1n1REzE

Peter Watts 301 Blindsight
"Species used to go extinct. Now they go on hiatus."
—Deborah MacLennan, Tables of our Reconstruction
"You poor guy," Chelsea said as we went our separate ways.
"Sometimes I don't think you'll ever be lonely." At the time I
wondered why she sounded so sad.
Now, I only wish she'd been right.
I know this hasn't been a seamless narrative. I've had to shatter
the story and string its fragments out along a death lasting decades.
I live for only an hour of every ten thousand now, you see. I wish
I didn't have to. If only I could sleep the whole way back, avoid
the agony of these brief time-lapsed resurrections.
If only I wouldn't die in my sleep if I tried. But living bodies
glitter with a lifetime's accumulation of embedded radioisotopes,
brilliant little shards that degrade cellular machinery at the
molecular level. It's not usually a problem. Living cells repair the
damage as fast as it occurs. But my undead ones let those errors
accumulate over time, and the journey home takes so much longer
than the trip out: I lie in stasis and corrode. So the onboard kickstarts
me every now and then to give my flesh the chance to stitch
itself back together.
Occasionally it talks to me, recites system stats, updates me on
any chatter from back home. Mostly, though, it leaves me alone
with my thoughts and the machinery ticking away where my left
hemisphere used to be. So I talk to myself, dictate history and
opinion from real hemisphere to synthetic one: bright brief
moments of awareness, long years of oblivious decay between.
Maybe the whole exercise is pointless from the start, maybe no
one's even listening.
It doesn't matter. This is what I do.
So there you have it: a memoir told from meat to machinery. A
tale told to myself, for lack of someone else to take an interest.
Anyone with half a brain could tell it.
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