Blindsight | Page 9

looked around, glanced at the sky--and
continued on her way, totally indifferent to the cattle on all sides, to the
heavenly portent that had transfixed them. Totally indifferent to the fact
that the world had just turned inside-out.
It was 1035 Greenwich Mean Time, February 13, 2082.
*
They clenched around the world like a fist, each black as the inside of
an event horizon until those last bright moments when they all burned
together. They screamed as they died. Every radio up to geostat
groaned in unison, every infrared telescope went briefly snowblind.
Ashes stained the sky for weeks afterwards; mesospheric clouds, high
above the jet stream, turned to glowing rust with every sunrise. The
objects, apparently, consisted largely of iron. Nobody ever knew what
to make of that.
For perhaps the first time in history, the world knew before being told:
if you'd seen the sky, you had the scoop. The usual arbiters of
newsworthiness, stripped of their accustomed role in filtering reality,
had to be content with merely labeling it. It took them ninety minutes to
agree on Fireflies. A half hour after that, the first Fourier transforms
appeared in the noosphere; to no one's great surprise, the Fireflies had
not wasted their dying breaths on static. There was pattern embedded in
that terminal chorus, some cryptic intelligence that resisted all earthly
analysis. The experts, rigorously empirical, refused to speculate: they
only admitted that the Fireflies had said something. They didn't know
what.
Everyone else did. How else would you explain 65,536 probes evenly
dispersed along a lat-long grid that barely left any square meter of
planetary surface unexposed? Obviously the Flies had taken our picture.
The whole world had been caught with its pants down in panoramic
composite freeze-frame. We'd been surveyed--whether as a prelude to

formal introductions or outright invasion was anyone's guess.
My father might have known someone who might have known. But by
then he'd long since disappeared, as he always did during times of
hemispheric crisis. Whatever he knew or didn't, he left me to find my
own answers with everyone else.
There was no shortage of perspectives. The noosphere seethed with
scenarios ranging from utopian to apocalyptic. The Fireflies had seeded
lethal germs through the jet stream. The Fireflies had been on a nature
safari. The Icarus Array was being retooled to power a doomsday
weapon against the aliens. The Icarus Array had already been destroyed.
We had decades to react; anything from another solar system would
have to obey the lightspeed limit like everyone else. We had days to
live; organic warships had just crossed the asteroid belt and would be
fumigating the planet within a week.
Like everyone else, I bore witness to lurid speculations and talking
heads. I visited blathernodes, soaked myself in other people's opinions.
That was nothing new, as far as it went; I'd spent my whole life as a
sort of alien ethologist in my own right, watching the world behave,
gleaning patterns and protocols, learning the rules that allowed me to
infiltrate human society. It had always worked before. Somehow,
though, the presence of real aliens had changed the dynamics of the
equation. Mere observation didn't satisfy any more. It was as though
the presence of this new outgroup had forced me back into the clade
whether I liked it or not; the distance between myself and the world
suddenly seemed forced and faintly ridiculous.
Yet I couldn't, for my life, figure out how to let it go.
Chelsea had always said that telepresence emptied the Humanity from
Human interaction. "They say it's indistinguishable," she told me once,
"just like having your family right there, snuggled up so you can see
them and feel them and smell them next to you. But it's not. It's just
shadows on the cave wall. I mean, sure, the shadows come in three-dee
color with force-feedback tactile interactivity. They're good enough to
fool the civilized brain. But your gut knows those aren't people, even if

it can't put its finger on how it knows. They just don't feel real. Know
what I mean?"
I didn't. Back then I'd had no clue what she was talking about. But now
we were all cavemen again, huddling beneath some overhang while
lightning split the heavens and vast formless monsters, barely glimpsed
in bright strobe-frozen instants, roared and clashed in the darkness on
all sides. There was no comfort in solitude. You couldn't get it from
interactive shadows. You needed someone real at your side, someone
to hold on to, someone to share your airspace along with your fear and
hope and uncertainty.
I imagined the presence of companions who wouldn't vanish the
moment I unplugged. But Chelsea was gone, and Pag in her wake. The
few others I could have called-- peers and