Rifters 4 - Blindsight (22 page)

You see the dismembered bodies of your friends. You see pieces on the floor, still a little bit alive, and this cunt has the nerve to talk about
productivity
?

"We didn't start it," you say.

"I don't know and I don't care. Like I said, it's not my job." Bates jerks a thumb over her shoulder at a door in the wall behind her, the door she must have entered through. "In there," she says, "are the ones who killed your friends. They've been disarmed. When you go through that door the room will go offline and remain unmonitored for a period of sixty seconds. Nobody besides yourself will ever hold you accountable for whatever happens in there during that time."

It's a trick. It has to be.

"What do you have to lose?" Bates wonders. "We can already do anything we want to you. It's not like we need you to give us an excuse."

Hesitantly, you take the gun. Bates doesn't stop you.

She's right, you realize. You have absolutely nothing to lose. You stand and, suddenly fearless, point the weapon at her face. "Why go in there? I can kill you right
here
."

She shrugs. "You could try. Waste of an opportunity, if you ask me."

"So I go in there, and I come out in sixty seconds, and then what?"

"Then we talk."

"We just—"

"Think of it as a gesture of good faith," she says. "Restitution, even."

The door opens at your approach, closes in your wake. And there they are, all four of them, spread up across the wall like a chorus line of Christs on crosses. There's no gleam in those eyes
now
. There's only a bright animal terror and the reflection of turned tables. Two of the Christs stain their pants when you look them in the eye.

What's left? Maybe fifty seconds?

It's not a lot. You could have done so much more with just a little extra time. But it's enough, and you don't want to impose on the good graces of this Bates woman.

Because she may at last be someone you can deal with.

*

Under other circumstances, Lieutenant Amanda Bates would have been court-martialed and executed within the month. No matter that the four who'd died had been guilty of multiple counts of rape, torture, and homicide; that's just what people
did
in wartime. It's what they'd always done. There was nothing
polite
about war, no honorable code beyond the chain of command and the circling of wagons. Deal with indiscretions if you must; punish the guilty if you have to, for appearance if nothing else. But for God's sake close the doors first. Never give your enemy the satisfaction of seeing discord in the ranks, show them nothing but unity and flinty-eyed resolve. There may be murderers and rapists in our midst, but by God they're
our
murderers and rapists.

You certainly don't give right of revenge to some terrorist twat with over a hundred friendly scalps on her belt.

Still, it was hard to argue with results: a negotiated ceasefire with the third-largest Realist franchise in the hemisphere. An immediate forty-six percent decline in terrorist activities throughout the affected territories. The unconditional cancellation of several in-progress campaigns which could have seriously compromised three major catacombs and taken out the Duluth Staging Grounds entirely. All because Lieutenant Amanda Bates, feeling her way through her first field command, had gambled on
empathy
as a military strategy.

It was collaborating with the enemy, it was treason, it was betrayal of the rank and file. Diplomats and politicians were supposed to do those things, not soldiers.

Still. Results.

It was all there in the record: initiative, creativity, a willingness to succeed by whatever means necessary and at whatever cost. Perhaps those inclinations needed to be punished, perhaps only tempered. The debate might have gone on forever if the story hadn't leaked—but it had, and suddenly the generals had a hero on their hands.

Sometime during her court-martial, Bates's death sentence turned into a rehabilitation; the only question was whether it would take place in the stockade or Officer's College. As it turned out, Leavenworth had both; it took her to its bosom and squeezed hard enough to virtually guarantee promotion, if it didn't kill her first. Three years later Major Bates was bound for the stars, where she was heard to say

We're breaking and entering, Siri...

Szpindel was not the first to register doubts. Others had wondered whether her assignment owed as much to superior qualifications as it did to the resolution of inconvenient PR. I, of course, had no opinion one way or the other; but I could see how she might strike some as a double-edged sword.

When the fate of the world hangs in the balance, you want to keep an eye on anyone whose career-defining moment involves consorting with the enemy.

"If you can see it, chances are it doesn't exist."

—
Kate Keogh,
Grounds for Suicide

Five times we did it. Over five consecutive orbits we threw ourselves between the monster's jaws, let it chew at us with a trillion microscopic teeth until
Theseus
reeled us in and stitched us back together. We crept through
Rorschach
's belly in fits and starts, focusing as best we could on the tasks at hand, trying to ignore the ghosts that tickled our midbrains. Sometimes the walls flexed subtly around us. Sometimes we only thought they did. Sometimes we took refuge in our diving bell while waves of charge and magnetism spiraled languidly past, like boluses of ectoplasm coursing down the intestine of some poltergeist god.

Sometimes we got caught in the open. The Gang would squabble amongst itself, uncertain which persona was which. Once I fell into a kind of waking paralysis while alien hands dragged me away down the hall; fortunately other hands brought me home, and voices that claimed to be real told me I'd made the whole thing up. Twice Amanda Bates found God,
saw
the fucker right there in front of her, knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that the creator not only existed but
spoke
to her, and her alone. Both times she lost her faith once we got her into the bell, but it was touch and go for a while; her warrior drones, drunk on power but still under line-of-sight control, staggered from their perimeters and pointed their weapons along bearings too close for comfort.

The grunts died fast. Some barely lasted a single foray; a few died in minutes. The longest-lived were the slowest on the draw, half-blind, thick-witted, every command and response bottlenecked by raw high-frequency sound buzzing across their shielded eardrums. Sometimes we backed them up with others that spoke optically: faster but nervous, and even more vulnerable. Together they guarded against an opposition that had not yet shown its face.

It hardly had to. Our troops fell even in the absence of enemy fire.

We worked through it all, through fits and hallucinations and occasional convulsions. We tried to watch each others' backs while magnetic tendrils tugged our inner ears and made us seasick. Sometimes we vomited into our helmets; then we'd just hang on, white-faced, sucking sour air through clenched teeth while the recyclers filtered chunks and blobs from our headspace. And we'd give silent thanks for the small mercy of nonstick, static-repellent faceplates.

It rapidly became obvious that my presence served as more than cannon fodder. It didn't matter that I lacked the Gang's linguistic skills or Szpindel's expertise in biology; I was another set of hands, in a place where anyone could be laid out at a moment's notice. The more people Sarasti kept in the field, the greater the odds that at least one of them would be halfway functional at any given moment. Even so, we were in barely any condition to accomplish anything. Every incursion was an exercise in reckless endangerment.

We did it anyway. It was that or go home.

The work proceeded in infinitesimal increments, hamstrung on every front. The Gang wasn't finding any evidence of signage or speech to decipher, but the gross mechanics of this thing were easy enough to observe. Sometimes
Rorschach
partitioned itself, extruded ridges around its passageways like the cartilaginous hoops encircling a human trachea. Over hours some of them might develop into contracting irises, into complete septa, lazy as warm candle wax. We seemed to be witnessing the growth of the structure in discrete segments.
Rorschach
grew mainly from the tips of its thorns; we'd made our incursion hundreds of meters from the nearest, but evidently the process extended at least this far back.

If it
was
part of the normal growth process, though, it was a feeble echo of what must have been going on in the heart of the apical zones. We couldn't observe those directly, not from inside; barely a hundred meters towards the thorn the tube grew too lethal even for suicidal flesh. But over those five orbits
Rorschach
grew by another eight percent, as mindless and mechanical as a growing crystal.

Through it all I tried to do my job. I compiled and collated, massaged data I would never understand. I watched the systems around me as best I could, factored each tic and trait into the mix. One part of my mind produced synopses and syntheses while another watched, incredulous and uncomprehending. Neither part could trace where those insights had come from.

It was difficult, though. Sarasti wouldn't let me back outside the system. Every observation was contaminated by my own confounding presence in the mix. I did my best. I made no suggestions that might affect critical decisions. In the field I did what I was told to, and no more. I tried to be like one of Bates's drones, a simple tool with no initiative and no influence on the group dynamic. I think I pulled it off, for the most part.

My nonsights accumulated on schedule and piled up in
Theseus
's transmission stack, unsent. There was too much local interference to get a signal through to Earth.

*

Szpindel was right: the ghosts followed us back. We began to hear voices other than Sarasti's, whispering up the spine. Sometimes even the brightly-lit wraparound world of the drum would warp and jiggle from the corner of my eye—and more than once I saw boney headless phantoms with too many arms, nested in the scaffolding. They seemed solid enough from the corner of my eye but any spot I focused on faded to shadow, to a dark translucent stain against the background. They were so very fragile, these ghosts. The mere act of observation drilled holes through them.

Szpindel had rattled off dementias like raindrops. I went to ConSensus for enlightenment and found a whole other self buried below the limbic system, below the hindbrain, below even the cerebellum. It lived in the brain stem and it was older than the vertebrates themselves. It was self-contained: it heard and saw and felt, independent of all those other parts layered overtop like evolutionary afterthoughts. It dwelt on nothing but its own survival. It had no time for planning or abstract analysis, spared effort for only the most rudimentary sensory processing. But it was
fast
, and it was dedicated, and it could react to threats in a fraction of the time it took its smarter roommates to even become
aware
of them.

And even when it couldn't—when the obstinate, unyielding neocortex refused to let it off the leash—still it tried to pass on what it saw, and Isaac Szpindel experienced an ineffable sense of
where to reach
. In a way, he had a stripped-down version of the Gang in his head. Everyone did.

I looked further and found God Itself in the meat of the brain, found the static that had sent Bates into rapture and Michelle into convulsions. I tracked Gray Syndrome to its headwaters in the temporal lobe. I heard voices ranting in the brains of schizophrenics. I found cortical infarcts that inspired people to reject their own limbs, imagined the magnetic fields that must have acted in their stead when Cruncher tried to dismember himself. And off in some half-forgotten pesthole of Twentieth-century case studies—filed under
Cotard's Syndrome
—I found Amanda Bates and others of her kind, their brains torqued into denial of the very self. "I used to have a heart," one of them said listlessly from the archives. "Now I have something that beats in its place." Another demanded to be buried, because his corpse was already stinking.

There was more, a whole catalog of finely-tuned dysfunctions that
Rorschach
had not yet inflicted on us. Somnambulism. Agnosias. Hemineglect. ConSensus served up a freak show to make any mind reel at its own fragility: a woman dying of thirst within easy reach of water, not because she couldn't see the faucet but because she couldn't
recognize
it. A man for whom the left side of the universe did not exist, who could neither perceive nor
conceive
of the left side of his body, of a room, of a line of text. A man for whom the very concept of
leftness
had become literally unthinkable.

Sometimes we could conceive of things and still not see them, although they stood right before us. Skyscrapers appeared out of thin air, the person talking to us changed into someone else during a momentary distraction— and we didn't notice. It wasn't magic. It was barely even misdirection. They called it
inattentional blindness
, and it had been well-known for a century or more: a tendency for the eye to simply
not notice
things that evolutionary experience classed as
unlikely
.

I found the opposite of Szpindel's
blindsight
, a malady not in which the sighted believe they are blind but one in which
the blind insist they can see
. The very idea was absurd unto insanity and yet there they were, retinas detached, optic nerves burned away, any possibility of vision denied by the laws of physics: bumping into walls, tripping over furniture, inventing endless ludicrous explanations for their clumsiness. The lights, unexpectedly turned off by some other party. A colorful bird glimpsed through the window, distracting attention from the obstacle ahead. I can see perfectly well, thank you. Nothing wrong with
my
eyes.