Peter Watts - Blindsight

Jukka Sarasti had just given us a pep talk.

He could have shut down Cunningham’s tirade — could have probably shut down a full-scale mutiny — by just sailing into our midst and baring his teeth. By looking at us. But he wasn’t trying to frighten us into submission, we were already nervous enough. And he wasn’t trying to educate us either, fight fear with fact; the more facts any sane person gathered about Rorschach , the more fearful they’d become. Sarasti was only trying to keep us functional , lost in space on the edge of our lives, facing down this monstrous enigma that might destroy us at any instant for any reason. Sarasti was trying to calm us down: good meat, nice meat . He was trying to keep us from falling apart. There there.

Sarasti was practicing psychology .

I looked around the table. Bates and Cunningham and the Gang sat still and bloodless.

Sarasti sucked at it.

“We have to get out of here,” Cunningham said. “These things are way beyond us.”

“We’ve shown more aggression than they have,” James said, but there was no confidence in her voice.

“ Rorschach plays those rocks like marbles. We’re sitting in the middle of a shooting gallery. Any time it feels like—”

“It’s still growing. It’s not finished.”

“That’s supposed to reassure me?”

“All I’m saying is, we don’t know ,” James said. “We could have years yet. Centuries.”

“We have fifteen days,” Sarasti announced.

“Oh shit ,” someone said. Cunningham, probably. Maybe Sascha.

For some reason everyone was looking at me.

Fifteen days. Who knows what had gone into that number? None of us asked aloud. Maybe Sarasti, in another fit of inept psychology, had made it up on the spur of the moment. Or maybe he’d derived it before we’d even reached orbit, held it back against the possibility — only now expired — that he might yet send us back into the labyrinth. I’d been half blind for half the mission; I didn’t know.

But one way or another, we had our Graduation Day.

The coffins lay against the rear bulkhead of the crypt — on what would be the floor during those moments when up and down held any meaning. We’d slept for years on the way out. We’d had no awareness of time’s passage — undead metabolism is far too sluggish even to support dreams — but somehow the body knew when it needed a change. Not one of us had chosen to sleep in our pods once we’d arrived. The only times we’d done so had been on pain of death.

But the Gang had taken to coming here ever since Szpindel had died.

His body rested in the pod next to mine. I coasted into the compartment and turned left without thinking. Five coffins: four open and emptied, one sealed. The mirrored bulkhead opposite doubled their number and the depth of the compartment.

But the Gang wasn’t there.

I turned right. The body of Susan James floated back-to-back with her own reflection, staring at an inverse tableau: three sealed sarcophagi, one open. The ebony plaque set into the retracted lid was dark; the others shone with identical sparse mosaics of blue and green stars. None of them changed. There were no scrolling ECGs, no luminous peak-and-valley tracings marked cardio or cns. We could wait here for hours, days, and none of those diodes would so much as twinkle. When you’re undead, the emphasis is on the second syllable.

The Gang’s topology had said Michelle when I’d first arrived, but it was Susan who spoke now, without turning. “I never met her.”

I followed her gaze to the name tag one of the sealed pods: Takamatsu . The other linguist, the other multiple.

“I met everyone else,” Susan continued. “Trained with them. But I never met my own replacement.”

They discouraged it. What would have been the point?

“If you want to—” I began.

She shook her head. “Thanks anyway.”

“Or any of the others — I can only imagine what Michelle—”

Susan smiled, but there was something cold about it. “Michelle doesn’t really want to talk to you right now, Siri.”

“Ah.” I hesitated for a moment, to give anyone else a chance to speak up. When nobody did, I pushed myself back towards the hatch. “Well, if any of you change—”

“No. None of us. Ever .”

Cruncher.

“You lie ,” he continued. “I see it. We all do.”

I blinked. “Lie? No, I—”

“You don’t talk. You listen . You don’t care about Michelle. Don’t care about anyone. You just want what we know . For your reports .”

“That’s not entirely true, Cruncher. I do care. I know Michelle must—”

“You don’t know shit . Go away.”

“I’m sorry I upset you.” I rolled on my axis and braced against the mirror.

“You can’t know Meesh,” he growled as I pushed off. “You never lost anyone. You never had anyone.

“You leave her alone.”

He was wrong on both counts. And at least Szpindel had died knowing that Michelle cared for him.

Chelsea died thinking I just didn’t give a shit.

It had been two years or more, and while we still interfaced occasionally we hadn’t met in the flesh since the day she’d left. She came at me from right out of the Oort, sent an urgent voice message to my inlays: Cygnus. Please call NOW. It’s important.

It was the first time since I’d known her that she’d ever blanked the optics.

I knew it was important. I knew it was bad, even without picture. I knew because there was no picture, and I could tell it was worse than bad from the harmonics in her voice. I could tell it was lethal.

I found out afterwards that she’d gotten caught in the crossfire. The Realists had sown a fibrodysplasia variant outside the Boston catacombs; an easy tweak, a single-point retroviral whose results served both as an act of terrorism and an ironic commentary on the frozen paralysis of Heaven’s occupants. It rewrote a regulatory gene controlling ossification on Chromosome 4, and rigged a metabolic bypass at three loci on 17.

Chelsea started growing a new skeleton. Her joints were calcifying within fifteen hours of exposure, her ligaments and tendons within twenty. By then they were starving her at the cellular level, trying to slow the bug by depriving it of metabolites, but they could only buy time and not much of it. Twenty-three hours in, her striated muscles were turning to stone.

I didn’t find this out immediately, because I didn’t call her back. I didn’t need to know the details. I could tell from her voice that she was dying. Obviously she wanted to say goodbye.

I couldn’t talk to her until I knew how to do that.

I spent hours scouring the noosphere, looking for precedents. There’s no shortage of ways to die; I found millions of case records dealing with the etiquette. Last words, last vows, instruction manuals for the soon-to-bereaved. Palliative neuropharm. Extended and expository death scenes in popular fiction. I went through it all, assigned a dozen front-line filters to separate heat from light.

By the time she called again the news was out: acute Golem outbreak lancing like a white-hot needle through the heart of Boston. Containment measures holding. Heaven secure. Modest casualties expected. Names of victims withheld pending notification of kin.

I still didn’t know the principles, the rules : all I had were examples. Last wills and testaments; the negotiation of jumpers with their would-be rescuers; diaries recovered from imploded submarines or lunar crash sites. Recorded memoirs and deathbed confessions rattling into flatline. Black box transcripts of doomed spaceships and falling beanstalks, ending in fire and static. All of it relevant. None of it useful; none of it her .