Blindsight

The Hugo Award'nominated novel by "a hard science fiction writer through and through and one of the very best alive." '” The Globe and Mail Two months have past since a myriad of alien objects clenched about the Earth, screaming as they burned. The heavens have been silent since'”until a derelict space probe hears whispers from a distant comet. Something talks out there: but not to us. Who should we send to meet the alien, when the alien doesn't want to meet? Send a linguist with multiple-personality disorder and a biologist so spliced with machinery that he can't feel his own flesh. Send a pacifist warrior and a vampire recalled from the grave by the voodoo of paleogenetics. Send a man with half his mind gone since childhood. Send them to the edge of the solar system, praying you can trust such freaks and monsters with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find'”but you'd give anything for that to be true, if you knew what was waiting for them. . . . Peter Watts lives in Toronto, Canada. The Hugo Award'nominated novel by "a hard science fiction writer through and through and one of the very best alive."'” The Globe and Mail Two months have past since a myriad of alien objects clenched about the Earth, screaming as they burned. The heavens have been silent since'”until a derelict space probe hears whispers from a distant comet. Something talks out there: but not to us. Who should we send to meet the alien, when the alien doesn't want to meet? Send a linguist with multiple-personality disorder and a biologist so spliced with machinery that he can't feel his own flesh. Send a pacifist warrior and a vampire recalled from the grave by the voodoo of paleogenetics. Send a man with half his mind gone since childhood. Send them to the edge of the solar system, praying you can trust such freaks and monsters with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find'”but you'd give anything for that to be true, if you knew what was waiting for them. "The genius of Blindsight is that its author has been clever enough to build a story that demonstrates [his] case . . . Much of the narrative pleasure of Blindsight comes from a conjoined experience of doubled discovery: as we gradually get to understand the nature of the crew . . . we find ourselves simultaneously beginning to get some sense of the alien species orbiting Ben in something . . . that Watts describes in terms that evoked, for me, some great, granulated, anfractuous rat king of shrikes multiplied a thousandfold from the simple single shrike out of Dan Simmons's Hyperion , which so goosed my midbrain . . . It is a sign of the pervasive toughness of Blindsight that its human readers can take pleasure in [the] message, because what the scramblers say to us in the end is, 'Shut up.'"'” The New York Review of Science Fiction "Trained as a marine biologist, Watts is completely at ease using his richly developed characters to spin possibilities and theories on the cutting edge of science. His dense idea storms may slow some readers, but most will sail through the tech-heavy patches purely for the thrill of seeing what happens next."'” Gwenda Bond, The Washington Post "This is a a very ambitious story, very successfully done. As a novel, it's gripping enough that my last-weekend glance to fill in details became a complete rereading. Rare that, but this is a rare book."'” The San Diego Union-Tribune "A brilliant piece of work, one that will delight fans of hard science fiction, but will also demonstrate to literary fans that contemporary science fiction is dynamic and fascinating literature that demands to be read."'” The Edmonton Journal "Challenging . . . fascinating and rewarding. Watts' all-but-declared literary ambition is to be a first-class hard science fiction writer on the sophisticated literary level of Gregory Benford or Arthur C. Clarke. And with

Peter Watts lives in Toronto, Canada.

Chapter One
Blood makes noise.
 —Suzanne Vega
 
Imagine you are Siri Keeton.
 
You wake in an agony of resurrection, gasping after a record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty days. You can feel your blood, syrupy with dobutamine and leuenkephalin, forcing its way through arteries shriveled by months on standby. The body inflates in painful increments: blood vessels dilate, flesh peels apart from flesh, ribs crack in your ears with sudden unaccustomed flexion. Your joints have seized up through disuse. You’re a stick man, frozen in some perverse rigor vitae.
 
You’d scream if you had the breath.
 
Vampires did this all the time, you remember. It was normal for them, it was their own unique take on resource conservation. They could have taught your kind a few things about restraint, if that absurd aversion to right angles hadn’t done them in at the dawn of civilization. Maybe they still can. They’re back now, after all—raised from the grave with the voodoo of paleogenetics, stitched together from junk genes and fossil marrow steeped in the blood of sociopaths and high-functioning autistics. One of them commands this very mission. A handful of his genes live on in your own body so it too can rise from the dead, here at the edge of interstellar space. Nobody gets past Jupiter without becoming part vampire.
 
The pain begins, just slightly, to recede. You fire up your inlays and access your own vitals. It’ll be long minutes before your body responds fully to motor commands, hours before it stops hurting. The pain’s an unavoidable side effect. That’s just what happens when you splice vampire subroutines into Human code. You asked about painkillers once, but nerve blocks of any kind compromise metabolic reactivation. Suck it up, soldier.
 
You wonder if this was how it felt for Chelsea, before the end. But that evokes a whole other kind of pain, so you block it out and concentrate on the life pushing its way back into your extremities. Suffering in silence, you check the logs for fresh telemetry.
 
You think: That can’t be right.
 
Because if it is, you’re in the wrong part of the universe. You’re not in the Kuiper Belt where you belong: you’re high above the ecliptic and deep into the Oort, the realm of long-period comets that only grace the sun every million years or so. You’ve gone interstellar, which means (you bring up the system clock) you’ve been undead for eighteen hundred days.
 
You’ve overslept by almost five years.
 
The lid of your coffin slides away. Your own cadaverous body reflects from the mirrored bulkhead opposite, a desiccated lungfish waiting for the rains. Bladders of isotonic saline cling to its limbs like engorged antiparasites, like the opposite of leeches. You remember the needles going in just before you shut down, way back when your veins were more than dry twisted filaments of beef jerky.
 
Szpindel’s reflection stares back from his own pod to your immediate right. His face is as bloodless and skeletal as yours. His wide sunken eyes jiggle in their sockets as he reacquires his own links, sensory interfaces so massive that your own off-the-shelf inlays amount to shadow puppetry in comparison.
 
You hear coughing and the rustling of limbs just past line of sight, catch glimpses of reflected motion where the others stir at the edge of vision.
 
“Wha . . . ” your voice is barely more than a hoarse whisper, “. . . happ . . . ?”
 
Szpindel works his jaw. Bone cracks audibly.
 
“. . . Sssuckered,” he hisses.
 
You haven’t even met the aliens yet, and already they’re running rings around you.
 
So we dragged ourselves back from the dead: five part-time cadavers, naked, emaciated, barely able to move even in zero g. We emerged from our coffins like premature moths ripped from their cocoons, still half-grub. We were alone and off course and utterly helpless, and it took a conscious effort to remember: They would never have risked our lives if we hadn’t been essential.
 
“Morning, commissar.” Isaac Szpindel reached one trembling, insensate hand for the feedback gloves at the base of his pod. Just past him, Susan James was curled into a loose fetal ball, murmuring to herselves. Only Amanda Bates, already dressed and cycling through a sequence of bone-cracking isometrics, possessed anything approaching mobility. Every now and then she tried bouncing a rubber ball off the bulkhead; but not even she was up to catching it on the rebound yet.
 
The journey had melted us down to a common archetype. James’s round cheeks and hips; Szpindel’s high forehead and lumpy, lanky chassis—even the enhanced carboplatinum brick shit house that Bates used for a body—all had shriveled to the same desiccated collection of sticks and bones. Even our hair seemed to have become strangely discolored during the voyage, although I knew that was impossible. More likely it was just filtering the pallor of the skin beneath. Still. The pre-dead James had been dirty blond, Szpindel’s hair had been almost dark enough to call black, but the stuff floating from their scalps looked the same dull kelpy brown to me now. Bates kept her head shaved, but even her eyebrows weren’t as rusty as I remembered them.
 
We’d revert to our old selves soon enough. Just add water. For now, though, the old slur was freshly relevant: The Undead really did all look the same, if you didn’t know how to look.
 
If you did, of course—if you forgot appearance and watched for motion, ignored meat and studied topology—you’d never mistake one for another. Every facial tic was a data point, every conversational pause spoke volumes more than the words to either side. I could see James’s personae shatter and coalesce in the flutter of an eyelash. Szpindel’s unspoken distrust of Amanda Bates shouted from the corner of his smile. Every twitch of the phenotype cried aloud to anyone who knew the language.
 
“Where’s—” James croaked, coughed, waved one spindly arm at Sarasti’s empty coffin gaping at the end of the row.
 
Szpindel’s lips cracked in a small rictus. “Gone back to Fab, eh? Getting the ship to build some dirt to lie on.”
 
“Probably communing with the Captain.” Bates breathed louder than she spoke, a dry rustle from pipes still getting reacquainted with the idea of respiration.
 
James again: “Could do that up here.”
 
“Could take a dump up here, too,” Szpindel rasped. “Some things you do by yourself, eh?”
 
And some things you kept to yourself. Not many baselines felt comfortable locking stares with a vampire—Sarasti, ever courteous, tended to avoid eye contact for exactly that reason—but there were other surfaces to his topology, just as mammalian and just as readable. If he had withdrawn from public view, maybe I was the reason. Maybe he was keeping secrets.
 
After all, Theseus damn well was.
 
She’d taken us a good fifteen AUs toward our destination before something scared her off course. Then she’d skidded north like a startled cat and started climbing: a wild high three-g burn off the ecliptic, thirteen hundred tonnes of momentum bucking against Newton’s first. She’d emptied her Penn tanks, bled dry her substrate mass, squandered a hundred forty days’ of fuel in hours. Then a long cold coast through the abyss, years of stingy accounting, the thrust of every antiproton weighed against the drag of sieving it from the void. Teleportation isn’t magic: the Icarus stream couldn’t send us the actual antimatter it made, only the quantum specs. Theseus had to filterfeed the raw material from space, one ion at a time. For long dark years she’d made do on pure inertia, hording every swallowed atom. Then a flip; ionizing lasers strafing the space ahead; a ramscoop thrown wide in a hard brake. The weight of a trillion trillion protons slowed her down and refilled her gut and flattened us all over again. Theseus had burned relentlessly until almost the moment of our resurrection.
 
It was easy enough to retrace those steps; our course was there in ConSensus for anyone to see. Exactly why the ship had blazed that trail was another matter. Doubtless it would all come out during the post-rez briefing. We were hardly the first vessel to travel under the cloak of sealed orders, and if there’d been a pressing need to know by now we’d have known by now. Still, I wondered who had locked out the Comm logs. Mission Control, maybe. Or Sarasti. Or Theseus herself, for that matter. It was easy to forget the Quantical AI at the heart of our ship. It stayed so discreetly in the background, nurtured and carried us and permeated our existence like an unobtrusive god; but like God, it never took your calls.
 
Sarasti was the official intermediary. When the ship did speak, it spoke to him—and Sarasti called it Captain.
 
So did we all.
 
He’d given us four hours to come back. It took more than three just to get me out of the crypt. By then my brain was at least firing on most of its synapses, although my body—still sucking fluids like a thirsty sponge—continued to ache with every movement. I swapped out drained electrolyte bags for fresh ones and headed aft.
 
Fifteen minutes to spin-up. Fifty to the post-resurrection briefing. Just enough time for those who preferred gravity-bound sleep to haul their personal effects into the drum and stake out their allotted 4.4 square meters of floor space.
 
Gravity—or any centripetal facsimile thereof—did not appeal to me. I set up my own tent in zero g and as far to stern as possible, nuzzling the forward wall of the starboard shuttle tube. The tent inflated like an abscess on Theseus’s spine, a little climate-controlled bubble of atmosphere in the dark cavernous vacuum beneath the ship’s carapace. My own effects were minimal; it took all of thirty seconds to stick them to the wall, and another thirty to program the tent’s environment.
 
Afterward I went for a hike. After five years, I needed the exercise.
 
Stern was closest, so I started there, at the shielding that separated payload from propulsion. A single sealed hatch blistered the aft bulkhead dead center. Behind it, a service tunnel wormed back through machinery best left untouched by Human hands. The fat superconducting torus of the ramscoop ring; the antennae fan behind it, unwound now into an indestructible soap bubble big enough to shroud a city, its face turned sunward to catch the faint quantum sparkle of the Icarus antimatter stream. More shielding behind that; then the telematter reactor, where raw hydrogen and refined information conjured fire three hundred times hotter than the sun’s. I knew the incantations, of course—antimatter cracking and deconstruction, the teleportation of quantum serial numbers—but it was still magic to me, how we’d come so far so fast. It would have been magic to anyone.
 
Except Sarasti, maybe.
 
Around me, the same magic worked at cooler temperatures and to less volatile ends: a small riot of chutes and dispensers crowded the bulkhead on all sides. A few of those openings would choke on my fist: one or two could swallow me whole. Theseus’s fabrication plant could build everything from cutlery to cockpits. Give it a big enough matter stockpile and it could have even built another Theseus, albeit in many small pieces and over a very long time. Some wondered if it could build another crew as well, although we’d all been assured that was impossible. Not even these machines had fine enough fingers to reconstruct a few trillion synapses in the space of a human skull. Not yet, anyway.
 
I believed it. They would never have shipped us out fully assembled if there’d been a cheaper alternative.
 
I faced forward. Putting the back of my head against that sealed hatch I could see almost to Theseus’s bow, an uninterrupted line of sight extending to a tiny dark bull’s-eye thirty meters ahead. It was like staring at a great textured target in shades of white and gray: concentric circles, hatches centered within bulkheads one behind another, perfectly aligned. Every one stood open, in nonchalant defiance of a previous generation’s safety codes. We could keep them closed if we wanted to, if it made us feel safer. That was all it would do, though; it wouldn’t improve our empirical odds one whit. In the event of trouble those hatches would slam shut long milliseconds before Human senses could even make sense of an alarm. They weren’t even computer-controlled. Theseus’s body parts had reflexes.
 
I pushed off against the stern plating—wincing at the tug and stretch of disused tendons—and coasted forward, leaving Fab behind. The shuttle-access hatches to Scylla and Charybdis briefly constricted my passage to either side. Past them the spine widened into a corrugated extensible cylinder two meters across and—at the moment—maybe fifteen long. A pair of ladders ran opposite each other along its length; raised portholes the size of manhole covers stippled the bulkhead to either side. Most of those just looked into the hold. A couple served as general-purpose airlocks, should anyone want to take a stroll beneath the carapace. One opened into my tent. Another, four meters farther forward, opened into Bates’s.
 
From a third, just short of the forward bulkhead, Jukka Sarasti climbed into view like a long white spider.
 
If he’d been Human I’d have known instantly what I saw there, I’d have smelled murderer all over his topology. And I wouldn’t have been able to even guess at the number of his victims, because his affect was so utterly without remorse. The killing of a hundred would leave no more stain on Sarasti’s surfaces than the swatting of an insect; guilt beaded and rolled off this creature like water on wax.
 
But Sarasti wasn’t Human. Sarasti was a whole different animal, and coming from him all those homicidal refractions meant nothing more than predator. He had the inclination, was born to it; whether he had ever acted on it was between him and Mission Control.
 
Maybe they cut you some slack, I didn’t say to him. Maybe it’s just a cost of doing business. You’re mission-critical, after all. For all I know you cut a deal. You’re so very smart, you know we wouldn’t have brought you back in the first place if we hadn’t needed you. From the day they cracked the vat you knew you had leverage.
 
Is that how it works, Jukka? You save the world, and the folks who hold your leash agree to look the other way?
 
As a child I’d read tales about jungle predators transfixing their prey with a stare. Only after I’d met Jukka Sarasti did I know how it felt. But he wasn’t looking at me now. He was focused on installing his own tent, and even if he had looked me in the eye there’d have been nothing to see but the dark wraparound visor he wore in deference to Human skittishness. He ignored me as I grabbed a nearby rung and squeezed past.
 
I could have sworn I smelled raw meat on his breath.
 
Into the drum (drums, technically; the BioMed hoop at the back spun on its own bearings). I flew through the center of a cylinder sixteen meters across. Theseus’s spinal nerves ran along its axis, the exposed plexii and piping bundled against the ladders on either side. Past them, Szpindel’s and James’s freshly erected tents rose from nooks on opposite sides of the world. Szpindel himself floated off my shoulder, still naked but for his gloves, and I could tell from the way his fingers moved that his favorite color was green. He anchored himself to one of three stairways to nowhere arrayed around the drum: steep narrow steps rising five vertical meters from the deck into empty air.
 
The next hatch gaped dead-center of the drum’s forward wall; pipes and conduits plunged into the bulkhead on each side. I grabbed a convenient rung to slow myself—biting down once more on the pain—and floated through.
 
T-junction. The spinal corridor continued forward, a smaller diverticulum branched off to an EVA cubby and the forward airlock. I stayed the course and found myself back in the crypt, mirror-bright and less than two meters deep. Empty pods gaped to the left; sealed ones huddled to the right. We were so irreplaceable we’d come with replacements. They slept on, oblivious. I’d met three of them back in training. Hopefully none of us would be getting reacquainted any time soon.
 
Only four pods to starboard, though. No backup for Sarasti.
 
Another hatchway. Smaller this time. I squeezed through into the bridge. Dim light there, a silent shifting mosaic of icons and alphanumerics iterating across dark glassy surfaces. Not so much bridge as cockpit, and a cramped one at that. I’d emerged between two acceleration couches, each surrounded by a horseshoe array of controls and readouts. Nobody expected to ever use this compartment. Theseus was perfectly capable of running herself, and if she wasn’t we were capable of running her from our inlays, and if we weren’t the odds were overwhelming that we were all dead anyway. Still, against that astronomically off-the-wall chance, this was where one or two intrepid survivors could pilot the ship home again after everything else had failed.
 
Between the footwells the engineers had crammed one last hatch and one last passageway: to the observation blister on Theseus’s prow. I hunched my shoulders (tendons cracked and complained) and pushed through—
 
—into darkness. Clamshell shielding covered the outside of the dome like a pair of eyelids squeezed tight. A single icon glowed softly from a touchpad to my left; faint stray light followed me through from the spine, brushed dim fingers across the concave enclosure. The dome resolved in faint shades of blue and gray as my eyes adjusted. A stale draft stirred the webbing floating from the rear bulkhead, mixed oil and machinery at the back of my throat. Buckles clicked faintly in the breeze like impoverished wind chimes.
 
I reached out and touched the crystal: the innermost layer of two, warm air piped through the gap between to cut the cold. Not completely, though. My fingertips chilled instantly.
 
Space out there.
 
Perhaps, en route to our original destination, Theseus had seen something that scared her clear out of the solar system. More likely she hadn’t been running away from anything but to something else, something that hadn’t been discovered until we’d already died and gone from Heaven. In which case . . .
 
I reached back and tapped the touchpad. I half-expected nothing to happen; Theseus’s windows could be as easily locked as her Comm logs. But the dome split instantly before me, a crack then a crescent then a wide-eyed lidless stare as the shielding slid smoothly back into the hull. My fingers clenched reflexively into a fistful of webbing. The sudden void stretched empty and unforgiving in all directions, and there was nothing to cling to but a metal disk barely four meters across.
 
Stars, everywhere. So many stars that I could not for the life of me understand how the sky could contain them all yet be so black. Stars, and—
 
—nothing else.
 
What did you expect? I chided myself. An alien mothership hanging off the starboard bow?
 
Well, why not? We were out here for something.
 
The others were, anyway. They’d be essential no matter where we’d ended up. But my own situation was a bit different, I realized. My usefulness degraded with distance.
 
And we were over half a light-year from home.
 
Copyright © 2006 by Peter Watts