/lit/ - Literature

>>4372706
SARASTI (cont'd)
You and your race and mine were never on the best of terms. But I do only what you force me to. You rationalize Keeton. You defend. You reject unpalatable truths, and if you can't reject them outright you trivialize them. Incremental evidence is never enough for you. You hear rumours of holocaust; you dismiss them. You see evidence of genocide; you insist it can't be so bad. Temperatures rise, glaciers melt- SPECIES EXTINCT – and you blame sunspots and volcanoes. Everyone is like this, but you most of all. You and your Chinese Room, you're own private TURING MACHINE. You turn incomprehension into mathematics, you reject the truth without even hearing it first.

KEETON
(Stunned)
Are you saying--

SARASTI
I can't afford to let the truth trickle through. There's no time. I can't give you the chance to shore up your rationales and your defenses. They must fall completely. You must be inundated. Shattered. Genocide is impossible to deny when you're buried up to your neck in dismembered bodies. You don't see it coming, but before you know it, the bodies will start accumulating...

KEETON
You played me. All this time. I'd have seen right through it, if you hadn't made me so involved.

SARASTI
(disappointed)
You might even read it off me directly.

KEETON
That's why you-- I thought that was because we were meat?

SARASTI
That, too. Now, listen. I'm going to tell you a vampire folktale. This is probably the most important anecdote you've ever heard.
YOU, SIRI KEETON, who battled SCRAMBLERS in VACUUM.

SARASTI (cont'd)
Listen:
A laser is assigned to find the darkness. Since it lives in a room without doors, or windows, or any other source of light, it thinks this will be easy. But everywhere it turns it sees brightness. Every wall, every piece of furniture it points at is brightly lit. Eventually it concludes there is no darkness. That light is everywhere.
SARASTI (Cont'd)
Your species is like the Dodo before it's extinction.