Blindsight, page 139 by Peter Watts
<< Return to Title Details & Download140
right? Sometimes the contacts corrode. Readout freezes on empty, so you think it's empty. What else you supposed to think? Not like you can go in and count the electrons."
"You're saying the brain's got some kind of existence gauge?"
"Brain's got all kinds of gauges. You can know you're blind even when you're not; you can know you can see, even when you're blind. And yeah, you can know you don't exist even when you do. It's a long list, commissar. Cotard's, Anton's, Damascus Disease. Just for starters."
He hadn't said blindsight.
"What was it like?" I asked.
"Like?" Although he knew exactly what I meant.
"Did your arm-- move by itself? When it reached for that battery?"
"Oh. Nah. You're still in control, you just--you get a feeling, is all. A sense of where to reach. One part of the brain playing charades with another, eh?" He gestured at the couch. "Get off. Seen enough of your ugly guts for now. And send up Bates if you can find where she's hiding. Probably back at Fab building a bigger army."
The misgivings glinted off him like sunlight. "You have a problem with her," I said.
He started to deny it, then remembered who he was talking to. "Not personally. Just--human node running mechanical infantry. Electronic reflexes slaved to meat reflexes. You tell me where the weak spot is."
"Down in Rorschach, I'd have to say all the links are pretty weak."
"Not talking about Rorschach," Szpindel said. "We go there. What stops them from coming here?"
"Them."
"Maybe they haven't arrived yet," he admitted. "But when they do, I'm betting we'll be going up against something bigger than anaerobic microbes." When I didn't answer he continued, his voice lowered. "And anyway, Mission Control didn't know shit about Rorschach. They thought they were sending us some place where drones could do all the heavy lifting. But they just hate not being i