Blindsight | Page 3

to
throw my own point of view away.
He may have been wrong. I may have been. But that, that distance--that
chronic sense of being an alien among your own kind--it's not entirely a
bad thing.

It came in especially handy when the real aliens came calling.
Theseus
"Blood makes noise." --Susanne 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 gee. 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' round
cheeks and hips, Szpindel's high forehead and lumpy, lanky
chassis--even the enhanced