Blindsight

Cunningham didn't just operate his remotes; he escaped into them, wore them like a secret identity to hide the feeble Human baseline within. He had sacrificed half of his neocortex for the chance to see x-rays and taste the shapes hiding in cell membranes, he had butchered one body to become a fleeting tenant of many. Pieces of him hid in the sensors and manipulators that lined the scrambler's cages; I might have gleaned vital cues from every piece of equipment in the subdrum if I'd ever thought to look. Cunningham was a topological jigsaw like everyone else, but half his pieces were hidden in machinery. My model was incomplete.

I don't think he ever aspired to such a state. Looking back, I see radiant self-loathing on every remembered surface. But there in the waning years of the twenty-first century, the only alternative he could see was the life of a parasite. Cunningham merely chose the lesser evil.

Now, even that was denied him. Sarasti's orders had severed him from his own sensorium. He no longer felt the data in his gut; he had to interpret it, step by laborious step, through screens and graphs that reduced perception to flat empty shorthand. Here was a system traumatized by multiple amputations. Here was a system with its eyes and ears and tongue cut out, forced to stumble and feel its way around things it had once inhabited, right down in the bone. Suddenly there was nowhere else to hide, and all those far-flung pieces of Robert Cunningham tumbled back into his flesh where I could see them at last.

It had been my mistake, all along. I'd been so focused on modelling other systems that I'd forgotten about the one doing the modelling. Bad eyes are only one bane of clear vision: bad assumptions can be just as blinding, and it wasn't enough to imagine I was Robert Cunningham.

I had to imagine I was Siri Keeton as well.

* * *

Of course, that only raises another question. If my guess about Cunningham was right, why did my tricks work on Isaac Szpindel? He was every bit as discontinuous as his replacement.

I didn't think about it much at the time. Szpindel was gone but the thing that had killed him was still there, hanging right off the bow, a vast swelling enigma that might choose to squash us at any instant. I was more than a little preoccupied.

Now, though—far too late to do anything about it—I think I might know the answer.

Maybe my tricks didn't work on Isaac either, not really. Maybe he saw through my manipulations as easily as Cunningham did. But maybe he just didn't care. Maybe I could read him because he let me. Which would mean— I can't find another explanation that fits— that he just liked me, regardless.

I think that might have made him a friend.

"If I can but make the words awake the feeling"

— Ian Anderson, Stand Up

Night shift. Not a creature was stirring.

Not in Theseus, anyway. The Gang hid in their tent. The transient lurked weightless and silent below the surface. Bates was in the bridge— she more or less lived up there now, vigilant and conscientious, nested in camera angles and tactical overlays. There was nowhere she could turn without seeing some aspect of the cipher off our starboard bow. She did what good she could, for the good it would do.

The drum turned quietly, lights dimmed in deference to a diel cycle that a hundred years of tweaks and retrofits hadn't been able to weed from the genes. I sat alone in the galley, squinting from the inside of a system whose outlines grew increasingly hazy, trying to compile my latest—how had Isaac put it? — postcard to posterity. Cunningham worked upside-down on the other side of the world.

Except Cunningham wasn't working. He hadn't even moved for at least four minutes. I'd assumed he was reciting the Kaddish for Szpindel—ConSensus said he'd be doing it twice daily for the next year, if we lived that long—but now, leaning to see around the spinal bundles in the core, I could read his surfaces as clearly as if I'd been sitting beside him. He wasn't bored, or distracted, or even deep in thought.

Robert Cunningham was petrified.

I stood and paced the drum. Ceiling turned into wall; wall into floor. I was close enough to hear his incessant soft muttering, a single indistinct syllable repeated over and over; then I was close enough to hear what he was saying—

"fuck fuck fuck fuck…"

— and still Cunningham didn't move, although I'd made no attempt to mask my approach.

Finally, when I was almost at his shoulder, he fell silent.

"You're blind," he said without turning. "Did you know that?"

"I didn't."

"You. Me. Everyone." He interlocked his fingers and clenched as if in prayer, hard enough to whiten the knuckles. Only then did I notice: no cigarette.