PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 156 Blindsight
Three years later Major Bates was bound for the stars, where she
was heard to say
We're breaking and entering, Siri...
Szpindel was not the first to register doubts. Others had
wondered whether her assignment owed as much to superior
qualifications as it did to the resolution of inconvenient PR. I, of
course, had no opinion one way or the other; but I could see how
she might strike some as a double-edged sword.
When the fate of the world hangs in the balance, you want to
keep an eye on anyone whose career-defining moment involves
consorting with the enemy.
"If you can see it, chances are it doesn't exist."
—Kate Keogh, Grounds for Suicide
Five times we did it. Over five consecutive orbits we threw
ourselves between the monster's jaws, let it chew at us with a
trillion microscopic teeth until Theseus reeled us in and stitched us
back together. We crept through Rorschach's belly in fits and
starts, focusing as best we could on the tasks at hand, trying to
ignore the ghosts that tickled our midbrains. Sometimes the walls
flexed subtly around us. Sometimes we only thought they did.
Sometimes we took refuge in our diving bell while waves of
charge and magnetism spiraled languidly past, like boluses of
ectoplasm coursing down the intestine of some poltergeist god.
Sometimes we got caught in the open. The Gang would
squabble amongst itself, uncertain which persona was which.
Once I fell into a kind of waking paralysis while alien hands
dragged me away down the hall; fortunately other hands brought
me home, and voices that claimed to be real told me I'd made the
whole thing up. Twice Amanda Bates found God, saw the fucker
right there in front of her, knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that
the creator not only existed but spoke to her, and her alone. Both