PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 248 Blindsight
billion souls with no off switch and no down time until the very
chassis wore out.
Why, we could go to the stars.
It hadn't worked out that way. Even if we'd outgrown the need to
stay quiet and hidden during the dark hours—the only predators
left were those we'd brought back ourselves—the brain still needed
time apart from the world outside. Experiences had to be
catalogued and filed, mid-term memories promoted to long-term
ones, free radicals swept from their hiding places among the
dendrites. We had only reduced the need for sleep, not eliminated
it—and that incompressible residue of downtime seemed barely
able to contain the dreams and phantoms left behind. They
squirmed in my head like creatures in a draining tidal pool.
I woke.
I was alone, weightless, in the center of my tent. I could have
sworn something had tapped me on the back. Leftover
hallucination, I thought. A lingering aftereffect of the haunted
mansion, going for one last bit of gooseflesh en route to extinction.
But it happened again. I bumped against the keelward curve of
the bubble, bumped again, head and shoulder-blades against fabric;
the rest of me came after, moving gently but irresistibly—
Down.
Theseus was accelerating.
No. Wrong direction. Theseus was rolling, like a harpooned
whale at the surface of the sea. Turning her belly to the stars.
I brought up ConSensus and threw a Nav-tac summary against
the wall. A luminous point erupted from the outline of our ship,
crawled away from Big Ben leaving a bright filament etched in its
wake. I watched until the numbers read 15G.
"Siri. My quarters, please."
I jumped. It sounded as though the vampire had been at my very
shoulder.
"Coming."
An ampsat relay, climbing at long last to an intercept with the
Icarus antimatter stream. Somewhere behind the call of duty, my
heart sank.
We weren't running, Robert Cunningham's fondest wishes