Blindsight

My knees pressed against my forehead. I hugged my folded legs as though clinging to a branch over a chasm.

You vicious asshole. You foul sadistic monster.

My breath rasped loud and mechanical. It nearly drowned out the blood roaring in my ears.

You tore me apart, you made me piss and shit myself and I cried like some gutted baby and you stripped me naked, you fucking thing, you night crawler, you broke my tools, you took away anything I ever had that let me touch anyone and you didn't have toyou babyfucker, it wasn't necessary but you knew that didn't you? You just wanted to play. I've seen your kind at it before, cats toying with mice, catch and release, a taste of freedom and then pouncing again, biting, not hard enough to kill— not just yet—before you let them loose again and they're hobbling now, maybe a leg snapped or a gash in the belly but they're still trying, still running or crawling or dragging themselves as fast as they can until you're on them again, and again because it's fun,because it gives you pleasure you sadistic piece of shit. You send us into the arms of that hellish thing and it plays with us too, and maybe you're even working together because it let me escape just like you do, it let me run right back into your arms and then you strip me down to some raw half-brained defenseless animal, I can't rotate or transform I can't even talk and you—

You—

It wasn't even personal, was it? You don't even hate me. You were just sick of keeping it all in, sick of restrainingyourself with all this meat, and nobody else could be spared from their jobs. This was myjob, wasn't it? Not synthesist, not conduit. Not even cannon fodder or decoy duty. I'm just something disposable to sharpen your claws on.

I hurt so much. It hurt just to breathe.

I was so alone.

Webbing pressed against the curve of my back, bounced me forward gently as a breeze, caught me again. I was back in my tent. My right hand itched. I tried to flex the fingers, but they were embedded in amber. Left hand reached for right, and found a plastic carapace extending to the elbow.

I opened my eyes. Darkness. Meaningless numbers and a red LED twinkled from somewhere along my forearm.

I didn't remember coming here. I didn't remember anyone fixing me.

Breaking. Being broken. That's what I remembered. I wanted to die. I wanted to just stay curled up until I withered away.

After an age, I forced myself to uncoil. I steadied myself, let some miniscule inertia bump me against the taut insulated fabric of my tent. I waited for my breathing to steady. It seemed to take hours.

I called ConSensus to the wall, and a feed from the drum. Soft voices, harsh light flaring against the wall: hurting my eyes, peeling them raw. I killed visual, and listened to words in the darkness.

"— a phase?" someone asked.

Susan James, her personhood restored. I knew her again: not a meat sack, no longer a thing.

"We have been over this." That was Cunningham. I knew him too. I knew them all. Whatever Sarasti had done to me, however far he'd yanked me from my room, I'd somehow fallen back inside.

It should have mattered more.

"— because for one thing, if it were really so pernicious, natural selection would have weeded it out," James was saying.

"You have a naïve understanding of evolutionary processes. There's no such thing as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe. It doesn't matter whether a solution's optimal. All that matters is whether it beats the alternatives."

I knew that voice too. It belonged to a demon.