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Peter Watts 159 Blindsight
the scaffolding. They seemed solid enough from the corner of my
eye but any spot I focused on faded to shadow, to a dark
translucent stain against the background. They were so very
fragile, these ghosts. The mere act of observation drilled holes
through them.
Szpindel had rattled off dementias like raindrops. I went to
ConSensus for enlightenment and found a whole other self buried
below the limbic system, below the hindbrain, below even the
cerebellum. It lived in the brain stem and it was older than the
vertebrates themselves. It was self-contained: it heard and saw
and felt, independent of all those other parts layered overtop like
evolutionary afterthoughts. It dwelt on nothing but its own
survival. It had no time for planning or abstract analysis, spared
effort for only the most rudimentary sensory processing. But it was
fast, and it was dedicated, and it could react to threats in a fraction
of the time it took its smarter roommates to even become aware of
them.
And even when it couldn't—when the obstinate, unyielding
neocortex refused to let it off the leash—still it tried to pass on
what it saw, and Isaac Szpindel experienced an ineffable sense of
where to reach. In a way, he had a stripped-down version of the
Gang in his head. Everyone did.
I looked further and found God Itself in the meat of the brain,
found the static that had sent Bates into rapture and Michelle into
convulsions. I tracked Gray Syndrome to its headwaters in the
temporal lobe. I heard voices ranting in the brains of
schizophrenics. I found cortical infarcts that inspired people to
reject their own limbs, imagined the magnetic fields that must have
acted in their stead when Cruncher tried to dismember himself.
And off in some half-forgotten pesthole of Twentieth-century case
studies—filed under Cotard's Syndrome—I found Amanda Bates
and others of her kind, their brains torqued into denial of the very
self. "I used to have a heart," one of them said listlessly from the
archives. "Now I have something that beats in its place." Another
demanded to be buried, because his corpse was already stinking.
There was more, a whole catalog of finely-tuned dysfunctions
that Rorschach had not yet inflicted on us. Somnambulism.