Firefall

"I was expecting hallucinations in the field," I admitted, "but up here?"
"TMS effects—" Szpindel snapped his fingers— "they're sticky, eh? Neurons get kicked into one state, take a while to come unstuck. You never got a TAT? Well-adjusted boy like you?"
"Once or twice," I said. "Maybe."
"Same principle."
"So I'm going to keep seeing this stuff."
"Party line is they fade over time. Week or two you're back to normal. But out here, with that thing..." He shrugged. "Too many variables. Not the least of which is, I assume we'll keep going back until Sarasti says otherwise."
"But they're basically magnetic effects."
"Probably. Although I'm not betting on anything where that fucker's concerned."
"Could something else be causing them?" I asked. "Something on this ship?"
"Like what?'
"I don't know. Leakage in Theseus' magnetic shielding, maybe."
"Not normally. Course, we've all got little implanted networks in our heads, eh? And you've got a whole hemisphere of prosthetics up there, who knows what kind of side-effects those might let you in for. Why? Rorschach not a good enough reason for you?"
I saw them before, I might have said.
And then Szpindel would say Oh, when? Where?
And maybe I'd reply When I was spying on your private life, and any chance of noninvasive observation would be flushed down to the atoms.
"It's probably nothing. I've just been—jumpy lately. Thought I saw something weird in the spinal bundle, back before we landed on Rorschach. Just for a second, you know, and it disappeared as soon as I focused on it."

"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?"

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.

So I can't really tell you, one way or the other.

You'll just have to imagine you're Siri Keeton.