Blindsight | Page 2

in a ball.
"Oh shit," Pag panted. Blood coursed unheeded from his nose and
splattered down his shirt. His cheek was turning blue and yellow. "Oh
shit oh shit oh shit..."
I thought of something to say. "You all right?"
"Oh shit, you--I mean, you never..." He wiped his mouth. Blood
smeared the back of his hand. "Oh man are we in trouble."
"They started it."
"Yeah, but you--I mean, look at them!"
The moaning thing was crawling away on all fours. I wondered how
long it would be before it found reinforcements. I wondered if I should
kill it before then.
"You'da never done that before," Pag said.
Before the operation, he meant.
I actually did feel something then--faint, distant, but unmistakable. I
felt angry. "They started--"
Pag backed away, eyes wide. "What are you doing? Put that down!"
I'd raised my fists. I didn't remember doing that. I unclenched them. It
took a while. I had to look at my hands very hard for a long, long time.
The rock dropped to the ground, blood-slick and glistening.

"I was trying to help." I didn't understand why he couldn't see that.
"You're, you're not the same," Pag said from a safe distance. "You're
not even Siri any more."
"I am too. Don't be a fuckwad."
"They cut out your brain!"
"Only half. For the ep--"
"I know for the epilepsy! You think I don't know? But you were in that
half--or, like, part of you was..." He struggled with the words, with the
concept behind them. "And now you're different. It's like, your mom
and dad murdered you--"
"My mom and dad," I said, suddenly quiet, "saved my life. I would
have died."
"I think you did die," said my best and only friend. "I think Siri died,
they scooped him out and threw him away and you're some whole other
kid that just, just grew back out of what was left. You're not the same.
Ever since. You're not the same."
I still don't know if Pag really knew what he was saying. Maybe his
mother had just pulled the plug on whatever game he'd been wired into
for the previous eighteen hours, forced him outside for some fresh air.
Maybe, after fighting pod people in gamespace, he couldn't help but see
them everywhere. Maybe.
But you could make a case for what he said. I do remember Helen
telling me (and telling me) how difficult it was to adjust. Like you had
a whole new personality, she said, and why not? There's a reason they
call it radical hemispherectomy: half the brain thrown out with
yesterday's krill, the remaining half press-ganged into double duty.
Think of all the rewiring that one lonely hemisphere must have
struggled with as it tried to take up the slack. It turned out okay,
obviously. The brain's a very flexible piece of meat; it took some doing,

but it adapted. I adapted. Still. Think of all that must have been
squeezed out, deformed, reshaped by the time the renovations were
through. You could argue that I'm a different person than the one who
used to occupy this body.
The grownups showed up eventually, of course. Medicine was
bestowed, ambulances called. Parents were outraged, diplomatic
volleys exchanged, but it's tough to drum up neighborhood outrage on
behalf of your injured baby when playground surveillance from three
angles shows the little darling--and five of his buddies-- kicking in the
ribs of a disabled boy. My mother, for her part, recycled the usual
complaints about problem children and absentee fathers--Dad was off
again in some other hemisphere--but the dust settled pretty quickly. Pag
and I even stayed friends, after a short hiatus that reminded us both of
the limited social prospects open to schoolyard rejects who don't stick
together.
So I survived that and a million other childhood experiences. I grew up
and I got along. I learned to fit in. I observed, recorded, derived the
algorithms and mimicked appropriate behaviors. Not much of it
was--heartfelt, I guess the word is. I had friends and enemies, like
everyone else. I chose them by running through checklists of behaviors
and circumstances compiled from years of observation.
I may have grown up distant but I grew up objective, and I have Robert
Paglino to thank for that. His seminal observation set everything in
motion. It led me into Synthesis, fated me to our disastrous encounter
with the Scramblers, spared me the worse fate befalling Earth. Or the
better one, I suppose, depending on your point of view. Point of view
matters: I see that now, blind, talking to myself, trapped in a coffin
falling past the edge of the solar system. I see it for the first time since
some beaten bloody friend on a childhood battlefield convinced me