Author: Peter Watts
ISBN: 0765319640
Date read: 2023/4/23
How strongly I recommend it: 10/10
This book is about a group of people, all of them highly enhanced sent as a first contact mission in the Oort cloud; a linguist with multiple conciousness inside her brain, a biologist that can see in x-ray, a military general that does not like violence, a synthesist (the main character, tasked to report back to earth), and a vampire resurrected using genetic engineering.
The setting is in late 21st century, with the event that made human realize that we are not alone in the universe, named Fireflies, happened on February 13, 2082. More than sixty thousand object burned up in a precise grid covering all of earth’s atmosphere; they screamed in all wavelengths as they burned. And that’s it, no invasion. Humanity scrambled to find answers with everyone coming up with their different theories. Finally a mission in three waves is sent after a signal is detected at the Kuiper belt.
The first two is uncrewed: a light speed probe that will do a flyby of the object, and a second not as fast probe designed to orbit the object and take accurate map of it while doing other experiments. The third, is the ship Theseus, a multinational effort filled with highly enhanced crew.
It’s a hard science fiction book. You can read this online by the way, just google it. This book also has a pretty huge following that someone made a really good trailer that I think does the book justice and can serve as a trailer:
This book gets better the more I read it. This book has so much ideas in it that could’ve been expanded to a couple of books. The amount of technical terms (both real and invented) were a barrier at first but it created a very vivid scene.
I would say the main theme that is discussed in this novel is definitely the nature of consciousness. Peter Watts, the author, is a biologist and in a few podcasts that I’ve watched he talked about how there are compelling evidence (or certainly an interesting theory) where self-awareness has nothing to do with intelligence. You can be smart, but that does not mean you need to recognize yourself in the mirror.
The story is told from the perspective of the main character, Siri Keeton. He is a synthesist which the book explains is a person that can for all practical purposes reads people’s minds just by being able to acutely observe their behavior, word tone, facial expressions and other very subtle things. He is able to do this because half his brain was removed when he was a child.
What is also interesting that I’ve noticed is the other characters in the book are all highly enhanced with technology. It’s almost like the book tries to explore the question, “what exactly makes us humans?”. I mean the name of the ship the crew is on is Theseus which is this greek myth where a group of people on that ship kept replacing parts of the ship such that when they landed on shore, you could ask, is it still the same ship? If every part of your body has been replaced by a machine or a different cell, are you still the same “you”?
Susan James for example, the linguist in the crew has multiple conciousness in her brain. This allows her to think and compute much faster than an average human, what the book calls “baseline”. Isaac Szpindel and Robert Cunnigham, the biologist, has so much enhancement they can taste chemical molecules in the air, see in x-ray and infrared. Major Amanda Bates, the military guy sent as a just-in-case is so attached to her drones (called grunts in the book) that it practically is another limb to her.
Another part of the book I really like is the leader of the crew, Jukka Sarasti which is a vampire. He is one of the many growing number of vampires resurrected from extinction with modern genetic engineering. The book described in detail how vampires were once a part of the genus Homo family tree. They were our original predator. Vampires have a dozen conscious mind so they are magnitudes much smarter than a human. The reason why vampires went extinct is that many civilizatons started to build things that have right angles, which if seen by a vampire’s eye short-circuits their brain and they have fatal seizures. I’m not good with words so you just have to read the book because the explanation is so compelling.
You can read the plot in wikipedia. And I’ll put some youtube videos that explains this book better. I would recommend any hard sci-fi fans to read this book. It’s awesome.
Some of my highlights that I think are really good, you can skip this.
◆ Prologue
▪ “I think Siri died, they scooped him out and threw him away and you’re some whole other kid that just, just grew back out of what was left. You’re not the same. Ever since. You’re not the same.”
▪ There’s a reason they call it radical hemispherectomy: half the brain thrown out with yesterday’s krill, the remaining half press-ganged into double duty.
▪ He may have been wrong. I may have been. But that, that distance—that chronic sense of being an alien among your own kind—it’s not entirely a bad thing. It came in especially handy when the real aliens came calling.
◆ Part 1 - Theseus
▪ You’re not in the Kuiper Belt where you belong: you’re high above the ecliptic and deep into the Oort, the realm of long-period comets that only grace the sun every million years or so. You’ve gone interstellar, which means (you bring up the system clock) you’ve been undead for eighteen hundred days. You’ve overslept by almost five years.
▪ So we dragged ourselves back from the dead: five part-time cadavers, naked, emaciated, barely able to move even in zero gee.
▪ It was 1035 Greenwich Mean Time, February 13, 2082.
▪ They clenched around the world like a fist, each black as the inside of an event horizon until those last bright moments when they all burned together. They screamed as they died. Every radio up to geostat groaned in unison, every infrared telescope went briefly snowblind.
▪ The experts, rigorously empirical, refused to speculate: they only admitted that the Fireflies had said something. They didn’t know what.
▪ We’d been surveyed—whether as a prelude to formal introductions or outright invasion was anyone’s guess.
▪ So here we were, rehydrated and squeaky-clean: Isaac Szpindel, to study the aliens. The Gang of Four—Susan James and her secondary personae— to talk to them. Major Amanda Bates was here to fight, if necessary. And Jukka Sarasti to command us all, to move us like chess pieces on some multidimensional game board that only vampires could see.
▪ Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world which poses no threat?
▪ And if the best toys do end up in the hands of those who’ve never forgotten that life itself is an act of war against intelligent opponents, what does that say about a race whose machines travel between the stars?
▪ So they sent us, and—in belated honor of the Historian mantra—they sent along a warrior, just in case. It was doubtful in the extreme that any child of Earth would be a match for a race with interstellar technology, should they prove unfriendly. Still, I could tell that Bates’ presence was a comfort, to the Human members of the crew at least. If you have to go up unarmed against an angry T-rex with a four-digit IQ, it can’t hurt to have a trained combat specialist at your side. At the very least, she might be able to fashion a pointy stick from the branch of some convenient tree.
▪ “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?
▪ “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.”
▪ Bates shook her head. “You’re saying whatever we’re talking to—it’s not even intelligent?” “Oh, it could be intelligent, certainly. But we’re not talking to it in any meaningful sense.” “So what is it? Voicemail?” “Actually,” Szpindel said slowly, “I think they call it a Chinese Room… " About bloody time, I thought.
▪ “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.”
▪ 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
▪ “It hides now,” Sarasti said. “It’s vulnerable now. “Now we go in.”
▪ And so we waited: four optimized hybrids somewhere past the threshold of mere humanity, one extinct predator who’d opted to command us instead of eating us alive. We waited for Rorschach to come back around the bend.
▪ “Oh, right,” Rorschach said suddenly. “We get it now. You don’t think there’s anyone here, do you? You’ve got some high-priced consultant telling you there’s nothing to worry about.”
◆ Part 2 - Rorschach
▪ I could not only see why Sascha had objected to the word; I could also see why Isaac Szpindel, no doubt unconsciously, had spoken it in the first place. As far as Earth was concerned, everyone on Theseus was an alter.
▪ “Not out there. In here. Everywhere. Can’t you see it?” “I can’t see anything,” Szpindel said, his voice shaking. “It’s in the EM fields,” James said. “That’s how they communicate. The whole structure is full of language, it’s—” “I can’t see anything,” Szpindel repeated. His breath echoed loud and fast over the link. “I’m blind.”
▪ She put her arms around me, drew me close. She smelled like sand, and sweat. I loved the way she smelled. For a while, I could feel a little bit safe. For a while I could feel like the bottom wasn’t going to drop out at any moment. Somehow, when I was with Chelsea, I mattered. I wanted her to hold me forever.
▪ Five times we did it. Over five consecutive orbits we threw ourselves between the monster’s jaws, let it chew at us with a trillion microscopic teeth until Theseus reeled us in and stitched us back together
▪ I’d never seen anything move so fast before. There was none of the languor we’d grown accustomed to from Rorschach’s septa, no lazy drift to contraction; the iris snapped shut in an instant. Suddenly the artery just ended three meters ahead, with a matte-black membrane filigreed in fine spiral.
▪ Sarasti hadn’t wasted any time. Szpindel’s replacement met us as we emerged, freshly thawed, nicotine-scented. The rehydration of his flesh was ongoing— saline bladders clung to each thigh—although it would never entirely erase the sharpness of his features. His bones cracked when he moved.
▪ Two weeks after we’d wounded it, Rorschach had begun to heal itself.
▪ “Thirty-seven minutes,” Sarasti had said, and none of us could fathom how he’d come to that number. Only Bates had dared to ask aloud, and he had merely glinted at her: “You can’t follow.” Vampire logic. From an obvious premise to an opaque conclusion. Our lives depended on
▪ “See what? Sascha! Someone tell me what—see what?” “—read? Keeton, do you read?” Somehow Bates had boosted the signal; static roared like an ocean, but I could hear the words behind it. “Yes! What—” “Keep absolutely still, do you understand? Absolutely still. Acknowledge.” “Acknowledged.” The drone kept me in its shaky sights, dark stereocam irises spasming wide, stuttering to pinpoints. “Wha—” “There’s something in front of you, Keeton. Directly between you and the grunt. Can’t you see it?”
▪ They didn’t. But the blackened thing against the belly of Bates’ machine was real enough. Not a hallucination. Not even some understandable artefact of fear and synesthesia. Rorschach was inhabited. Its inhabitants were invisible. Sometimes. Sort of. And, oh yeah. We’d just killed one.
▪ “Scrambler,” James suggested. Cunningham rolled his tongue around it. “Very well. That scrambler is an absolute miracle of evolutionary engineering. It’s also dumb as a stick.” A moment’s silence. “So what is it?” James asked at last. “Somebody’s pet?”
▪ Because the scrambler was dead at our hands, no doubt about it. But it wasn’t an alien, not really. It wasn’t intelligent. It was just a blood cell with waldoes. It was dumb as a stick.
▪ “Jesus, Siri. People aren’t rational. You aren’t rational. We’re not thinking machines, we’re—we’re feeling machines that happen to think.” He took a breath, and another hit. “And you already know that, or you couldn’t do your job. Or at least—” He grimaced— “the system knows.”
▪ “You use your Chinese room the way they used vision. You’ve reinvented empathy, almost from scratch, and in some ways—not all obviously, or I wouldn’t have to tell you this—but in some ways yours is better than the original. It’s why you’re so good at synthesis.” I shook my head. “I just observe, that’s all. I watch what people do, and then I imagine what would make them do that.”
▪ “Holy shit,” Sascha breathed, watching them. “The bloodsucker called it.” He hadn’t called everything. He hadn’t called a mob of multiarmed aliens ripping one of their own to pieces before my eyes. He hadn’t seen that coming. Or at least, he hadn’t mentioned it.
▪ But Isaac Szpindel had been an atheist. All of us were. We’d all started out that way, at least.
▪ Why should man expect his prayer for mercy to be heard by What is above him when he shows no mercy to what is under him? —Pierre Troubetzkoy
▪ “I guess—maybe I thought I could help, you know? Help fix whatever made you so—so angry all the time.”
▪ This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, and keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the speech from the screams.
▪ They’re intelligent, Robert. They’re smarter than us. Maybe they’re smarter than Jukka. And we’re—why can’t you just admit it?” I could see it all over her: Isaac would have admitted it. “Because they don’t have the circuitry,” Cunningham insisted. “How could—” “I don’t know how!” she cried. “That’s your job! All I know is that I’m torturing beings that can think rings around us… "
▪ Bates pounced: “But the bees are programmed. Genetically.” “You misunderstand. Scramblers are the honeycomb.” “Rorschach is the bees,” James murmured. Cunningham nodded. “Rorschach is the bees. And I don’t think Rorschach’s magnetic fields are counterintrusion mechanisms at all. I think they’re part of the life-support system. I think they mediate and regulate a good chunk of scrambler metabolism. What we’ve got back in the hold is a couple of creatures dragged out of their element and holding their breath. And they can’t hold it forever.”
▪ “These scramblers—they know the answers, Siri. They’re intelligent, we know they are. But it’s almost as though they don’t know they know, unless you hurt them. As if they’ve got blindsight spread over every sense.”
▪ These things are fast, Keeton. Way faster than we could have guessed even from that high-speed whisper line they were using. They’re bloody superconductors.”
▪ “You’re not listening. The trap you set wouldn’t have caught anything like that, not unless it wanted to be caught. We didn’t grab specimens at all. We grabbed spies.”
▪ “I think that first one was—you know it was a juvenile, right? Maybe it was just inexperienced. Maybe it was stupid, and it made a bad decision. I think we’re dealing with a species so far beyond us that even their retarded children can rewire our brains on the fly, and I can’t tell you how fucking scared that should make you.”
▪ “Those frayed motor nerves I couldn’t figure out, those pointless cross-connections—they’re logic gates. Scramblers time-share. Their sensory and motor plexii double as associative neurons during idle time, so every part of the system can be used for cognition when it isn’t otherwise engaged. Nothing like it ever evolved on Earth. It means they can do a great deal of processing without a lot of dedicated associative mass, even for an individual.”
▪ “We can cause those effects,” Sarasti said coolly. “As you say. Strokes cause them. Tumors. Random accidents.” “Random? Those were experiments, people! That was vivisection! They let you in so they could take you apart and see what made you tick and you never even knew it.”
▪ “It’s still growing. It’s not finished.” “That’s supposed to reassure me?” “All I’m saying is, we don’t know,” James said. “We could have years yet. Centuries.” “We have fifteen days,” Sarasti announced. “Oh shit,” someone said. Cunningham, probably. Maybe Sascha. For some reason everyone was looking at me.
▪ Fifteen days. Who knows what had gone into that number? None of us asked aloud. Maybe Sarasti, in another fit of inept psychology, had made it up on the spur of the moment. Or maybe he’d derived it before we’d even reached orbit, held it back against the possibility—only now expired— that he might yet send us back into the labyrinth. I’d been half blind for half the mission; I didn’t know. But one way or another, we had our Graduation Day.
▪ He pointed at the display. I turned, reflexively obedient. Something stabbed my hand like a spike at a crucifixion. I screamed. Electric pain jolted to my shoulder. I yanked my hand back without thinking; the embedded blade split its flesh like a fin through water. Blood sprayed into the air
▪ Sarasti shook me. “Are you in there, Keeton?” My blood splattered across his face like rain. I babbled and cried. “Are you listening? Can you see?”
▪ And suddenly I could. Suddenly everything clicked into focus. Sarasti wasn’t talking at all. Sarasti didn’t even exist anymore. Nobody did. I was alone in a great spinning wheel surrounded by things that were made out of meat, things that moved all by themselves. Some of them were wrapped in pieces of cloth.
▪ You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.
▪ Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can’t see both aspects of the Necker Cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That’s a pretty half-assed way to parse reality. You’re always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on, try. Defocus. It’s the next logical step. Oh, but you can’t. There’s something in the way. And it’s fighting back.
▪ I wastes energy and processing power, self-obsesses to the point of psychosis. Scramblers have no need of it, scramblers are more parsimonious. With simpler biochemistries, with smaller brains—deprived of tools, of their ship, even of parts of their own metabolism—they think rings around you. They hide their language in plain sight, even when you know what they’re saying. They turn your own cognition against itself. They travel between the stars. This is what intelligence can do, unhampered by self-awareness.
▪ “Well, we damn well beat the alternatives.” Some subtle overdubbed harmonic in James’ voice suggested a chorus: the whole Gang, rising as one in opposition. I couldn’t believe it. I’d just been mutilated, beaten before their eyes—and they were talking about biology?
▪ Amanda Bates was no longer merely considering a change of command. Now it was only a matter of when.
▪ All of them, I began to realize, had missed the point. All those theories, all those drugdreams and experiments and models trying to prove what consciousness was: none to explain what it was good for.
▪ Maybe he’d simply gone insane. He had broken me. He had presented his arguments. I had followed his trail of bread crumbs through ConSensus, through Theseus. And now, only nine days from graduation, I knew one thing for sure: Sarasti was wrong. He had to be. I couldn’t see how, but I knew it just the same. He was wrong. Somehow, absurdly, that had become the one thing I did care about.
▪ How do you say We come in peace when the very words are an act of war? “That’s why they won’t talk to us,” I realized.
▪ Because if Sarasti was right, scramblers were the norm: evolution across the universe was nothing but the endless proliferation of automatic, organized complexity, a vast arid Turing machine full of self-replicating machinery forever unaware of its own existence. And we—we were the flukes and the fossils.
▪ “Right answer,” I murmured. “Wrong question.” “What?” “Stretch, remember? When you asked it which objects were in the window.” “And it missed the scrambler.” James nodded. “So?” “It didn’t miss the scrambler. You thought you were asking about the things it saw, the things that existed on the board. Stretch thought you were asking about—” “The things it was aware of,” she finished. “He’s right,” I whispered. “Oh God. I think he’s right.”
◆ Part 3 - Charybdis
▪ So there you have it: a memoir told from meat to machinery. A tale told to myself, for lack of someone else to take an interest.
▪ It’s been almost fourteen years now. You lose track of such things out here.
▪ And now the game is over, and a single pawn stands on that scorched board and its face is human after all.
▪ I can’t miss Jukka Sarasti. God knows I try, every time I come online. He saved my life. He — humanized me. I’ll always owe him for that, for however long I live; and for however long I live I’ll never stop hating him for the same reason. In some sick surrealistic way I had more in common with Sarasti than I did with any human. But I just don’t have it in me. He was a predator and I was prey, and it’s not in the nature of the lamb to mourn the lion.
▪ Though he died for our sins, I cannot miss Jukka Sarasti. I can empathize with him, though. At long long last I can empathise, with Sarasti, with all his extinct kind. Because we humans were never meant to inherit the Earth. Vampires were
▪ Sometimes it seems as though my whole life’s been a struggle to reconnect, to regain whatever got lost when my parents killed their only child. Out in the Oort, I finally won that struggle. Thanks to a vampire and a boatload of freaks and an invading alien horde, I’m Human again. Maybe the last Human. By the time I get home, I could be the only sentient being in the universe. If I’m even that much. Because I don’t know if there is such a thing as a reliable narrator. And Cunningham said zombies would be pretty good at faking it. So I can’t really tell you, one way or the other. You’ll just have to imagine you’re Siri Keeton.