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Peter Watts 236 Blindsight
cycle that a hundred years of tweaks and retrofits hadn't been able
to weed from the genes. I sat alone in the galley, squinting from
the inside of a system whose outlines grew increasingly hazy,
trying to compile my latest—how had Isaac put it— postcard to
posterity. Cunningham worked upside-down on the other side of
the world.
Except Cunningham wasn't working. He hadn't even moved for
at least four minutes. I'd assumed he was reciting the Kaddish for
Szpindel—ConSensus said he'd be doing it twice daily for the next
year, if we lived that long—but now, leaning to see around the
spinal bundles in the core, I could read his surfaces as clearly as if
I'd been sitting beside him. He wasn't bored, or distracted, or even
deep in thought.
Robert Cunningham was petrified.
I stood and paced the drum. Ceiling turned into wall; wall into
floor. I was close enough to hear his incessant soft muttering, a
single indistinct syllable repeated over and over; then I was close
enough to hear what he was saying—
"fuck fuck fuck fuck..."
—and still Cunningham didn't move, although I'd made no
attempt to mask my approach.
Finally, when I was almost at his shoulder, he fell silent.
"You're blind," he said without turning. "Did you know that"
"I didn't."
"You. Me. Everyone." He interlocked his fingers and clenched
as if in prayer, hard enough to whiten the knuckles. Only then did I
notice: no cigarette.
"Vision's mostly a lie anyway," he continued. "We don't really
see anything except a few hi-res degrees where the eye focuses.
Everything else is just peripheral blur, just— light and motion.
Motion draws the focus. And your eyes jiggle all the time, did you
know that, Keeton Saccades, they're called. Blurs the image, the
movement's way too fast for the brain to integrate so your eye just
—shuts down between pauses. It only grabs these isolated freezeframes,
but your brain edits out the blanks and stitches an — an
illusion of continuity into your head."
He turned to face me. "And you know what's really amazing If