1n1REzE

Peter Watts 134 Blindsight
stuck to me..."
Almost there. "Cruncher, listen," Bates snapped. "Are you with
m—"
"Get it off!"
We stuffed the Gang into the tent. Bates moved aside as I dove
in after them. Amazing, the way she held it together. Somehow
she kept the demons at bay, herded us to shelter like a border collie
in a thunderstorm. She was—
She wasn't following us in. She wasn't even there. I turned to
see her body floating outside the tent, one gloved hand grasping the
edge of the flap; but even under all those layers of Kapton and
Chromel and polycarbonate, even behind the distorted halfreflections
on her faceplate, I could tell that something was
missing. All her surfaces had just disappeared.
This couldn't be Amanda Bates. The thing before me had no
more topology than a mannequin.
"Amanda" The Gang gibbered at my back, softly hysteric.
Szpindel: "What's happening"
"I'll stay out here," Bates said. She had no affect whatsoever.
"I'm dead anyway."
"Wha—" Szpindel had lots. "You will be, if you don't—"
"You leave me here," Bates said. "That's an order."
She sealed us in.
It wasn't the first time, not for me. I'd had invisible fingers
poking through my brain before, stirring up the muck, ripping open
the scabs. It was far more intense when Rorschach did it to me,
but Chelsea was more—
—precise, I guess you'd say.
Macramé, she called it: glial jumpstarts, cascade effects, the
splice and dice of critical ganglia. While I trafficked in the reading
of Human architecture, Chelsea changed it—finding the critical
nodes and nudging them just so, dropping a pebble into some
trickle at the headwaters of memory and watching the ripples build
to a great rolling cascade deep in the downstream psyche. She
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