to check the rest of—”

But Theseus had been watching, and was way ahead of us. It had already searched the archives and served up the results: three similar exchanges over two days, ranging in duration from a tenth of a second to almost two.

“They’re talking,” James said.

Cunningham shrugged, a forgotten cigarette burning down between his fingers. “So do a lot of things. And at that rate of exchange they’re not exactly doing calculus. You could get as much information out of a dancing honeybee.”

“That’s nonsense and you know it, Robert.”

“What I know is that—”

“Honeybees don’t deliberately hide what they’re saying. Honeybees don’t develop whole new modes of communication configured specifically to confound observers. That’s flexible, Robert. That’s intelligent.”

“And what if it is, hmm? Forget for a moment the inconvenient fact that these things don’t even have brains. I really don’t think you’ve thought this through.”

“Of course I have.”

“Indeed? Then what are you so happy about? Don’t you know what this means?”

Sudden prickling on the back of my neck. I looked around; I looked up. Jukka Sarasti had appeared in the center of the drum, eyes gleaming, teeth bared, watching us.

Cunningham followed my gaze, and nodded. “I’d wager it does…”

* * *

There was no way to learn what they’d whispered across that wall. We could recover the audio easily enough, parse every tick and tap they’d exchanged, but you can’t decipher a code without some idea of content. We had patterns of sound that could have meant anything. We had creatures whose grammar and syntax — if their mode of communication even contained such attributes — were unknown and perhaps unknowable. We had creatures smart enough to talk, and smart enough to hide that fact. No matter how much we wanted to learn, they were obviously unwilling to teach us.

Not without — how had I put it? — negative reinforcement.

It was Jukka Sarasti who made the decision. We did it on his orders, as we did everything else. But after the word had come down — after Sarasti had disappeared in the night and Bates had retreated down the spine and Robert Cunningham had returned to his studies at the back of the drum — I was the one Susan James was left with. The first to speak the vile thought aloud, the official witness to posterity. I was the one she looked at, and looked away from, her surfaces hard and refractory.

And then she started.

* * *

This is how you break down the wall:

Start with two beings. They can be human if you like, but that’s hardly a prerequisite. All that matters is that they know how to talk among themselves.

Separate them. Let them see each other, let them speak. Perhaps a window between their cages. Perhaps an audio feed. Let them practice the art of conversation in their own chosen way.

Hurt them.

It may take a while to figure out how. Some may shrink from fire, others from toxic gas or liquid. Some creatures may be invulnerable to blowtorches and grenades, but shriek in terror at the threat of ultrasonic sound. You have to experiment; and when you discover just the right stimulus, the optimum balance between pain and injury, you must inflict it without the remorse.

You leave them an escape hatch, of course. That’s the very point of the exercise: give one of your subjects the means to end the pain, but give the other the information required to use it. To one you might present a single shape, while showing the other a whole selection. The pain will stop when the being with the menu chooses the item its partner has seen. So let the games begin. Watch your subjects squirm. If — when — they trip the off switch, you’ll know at least some of the information they exchanged; and if you record everything that passed between them, you’ll start to get some idea of how they exchanged it.

When they solve one puzzle, give them a new one. Mix things up. Switch their roles. See how they do at circles versus squares. Try them out on factorials and Fibonnaccis. Continue until Rosetta Stone results.

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, and keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the speech from the screams.