Blindsight

We stuffed the Gang into the tent. Bates moved aside as I dove in after them. Amazing, the way she held it together. Somehow she kept the demons at bay, herded us to shelter like a border collie in a thunderstorm. She was—

She wasn’t following us in. She wasn’t even there. I turned to see her body floating outside the tent, one gloved hand grasping the edge of the flap; but even under all those layers of Kapton and Chromel and polycarbonate, even behind the distorted half-reflections on her faceplate, I could tell that something was missing. All her surfaces had just disappeared.

This couldn’t be Amanda Bates. The thing before me had no more topology than a mannequin.

“Amanda?” The Gang gibbered at my back, softly hysteric.

Szpindel: “What’s happening?”

“I’ll stay out here,” Bates said. She had no affect whatsoever. “I’m dead anyway.”

“Wha—” Szpindel had lots. “You will be, if you don’t—”

“You leave me here,” Bates said. “That’s an order.”

She sealed us in.

* * *

It wasn’t the first time, not for me. I’d had invisible fingers poking through my brain before, stirring up the muck, ripping open the scabs. It was far more intense when Rorschach did it to me, but Chelsea was more—

—precise, I guess you’d say.

Macramé, she called it: glial jumpstarts, cascade effects, the splice and dice of critical ganglia. While I trafficked in the reading of Human architecture, Chelsea changed it — finding the critical nodes and nudging them just so, dropping a pebble into some trickle at the headwaters of memory and watching the ripples build to a great rolling cascade deep in the downstream psyche. She could hotwire happiness in the time it took to fix a sandwich, reconcile you with your whole childhood in the course of a lunch hour or three.

Like so many other domains of human invention, this one had learned to run without her. Human nature was becoming an assembly-line edit, Humanity itself increasingly relegated from Production to product. Still. For me, Chelsea’s skill set recast a strange old world in an entirely new light: the cut-and-paste of minds not for the greater good of some abstract society, but for the simple selfish wants of the individual.

“Let me give you the gift of happiness,” she said.

“I’m already pretty happy.”

“I’ll make you happier. A TAT, on me.”

“Tat?”

“Transient Attitudinal Tweak. I’ve still got privileges at Sax.”

“I’ve been tweaked plenty. Change one more synapse and I might turn into someone else.”

“That’s ridiculous and you know it. Or every experience you had would turn you into a different person.”

I thought about that. “Maybe it does.”

But she wouldn’t let it go, and even the strongest anti-happiness argument was bound to be an uphill proposition; so one afternoon Chelsea fished around in her cupboards and dredged up a hair-net studded with greasy gray washers. The net was a superconducting spiderweb, fine as mist, that mapped the fields of merest thought. The washers were ceramic magnets that bathed the brain in fields of their own. Chelsea’s inlays linked to a base station that played with the interference patterns between the two.

“They used to need a machine the size of a bathroom just to house the magnets.” She laid me back on the couch and stretched the mesh across my skull. “That’s the only outright miracle you get with a portable setup like this. We can find hot spots, and we can even zap ’em if they need zapping, but TMS effects fade after a while. We’ll have to go to a clinic for anything permanent.”

“So we’re fishing for what, exactly? Repressed memories?”

“No such thing.” She grinned in toothy reassurance. “There are only memories we choose to ignore, or kinda think around, if you know what I mean.”

“I thought this was the gift of happiness. Why—”

She laid a fingertip across my lips. “Believe it or not, Cyggers, people sometimes choose to ignore even good memories. Like, say, if they enjoyed something they didn’t think they should. Or—” she kissed my forehead — “if they don’t think they deserve to be happy.”

“So we’re going for—”

“Potluck. You can never tell ’til you get a bite. Close your eyes.”

A soft hum started up somewhere between my ears. Chelsea’s voice led me on through the darkness. “Now keep in mind, memories aren’t historical archives. They’re — improvisations, really. A lot of the stuff you associate with a particular event might be factually wrong, no matter how clearly you remember it. The brain has a funny habit of building composites. Inserting details after the fact. But that’s not to say your memories aren’t true, okay? They’re an honest reflection of how you saw the world, and every one of them went into shaping how you see it. But they’re not photographs. More like impressionist paintings. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Ah,” she said. “There’s something.”

“What?”

“Functional cluster. Getting a lot of low-level use but not enough to intrude into conscious awareness. Let’s just see what happens when we—”