The Island - Peter Watts

Peter Watts 7 The Island
Who the hell's been raising him all this time? Whose problem is
this?
Not mine.
"Call me in ten months," I say. "I'm going back to bed."
It's as though he never left. I climb back into the bridge and
there he is, staring into tac. DHF428 fills the tank, a swollen red
orb that turns my son's face into a devil mask.
He spares me the briefest glance, eyes wide, fingers twitching as
if electrified. "Vons don't see it."
I'm still a bit groggy from the thaw. "See wh—"
"The sequence!" His voice borders on panic. He sways back and
forth, shifting his weight from foot to foot.
"Show me."
Tac splits down the middle. Cloned dwarves burn before me
now, each perhaps twice the size of my fist. On the left, an Eri'seye
view: DHF428 stutters as it did before, as it presumably has
these past ten months. On the right, a compound-eye composite:
an interferometry grid built by a myriad precisely-spaced vons,
their rudimentary eyes layered and parallaxed into something
approaching high resolution. Contrast on both sides has been
conveniently cranked up to highlight the dwarf's endless winking
for merely human eyes.
Except it's only winking from the left side of the display. On the
right, 428 glowers steady as a standard candle.
"Chimp: any chance the grid just isn't sensitive enough to see
the fluctuations?"
"No."
"Huh." I try to think of some reason it would lie about this.
"Doesn’t make sense," my son complains.
"It does," I murmur, "if it's not the sun that's flickering."
"But is flickering—" He sucks his teeth. "You can see it fl—
wait, you mean something behind the vons? Between, between
them and us?"
"Mmmm."
*