PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 123 Blindsight
later download; none had returned. We'd tried everything.
"We can go in ourselves," James said.
Almost everything.
"Right," Szpindel replied in a voice that couldn't mean anything
but wrong.
"It's the only way to learn anything useful."
"Yeah. Like how many seconds it would take your brain to turn
into synchrotron soup."
"Our suits can be shielded."
"Oh, you mean like Mandy's drones?"
"I'd really rather you didn't call me that," Bates remarked.
"The point is, Rorschach kills you whether you're meat or
mechanical."
"My point is that it kills meat differently," James replied. "It
takes longer."
Szpindel shook his head. "You'd be good as dead in fifty
minutes. Even shielded. Even in the so-called cool zones."
"And completely asymptomatic for three hours or more. And
even after that it would take days for us to actually die and we'd be
back here long before then, and the ship could patch us up just like
that. We even know that much, Isaac, it's right there in ConSensus.
And if we know it, you know it. So we shouldn't even be having
this argument."
"That's your solution? We saturate ourselves with radiation
every thirty hours and then I get to cut out the tumors and stitch
everyone's cells back together?"
"The pods are automatic. You wouldn't have to lift a finger."
"Not to mention the number those magnetic fields would do on
your brain. We'd be hallucinating from the moment we—"
"Faraday the suits."
"Ah, so we go in deaf dumb and blind. Good idea."
"We can let light pass. Infrared—"
"It's all EM, Suze. Even if we blacked out our helmets
completely and used a camera feed, we'd get leakage where the
wire went through."
"Some, yes. But it'd be better than—"
"Jesus." A tremor sent spittle sailing from the corner of