Blindsight

“Jesus.” A tremor sent spittle sailing from the corner of Szpindel’s mouth. “Let me talk to Mi—”

“I’ve discussed it with the rest of the gang, Isaac. We’re all agreed.”

“All agreed? You don’t have a working majority in there, Suze. Just because you cut your brain into pieces doesn’t mean they each get a vote.”

“I don’t see why not. We’re each at least as sentient as you are.”

“They’re all you. Just partitioned.”

“You don’t seem to have any trouble treating Michelle as a separate individual.”

“Michelle’s — I mean, yes, you’re all very different facets, but there’s only one original. Your alters—”

“Don’t call us that.” Sascha erupted with a voice cold as LOX. “Ever.”

Szpindel tried to pull back. “I didn’t mean — you know I didn’t—”

But Sascha was gone. “What are you saying?” said the softer voice in her wake. “Do you think I’m just, I’m just Mom, play-acting? You think when we’re together you’re alone with her?”

“Michelle,” Szpindel said miserably. “No. What I think—”

“Doesn’t matter,” Sarasti said. “We don’t vote here.”

He floated above us, visored and unreadable in the center of the drum. None of us had seen him arrive. He turned slowly on his axis, keeping us in view as we rotated around him.

“Prepping Scylla. Amanda needs two untethered grunts with precautionary armament. Cams from one to a million Angstroms, shielded tympanics, no autonomous circuitry. Platelet boosters, dimenhydrinate and potassium iodide for everyone by 1350.”

“Everyone?” Bates asked.

Sarasti nodded. “Window opens four hours twenty-three.” He turned back down the spine.

“Not me,” I said.

Sarasti paused.

“I don’t participate in field ops,” I reminded him.

“Now you do.”

“I’m a synthesist.” He knew that. Of course he knew, everyone did: you can’t observe the system unless you stay outside the system.

“On Earth you’re a synthesist,” he said. “In the Kuiper you’re a synthesist. Here you’re mass. Do what you’re told.”

He disappeared.

“Welcome to the big picture,” Bates said softly.

I looked at her as the rest of the group broke up. “You know I—”

“We’re a long way out, Siri. Can’t wait fourteen months for feedback from your bosses, and you know it.”

She leapt from a standing start, arced smoothly through holograms into the weightless core of the drum. But then she stopped herself, as if distracted by some sudden insight. She grabbed a spinal conduit and swung back to face me.

“You shouldn’t sell yourself short,” she said. “Or Sarasti either. You’re an observer, right? It’s a safe bet there’s going to be a lot down there worth observing.”

“Thanks,” I said. But I already knew why Sarasti was sending me into Rorschach, and there was more to it than observation.

Three valuable agents in harm’s way. A decoy bought one-in-four odds that an enemy would aim somewhere else.

“The Lord will take control of you. You will dance and shout and become a different person.”

—1 Samuel 10:6

“We were probably fractured during most of our evolution,” James once told me, back when we were all still getting acquainted. She tapped her temple. “There’s a lot of room up here; a modern brain can run dozens of sentient cores without getting too crowded. And parallel multitasking has obvious survival advantages.”

I nodded. “Ten heads are better than one.”

“Our integration may have actually occurred quite recently. Some experts think we can still revert to multiples under the right circumstances.”

“Well, of course. You’re living proof.”

She shook their head. “I’m not talking about physical partitioning. We’re the state of the art, certainly, but theoretically surgery isn’t even necessary. Simple stress could do something like it, if it was strong enough. If it happened early in childhood.”

“No kidding.”

“Well, in theory,” James admitted, and changed into Sascha who said, “Bullshit in theory. There’s documented cases as recently as fifty years ago.”

“Really.” I resisted the temptation to look it up on my inlays; the unfocused eyes can be a giveaway. “I didn’t know.”

“Well it’s not like anyone talks about it now. People were fucking barbarians about multicores back then — called it a disorder, treated it like some kind of disease. And their idea of a cure was to keep one of the cores and murder all the others. Not that they called it murder, of course. They called it integration or some shit. That’s what people did back then: created other people to suck up all the abuse and torture, then got rid of them when they weren’t needed any more.”

It hadn’t been the tone most of us were looking for at an ice-breaking party. James had gently eased back into the driver’s seat and the conversation had steered closer to community standards.