Blindsight, page 259 by Peter Watts
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u think the official observer was somehow exempt from observation?" Cunningham asked after a while.
"No," I said softly. "I suppose not.""
He nodded. "Have you seen any since? I'm not talking about run-of-the-mill TMS hallucinations. I mean scramblers. Have you hallucinated any since you actually saw one in the flesh, since you knew what they looked like?"
I thought about it. "No."
He shook his head, some new opinion confirmed. "You really are something, Keeton, you know that? You don't lie to yourself? Even now, you don't know what you know."
"What are you talking about?"
"You figured it out. From Rorschach's architecture, probably--form follows function, yes? Somehow you pieced together a fairly good idea of what a scrambler looked like before anyone ever laid eyes on them. Or at least--" He drew a breath; his cigarette flared like an LED-- "part of you did. Some collection of unconscious modules working their asses off on your behalf. But they can't show their work, can they? You don't have conscious access to those levels. So one part of the brain tries to tell another any way it can. Passes notes under the table."
"Blindsight," I murmered. You just get a feeling of where to reach...
"More like schizophrenia, except you saw pictures instead of hearing voices. You saw pictures. And you still didn't understand."
I blinked. "But how would I--I mean--"
"What did you think, that Theseus was haunted? That the scramblers were communing with you telepathically? What you do--it matters, Keeton. They told you you were nothing but their stenographer and they hammered all those layers of hands-off passivity into you but you just had to take some initiative anyway, didn't you? Had to work the problem on your own. The only thing you couldn't do was admit it to yourself." Cunningham shook his head. "Siri Keeton. See what they've done to you."
He touched his face.
"See wh