1n1REzE

Peter Watts 284 Blindsight
a long, deep breath, and turned back to her study of slingshot
mechanics. "Rorschach wouldn't have tried so hard to scare us off
in the first place if we couldn't touch it, right"
I swallowed. "Right."
"So there's still a chance." She nodded to herself. "There's still a
chance."
The demon arranged his pieces for the end game. He didn't have
many left. The soldier he placed in the bridge. He packed obsolete
linguists and diplomats back in their coffin, out of sight and out of
the way.
He called the jargonaut to his quarters— and although it would
be the first time I'd seen him since the attack, his summons carried
not the slightest trace of doubt that I would obey. I did. I came on
command, and saw that he had surrounded himself with faces.
Every last one of them was screaming.
There was no sound. The disembodied holograms floated in
silent tiers around the bubble, each contorted into a different
expression of pain. They were being tortured, these faces; half a
dozen real ethnicities and twice as many hypothetical ones, skin
tones ranging from charcoal to albino, brows high and slanted,
noses splayed or pointed, jaws receding or prognathous. Sarasti
had called the entire hominid tree into existence around him,
astonishing in their range of features, terrifying in their consistency
of expression.
A sea of tortured faces, rotating in slow orbits around my
vampire commander.
"My God, what is this"
"Statistics." Sarasti seemed focused on a flayed Asian child.
"Rorschach's growth allometry over a two-week period."
"They're faces…"
He nodded, turning his attention to a woman with no eyes.
"Skull diameter scales to total mass. Mandible length scales to EM
transparency at one Angstrom. One hundred thirteen facial
dimensions, each presenting a different variable. Principle-
*