PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 66 Blindsight
Or suppose they throw you a party, Chelsea had replied.
Then you don't know whether they're doing it sincerely, or if
your earlier interaction just guilted them into observing an
occasion they'd rather have ignored. But if you don't tell anyone,
and nobody commemorates the event, there's no reason to feel
badly because after all, nobody knew. And if someone does buy
you a drink then you know it's sincere because nobody would go to
all the trouble of finding out when your birthday is— and then
celebrating it—if they didn't honestly like you.
Of course, the Gang was more up to speed on such things. I
didn't have to explain it verbally: I could just grab a piece of
ConSensus and plot out the payoff matrix, Tell/Don't Tell along
the columns, Celebrated/Not Celebrated along the rows, the
unassailable black-and-white logic of cost and benefit in the
squares themselves. The math was irrefutable: the one winning
strategy was concealment. Only fools revealed their birthdays.
Sascha looked at me. "You ever show this to anyone else?"
"Sure. My girlfriend."
Her eyebrows lifted. "You had a girlfriend? A real one?"
I nodded. "Once."
"I mean after you showed this to her."
"Well, yes."
"Uh huh." Her eyes wandered back to the payoff matrix. "Just
curious, Siri. How did she react?"
"She didn't, really. Not at first. Then—well, she laughed."
"Better woman than me." Sascha shook her head. "I'd have
dumped you on the spot."
My nightly constitutional up the spine: glorious dreamy flight
along a single degree of freedom. I sailed through hatches and
corridors, threw my arms wide and spun in the gentle cyclonic
breezes of the drum. Bates ran circles around me, bouncing her
ball against bins and bulkheads, stretching to field each curving
rebound in the torqued pseudograv. The toy ricocheted off a
stairwell and out of reach as I passed; the major's curses followed
*