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

she let me look at her, Chelsea had almost exhausted her degrees of freedom.

“Cyg,” she slurred. “Know you’re there.”

Her jaw was locked half-open; her tongue must have stiffened with every word. She did not look at the camera. She could not look at the camera.

“Guess I know why you’re not answ’ring. I’ll try’nt—_try not_ to take it pers’n’lly.”

Ten thousand deathbed goodbyes arrayed around me, a million more within reach. What was I supposed to do, pick one at random? Stitch them into some kind of composite? All these words had been for other people. Grafting them onto Chelsea would reduce them to clichés, to trite platitudes. To insults.

“Want t’say, don’ feel bad. I know y’re just— ‘s’not your fault, I guess. You’d pick up if you could.”

And say what? What do you say to someone who’s dying in fast-forward before your eyes?

“Just keep trying t’connect, y’know. Can’t help m’self…”

Although the essentials of this farewell are accurate, details from several deaths have been combined for dramatic purposes.

“Please? Jus’—talk to me, Cyg…”

More than anything, I wanted to.

“Siri, I…just…”

I’d spent all this time trying to figure out how.

“Forget’t,” she said, and disconnected.

I whispered something into the dead air. I don’t even remember what.

I really wanted to talk to her.

I just couldn’t find an algorithm that fit.

“Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.”

—Aldous Huxley

They’d hoped, by now, to have banished sleep forever.

The waste was nothing short of obscene: a third of every Human life spent with its strings cut, insensate, the body burning fuel but not producing. Think of all we could accomplish if we didn’t have to lapse into unconsciousness every fifteen hours or so, if our minds could stay awake and alert from the moment of infancy to that final curtain call a hundred twenty years later. Think of eight billion souls with no off switch and no down time until the very chassis wore out.

Why, we could go to the stars.

It hadn’t worked out that way. Even if we’d outgrown the need to stay quiet and hidden during the dark hours—the only predators left were those we’d brought back ourselves—the brain still needed time apart from the world outside. Experiences had to be catalogued and filed, mid-term memories promoted to long-term ones, free radicals swept from their hiding places among the dendrites. We had only reduced the need for sleep, not eliminated it—and that incompressible residue of downtime seemed barely able to contain the dreams and phantoms left behind. They squirmed in my head like creatures in a draining tidal pool.

I woke.

I was alone, weightless, in the center of my tent. I could have sworn something had tapped me on the back. Leftover hallucination, I thought. A lingering aftereffect of the haunted mansion, going for one last bit of gooseflesh en route to extinction.

But it happened again. I bumped against the keelward curve of the bubble, bumped again, head and shoulder-blades against fabric; the rest of me came after, moving gently but irresistibly—

Down.

Theseus was accelerating.

No. Wrong direction. Theseus was rolling, like a harpooned whale at the surface of the sea. Turning her belly to the stars.

I brought up ConSensus and threw a Nav-tac summary against the wall. A luminous point erupted from the outline of our ship, crawled away from Big Ben leaving a bright filament etched in its wake. I watched until the numbers read 15G.

“Siri. My quarters, please.”

I jumped. It sounded as though the vampire had been at my very shoulder.

“Coming.”

An ampsat relay, climbing at long last to an intercept with the Icarus antimatter stream. Somewhere behind the call of duty, my heart sank.

We weren’t running, Robert Cunningham’s fondest wishes notwithstanding. Theseus was stockpiling ordinance.

*

The open hatch gaped like a cave in the face of a cliff. The pale blue light from the spine couldn’t seem to reach inside. Sarasti was barely more than a silhouette, black on gray, his bright bloody eyes reflecting catlike in the surrounding gloom.

“Come.” He amped up the shorter wavelengths in deference to human vision. The interior of the bubble brightened, although the light remained slightly red-shifted. Like Rorschach with high beams.

I floated into Sarasti’s parlor. His face, normally paper-white, was so flushed it looked sunburned. He gorged himself, I couldn’t help thinking. He drank deep. But all that blood was his own. Usually he kept it deep in the flesh, favoring the vital organs. Vampires were efficient that way. They only washed out their peripheral tissues occasionally, when lactate levels got too high.

Or when they were hunting.

He had a needle to his throat, injected himself with three cc’s of clear liquid as I watched. His antiEuclideans. I wondered how often he had to replenish them, now that he’d lost faith in the implants. He withdrew the needle and slipped it into a sheath geckoed to a convenient strut. His color drained as I watched, sinking back to the core, leaving his skin waxy and corpselike.

“You’re here as official observer,” Sarasti said.

I observed. His quarters were even more spartan than mine. No personal effects to speak of. No custom coffin lined with shrink-wrapped soil. Nothing but two jumpsuits, a pouch for toiletries, and a disconnected fiberop umbilicus half as thick as my little finger, floating like a roundworm in formalin. Sarasti’s hardline to the Captain. Not even a cortical jack, I remembered. It plugged into the medulla, the brainstem. That was logical enough; that was where all the neural cabling converged, the point of greatest bandwidth. Still, it was a disquieting thought—that Sarasti linked to the ship through the brain of a reptile.

An image flared on the wall, subtly distorted against the concave surface: Stretch and Clench in their adjoining cells, rendered in splitscreen. Cryptic vitals defaced little grids below each image.

The distortion distracted me. I looked for a corrected feed in ConSensus, came up empty. Sarasti read my expression: “Closed circuit.”

By now the scramblers would have seemed sick and ragged even to a virgin audience. They floated near the middle of their respective compartments, segmented arms drifting aimlessly back and forth. Membranous patches of—skin, I suppose—were peeling from the cuticles, giving them a fuzzy, decomposing aspect.

“The arms move continuously,” Sarasti remarked. “Robert says it assists in circulation.”

I nodded, watching the display.

“Creatures that move between stars can’t even perform basic metabolic functions without constant flailing.” He shook his head. “Inefficient. Primitive.”

I glanced at the vampire. He remained fixed on our captives.

“Obscene,” he said, and moved his fingers.

A new window opened on the wall: the Rosetta protocol, initializing. Kilometers away, microwaves flooded the holding tanks.

I reminded myself: No interference. Only observation.

However weakened their condition, the scramblers were not yet indifferent to pain. They knew the game, they knew the rules; they dragged themselves to their respective panels and played for mercy. Sarasti had simply invoked a step-by-step replay of some previous sequence. The scramblers went through it all again, buying a few moments’ intermittent respite with the same old proofs and theorems.

Sarasti clicked, then spoke: “They regenerate these solutions faster than they did before. Do you think they’re acclimated to the microwaves?”

Another readout appeared on the display; an audio alarm began chirping somewhere nearby. I looked at Sarasti, and back at the readout: a solid circle of turquoise backlit by a pulsing red halo. The shape meant atmospheric anomaly. The color meant oxygen.

I felt a moment of confusion—(_Oxygen? Why would oxygen set off the alarm?_)—until I remembered: Scramblers were anaerobes.

Sarasti muted the alarm with a wave of his hand.

I cleared my throat: “You’re poisoning—”

“Watch. Performance is consistent. No change.”

I swallowed. Just observe.

“Is this an execution?” I asked. “Is this a, a mercy killing?”

Sarasti looked past me, and smiled. “No.”

I dropped my eyes. “What, then?”

He pointed at the display. I turned, reflexively obedient.

Something stabbed my hand like a spike at a crucifixion.

I screamed. Electric pain jolted to my shoulder. I yanked my hand back without thinking; the embedded blade split its flesh like a fin through water. Blood sprayed into the air and stayed there, a comet’s tail of droplets tracing the frenzied arc of my hand.

Sudden scalding heat from behind. Flesh charred on my back. I screamed again, flailing. A veil of bloody droplets swirled in the air.

Somehow I was in the corridor, staring dumbly at my right hand. It had been split to the heel of the palm, flopped at the end of my wrist in two bloody, bifingered chunks. Blood welled from the torn edges and wouldn’t fall. Sarasti advanced through a haze of trauma and confusion. His face swam in and out of focus, rich with his blood or mine. His eyes were bright red mirrors, his eyes were time machines. Darkness roared around them and it was half a million years ago and I was just another piece of meat on the African savannah, a split-second from having its throat torn out.

“Do you see the problem?” Sarasti asked, advancing. A great spider crab hovered at his shoulder. I forced focus through the pain: one of Bates’ grunts, taking aim. I kicked blindly, hit the ladder through sheer happenstance, careened backwards down the corridor.

The vampire came after me, his face split into something that would have been a smile on anyone else. “Conscious of pain, you’re distracted by pain. You’re_ fixated_ on it. Obsessed by the one threat, you miss the other.”

I flailed. Crimson mist stung my eyes.

“So much more aware, so much less perceptive. An automaton could do better.”

He’s snapped, I thought. He’s insane. And then No, he’s a transient._ He’s always been a transient_—

“They could do better,” he said softly.

—_and he’s been hiding for days. Deep down. Hiding from the seals. _

_What else would he do?_

Sarasti raised his hands, fading in and out of focus. I hit something, kicked without aiming, bounced away through swirling mist and startled voices. Metal cracked the back of my head and spun me around.

A hole, a burrow. A place to hide. I dove through, my torn hand flapping like a dead fish against the edge of the hatch. I cried out and tumbled into the drum, the monster at my heels.

Startled shouts, very close now. “This wasn’t the plan, Jukka! This wasn’t the goddamned plan!” That was Susan James, full of outrage, while Amanda Bates snarled “Stand down, right fucking now!” and leapt from the deck to do battle. She rose through the air, all overclocked reflexes and carboplatinum augments but Sarasti just batted her aside and kept on coming. His arm shot out like a striking snake. His hand clamped around my throat.

“Is this what you meant?” James cried from some dark irrelevant hiding place. “Is this your preconditioning?”

Sarasti shook me. “Are you in there, Keeton?”

My blood splattered across his face like rain. I babbled and cried.

“Are you listening? Can you see?”

And suddenly I could. Suddenly everything clicked into focus. Sarasti wasn’t talking at all. Sarasti didn’t even exist anymore. Nobody did. I was alone in a great spinning wheel surrounded by things that were made out of meat, things that moved all by themselves. Some of them were wrapped in pieces of cloth. Strange nonsensical sounds came from holes at their top ends, and there were other things up there, bumps and ridges and something like marbles or black buttons, wet and shiny and embedded in the slabs of meat. They glistened and jiggled and moved