1n1REzE

Peter Watts 260 Blindsight
nowhere, saw antimatter's quantum blueprints stream down into
Theseus's buffers. Mass and specs combined in Fab, topped up our
reserves, forged the tools that Jukka Sarasti needed for his master
plan, whatever that was.
Maybe he'd lose. Maybe Rorschach would kill us all, but not
before it had played with Sarasti the way Sarasti had played with
me. That would almost make it worthwhile. Or maybe Bates'
mutiny would come first, and succeed. Maybe she would slay the
monster, and commandeer the ship, and take us all to safety.
But then I remembered: the universe was closed, and so very
small. There was really nowhere else to go.
I put my ear to feeds throughout the ship. I heard routine
instructions from the predator, murmured conversations among the
prey. I took in only sound, never sight; a video feed would have
spilled light into my tent, left me naked and exposed. So I listened
in the darkness as the others spoke among themselves. It didn't
happen often any more. Perhaps too much had been said already,
perhaps there was nothing left to do but mind the countdown.
Sometimes hours would pass with no more than a cough or a grunt.
When they did speak, they never mentioned my name. Only
once did I hear any of them even hint at my existence.
That was Cunningham, talking to Sascha about zombies. I heard
them in the galley over breakfast, unusually talkative. Sascha
hadn't been let out for a while, and was making up for lost time.
Cunningham let her, for reasons of his own. Maybe his fears had
been soothed somehow, maybe Sarasti had revealed his master
plan. Or maybe Cunningham simply craved distraction from the
imminence of the enemy.
"It doesn't bug you" Sascha was saying. "Thinking that your
mind, the very thing that makes you you, is nothing but some kind
of parasite"
"Forget about minds," he told her. "Say you've got a device
designed to monitor—oh, cosmic rays, say. What happens when
you turn its sensor around so it's not pointing at the sky anymore,
but at its own guts" He answered himself before she could: "It
does what it's built to. It measures cosmic rays, even though it's
not looking at them any more. It parses its own circuitry in terms