Title: Blindspot Date: 2021-01-01 5:00 Category: fiction Tags: epistemic horror Status: draft "I don't understand," muttered Wesley to himself, examining the reflections off of the surface of the water in his paper cup. It was raining outside and the drops falling outside the window made [...] "What don't you understand?" Wesley was startled; he wasn't prepared for his private mutterings to be eavesdropped upon. In this case it was just Charles, one of the programmers. Wesley didn't like the man, but at the moment he couldn't recall exactly why. "My girlfriend." Charles laughed, a natural, confident laugh. "Hey, women, right? Where to begin?" Wesley sighed; Charles's casual misogyny was so many worlds distant from Wesley's actual relationship problems that Wesley didn't think he had much hope of communicating with the man. "It's not like that," Wesley said. "She's a theist. It doesn't make any sense." "Uh---" Charles was too self-possessed to be described as uncomfortable exactly, but Wesley could tell that he had put the other man off guard; whether it was because Charles himself was religious or just didn't think the subject appropirate for workplace office cooler banter, or whether he simply had trouble parsing the sentence and didn't feel like saying “What?”, Wesley couldn't say. Charles decided to change the subject to something work-related. "So, did you finish the help module we were talking about the other day?" "Still working on it," said Wesley tersely, "I'll get back to you---Thursday?" Charles gave him another look that he didn't quite know how to interpret, and left. Wesley finshed his water cup, and proceeded to his own cubicle. It was best to put last night's dispute with Rachel out of his mind; he would think it over on his own time, and somehow patch things up with Rachel. Now it was time to work! He was a techinical writer at a midsized software company in the city; his job was to write help documentation for the company's products. It may have been a modest position---certainly relative to Wesley's native talents---but he found the work fairly engaging (at times), and it paid well enough, and the conditions were comfortable. But when pondering the benefits of his position, before pay and perks, he was proud of his role in the scheme of things. When some hapless user out there found him- or herself befuddled by the company's products, it was his job to make sure that when they came to read the freaking manual that the manual was clear and helpful. If he communicated poorly, then who could say what the toll would be on the hapless users? And if he wrote well, then he similarly did not know how to calculate how much smoother their days would go. The point was, even if he was not a programmer---yet, he reminded himself that he would need to finish that Sudoku solver in Python one of these days---he had a place in the great world economy; he made a difference; he created value, and was paid for it. He swore---as a ceremonial gesture for his own amusement, there being no God or spirit of honor to accept the gesture---that in a lesser or a greater job, he would always seek to do his work to the best of his ability. So resolved, he maximized the appropriate window in preparation to begin writing, but---oh, hell, he was still so preoccupied by the dispute with Rachel last night. He kept remembering, wanting to examine his every line. He didn't regret having challenged Rachel's (so uncharacteristic, so perplexing!) superstition, but surely there must have been a better way for him to have phrased things, some rhetorical strategy he could have taken to point out her blindspot, this one irrationality that was so inconsistent with the rest of her being. His rhetorical performance had been lacking, he could tell that---indeed, who could say but that he had made things worse? But knowing that he had spoke wrongly (even as he was right) didn't tell him what he should have said instead. It was said that hindsight is 20/20, but sometimes even hindsight was blind. He tried to keep his mind on the sacred work, set his hands to the keyboard, but memories from last night kept invading his thoughts. ------------------------------------------- Rachel had come home late. "Wow, you're home late," said Wesley. "Sorry I didn't make dinner for us; I had soup. Where have you been?" Rachel answered both questions in stride. "Don't worry about dinner, I'm fasting until this time tomorrow. I was at the Kol Nidre service at Beth Shalom." She cocked her head, looking at him. "I thought you knew." "I thought you were joking," he deadpanned. "Wesley, It's Yom Kippur. This is the day when my people atone for our sins of the previous year." "I can hardly object to a day to regret one's wrongdoings, but why do have to bring 'your people'---scare quotes---and their primitive superstitions into it? Maybe it made sense for a bunch of nomadic goatherders three thousand years ago," he said, although regretting the concession immediately: whatever disadvantages the authors of the Old Testament had had, he didn't want to excuse anyone for believing falsehood. "But that was a long time ago," he continued, "We have science now. You, of all people, should know better!" [...] "Reform Judaism. You don't even take your own lies seriously! I bet seven-eighths of the congregation only shows up twice a year---and a lot of them wouldn't come if you didn't cap the services at two-and-a-quarter hours." She shrugged, denying nothing. [...] "This is just like 'What the Tortise Said to Achilles.' You accept that A, and you accept that A-implies-B, but you don't accept B!" "I disagree about the applicability to our current dispute, but the Tortise had a point." Now Wesley [...] "It's a subtle issue in the philosophy of logic. To clarify, I'm not asserting that there's any possible world where not-A, B, and B-or-not-A are all true, but there are all sorts of foundational issues that have to be dealt with that explain why I can say that. Just because the obvious answer turns out to be right, doesn't mean it's right for the obvious reasons." Wesley nodded, deferring to her expertise for the moment. "This is off-topic, though," he said, "Can I add it to the list?" "Sure." They kept a list clipped to the refrigerator of topics they wanted to discuss. [...] "You're lying! Stop lying!" "Now that's unfair even conditional on you being right about the object-level issue. If I'm mistaken, by all means let it be said that I'm mistaken, but---" "Self-deception, then." "I hate that term. What's the model being implied? That some subsystem of my brain knows the truth, but insists on lying to the rest of me?" "Something like that." ”Well, that's hardly parsimonious.” "I'm not angry at you---" "Yes you are.” A moment of introspection confirmed her observation. "Okay, you're right," he said. "I am angry, but it's not endrosed upon reflection. It's just—Rachel, you're the most beautiful person I've ever met." "And when you say beautiful, you really mean intelligent." "Of course." "I don't want to discuss this anymore." [...] “The Komologrov complexity of the God hypothesis is---” Rachel burst out laughing. Wesley didn't know how to respond, not being aware of having told a joke. “Uh---what's funny?” “Komologrov complexity!” she howled. “Neither of us has the expertise to talk about that. You're just throwing around big words without knowing what they mean.” Wesley flushed. [...] "Until you can see that which the evidence supports and what I believe as manifestations of the same thing, then you don't understand this belief business at all." "Wesley, please stop—" "If you could just stop rationalizing backwards from your familiar conclusion—" "No. Stop—" "And look at the actual details of your thought process—" "You're hurting me!" And she burst into tears. Wesley rushed to hug her, to try to comfort her, but she pushed him away. “Don't touch me! Don't touch me!” she yelled as she continued sobbing. Wesley didn't know what he could say, what he could do; one moment it had just been one of their usual philosophical disusssions, and then the next Rachel was in these hysterics. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I'm sorry; I'm sorry.” Except he wasn't really sorry; he believed everything he had said. Then there was a knock on the door. Rachel was still crying, and Wesley still didn't know how to comfort her. At a loss for what else to do, he walked over to get the door. It was Jude and Charlotte, the couple who lived in the next apartment. Wesley wondered how he looked, standing dumbly before them with Rachel still sobbing in the background. “Uh, hi,” said Jude, “We just wanted to make sure that everything is all right.” “Uh, yeah,” said Wesley. “Rachel and I were just---having a discussion,” he continued, conscious of how unconvincing this must have been although true. He looked back at Rachel, who had stopped crying for the moment, and who was looking earnestly at Jude and Charlotte earnestly. “Yes,” she said. “Um, would you like to come in for tea?” Wesley said lamely. [...] ------------------------------------------- Wesley's reverie was interrupted by a noise: a sharp ping, almost metallic in nature. At first he could not be sure that he had heard it at all. The ping was accompanied by a slight distortion in the edge of his visual field, which Wesley could not describe in any way except to say that it had been there. Wesley reacted with a bit of a start, but then a moment later he began to doubt that he was reacting to anything at all---surely he was but imagining things. He had hardly but a moment to consider this possibility when the ping came again, and again the distortion at the edge of his vision. And before he had time still yet to consider this, the ping and the distortion came yet again, and Wesley realized that there was nothing mysterious about the matter: it was just, after all, the intra-office instant messaging system: his boss Eric was IMing him, and Wesley had been so lost in thought that he didn't properly interpret the audio and visual prompts. The distortion in his sight was just the messages appearing in the corner of his monitor, in his peripheral vision, as it turned out, as he had been staring into the space to the right of his monitor. The messages in the lower-right side of the screen read: Eric Dalton: Wes Eric Dalton: See me in my office Eric Dalton: ASAP Wesley read the words, duly, dully, but it took him a few moments to fully register their meaning. [...] "Have you done any work at all during the past three weeks?" Wesley's instinct was to lie or change the subject, but he pushed the feeling away, not because (or at least, not only because) it would never have worked anyway, but because he had a self-image to maintain. He was an honest person. "No," he said quietly. "What have you been doing the past three weeks?" It was the strangest thing, but Wesley didn't know. He was sure his memory had suffered no damage. He could remember moments in isolation, but somehow he couldn't reconstruct the gestalt, how the moments added up into days. He said nothing. "That's about what I guessed," said Eric. "You're fired. Have your desk cleaned out by noon tomorrow. Goodbye, and good---" he paused, and Wesley was expecting him to say riddance, "luck." "Don't I get two weeks notice?" "Did you give me two weeks notice before you stopped doing things?" Wesley nodded, slowly, to acknowledge the righteousness of the question, if not to answer it. He backed away a few steps, turned, left the office, saying nothing more, walking swiftly down the hallway, past the water cooler, and then quickening his pace to a jog. He could come back for the stuff in his cubicle tomorrow, right now he just wanted to get out, out, out. No one saw him and no one spoke to him, as he jogged down the stairwell, and out of the building, out onto the sidewalk. He couldn't say why it was so important to him that he be outdoors in this moment, why it was important to get his body out into the cold air before the previous two minutes's events really hit him hard. The city was beautiful in the rain. He began to cry, and the thought occured to him that it had to have been because the city was so beautiful in the rain; there was no other possible reason he could be crying at this moment. A woman with an umbrella passing by gave him a funny look, but he just stared blankly past her, trying to blink back the tears, failing miserably at this, and then sobbing a bit more. The city was beautiful because of its awesomeness---with an unquestionable solemnity, he was certain that was the right word. The rain and the clouds were a natural process, but nearly everything else in his vision was gloriously artificial; it had been built by humans. For years, he had held himself with a sense of superiority over others. He thought he was better than ordinary people, because he knew more science, because he had glimpsed deeply into the true structure of the world, while they (it was always an amorphous they) surely just went about their daily lives, not knowing, not seeing what he and similarly well-read people could see. But ultimately---did it matter? From the inside, anyone can see that they're right, so the test of a true science was that you didn't need to see it from the inside. You could know them by their works: a bridge that stays up, software that doesn't crash, happy and healthy people that can hold jobs and earn PhDs. Whatever nonsense people professed, they had to be successfully dealing with reality in some way, operating as well-designed mapping engines and choice machines, or their plans couldn't possibly work. That was what it meant for a theory to be true whether or not you believed it---it didn't matter whether or not you believed it. "I'm not as smart as I thought," he said aloud. Until you can see that which I should be doing and what I'm doing as manifestations of the same thing, then you don't understand this choice business at all. And if he could just stop rationalizing backwards from his familiar behavior—and look at the actual details of his decision process--- But he refused. It was easier not to look, not to notice. He had solved one other problem, though. He unclipped his cell phone from his belt (the device's stolid presence better testimony to the nature of this world than a thousand lectures on physics) and called Rachel. The morning Yom Kippur service should have been over; she would have her phone on. "Hello," she said. "Wesley?" "Now I understand."