1n1REzE

Peter Watts 233 Blindsight
shouting frustration. His extended phenotype had been amputated;
once the very ghost in the machine, now he was just another guy
punching buttons, and—
—and suddenly, something clicked. Cunningham's facades
swirled to translucency before my eyes. Suddenly, I could almost
imagine him.
He got it right the second time. The tip of his machine shot out
like a striking snake and darted back again, almost too fast to see.
Waves of color flushed from Stretch's injury like ripples chased
across still water by a falling stone.
Cunningham must have thought he saw something in my face.
"It helps if you try not to think of them as people," he said. And
for the very first time I could read the subtext, as clear and sharp as
broken glass:
Of course, you don't think of anyone that way...
Cunningham didn't like to be played.
No one does. But most people don't think that's what I'm doing.
They don't know how much their bodies betray when they close
their mouths. When they speak aloud, it's because they want to
confide; when they don't, they think they're keeping their opinions
to themselves. I watch them so closely, customize each word so
that no system ever feels used— and yet for some reason, that
didn't work with Robert Cunningham.
I think I was modeling the wrong system.
Imagine you are a synthesist. You deal in the behavior of
systems at their surfaces, infer the machinery beneath from its
reflections above. That is the secret of your success: you
understand the system by understanding the boundaries that
contain it.
Now imagine you encounter someone who has ripped a hole in
those boundaries and bled beyond them.
Robert Cunningham's flesh could not contain him. His duties
pulled him beyond the meat sack; here in the Oort, his topology
rambled all over the ship. That was true of all of us, to some
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