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Peter Watts 212 Blindsight
and cooperated, and gave away far more than they thought they
did.
But beneath Szpindel's gruff camaraderie, beneath James's
patient explanations—there was no real respect. How could there
be These people were the bleeding edge, the incandescent apex of
hominid achievement. They were trusted with the fate of the
world. I was just a tattletale for small minds back home. Not even
that much, when home receded too deeply into the distance.
Superfluous mass. Couldn't be helped. No use getting bothered
over it.
Still, Szpindel had only coined commissar half-jokingly.
Cunningham believed it, and didn't laugh. And while I'd
encountered many others like him over the years, those had only
tried to hide themselves from sight. Cunningham was the first who
seemed to succeed.
I tried to build the relationship all the way through training, tried
to find the missing pieces. I watched him working the simulator's
teleops one day, exercising the shiny new interfaces that spread
him through walls and wires. He was practicing his surgical skills
on some hypothetical alien the computer had conjured up to test his
technique. Sensors and jointed teleops sprouted like the legs of an
enormous spider crab from an overhead mount. Spirit-possessed,
they dipped and weaved around some semiplausible holographic
creature. Cunningham's own body merely trembled slightly, a
cigarette jiggling at the corner of its mouth.
I waited for him to take a break. Eventually the tension ebbed
from his shoulders. His vicarious limbs relaxed.
"So." I tapped my temple. "Why'd you do it"
He didn't turn. Above the dissection, sensors swiveled and
stared back like dismembered eyestalks. That was the center of
Cunningham's awareness right now, not this nicotine-stained body
in front of me. Those were his eyes, or his tongue, or whatever
unimaginable bastard-senses he used to parse what the machines
sent him. Those clusters aimed back at me, at us—and if Robert
Cunningham still possessed anything that might be called vision,
he was watching himself from eyes two meters outside his own
skull.