Rifters 4 - Blindsight (21 page)

By the time I reached him Szpindel had unfolded the couch into a half-cot. "Lie down."

I did. "I wasn't talking about back in
Rorschach
, you know. I meant
here
. I saw something right now. When I woke up."

"Raise your left hand," he said. Then: "
Just
your left, eh?"

I lowered my right, winced at the pinprick. "That's a bit primitive."

He eyed the blood-filled cuvette between his thumb and forefinger: a shivering ruby teardrop the size of a fingernail. "Wet sample's still best for some things."

"Aren't the pods supposed to do everything?"

Szpindel nodded. "Call it a quality-control test. Keep the ship on its toes." He dropped the sample onto the nearest countertop. The teardrop flattened and burst; the surface drank my blood as if parched. Szpindel smacked his lips. "Elevated cholinesterase inhibitors in the ret. Yum."

For all I knew, my blood results actually
did
taste good to the man. Szpindel didn't just read results; he
felt
them, smelled and saw and
experienced
each datum like drops of citrus on the tongue. The whole BioMed subdrum was but a part of the Szpindel prosthesis: an extended body with dozens of different sensory modes, forced to talk to a brain that knew only five.

No wonder he'd bonded with Michelle. He was almost synesthesiac himself.

"You spent a bit longer in there than the rest of us," he remarked.

"That's significant?"

A jerking shrug. "Maybe your organs got a bit more cooked than ours. Maybe you just got a delicate constitution. Your pod would've caught anything—imminent, so I figure—ah."

"What?"

"Some cells along your brainpan going into overdrive. More in your bladder and kidney."

"Tumors?"

"What you expect?
Rorschach
's no rejuve spa."

"But the pod—"

Szpindel grimaced; his idea of a reassuring smile. "Repairs ninety-nine point nine percent of the damage, sure. By the time you get to the last zero-point-one, you're into diminishing returns. These're
small
, commissar. Chances are your own body'll take care of 'em. If not, we know where they live."

"The ones in my brain. Could they be causing—"

"Not a chance." He chewed on his lower lip for a moment. "Course, cancer's not all that thing did to us."

"What I saw. Up in the crypt. It had these multijointed arms from a central mass. Big as a person, maybe."

Szpindel nodded. "Get used to it."

"The others are seeing these things?"

"I doubt it. Everyone has a different take, like—" his twitching face conveyed
Dare I say it?
"—
Rorschach
blots."

"I was expecting hallucinations in the field," I admitted, "but up here?"

"TMS effects—" Szpindel snapped his fingers— "they're
sticky
, eh? Neurons get kicked into one state, take a while to come unstuck. You never got a TAT? Well-adjusted boy like you?"

"Once or twice," I said. "Maybe."

"Same principle."

"So I'm going to keep seeing this stuff."

"Party line is they fade over time. Week or two you're back to normal. But out here, with
that
thing..." He shrugged. "Too many variables. Not the least of which is, I assume we'll keep going
back
until Sarasti says otherwise."

"But they're basically magnetic effects."

"Probably. Although I'm not betting on anything where
that
fucker's concerned."

"Could something else be causing them?" I asked. "Something on
this
ship?"

"Like what?'

"I don't know. Leakage in
Theseus
' magnetic shielding, maybe."

"Not normally. Course, we've all got little implanted networks in our heads, eh? And you've got a whole hemisphere of prosthetics up there, who knows what kind of
side
-
effects
those might let you in for. Why?
Rorschach
not a good enough reason for you?"

I saw them before,
I might have said.

And then Szpindel would say
Oh, when? Where?

And maybe I'd reply
When I was spying on your private life
, and any chance of
noninvasive observation
would be flushed down to the atoms.

"It's probably nothing. I've just been—jumpy lately. Thought I saw something weird in the spinal bundle, back before we landed on
Rorschach
. Just for a second, you know, and it disappeared as soon as I focused on it."

"Multijointed arms with a central mass?"

"God no. Just a flicker, really. If it was anything at all, it was probably just Amanda's rubber ball floating around up there."

"Probably." Szpindel seemed almost amused. "Couldn't hurt to check for leakage in the shielding, though. Just in case. Not like we need something
else
making us see things, eh?"

I shook my head at remembered nightmares. "How are the others?"

"Gang's fine, if a bit disappointed. Haven't seen the Major." He shrugged. "Maybe she's avoiding me."

"It hit her pretty hard."

"No worse than the rest of us, really. She might not even remember it."

"How—how could she possibly believe she didn't even
exist
?"

Szpindel shook his head. "Didn't believe it.
Knew
it. For a fact."

"But how—"

"Charge gauge on your car, right? Sometimes the contacts corrode. Readout freezes on empty, so you think it's empty. What else you supposed to think? Not like you can go in and count the electrons."

"You're saying the brain's got some kind of
existence gauge
?"

"Brain's got all
kinds
of gauges. You can
know
you're blind even when you're not; you can
know
you can see, even when you're blind. And yeah, you can
know
you don't exist even when you do. It's a long list, commissar. Cotard's, Anton's, Damascus Disease. Just for starters."

He hadn't said
blindsight
.

"What was it like?" I asked.

"Like?" Although he knew exactly what I meant.

"Did your arm— move by itself? When it reached for that battery?"

"Oh. Nah. You're still in control, you just—you get a feeling, is all. A
sense
of where to reach. One part of the brain playing charades with another, eh?" He gestured at the couch. "Get off. Seen enough of your ugly guts for now. And send up Bates if you can find where she's hiding. Probably back at Fab building a bigger army."

The misgivings glinted off him like sunlight. "You have a problem with her," I said.

He started to deny it, then remembered who he was talking to. "Not personally. Just—human node running mechanical infantry. Electronic reflexes slaved to meat reflexes. You tell me where the weak spot is."

"Down in
Rorschach,
I'd have to say
all
the links are pretty weak."

"Not talking about
Rorschach
," Szpindel said. "We go there. What stops them from coming here?"

"Them."

"Maybe they haven't arrived yet," he admitted. "But when they do, I'm betting we'll be going up against something bigger than anaerobic microbes." When I didn't answer he continued, his voice lowered. "And anyway, Mission Control didn't know shit about
Rorschach
. They thought they were sending us some place where drones could do all the heavy lifting. But they just hate not being in command, eh? Can't admit the grunts're smarter than the generals. So our defenses get compromised for political appearances—not like
that's
any kinda news—and I'm no jarhead but it strikes me as real bad strategy."

I remembered Amanda Bates, midwifing the birth of her troops.
I'm more of a safety precaution....

"Amanda—" I began.

"Like Mandy fine. Nice mammal. But if we're cruising into a combat situation I don't want my ass covered by some network held back by its weakest link."

"If you're going to be surrounded by a swarm of killer robots, maybe—"

"Yeah, people keep saying that. Can't trust the machines. Luddites love to go on about computer malfunctions, and how many accidental wars we might have prevented because a human had the final say. But funny thing, commissar; nobody talks about how many intentional wars got
started
for the same reason. You're still writing those postcards to posterity?"

I nodded, and didn't wince inwardly. It was just Szpindel.

"Well, feel free to stick this conversation in your next one. For all the good it'll do."

*

Imagine you are a prisoner of war.

You've got to admit you saw it coming. You've been crashing tech and seeding biosols for a solid eighteen months; that's a good run by anyone's standards. Realist saboteurs do not, as a rule, enjoy long careers. Everyone gets caught eventually.

It wasn't always thus. There was a day you might have even hoped for a peaceful retirement. But then they brought the vampires back from the Pleistocene and Great Grieving Ganga did
that
ever turn the balance of power upside down. Those fuckers are always ten steps ahead. It only makes sense; after all, hunting people is what bloodsuckers evolved to
do
.

There's this line from an early pop-dyn textbook, really old, maybe even TwenCen. It's something of a mantra—maybe
prayer
would be a better word—among those in your profession.
Predators run for their dinner
, it goes.
Prey run for their lives.
The moral is supposed to be that on average, the hunted escape the hunters because they're more motivated.

Maybe that was true when it all just came down to who ran faster. Doesn't seem to hold when the strategy involves tactical foresight and double-reverse mind fucks, though. The vampires win every time.

And now you're caught, and while it may have been vampires that set the trap, it was regular turncoat baseline humans who pulled the trigger. For six hours now you've been geckoed to the wall of some unnamed unlisted underground detention facility, watching as some of those selfsame
humans
played games with your boyfriend and co-conspirator. These are not your average games. They involve pliers, and glowing wires, and body parts that were not designed to detach. You wish, by now, that your lover were dead, like the two others in your cell whose parts are scattered about the room. But they're not letting that happen. They're having too much fun.

That's what it all comes down to. This is not an interrogation; there are less invasive ways to get more reliable answers. These are simply a few more sadistic thugs with Authority, killing time and other things, and you can only cry and squeeze your eyes tight and whimper like an animal even though they haven't laid a hand on you yet. You can only wish they hadn't saved you for last, because you know what that means.

But suddenly your tormentors stop in mid-game and cock their heads as if listening to some collective inner voice. Presumably it tells them to take you off the wall, bring you into the next room, and sit you down at one of two gel-padded chairs on opposite sides of a smart desk, because this is what they do—far more gently than you'd expect—before retiring. You can also assume that whoever has given these instructions is both powerful and displeased, because all the arrogant sadistic cockiness has drained from their faces in the space of a heartbeat.

You sit and wait. The table glows with soft, cryptic symbols that would be of no earthly interest to you even if you could understand them, even if they contained the very secret of the vampires themselves. Some small part of you wonders if this latest development might be cause for hope; the rest of you doesn't dare believe it. You hate yourself for caring about your own survival when chunks of your friends and allies are still warm on the other side of the wall.

A stocky Amerind woman appears in the room with you, clad in nondescript military weave. Her hair is buzzed short, her throat veined with the faint mesh of a sub-q antennae. Your brain stem sees that she is ten meters tall, even though some impertinent gelatinous overlay insists that she is of only average height.

The name tag on her left breast says
Bates
. You see no sign of rank.

Bates
extracts a weapon from its sheath on her thigh. You flinch, but she does not point it at you. She sets it on the desk, easily within your reach, and sits across from you.

A microwave pistol. Fully charged, unlocked. On its lowest setting it causes sunburn and nausea. On its highest it flash-boils brains in the skull. At any setting between, it inflicts pain and injury in increments as fine as your imagination.

Your imagination has been retooled for great sensitivity along such scales. You stare numbly at the gun, trying to figure the trick.

"Two of your friends are dead," Bates says, as though you haven't just watched them die. "Irrecoverably so."

Irrecoverably dead. Good one.

"We could reconstitute the bodies, but the brain damage..." Bates clears her throat as if uncomfortable, as if embarrassed. It's a surprisingly human gesture for a monster. "We're trying to save the other one. No promises.

"We need information," she says, cutting to the chase.

Of course. What came before was psychology, softening-up. Bates is the good cop.

"I've got nothing to tell you," you manage. It's ten percent defiance, ninety percent deduction: they wouldn't have been able to catch you in the first place unless they already knew everything.

"Then we need an arrangement," Bates says. "We need to come to some kind of accommodation."

She has to be kidding.

Your incredulity must be showing. Bates addresses it: "I'm not completely unsympathetic. My gut doesn't much like the idea of swapping reality for simulation, and it doesn't buy that what-is-truth spin the Body Economic sells to get around it. Maybe there's reason to be scared. Not my problem, not my job, just my opinion and it could be wrong. But if we kill each other in the meantime, we don't find out either way. It's unproductive."