PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 213 Blindsight
"Do what, exactly?" he said at last. "The enhancements?"
Enhancements. As though he'd upgraded his wardrobe instead
of ripping out his senses and grafting new ones into the wounds.
I nodded.
"It's vital to keep current," he said. "If you don't reconfigure you
can't retrain. If you don’t retrain you're obsolete inside a month,
and then you're not much good for anything except Heaven or
dictation."
I ignored the jibe. "Pretty radical transformation, though."
"Not these days."
"Didn't it change you?"
His body dragged on the cigarette. Targeted ventilation sucked
away the smoke before it reached me. "That's the whole point."
"Surely you were affected personally, though. Surely—"
"Ah." He nodded; at the far end of shared motor nerves, teleops
jiggled in sympathy. "Change the eyes that look at the world,
change the me does the looking?"
"Something like that."
Now he was watching me with fleshly eyes. Across the
membrane those snakes and eyestalks returned to their work on the
virtual carcass, as if deciding they'd wasted enough time on
pointless distractions. I wondered which body he was in now.
"I'm surprised you'd have to ask," the meat one said. "Doesn't my
body language tell you everything? Aren't jargonauts supposed to
read minds?"
He was right, of course. I wasn't interested in Cunningham's
words; those were just the carrier wave. He couldn't hear the real
conversation we were having. All his angles and surfaces spoke
volumes, and although their voices were strangely fuzzed with
feedback and distortion I knew I'd be able to understand them
eventually. I only had to keep him talking.
But Jukka Sarasti chose that moment to wander past and
surgically trash my best-laid plans.
"Siri's best in his field," he remarked. "But not when it gets too
close to home."