PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 144 Blindsight
fate. We filed from the shuttle into a great balloon that Sarasti had
erected to capture our personal effects; we shed our contaminated
space suits and clothing and emerged naked into the spine. We
passed single-file through the drum, the Flying Dead in formation.
Jukka Sarasti—discreetly distant on the turning floor—leapt up in
our wake and disappeared aft, to feed our radioactive cast-offs into
the decompiler.
Into the crypt. Our coffins lay open across the rear bulkhead.
We sank gratefully and wordlessly into their embrace. Bates
coughed blood as the lids came down.
My bones hummed as the Captain began to shut me off. I went
to sleep a dead man. I had only theory and the assurances of fellow
machinery that I would ever be born again.
Keeton, come forth.
I woke up ravenous. Faint voices drifted forward from the drum.
I floated in my pod for a few moments, eyes closed, savoring
absences: no pain, no nausea. No terrifying subliminal sense of
one's own body sloughing incrementally to mush. Weakness, and
hunger; otherwise I felt fine.
I opened my eyes.
Something like an arm. Grey and glistening, far too— too
attenuate to be human. No hand at its tip. Too many joints, a limb
broken in a dozen places. It extended from a body barely visible
over the lip of the pod, a suggestion of dark bulk and other limbs in
disjoint motion. It hovered motionless before me, as if startled in
the midst of some shameful act.
By the time I had breath enough to cry out, it had whipped back
out of sight.
I erupted from the pod, eyes everywhere. Now they saw nothing:
an empty crypt, a naked note-taker. The mirrored bulkhead
reflected vacant pods to either side. I called up ConSensus: all
systems nominal.
It didn't reflect, I remembered. The mirror didn't show it.
I headed aft, heart still pounding. The drum opened around me,
*