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Peter Watts 234 Blindsight
extent; Bates and her drones, Sarasti and his limbic link—even the
ConSensus inlays in our heads diffused us a bit, spread us just
slightly beyond the confines of our own bodies. But Bates only ran
her drones; she never inhabited them. The Gang of Four may have
run multiple systems on a single motherboard, but each had its own
distinct topology and they only surfaced one at a time. And Sarasti
—
Well, Sarasti was a whole different story, as it turned out.
Cunningham didn't just operate his remotes; he escaped into
them, wore them like a secret identity to hide the feeble Human
baseline within. He had sacrificed half of his neocortex for the
chance to see x-rays and taste the shapes hiding in cell membranes,
he had butchered one body to become a fleeting tenant of many.
Pieces of him hid in the sensors and manipulators that lined the
scrambler's cages; I might have gleaned vital cues from every
piece of equipment in the subdrum if I'd ever thought to look.
Cunningham was a topological jigsaw like everyone else, but half
his pieces were hidden in machinery. My model was incomplete.
I don't think he ever aspired to such a state. Looking back, I see
radiant self-loathing on every remembered surface. But there in
the waning years of the twenty-first century, the only alternative he
could see was the life of a parasite. Cunningham merely chose the
lesser evil.
Now, even that was denied him. Sarasti's orders had severed
him from his own sensorium. He no longer felt the data in his gut;
he had to interpret it, step by laborious step, through screens and
graphs that reduced perception to flat empty shorthand. Here was a
system traumatized by multiple amputations. Here was a system
with its eyes and ears and tongue cut out, forced to stumble and
feel its way around things it had once inhabited, right down in the
bone. Suddenly there was nowhere else to hide, and all those farflung
pieces of Robert Cunningham tumbled back into his flesh
where I could see them at last.
It had been my mistake, all along. I'd been so focused on
modelling other systems that I'd forgotten about the one doing the
modelling. Bad eyes are only one bane of clear vision: bad
assumptions can be just as blinding, and it wasn't enough to