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Peter Watts 246 Blindsight
through it all, assigned a dozen front-line filters to separate heat
from light.
By the time she called again the news was out: acute Golem
outbreak lancing like a white-hot needle through the heart of
Boston. Containment measures holding. Heaven secure. Modest
casualties expected. Names of victims withheld pending
notification of kin.
I still didn't know the principles, the rules: all I had were
examples. Last wills and testaments; the negotiation of jumpers
with their would-be rescuers; diaries recovered from imploded
submarines or lunar crash sites. Recorded memoirs and deathbed
confessions rattling into flatline. Black box transcripts of doomed
spaceships and falling beanstalks, ending in fire and static. All of
it relevant. None of it useful; none of it her.
She called again, and still the optics were blank, and still I didn't
answer.
But the last time she called, she didn't spare me the view.
They'd made her as comfortable as possible. The gelpad
conformed to every twisted limb, every erupting spur of bone.
They would not have left her in any pain.
Her neck had torqued down and to the side as it petrified, left her
staring at the twisted claw that had once been her right hand. Her
knuckles were the size of walnuts. Plates and ribbons of ectopic
bone distended the skin of her arms and shoulders, buried her ribs
in a fibrous mat of calcified flesh.
Movement was its own worst enemy. Golem punished even the
slightest twitch, provoked the growth of fresh bone along any
joints and surfaces conspiring to motion. Each hinge and socket
had its own nonrenewable ration of flexibility, carved in stone;
every movement depleted the account. The body seized
incrementally. By the time she let me look at her, Chelsea had
almost exhausted her degrees of freedom.
"Cyg," she slurred. "Know you're there."
Her jaw was locked half-open; her tongue must have stiffened
with every word. She did not look at the camera. She could not
look at the camera.
"Guess I know why you're not answ'ring. I'll try'nt—try not to