Blindsight + Echopraxia by Peter Watts

Author:Peter Watts [Watts, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction, Hugo, Physical Copy
ISBN: 9781784080457
Google: UJKCBAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00KFDQXD0
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Published: 2014-09-10T12:00:00+00:00

. . .

He found Lianna back on the front steps, supper balanced on her knees, watching the sun go down. She looked back over her shoulder as he pushed through the door.

“I asked about your brain-boosters,” she said. “No luck. The assembly line’s booked or something.”

“Thanks for trying,” he said.

“Jim might still be holding. If you haven’t asked him already.”

He shifted his tray to one hand, used the other to rub away the vague pain behind his eyes. “Mind if I join you?”

She spared one hand to take in the staircase, as broad and excessive as a cathedral’s.

He sat beside her, picked at his own plate. “About this morning, I, uh...”

She stared at the horizon. The sun stared back, highlighting her cheekbones.

“...sorry,” he finished.

“Forget it. Nobody likes being in a cage.”

“Still. I shouldn’t have shot the messenger.” A sudden chilly breeze crawled across his shoulders.

Lianna shrugged. “You ask me, nobody should shoot anybody.”

He raised his eyes. Venus twinkled back at them. He wondered briefly if those photons had followed a straight line to his eyes, or if they’d been shunted around some invisible spillway of curves and angles at the last nanosecond. He looked around at the cracked desert floor, lifted his gaze to the more jagged topography in the distance. Wondered how many unseen agents were looking back.

“You always eat out here?”

“When I can.” The lowering sun stretched her shadow along the ramparts behind them, a giantess silhouetted in orange. “It’s—stark, you know?”

Ribbed clouds, a million shades of salmon, scudding against an orange and purple sky.

“How long does this go on?” he wondered.

“This?”

“They lurk out there, we wait in here. When does somebody actually make a move?”

“Oldschool, you gotta relax.” She shook her head, smiled a twilit smile. “You could obsess and second-guess for a solid month and I guarantee you wouldn’t be able to think of anything our hosts haven’t already factored five ways to Sunday. They’ve been making moves all day.”

“Such as?”

“Don’t ask me.” She shrugged. “I probably wouldn’t understand even if they told me. They’re wired up way differently.”

Hive mind, he reminded himself. Synesthetes, too, if he wasn’t mistaken.

“You do understand them, though,” he said. “That’s your job.”

“Not the way you think. And not without a fair bit of modding on my own.”

“How, then?”

“I’m not sure,” she admitted.

“Come on.”

“No, really. It’s a kind of Zen thing. Like playing the piano, or being a centipede in Heaven. The moment you start to think about what you’re doing, you screw up. You just have to get into the zone.”

“They must have trained you at some point,” Brüks insisted. “There must have been some kind of conscious learning curve.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” She squinted up at some invisible behemoth he still couldn’t see. “But they kind of—bypassed that. Zapped my fornix with just the right burst of ultrasound and next thing I know it’s four days later and I have all these reflexes. Not so much that I understand them as my fingers do, you know? Phonemes, rhythms, gestures—eye movements, sometimes—” She frowned.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.