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Peter Watts 127 Blindsight
abuse—fragmentary personae offered up to suffer rapes and
beatings while the child behind took to some unknowable
sanctuary in the folds of the brain. It was both survival strategy
and ritual self-sacrifice: powerless souls hacking themselves to
pieces, offering up quivering chunks of self in the desperate hope
that the vengeful gods called Mom or Dad might not be insatiable.
None of it had been real, as it turned out. Or at least, none of it
had been confirmed. The experts of the day had been little more
than witch doctors dancing through improvised rituals:
meandering free-form interviews full of leading questions and
nonverbal cues, scavenger hunts through regurgitated childhoods.
Sometimes a shot of lithium or haloperidol when the beads and
rattles didn't work. The technology to map minds was barely off
the ground; the technology to edit them was years away. So the
therapists and psychiatrists poked at their victims and invented
names for things they didn't understand, and argued over the
shrines of Freud and Klein and the old Astrologers. Doing their
very best to sound like practitioners of Science.
Inevitably, it was Science that turned them all into road kill;
MPD was a half-forgotten fad even before the advent of synaptic
rewiring. But alter was a word from that time, and its resonance
had persisted. Among those who remembered the tale, alter was
codespeak for betrayal and human sacrifice. Alter meant cannon
fodder.
Imagining the topology of the Gang's coexisting souls, I could
see why Sascha embraced the mythology. I could see why Susan
let her. After all, there was nothing implausible about the concept;
the Gang's very existence proved that much. And when you've
been peeled off from a pre-existing entity, sculpted from
nonexistence straight into adulthood—a mere fragment of
personhood, without even a full-time body to call your own—you
can be forgiven a certain amount of anger. Sure you're all equal,
all in it together. Sure, no persona is better than any other. Susan's
still the only one with a surname.
Better to direct that resentment at old grudges, real or imagined;
less problematic, at least, than taking it out on someone who shares
the same flesh.