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Peter Watts 245 Blindsight
He was wrong on both counts. And at least Szpindel had died
knowing that Michelle cared for him.
Chelsea died thinking I just didn't give a shit.
It had been two years or more, and while we still interfaced
occasionally we hadn't met in the flesh since the day she'd left. She
came at me from right out of the Oort, sent an urgent voice
message to my inlays: Cygnus. Please call NOW. It's important.
It was the first time since I'd known her that she'd ever blanked
the optics.
I knew it was important. I knew it was bad, even without
picture. I knew because there was no picture, and I could tell it
was worse than bad from the harmonics in her voice. I could tell it
was lethal.
I found out afterwards that she'd gotten caught in the crossfire.
The Realists had sown a fibrodysplasia variant outside the Boston
catacombs; an easy tweak, a single-point retroviral whose results
served both as an act of terrorism and an ironic commentary on the
frozen paralysis of Heaven's occupants. It rewrote a regulatory
gene controlling ossification on Chromosome 4, and rigged a
metabolic bypass at three loci on 17.
Chelsea started growing a new skeleton. Her joints were
calcifying within fifteen hours of exposure, her ligaments and
tendons within twenty. By then they were starving her at the
cellular level, trying to slow the bug by depriving it of metabolites,
but they could only buy time and not much of it. Twenty-three
hours in, her striated muscles were turning to stone.
I didn't find this out immediately, because I didn't call her back.
I didn't need to know the details. I could tell from her voice that
she was dying. Obviously she wanted to say goodbye.
I couldn't talk to her until I knew how to do that.
I spent hours scouring the noosphere, looking for precedents.
There's no shortage of ways to die; I found millions of case records
dealing with the etiquette. Last words, last vows, instruction
manuals for the soon-to-bereaved. Palliative neuropharm.
Extended and expository death scenes in popular fiction. I went
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