Plot
In the year 2082, everyone on Earth becomes aware of an alien presence when thousands of micro-satellites, dubbed "Fireflies", survey the Earth in a bright planet-wide flash. Through good luck, an incoming alien vessel is detected, and the ship Theseus, with its artificial intelligence called Captain and crew of five, are sent out to engage in first contact with the huge alien vessel called Rorschach.
As they explore the vessel in multiple excursions and attempt to analyze it and its inhabitants, the narrator, Siri, considers his life and strives to understand himself and ponders the nature of intelligence and consciousness, their utility, and what an alien mind might be like. Eventually the crew realizes that they are greatly outmatched by the vessel and its unconscious but extremely capable inhabitants.
When the level of this threat becomes clear, Theseus runs a kamikaze mission using its highly destructive antimatter payload, seemingly succeeding in eliminating the aliens. Siri returns to Earth, which he eventually realizes is being overrun by an offshoot of humanity.
Read more about this topic: Blindsight (science Fiction Novel)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The westward march has stopped, upon the final plains of the Pacific; and now the plot thickens ... with the change, the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be known.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“But, when to Sin our byast Nature leans,
The careful Devil is still at hand with means;
And providently Pimps for ill desires:
The Good Old Cause, reviv’d, a Plot requires,
Plots, true or false, are necessary things,
To raise up Common-wealths and ruine Kings.”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)