PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 50 Blindsight
indirect, creeping from under seats and the edges of tables; the
chromatics, this afternoon at least, were defiantly longwave. It was
a place where baselines could pretend to see in infrared.
So I pretended for a moment, assessing the woman in the corner
booth: gangly and glorious, half-a-dozen ethnicities coexisting
peacefully with no single voice dominant. Something glowed on
her cheek, a faint emerald staccato against the ambient red shift.
Her hair floated in a diffuse ebony cloud about her head; as I
neared I caught occasional glints of metal within that nimbus, the
threads of a static generator purveying the illusion of
weightlessness. In normal light her blood-red skin would
doubtless shift down to the fashionable butterscotch of the
unrepentant mongrel.
She was attractive, but so was everyone in this kind of light; the
longer the wavelength, the softer the focus. There's a reason
fuckcubbies don't come with fluorescent lights.
You will not fall for this, I told myself.
"Chelsea," she said. Her little finger rested on one of the table's
inset trickle-chargers. "Former neuroaestheticist, presently a
parasite on the Body Economic thanks to genes and machines on
the cutting edge."
The glow on her cheek flapped bright lazy wings: a tattoo, a
bioluminescent butterfly.
"Siri," I said. "Freelance synthesist, indentured servant to the
genes and machines that turned you into a parasite."
She waved at the empty seat. I took it, assessing the system
before me, sizing up the best approach for a fast yet diplomatic
disconnect. The set of her shoulders told me she enjoyed
lightscapes, and was embarrassed to admit it. Monahan was her
favorite artist. She thought herself a natural girl because she'd
stayed on chemical libidinals all these years, even though a
synaptic edit would have been simpler. She revelled in her own
inconsistency: a woman whose professional machinery edited
thought itself, yet mistrustful of the dehumanising impact of
telephones. Innately affectionate, and innately afraid of unreturned
affection, and indomitably unwilling to let any of that stop her.
She liked what she saw when looked at me. She was a little