1n1REzE

Peter Watts 52 Blindsight
basic principle. We just turned art into science."
"Yeah, but when" The recent past, certainly. Sometime within
the past twenty years or so—
Her voice grew suddenly quiet. "Robert told me about your
operation. Some kind of viral epilepsy, right Back when you
were just a tyke."
I'd never explicitly asked him to keep it a secret. What was the
difference anyway I'd made a full recovery.
Besides, Pag still thought that had happened to someone else.
"I don't know your specifics," Chelsea continued gently. "But
from the sound of it, noninvasive techniques wouldn't have helped.
I'm sure they only did what they had to."
I tried to suppress the thought, and couldn't: I like this woman.
I felt something then, a strange, unfamiliar sensation that
somehow loosened my vertebrae. The chair felt subtly, indefinably
more comfortable at my back.
"Anyway." My silence had thrown her off-stride. "Haven't done
it much since the bottom dropped out of the market. But it did
leave me with a fondness for face-to-face encounters, if you know
what I mean."
"Yeah. Pag said you took your sex in the first-person."
She nodded. "I'm very old-school. You okay with that"
I wasn't certain. I was a virgin in the real world, one of the few
things I still had in common with the rest of civilized society. "In
principle, I guess. It just seems—a lot of effort for not as much
payoff, you know"
"Don't I." She smiled. "Real fuckbuddies aren't airbrushed. Got
all these needs and demands that you can't edit out. How can you
blame anyone for saying no thanks to all that, now there's a choice
You gotta wonder how our parents ever stayed together
sometimes."
You gotta wonder why they did. I felt myself sinking deeper into
the chair, wondered again at this strange new sensation. Chelsea
had said the dopamine was tweaked. That was probably it.
She leaned forward, not coy, not coquettish, not breaking eye
contact for an instant in the longwave gloom. I could smell the
lemony tang of pheromones and synthetics mingling on her skin.