Blindsight

"How can you possibly tell the rest of us what your bleeding edge is up to if you don't understand it yourself?" Chelsea demanded back when things were good between us. Before she got to know me.

I shrugged. "It's not my job to understand them. If I could, they wouldn't be very bleeding-edge in the first place. I'm just a, you know, a conduit."

"Yeah, but how can you translate something if you don't understand it?"

A common cry, outside the field. People simply can't accept that patterns carry their own intelligence, quite apart from the semantic content that clings to their surfaces; if you manipulate the topology correctly, that content just—comes along for the ride.

"You ever hear of the Chinese Room?" I asked.

She shook her head. "Only vaguely. Really old, right?"

"Hundred years at least. It's a fallacy really, it's an argument that supposedly puts the lie to Turing tests. You stick some guy in a closed room. Sheets with strange squiggles come in through a slot in the wall. He's got access to this huge database of squiggles just like it, and a bunch of rules to tell him how to put those squiggles together."

"Grammar," Chelsea said. "Syntax."

I nodded. "The point is, though, he doesn't have any idea what the squiggles are, or what information they might contain. He only knows that when he encounters squiggle delta, say, he's supposed to extract the fifth and sixth squiggles from file theta and put them together with another squiggle from gamma. So he builds this response string, puts it on the sheet, slides it back out the slot and takes a nap until the next iteration. Repeat until the remains of the horse are well and thoroughly beaten."

"So he's carrying on a conversation," Chelsea said. "In Chinese, I assume, or they would have called it the Spanish Inquisition."

"Exactly. Point being you can use basic pattern-matching algorithms to participate in a conversation without having any idea what you're saying. Depending on how good your rules are, you can pass a Turing test. You can be a wit and raconteur in a language you don't even speak."

"That's synthesis?"

"Only the part that involves downscaling semiotic protocols. And only in principle. And I'm actually getting my input in Cantonese and replying in German, because I'm more of a conduit than a conversant. But you get the idea."

"How do you keep all the rules and protocols straight? There must be millions of them."

"It's like anything else. Once you learn the rules, you do it unconsciously. Like riding a bike, or pinging the noosphere. You don't actively think about the protocols at all, you just—imagine how your targets behave."

"Mmm." A subtle half-smile played at the corner of her mouth. "But—the argument's not really a fallacy then, is it? It's spot-on: you really don't understand Cantonese or German."

"The system understands. The whole Room, with all its parts. The guy who does the scribbling is just one component. You wouldn't expect a single neuron in your head to understand English, would you?"

"Sometimes one's all I can spare." Chelsea shook her head. She wasn't going to let it go. I could see her sorting questions in order of priority; I could see them getting increasingly—personal…

"To get back to the matter at hand," I said, preempting them all, "you were going to show me how to do that thing with the fingers…"

A wicked grin wiped the questions right off her face. "Oooh, that's right…"

It's risky, getting involved. Too many confounds. Every tool in the shed goes dull and rusty the moment you get entangled with the system you're observing.

Still serviceable in a pinch, though.

* * *

"It hides now," Sarasti said. "It's vulnerable now.

"Now we go in."

It wasn't news so much as review: we'd been straight-lining towards Ben for days now. But perhaps the Chinese Room Hypothesis had strengthened his resolve. At any rate, with Rorschach in eclipse once more, we prepared to take intrusiveness to the next level.

Theseus was perpetually gravid; a generic probe incubated in her fabrication plant, its development arrested just short of birth in anticipation of unforeseen mission requirements. Sometime between briefings the Captain had brought it to parturition, customized for close contact and ground work. It burned down the well at high gee a good ten hours before Rorschach's next scheduled appearance, inserted itself into the rock stream, and went to sleep. If our calculations were in order, it would not be smashed by some errant piece of debris before it woke up again. If all went well, an intelligence that had precisely orchestrated a cast of millions would not notice one extra dancer on the floor. If we were just plain lucky, the myriad high-divers that happened to be line-of-sight at the time were not programmed as tattletales.

Acceptable risks. If we hadn't been up for them, we might as well have stayed home.