PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 259 Blindsight
"Grab a chair," Cunningham said from his seat in the Commons.
"It's golden oldies time."
There was something about her.
"I'm sick of that song," Bates said. "We've played it to death."
Even now, my tools chipped and battered, my perceptions barely
more than baseline, I could see the change. This torture of
prisoners, this assault upon crew, had crossed a line in her head.
The others wouldn't see it. The lid on her affect was tight as a
boilerplate. But even through the dim shadows of my window the
topology glowed around her like neon.
Amanda Bates was no longer merely considering a change of
command. Now it was only a matter of when.
The universe was closed and concentric.
My tiny refuge lay in its center. Outside that shell was another,
ruled by a monster, patrolled by his lackeys. Beyond that was
another still, containing something even more monstrous and
incomprehensible, something that might soon devour us all.
There was nothing else. Earth was a vague hypothesis, irrelevant
to this pocket cosmos. I saw no place into which it might fit.
I stayed in the center of the universe for a long time, hiding. I
kept the lights off. I didn't eat. I crept from my tent only to piss or
shit in the cramped head down at Fab, and only when the spine was
deserted. A field of painful blisters rose across my flash-burned
back, as densely packed as kernels on a corncob. The slightest
abrasion tore them open.
Nobody tapped at my door, nobody called my name through
ConSensus. I wouldn't have answered if they had. Maybe they
knew that, somehow. Maybe they kept their distance out of respect
for my privacy and my disgrace.
Maybe they just didn't give a shit.
I peeked outside now and then, kept an eye on Tactical. I saw
Scylla and Charybdis climb into the accretion belt and return
towing captured reaction mass in a great distended mesh between
them. I watched our ampsat reach its destination in the middle of
*