Blindsight, page 219 by Peter Watts
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ly at its touchpad.
James looked away.
New glyphs appeared. 500 Watts retreated to zero. Stretch returned to its holding pattern; the spikes and jags of its telemetry smoothed.
James let out her breath. "What happened?" I asked.
"Wrong answer." She tapped into Stretch's feed, showed me the display that had tripped it up. A pyramid, a star, simplified representations of a scrambler and of Rorschach rotated on the board.
"It was stupid, it was just a--a warm-up exercise, really. I asked it to name the objects in the window." She laughed softly and without humor. "That's the thing about functional languages, you know. If you can't point at it, you can't talk about it."
"And what did it say?"
She pointed at Stretch's first spiral: "Polyhedron star Rorschach are present."
"It missed the scrambler."
"Got it right the second time. Still, stupid mistake for something that can think rings around a vampire, isn't it?" Susan swallowed. "I guess even scramblers slip up when they're dying."
I didn't know what to say. Behind me, barely audible, Cunningham muttered some two-stroke mantra to himself in an endless loop.
"Jukka says--" Susan stopped, began again: "You know that blindsight we get sometimes, in Rorschach?"
I nodded, and wondered what Jukka had said.
"Apparently the same thing can happen to the other senses too," she told me. "You can have blindtouch, and blindsmell, and blindhearing..."
"That would be deafness."
She shook her head. "But it isn't really, is it? Any more than blindsight is really blindness. Something in your head is still taking it all in. Something in the brain is still seeing, and hearing, even if you're not--aware of it. Unless someone forces you to guess, or there's some threat. You just get a really strong feeling you should move out of the way, and five seconds later a bus drives over the spot y