Blindsight

I tried to build the relationship all the way through training, tried to find the missing pieces. I watched him working the simulator’s teleops one day, exercising the shiny new interfaces that spread him through walls and wires. He was practicing his surgical skills on some hypothetical alien the computer had conjured up to test his technique. Sensors and jointed teleops sprouted like the legs of an enormous spider crab from an overhead mount. Spirit-possessed, they dipped and weaved around some semiplausible holographic creature. Cunningham’s own body merely trembled slightly, a cigarette jiggling at the corner of its mouth.

I waited for him to take a break. Eventually the tension ebbed from his shoulders. His vicarious limbs relaxed.

“So.” I tapped my temple. “Why’d you do it?”

He didn’t turn. Above the dissection, sensors swiveled and stared back like dismembered eyestalks. That was the center of Cunningham’s awareness right now, not this nicotine-stained body in front of me. Those were his eyes, or his tongue, or whatever unimaginable bastard-senses he used to parse what the machines sent him. Those clusters aimed back at me, at us — and if Robert Cunningham still possessed anything that might be called vision, he was watching himself from eyes two meters outside his own skull.

“Do what, exactly?” he said at last. “The enhancements?”

Enhancements. As though he’d upgraded his wardrobe instead of ripping out his senses and grafting new ones into the wounds.

I nodded.

“It’s vital to keep current,” he said. “If you don’t reconfigure you can’t retrain. If you don’t retrain you’re obsolete inside a month, and then you’re not much good for anything except Heaven or dictation.”

I ignored the jibe. “Pretty radical transformation, though.”

“Not these days.”

“Didn’t it change you?”

His body dragged on the cigarette. Targeted ventilation sucked away the smoke before it reached me. “That’s the whole point.”

“Surely you were affected personally, though. Surely—”

“Ah.” He nodded; at the far end of shared motor nerves, teleops jiggled in sympathy. “Change the eyes that look at the world, change the me does the looking?”

“Something like that.”

Now he was watching me with fleshly eyes. Across the membrane those snakes and eyestalks returned to their work on the virtual carcass, as if deciding they’d wasted enough time on pointless distractions. I wondered which body he was in now.

“I’m surprised you’d have to ask,” the meat one said. “Doesn’t my body language tell you everything? Aren’t jargonauts supposed to read minds?”

He was right, of course. I wasn’t interested in Cunningham’s words; those were just the carrier wave. He couldn’t hear the real conversation we were having. All his angles and surfaces spoke volumes, and although their voices were strangely fuzzed with feedback and distortion I knew I’d be able to understand them eventually. I only had to keep him talking.

But Jukka Sarasti chose that moment to wander past and surgically trash my best-laid plans.

“Siri’s best in his field,” he remarked. “But not when it gets too close to home.”

Why should man expect his prayer for mercy to be heard by What is above him when he shows no mercy to what is under him?

—Pierre Troubetzkoy

“The thing is,” Chelsea said, “this whole first-person thing takes effort. You have to care enough to try, you know? I’ve been working my ass off on this relationship, I’ve been working so hard, but you just don’t seem to care…”

She thought she was breaking the news. She thought I hadn’t seen it coming, because I hadn’t said anything. I’d probably seen it before she had. I hadn’t said anything because I’d been scared of giving her an opening.

I felt sick to my stomach.

“I care about you,” I said.

“As much as you could care about anything,” she admitted. “But you — I mean, sometimes you’re fine, Cygnus, sometimes you’re wonderful to be around but whenever anything gets the least bit intense you just go away and leave this, this battle computer running your body and I just can’t deal with it any more…”

I stared at the butterfly on the back of her hand. Its wings flexed and folded, lazy and iridescent. I wondered how many of those tattoos she had; I’d seen five of them on different body parts, albeit only one at a time. I thought about asking her, but this didn’t seem like the right moment.

“You can be so — so brutal sometimes,” she was saying. “I know you don’t mean to be, but… I don’t know. Maybe I’m your pressure-release valve, or something. Maybe you have to submerge yourself so much on the job that everything just, just builds up and you need some kind of punching bag. Maybe that’s why you say the things you do.”

She was waiting for me to say something now. “I’ve been honest,” I said.