Peter Watts - Blindsight

“He’s aware all right. Those things are so fast it’s scary. You know they can hold both aspects of a Necker cube in their heads at the same time?”

The term rang a bell. I subtitled, and saw the thumbnail of a familiar wireframe box:

Now I remembered: classic ambiguous illusion. Sometimes the shaded panel seemed to be in front, sometimes behind. The perspective flipped back and forth as you watched.

“You or I, we can only see it one way or the other,” Pag was saying. “Vamps see it both ways at once . Do you have any idea what kind of an edge that gives ’em?”

“Not enough of one.”

“ Touché . But hey, not their fault neutral traits get fixed in small populations.”

“I don’t know if I’d call the Crucifix glitch neutral .”

“It was at first. How many intersecting right angles do you see in nature?” He waved one dismissive hand. “Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is they can do something that’s neurologically impossible for us Humans. They can hold simultaneous multiple worldviews , Pod-man. They just see things we have to work out step-by-step, they don’t have to think about it. You know, there isn’t a single baseline human who could just tell you, just off the top of their heads, every prime number between one and a billion? In the old days, only a few autistics could do shit like that.”

“He never uses the past tense,” I murmered.

“Huh? Oh, that.” Pag nodded. “They never experience the past tense. It’s just another thread to them. They don’t remember stuff, they relive it.”

“What, like a post-traumatic flashback?”

“Not so traumatic.” He grimaced. “Not for them , at least.”

“So this is obviously your current hot spot? Vampires?”

“Pod, vampires are the capital-Hot spot for anyone with a ‘neuro’ in their c.v. I’m just doing a couple of histology papers. Pattern-matching receptors, Mexican-hat arrays, reward/irrelevance filters. The eyes, basically.”

“Right.” I hesitated. “Those kind of throw you.”

“No shit .” Pag nodded knowingly. “That tap lucidum of theirs, that shine . Scary.” He shook his head, impressed all over again at the recollection.

“You’ve never met one,” I surmised.

“What, in the flesh? I’d give my left ball. Why?”

“It’s not the shine. It’s the—” I groped for a word that fit — “The attitude , maybe.”

“Yeah,” he said after a bit. “I guess sometimes you’ve just gotta be there, huh? Which is why I envy you, Pod-man.”

“You shouldn’t.”

“I should. Even if you never meet whoever sent the ’Flies, you’re in for one Christly research opportunity with that — Sarasti, is it?”

“Wasted on me. The only neuro in my file’s under medical history.”

He laughed. “Anyway, like I said, I just saw your name in the headlines and I figured, hey, the man’s leaving in a couple of months, I should probably stop waiting around for him to call.”

It had been over two years. “I didn’t think I’d get through. I thought you’d shitlisted me.”

“Nah. Never.” He looked down, though, and fell silent.

“But you should have called her,” he said at last.

“I know.”

“She was dying . You should’ve—”

“There wasn’t time.”

He let the lie sit there for a while.

“Anyway,” he said at last. “I just wanted to wish you luck.” Which wasn’t exactly true either.

“Thanks. I appreciate that.”

“Kick their alien asses. If aliens have asses.”

“There’s five of us, Pag. Nine if you count the backups. We’re not exactly an army.”

“Just an expression, fellow mammal. Bury the hatchet. Damn the torpedoes. Soothe the serpent.”

Raise the white flag , I thought.

“I guess you’re busy,” he said, “I’ll—”

“Look, you want to get together? In airspace? I haven’t been to QuBit’s in a while.”

“Love to, Pod. Unfortunately I’m in Mankoya. Splice’n’dice workshop.”

“What, you mean physically ?”

“Cutting-edge research. Old-school habits.”

“Too bad.”

“Anyway, I’ll let you go. Just wanted, you know—”

“Thanks,” I said again.

“So, you know. Bye,” Robert Paglino told me. Which was, when you got down to it, the reason he’d called.

He wasn’t expecting another chance.

Pag blamed me for the way it had ended with Chelsea. Fair enough. I blamed him for the way it began.

He’d gone into neuroeconomics at least partly because his childhood buddy had turned into a pod person before his eyes. I’d ended up in Synthesis for roughly the same reason. Our paths had diverged, and we didn’t see each other in the flesh all that often; but two decades after I’d brutalized a handful of children on his behalf, Robert Paglino was still my best and only friend.

“You need to seriously thaw out,” he told me, “And I know just the lady to handle the oven mitts.”

“That is perhaps the worst use of metaphor in the history of human language,” I said.

“Seriously, Pod. She’ll be good for you. A, a counterbalance — ease you a bit closer to the comfy mean, you know?”

“No, Pag, I don’t. What is she, another neuroeconomist?”

“Neuroaestheticist,” he said.

“There’s still a market for those?” I couldn’t imagine how; why pay to tweak your compatibility with some significant other, when significant others themselves were so out of fashion?

“Not much of one,” Pag admitted. “Fact is, she’s pretty much retired. But she’s still got the tools, my man. Very thigmotactic. Likes all her relationships face-to-face and in the flesh.”

“I dunno, Pag. Sounds like work.”

“Not like your work. She’s got to be easier than the bleeding composites you front for. She’s smart, she’s sexy, and she’s nicely inside the standard deev except for the personal contact thing. Which is not so much outright perversion as charming fetish. In your case it could even be therapeutic.”

“If I wanted therapy I’d see a therapist.”

“She does a bit of that too, actually.”

“Yeah?” And then, despite myself, “Any good?”

He looked me up and down. “No one’s that good. That’s not what this is. I just figured you two would click. Chelse is one of the few who might not be completely put off by your intimacy issues.”

“ Everyone ’s got intimacy issues these days, in case you hadn’t noticed.” He must have; the population had been dropping for decades.

“I was being euphemistic. I meant your aversion to general Human contact.”

“Making it euphemistic to call you Human?”

He grinned. “Different deal. We got history.”

“No thanks.”

“Too late. She’s already en route to the appointed place.”

“Appoin — you’re an asshole, Pag.”

“The tightest.”

Which was how I found myself intrusively face-to-face in an airspace lounge south of Beth and Bear. The lighting was low and indirect, creeping from under seats and the edges of tables; the chromatics, this afternoon at least, were defiantly longwave. It was a place where baselines could pretend to see in infrared.

So I pretended for a moment, assessing the woman in the corner booth: gangly and glorious, half-a-dozen ethnicities coexisting peacefully with no single voice dominant. Something glowed on her cheek, a faint emerald staccato against the ambient red shift. Her hair floated in a diffuse ebony cloud about her head; as I neared I caught occasional glints of metal within that nimbus, the threads of a static generator purveying the illusion of weightlessness. In normal light her blood-red skin would doubtless shift down to the fashionable butterscotch of the unrepentant mongrel.