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Peter Watts 237 Blindsight
something only moves during the gaps, your brain just—ignores it.
It's invisible."
I glanced at his workspace. The usual splitscreen glowed to one
side—realtime images of the scramblers in their pens—but
Histology, ten thousand times larger than life, took center stage.
The paradoxical neural architecture of Stretch & Clench glistened
on the main window, flensed and labeled and overlaid by circuit
diagrams a dozen layers thick. A dense, annotated forest of alien
trunks and brambles. It looked a little like Rorschach itself.
I couldn't parse any of it.
"Are you listening, Keeton Do you know what I'm saying"
"You've figured out why I couldn't—you're saying these things
can somehow tell when our eyes are offline, and..."
I didn't finish. It just didn't seem possible.
Cunningham shook his head. Something that sounded
disturbingly like a giggle escaped his mouth. "I'm saying these
things can see your nerves firing from across the room, and
integrate that into a crypsis strategy, and then send motor
commands to act on that strategy, and then send other commands
to stop the motion before your eyes come back online. All in the
time it would take a mammalian nerve impulse to make it halfway
from your shoulder to your elbow. These things are fast, Keeton.
Way faster than we could have guessed even from that high-speed
whisper line they were using. They're bloody superconductors."
It took a conscious effort to keep from frowning. "Is that even
possible"
"Every nerve impulse generates an electromagnetic field. That
makes it detectable."
"But Rorschach's EM fields are so—I mean, reading the firing of
a single optic nerve through all that interference—"
"It's not interference. The fields are part of them, remember
That's probably how they do it."
"So they couldn't do that here."
"You're not listening. The trap you set wouldn't have caught
anything like that, not unless it wanted to be caught. We didn't
grab specimens at all. We grabbed spies."
Stretch and Clench floated in splitscreen before us, arms swaying