PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 221 Blindsight
I glanced at Susan. "Are you going to do this all yourself?"
Her eyes were bright and wet as she killed the current. Clench's
icon dimmed. Stretch's remained dormant.
I cleared my throat. "I mean—"
"Who else is going to do this, Siri? Jukka? You?"
"The rest of the Gang. Sascha could—"
"Sascha?" She stared at me. "Siri, I created them. Do you think
I did that so I could hide behind them when—so I could force them
to do things like this?" She shook her head. "I'm not bringing
them out. Not for this. I wouldn't do that to my worst enemy."
She turned away from me. There were drugs she could have
taken, neuroinhibitors to wash away the guilt, short-circuit it right
down in the molecules. Sarasti had offered them up as if he were
tempting some solitary messiah in the desert. James had refused
him, and would not say why.
"Repeat," she said.
The current flickered on, then off.
"Repeat," she said again.
Not a twitch.
I pointed. "I see it," she said.
Clench had pressed the tip of one arm against the touchpad. The
icon there glowed like a candle flame.
Six and a half minutes later they'd graduated from yellow
squares to time-lapsed four-dimensional polyhedrons. It took them
as long to distinguish between two twenty-six-faceted shifting
solids—differing by one facet in a single frame—as it took them to
tell the difference between a yellow square and a red triangle.
Intricate patterns played across their surfaces the whole time,
dynamic needlepoint mosaics flickering almost too fast to see.
"Fuck," James whispered.
"Could be splinter skills." Cunningham had joined us in
ConSensus, although his body remained halfway around BioMed.
"Splinter skills," she repeated dully.
"Savantism. Hyperperformance at one kind of calculation
*