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Peter Watts 131 Blindsight
the mind the sense of being watched, the dread certainty of malign
and alien observers just out of sight. More than once I turned,
expecting to catch one of those phantoms in the open. All I ever
saw was a half-blind grunt floating down the passageway, or a
wide-eyed and jittery crewmate returning my stare. And the walls
of some glistening black lava tube with a hundred embedded eyes,
all snapped shut just the instant before. Our lights pushed the
darkness back perhaps twenty meters in either direction; beyond,
mist and shadows seethed. And the sounds—Rorschach creaked
around us like some ancient wooden hull trapped in pack ice.
Electricity hissed like rattlesnakes.
You tell yourself it's mostly in your head. You remind yourself
it's well-documented, an inevitable consequence of meat and
magnetism brought too close together. High-energy fields release
the ghosts and the grays from your temporal lobe, dredge up
paralyzing dread from the midbrain to saturate the conscious mind.
They fuck with your motor nerves and make even dormant inlays
sing like fine fragile crystal.
Energy artefacts. That's all they are. You repeat that to yourself,
you repeat it so often it loses any pretense of rationality and
devolves into rote incantation, a spell to ward off evil spirits.
They're not real, these whispering voices just outside your helmet,
those half-seen creatures flickering at the edge of vision. They're
tricks of the mind, the same neurological smoke-and-mirrors that
convinced people throughout the ages that they were being haunted
by ghosts, abducted by aliens, hunted by—
—vampires—
—and you wonder whether Sarasti really stayed behind or if he
was here all along, waiting for you...
"Another spike," Bates warned as Tesla and Seiverts surged on
my HUD. "Hang on."
I was installing the Faraday bell. Trying to. It should have been
simple enough; I'd already run the main anchor line down from the
vestibule to the flaccid sack floating in the middle of the
passageway. I was—that's right, something about a spring line.
To, to keep the bell centered. The wall glistened in my headlamp
like wet clay. Satanic runes sparkled in my imagination.