Peter Watts - Blindsight

She called again, and still the optics were blank, and still I didn’t answer.

But the last time she called, she didn’t spare me the view.

They’d made her as comfortable as possible. The gelpad conformed to every twisted limb, every erupting spur of bone. They would not have left her in any pain.

Her neck had torqued down and to the side as it petrified, left her staring at the twisted claw that had once been her right hand. Her knuckles were the size of walnuts. Plates and ribbons of ectopic bone distended the skin of her arms and shoulders, buried her ribs in a fibrous mat of calcified flesh.

Movement was its own worst enemy. Golem punished even the slightest twitch, provoked the growth of fresh bone along any joints and surfaces conspiring to motion. Each hinge and socket had its own nonrenewable ration of flexibility, carved in stone; every movement depleted the account. The body seized incrementally. By the time 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.

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.”