1n1REzE

Peter Watts 174 Blindsight
extruding from the cut surface and writhing slowly into the
darkness. "It's—huh," Bates said. "Triggered by the pressure drop,
I guess. That's one way to seal a breach."
Two weeks after we'd wounded it, Rorschach had begun to heal
itself.
Apogee behind us now. All downhill from here. Theseus began
the long drop back into enemy territory.
"Doesn't use septa," Sarasti said.
"My genes done gone and tricked my brain
By making fucking feel so great
That's how the little creeps attain
Their plan to fuckin' replicate
But brain's got tricks itself, you see
To get the bang but not the bite
I got this here vasectomy
My genes can fuck themselves tonight."
—The r-selectors, Trunclade
First-person sex—real sex, as Chelsea insisted on calling it—
was an acquired taste: jagged breathing, the raw slap and stink of
sweaty skin full of pores and blemishes, a whole other person with
a whole other set of demands and dislikes. There was definite
animal appeal, no doubt about it. This was, after all, how we'd
done it for millions of years. But this, this third-world carnality
had always carried an element of struggle, of asynchronous
patterns in conflict. There was no convergence here. There was
only the rhythm of bodies in collision, a struggle for dominance,
each trying to force the other into synch.
Chelsea regarded it as love in its purest form. I came to think of
it as hand-to-hand combat. Before, whether fucking creations from
my own menu or slip-on skins from someone else's, I had always