1n1REzE

Peter Watts 126 Blindsight
advantages."
I nodded. "Ten heads are better than one."
"Our integration may have actually occurred quite recently.
Some experts think we can still revert to multiples under the right
circumstances."
"Well, of course. You're living proof."
She shook their head. "I'm not talking about physical
partitioning. We're the state of the art, certainly, but theoretically
surgery isn't even necessary. Simple stress could do something like
it, if it was strong enough. If it happened early in childhood."
"No kidding."
"Well, in theory," James admitted, and changed into Sascha who
said, "Bullshit in theory. There's documented cases as recently as
fifty years ago."
"Really." I resisted the temptation to look it up on my inlays; the
unfocused eyes can be a giveaway. "I didn't know."
"Well it's not like anyone talks about it now. People were
fucking barbarians about multicores back then—called it a
disorder, treated it like some kind of disease. And their idea of a
cure was to keep one of the cores and murder all the others. Not
that they called it murder, of course. They called it integration or
some shit. That's what people did back then: created other people
to suck up all the abuse and torture, then got rid of them when they
weren't needed any more."
It hadn't been the tone most of us were looking for at an icebreaking
party. James had gently eased back into the driver's seat
and the conversation had steered closer to community standards.
But I hadn't heard any of the Gang use alter to describe each
other, then or since. It had seemed innocuous enough when
Szpindel had said it. I wondered why they'd taken such offence—
and now, floating alone in my tent with a few pre-op minutes to
kill, there was no one to see my eyes glaze.
Alter carried baggage over a century old, ConSensus told me.
Sascha was right; there'd been a time when MCC was MPD, a
Disorder rather than a Complex, and it had never been induced
deliberately. According to the experts of that time, multiple
personalities arose spontaneously from unimaginable cauldrons of