PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 153 Blindsight
flinch, but she does not point it at you. She sets it on the desk,
easily within your reach, and sits across from you.
A microwave pistol. Fully charged, unlocked. On its lowest
setting it causes sunburn and nausea. On its highest it flash-boils
brains in the skull. At any setting between, it inflicts pain and
injury in increments as fine as your imagination.
Your imagination has been retooled for great sensitivity along
such scales. You stare numbly at the gun, trying to figure the trick.
"Two of your friends are dead," Bates says, as though you
haven't just watched them die. "Irrecoverably so."
Irrecoverably dead. Good one.
"We could reconstitute the bodies, but the brain damage..."
Bates clears her throat as if uncomfortable, as if embarrassed. It's a
surprisingly human gesture for a monster. "We're trying to save
the other one. No promises.
"We need information," she says, cutting to the chase.
Of course. What came before was psychology, softening-up.
Bates is the good cop.
"I've got nothing to tell you," you manage. It's ten percent
defiance, ninety percent deduction: they wouldn't have been able to
catch you in the first place unless they already knew everything.
"Then we need an arrangement," Bates says. "We need to come
to some kind of accommodation."
She has to be kidding.
Your incredulity must be showing. Bates addresses it: "I'm not
completely unsympathetic. My gut doesn't much like the idea of
swapping reality for simulation, and it doesn't buy that what-istruth
spin the Body Economic sells to get around it. Maybe there's
reason to be scared. Not my problem, not my job, just my opinion
and it could be wrong. But if we kill each other in the meantime,
we don't find out either way. It's unproductive."
You see the dismembered bodies of your friends. You see pieces
on the floor, still a little bit alive, and this cunt has the nerve to talk
about productivity?
"We didn't start it," you say.
"I don't know and I don't care. Like I said, it's not my job."
Bates jerks a thumb over her shoulder at a door in the wall behind