PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 35 Blindsight
wouldn't even have the childish satisfaction of holding my breath
and refusing to play—the will to resist is no less mechanical than
the urge to breathe. Both can be subverted with the right
neurochemical keys.
"You killed my Kurzweill contract," I realized.
"That's the least of what we did."
We let the vacuum between us speak for a while.
"If I could go back and undo the—the thing that made you what
you are," Dad said after a while, "I would. In a second."
"Yeah."
"I have to go. I just wanted to give you the heads-up."
"Yeah. Thanks."
"I love you, son."
Where are you? Are you coming back?
"Thanks," I said again. "That's good to know."
This is what my father could not unmake. This is what I am:
I am the bridge between the bleeding edge and the dead center.
I stand between the Wizard of Oz and the man behind the curtain.
I am the curtain.
I am not an entirely new breed. My roots reach back to the dawn
of civilization but those precursors served a different function, a
less honorable one. They only greased the wheels of social
stability; they would sugarcoat unpleasant truths, or inflate
imaginary bogeymen for political expedience. They were vital
enough in their way. Not even the most heavily-armed police state
can exert brute force on all of its citizens all of the time. Meme
management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of
perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives.
There have always been those tasked with the rotation of
informational topologies, but throughout most of history they had
little to do with increasing its clarity.
The new Millennium changed all that. We've surpassed
ourselves now, we're exploring terrain beyond the limits of merely
human understanding. Sometimes its contours, even in
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