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Peter Watts 85 Blindsight
"The pathology's classic."
"What pathology" I asked.
"It doesn't mean anything except that they're different from the
Human baseline," James insisted. "Which is not something
anyone here can look down their nose about."
I tried again: "What pathology"
James shook her head. Szpindel filled me in: "There's a
syndrome you might have heard about, eh Fast talkers, no
conscience, tend to malapropism and self-contradiction. No
emotional affect."
"We're not talking about human beings here," James said again,
softly.
"But if we were," Szpindel added, "we might call Rorschach a
clinical sociopath."
Sarasti had said nothing during this entire exchange. Now, with
the word hanging out in the open, I noticed that nobody else would
look at him.
We all knew that Jukka Sarasti was a sociopath, of course. Most
of us just didn't mention it in polite company.
Szpindel was never that polite. Or maybe it was just that he
seemed to almost understand Sarasti; he could look behind the
monster and regard the organism, no less a product of natural
selection for all the human flesh it had devoured in eons past. That
perspective calmed him, somehow. He could watch Sarasti
watching him, and not flinch.
"I feel sorry for the poor son of a bitch," he said once, back in
training.
Some would have thought that absurd. This man, so massively
interfaced with machinery that his own motor skills had degraded
for want of proper care and feeding; this man who heard x-rays and
saw in shades of ultrasound, so corrupted by retrofits he could no
longer even feel his own fingertips without assistance—this man
could pity anyone else, let alone an infra-eyed predator built to
murder without the slightest twitch of remorse
*