1n1REzE

Peter Watts 140 Blindsight
trembled in the helmet. "That's crazy, eh"
"Define crazy."
The Gang floated quietly, cheek-to-jowl behind Szpindel in the
cramped enclosure. Cruncher had stopped obsessing about the leg
as soon as we'd sealed up. Or maybe he'd simply been overridden;
I thought I saw facets of Susan in the twitching of those thick
gloved fingers.
Szpindel's breath echoed second-hand over the link. "If Bates is
dead, then so are we."
"Maybe not. We wait out the spike, we get out of here.
Besides," I added, "she wasn't dead. She only said she was."
"Fuck," Szpindel reached out and pressed his gloved palm
against the skin of the tent. He felt back and forth along the fabric.
"Someone did put out a transducer—"
"Eight o'clock," I said. "About a meter." Szpindel's hand came
to rest across the wall from the pod. My HUD flooded with
second-hand numbers, vibrated down his arm and relayed to our
suits.
Still five Tesla out there. Falling, though. The tent expanded
around us as if breathing, shrank back in the next second as some
transient low-pressure front moved past.
"When did your sight come back" I wondered.
"Soon as we came inside."
"Sooner. You saw the battery."
"Fumbled it." He grunted. "Not that I'm much less of a spaz
even when I'm not blind, eh Bates! You out there"
"You reached for it. You almost caught it. That wasn't blind
chance."
"Not blind chance. Blindsight. Amanda Respond, please."
"Blindsight"
"Nothing wrong with the receptors," he said distractedly. "Brain
processes the image but it can't access it. Brain stem takes over."
"Your brainstem can see but you can't"
"Something like that. Shut up and let me—Amanda, can you
hear me"
"...No..."
Not from anyone in the tent, that voice. It had shivered down