“All I’m saying is, we aren’t necessarily dealing with deliberate deception here. An entity who parses information at one scale might not be aware of inconsistencies on another; it might not even have conscious access to that level.”
“That’s not all you’re saying.”
“Isaac, you can’t apply Human norms to a—”
“I wondered what you were up to.” Szpindel dove into the transcripts. A moment later he dredged up an excerpt:
Request information on environments you consider lethal. Request information on your response to the prospect of imminent exposure to lethal environments.
GLAD TO COMPLY. BUT YOUR LETHAL IS DIFFERENT FROM US. THERE ARE MANY MIGRATING CIRCUMSTANCES.
“You were testing it!” Szpindel crowed. He smacked his lips; his jaw ticced. You were looking for an emotional response!”
“It was just a thought. It didn’t prove anything.”
“Was there a difference? In the response time?”
James hesitated, then shook her head. “But it was a stupid idea. There are so many variables, we have no idea how they—I mean, they’re alien…”
“The pathology’s classic.”
“What pathology?” I asked.
“It doesn’t mean anything except that they’re different from the Human baseline,” James insisted. “Which is not something anyone here can look down their nose about.”
I tried again: “What pathology?”
James shook her head. Szpindel filled me in: “There’s a syndrome you might have heard about, eh? Fast talkers, no conscience, tend to malapropism and self-contradiction. No emotional affect.”
“We’re not talking about human beings here,” James said again, softly.
“But if we were,” Szpindel added, “we might call Rorschach a clinical sociopath.”
Sarasti had said nothing during this entire exchange. Now, with the word hanging out in the open, I noticed that nobody else would look at him.
We all knew that Jukka Sarasti was a sociopath, of course. Most of us just didn’t mention it in polite company.
Szpindel was never that polite. Or maybe it was just that he seemed to almost understand Sarasti; he could look behind the monster and regard the organism, no less a product of natural selection for all the human flesh it had devoured in eons past. That perspective calmed him, somehow. He could watch Sarasti watching him, and not flinch.
“I feel sorry for the poor son of a bitch,” he said once, back in training.
Some would have thought that absurd. This man, so massively interfaced with machinery that his own motor skills had degraded for want of proper care and feeding; this man who heard x-rays and saw in shades of ultrasound, so corrupted by retrofits he could no longer even feel his own fingertips without assistance—this man could pity anyone else, let alone an infra-eyed predator built to murder without the slightest twitch of remorse?
“Empathy for sociopaths isn’t common,” I remarked.
“Maybe it should be. We, at least—” he waved an arm; some remote-linked sensor cluster across the simulator whirred and torqued reflexively—“chose the add-ons. Vampires had to be sociopaths. They’re too much like their own prey—a lot of taxonomists don’t even consider them a subspecies, you know that? Never diverged far enough for complete reproductive isolation. So maybe they’re more syndrome than race. Just a bunch of obligate cannibals with a consistent set of deformities.”
“And how does that make—”
“If the only thing you can eat is your own kind, empathy is gonna be the first thing that goes. Psychopathy’s no disorder in those shoes, eh? Just a survival strategy. But they still make our skin crawl, so we—chain ’em up.”
“You think we should’ve repaired the Crucifix glitch?” Everyone knew why we hadn’t. Only a fool would resurrect a monster without safeguards in place. Vampires came with theirs built in: without his antiEuclideans Sarasti would go grand mal the first time he caught close sight of a four-panel window frame.
But Szpindel was shaking his head. “We couldn’t have fixed it. Or we could have,” he amended, “but the glitch is in the visual cortex, eh? Linked to their omnisavantism. You fix it, you disable their pattern-matching skills, and then what’s the point in even bringing them back?”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Well, that’s the official story.” He fell silent a moment, cracked a crooked grin. “Then again, we didn’t have any trouble fixing the protocadherin pathways when it suited us.”
I subtitled. Context-sensitive, ConSensus served up protocadherin γ-Y: the magical hominid brain protein that vampires had never been able to synthesize. The reason they hadn’t just switched to zebras or warthogs once denied Human prey, why our discovery of the terrible secret of the Right Angle had spelled their doom.
“Anyway, I just think he’s—cut off.” A nervous tic tugged at the corner of Szpindel’s mouth. “Lone wolf, nothing but sheep for company. Wouldn’t you feel lonely?”
“They don’t like company,” I reminded him. You didn’t put vampires of the same sex together, not unless you were taking bets on a bloodbath. They were solitary hunters and very territorial. With a minimum viable pred-prey ratio of one to ten—and human prey spread so sparsely across the Pleistocene landscape—the biggest threat to their survival had been competition from their own kind. Natural selection had never taught them to play nicely together.
That didn’t cut any ice with Szpindel, though. “Doesn’t mean he can’t be lonely,” he insisted.
“Just means he can’t fix it.”
THEY KNOW THE WORDS BUT NOT THE MUSIC.
WE DID IT with mirrors, great round parabolic things, each impossibly thin and three times as high as a man. Theseus rolled them up and bolted them to firecrackers stuffed with precious antimatter from our dwindling stockpiles. With twelve hours to spare she flung them like confetti along precise ballistic trajectories, and when they were safely distant she set them alight. They pinwheeled off every which way, gamma sleeting in their wake until they burned dry. Then they coasted, unfurling mercurial insect wings across the void.
In the greater distance, four hundred thousand alien machines looped and burned and took no obvious notice.
Rorschach fell around Ben barely fifteen hundred kilometers from atmosphere, a fast endless circle that took just under forty hours to complete. By the time it didn’t return to our sight, the mirrors were all outside the zone of total blindness. A closeup of Ben’s equatorial edge floated in ConSensus. Mirror icons sparkled around it like an exploding schematic, like the disconnected facets of some great expanding compound eye. None had brakes. Whatever high ground the mirrors held, they wouldn’t hold it for long.
“There,” Bates said.
A mirage wavered stage left, a tiny spot of swirling chaos perhaps half the size of a fingernail held at arms-length. It told us nothing, it was pure heat-shimmer—but light bounced towards us from dozens of distant relayers, and while each saw scarcely more than our last probe had—a patch of dark clouds set slightly awry by some invisible prism—each of those views refracted differently. The Captain sieved flashes from the heavens and stitched them into a composite view.