1n1REzE

Peter Watts 143 Blindsight
"There was a pattern there," James insisted. "In the fields. In my
head. Rorschach was talking. Maybe not to us, but it was talking."
"Good." Bates pushed herself back to let us pass. "Maybe now
we can finally learn to talk back."
"Maybe we can learn to listen," James said.
We fled like frightened children with brave faces. We left a base
camp behind: Jack, still miraculously functional in its vestibule; a
tunnel into the haunted mansion; forlorn magnetometers left to die
in the faint hope they might not. Crude pyronometers and
thermographs, antique radiation-proof devices that measured the
world through the flex and stretch of metal tabs and etched their
findings on rolls of plastic. Glow-globes and diving bells and
guide ropes strung one to another. We left it all behind, and
promised to return in thirty-six hours if we lived so long.
Inside each of us, infinitesimal lacerations were turning our cells
to mush. Plasma membranes sprang countless leaks.
Overwhelmed repair enzymes clung desperately to shredded genes
and barely delayed the inevitable. Anxious to avoid the rush,
patches of my intestinal lining began flaking away before the rest
of the body had a chance to die.
By the time we docked with Theseus both Michelle and I were
feeling nauseous. (The rest of the Gang, oddly, was not; I had no
idea how that was possible.) The others would be presenting the
same symptoms within minutes. Without intervention we would
all be vomiting our guts out for the following two days. Then the
body would pretend to recover; for perhaps a week we would feel
no pain and have no future. We would walk and talk and move
like any living thing, and perhaps convince ourselves that we were
immortal after all.
Then we would collapse into ourselves, rotted from the inside
out. We would bleed from our eyes and mouths and assholes, and
if any God was merciful we would die before splitting open like
rotten fruit.
But of course Theseus, our redeemer, would save us from such a
*