1n1REzE

Peter Watts 292 Blindsight
purple-faced, stiff-limbed— was foaming at the mouth.
"Reactor offline," the Captain reported. Sarasti bounced off the
wall.
He's having a seizure, I realized.
I released the ladder and pushed astern. Theseus swung
lopsidedly around me. Sarasti convulsed in mid-air; clicks and
hisses and choking sounds stuttered from his mouth. His eyes were
so wide they seemed lidless. His pupils were mirror-red pinpoints.
The flesh twitched across his face as though trying to crawl off.
Ahead and behind, battlebots held their position and ignored us.
"Bates!" I yelled up the spine. "We need help!"
Angles, everywhere. Seams on the shield plates. Sharp shadows
and protrusions on the surface of every drone. A two-by-three
matrix of insets, bordered in black, floating over the main
ConSensus display: two big interlinked crosses right in front of
where Sarasti had been hanging.
This can't be happening. He just took his antiEuclideans. I saw
him. Unless...
Someone had spiked Sarasti's drugs.
"Bates!" She should be linked into the grunts, they should have
leapt forward at the first sign of trouble. They should be dragging
my commander to the infirmary by now. They waited stolid and
immobile. I stared at the nearest: "Bates, you there" And then—
in case she wasn't—I spoke to the grunt directly. "Are you
autonomous Do you take verbal orders"
On all sides the robots watched; the Captain just laughed at me,
its voice posing as an alarm.
Infirmary.
I pushed. Sarasti's arms flailed randomly against my head and
shoulders. He tumbled forward and sideways, hit the moving
ConSensus display dead center, bounced away up the spine. I
kicked off in his wake—
—and glimpsed something from the corner of my eye—
—and turned—
—And dead center of ConSensus, Rorschach erupted from Ben's
seething face like a breaching whale. It wasn't just the EMenhance:
the thing was glowing, deep angry red. Enraged, it hurled