Blindsight, Peter Watts [books under 200 pages TXT] 📗

to cry out, it had whipped back out of sight.

I erupted from the pod, eyes everywhere. Now they saw nothing: an empty crypt, a naked note-taker. The mirrored bulkhead reflected vacant pods to either side. I called up ConSensus: all systems nominal.

It didn’t reflect, I remembered. The mirror didn’t show it.

I headed aft, heart still pounding. The drum opened around me, Szpindel and the Gang conversing in low tones aft. Szpindel glanced up and waved a trembling hand in greeting.

“You need to check me out,” I called. My voice wasn’t nearly so steady as I’d hoped.

“Admitting you have a problem is the first step,” Szpindel called back. “Just don’t expect miracles.” He turned back to the Gang; James on top, they sat in a diagnostic couch staring at some test pattern shimmering on the rear bulkhead.

I grabbed the tip of a stairway and pulled myself down. Coriolis pushed me sideways like a flag in the breeze. “I’m either hallucinating or there’s something on board.”

“You’re hallucinating.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I. Take a number. Wait your turn.”

He was serious. Once I forced myself to calm down and read the signs, I could see he wasn’t even surprised.

“Guess you’re pretty hungry after all that exhausting lying around, eh?” Szpindel waved at the galley. “Eat something. Be with you in a few minutes.”

I forced myself to work up my latest synopsis while I ate, but that only took half a mind; the other still shivered in residual thrall to fight-flight. I tried to distract it by tapping the BioMed feed.

“It was real,” James was saying. “We all saw it.”

No. Couldn’t have been.

Szpindel cleared his throat. “Try this one.”

The feed showed what she saw: a small black triangle on a white background. In the next instant it shattered into a dozen identical copies, and a dozen dozen. The proliferating brood rotated around the center screen, geometric primitives ballroom-dancing in precise formation, each sprouting smaller triangles from its tips, fractalizing, rotating, evolving into an infinite, intricate tilework…

A sketchpad, I realized. An interactive eyewitness reconstruction, without the verbiage. Susan’s own pattern-matching wetware reacted to what she saw— no, there were more of them; no, the orientation’s wrong; yes, that’s it, but bigger— and Szpindel’s machine picked those reactions right out of her head and amended the display in realtime. It was a big step up from that half-assed workaround called language. The easily-impressed might have even called it mind-reading.

It wasn’t, though. It was all just feedback and correlation. It doesn’t take a telepath to turn one set of patterns into another. Fortunately.

“That’s it! That’s it!” Susan cried.

The triangles had iterated out of existence. Now the display was full of interlocking asymmetrical pentagrams, a spiderweb of fish scales.

“Don’t tell us that’s random noise,” she said triumphantly.

“No,” Szpindel said, “It’s a Klüver constant.”

“A—”

“It’s a hallucination, Suze.”

“Of course. But something planted it in our head, right? And—”

“It was in your head all along. It was in your head the day you were born.”

“No.”

“It’s an artefact of deep brain structure. Even congenitally blind people see them sometimes.”

“None of us have seen them before. Ever.”

“I believe you. But there’s no information there, eh? That wasn’t Rorschach talking, it was just—interference. Like everything else.”

“But it was so vivid! Not that flickering corner-of-your-eye stuff we saw everywhere. This was solid. It was realer than real.”

“That’s how you can tell it wasn’t. Since you don’t actually see it, there’s no messy eyeball optics to limit resolution.”

“Oh,” James said, and then, softly: “Shit.”

“Yeah. Sorry.” And then, “Any time you’re ready.”

I looked up; Szpindel was waving me over. James rose from her chair, but it was Michelle who gave him a quick disconsolate squeeze and Sascha who grumbled past me on her way to their tent.

By the time I reached him Szpindel had unfolded the couch into a half-cot. “Lie down.”

I did. “I wasn’t talking about back in Rorschach, you know. I meant here. I saw something right now. When I woke up.”

“Raise your left hand,” he said. Then: “Just your left, eh?”

I lowered my right, winced at the pinprick. “That’s a bit primitive.”

He eyed the blood-filled cuvette between his thumb and forefinger: a shivering ruby teardrop the size of a fingernail. “Wet sample’s still best for some things.”

“Aren’t the pods supposed to do everything?”

Szpindel nodded. “Call it a quality-control test. Keep the ship on its toes.” He dropped the sample onto the nearest countertop. The teardrop flattened and burst; the surface drank my blood as if parched. Szpindel smacked his lips. “Elevated cholinesterase inhibitors in the ret. Yum.”

For all I knew, my blood results actually did taste good to the man. Szpindel didn’t just read results; he felt them, smelled and saw and experienced each datum like drops of citrus on the tongue. The whole BioMed subdrum was but a part of the Szpindel prosthesis: an extended body with dozens of different sensory modes, forced to talk to a brain that knew only five.

No wonder he’d bonded with Michelle. He was almost synesthesiac himself.

“You spent a bit longer in there than the rest of us,” he remarked.

“That’s significant?”

A jerking shrug. “Maybe your organs got a bit more cooked than ours. Maybe you just got a delicate constitution. Your pod would’ve caught anything—imminent, so I figure—ah.”

“What?”

“Some cells along your brainpan going into overdrive. More in your bladder and kidney.”

“Tumors?”

“What you expect? Rorschach‘s no rejuve spa.”

“But the pod—”

Szpindel grimaced; his idea of a reassuring smile. “Repairs ninety-nine point nine percent of the damage, sure. By the time you get to the last zero-point-one, you’re into diminishing returns. These’re small, commissar. Chances are your own body’ll take care of ‘em. If not, we know where they live.”

“The ones in my brain. Could they be causing—”

“Not a chance.” He chewed on his lower lip for a moment. “Course, cancer’s not all that thing did to us.”

“What I saw. Up in the crypt. It had these multijointed arms from a central mass. Big as a person, maybe.”

Szpindel nodded. “Get used to it.”

“The others are seeing these things?”

“I doubt it. Everyone has a different take, like—” his twitching face conveyed Dare I say it? “—Rorschach blots.”

“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.”

“Multijointed arms with a central mass?”

“God no. Just a flicker, really. If it was anything at all, it was probably just Amanda’s rubber ball floating around up there.”

“Probably.” Szpindel seemed almost amused. “Couldn’t hurt to check for leakage in the shielding, though. Just in case. Not like we need something else making us see things, eh?”

I shook my head at remembered nightmares. “How are the others?”

“Gang’s fine, if a bit disappointed. Haven’t seen the Major.” He shrugged. “Maybe she’s avoiding me.”

“It hit her pretty hard.”

“No worse than the rest of us, really. She might not even remember it.”

“How—how could she possibly believe she didn’t even exist?”

Szpindel shook his head. “Didn’t believe it. Knew it. For a fact.”

“But how—”

“Charge gauge on your car, right? Sometimes the contacts corrode. Readout freezes on empty, so you think it’s empty. What else you supposed to think? Not like you can go in and count the electrons.”

“You’re saying the brain’s got some kind of existence gauge?”

“Brain’s got all kinds of gauges. You can know you’re blind even when you’re not; you can know you can see, even when you’re blind. And yeah, you can know you don’t exist even when you do. It’s a long list, commissar. Cotard’s, Anton’s, Damascus Disease. Just for starters.”

He hadn’t said blindsight.

“What was it like?” I asked.

“Like?” Although he knew exactly what I meant.

“Did your arm— move by itself? When it reached for that battery?”

“Oh. Nah. You’re still in control, you just—you get a feeling, is all. A sense of where to reach. One part of the brain playing charades with another, eh?” He gestured at the couch. “Get off. Seen enough of your ugly guts for now. And send up Bates if you can find where she’s hiding. Probably back at Fab building a bigger army.”

The misgivings glinted off him like sunlight. “You have a problem with her,” I said.

He started to deny it, then remembered who he was talking to. “Not personally. Just—human node running mechanical infantry. Electronic reflexes slaved to meat reflexes. You tell me where the weak spot is.”

“Down in Rorschach, I’d have to say all the links are pretty weak.”

“Not talking about Rorschach,” Szpindel said. “We go there. What stops them from coming here?”

“Them.”

“Maybe they haven’t arrived yet,” he admitted. “But when they do, I’m betting we’ll be going up against something bigger than anaerobic microbes.” When I didn’t answer he continued, his voice lowered. “And anyway, Mission Control didn’t know shit about Rorschach. They thought they were sending us some place where drones could do all the heavy lifting. But they just hate not being in command, eh? Can’t admit the grunts’re smarter than the generals. So our defenses get compromised for political appearances—not like that’s any kinda news—and I’m no jarhead but it strikes me as real bad strategy.”

I remembered Amanda Bates, midwifing the birth of her troops. I’m more of a safety precaution….

“Amanda—” I began.

“Like Mandy fine. Nice mammal. But if we’re cruising into a combat situation I don’t want my ass covered by some network held back by its weakest link.”

“If you’re going to be surrounded by a swarm of killer robots, maybe—”

“Yeah, people keep saying that. Can’t trust the machines. Luddites love to go on about computer malfunctions, and how many accidental wars we might have prevented because a human had the final say. But funny thing, commissar; nobody talks about how many intentional wars got started for the same reason. You’re still writing those postcards to posterity?”

I nodded, and