Blindsight (Firefall, #1)

by Peter Watts

Alter carried baggage over a century old, ConSensus told me. Sascha was right; there’d been a time when MCC was MPD, a disorder rather than a complex, and it had never been induced deliberately. According to the experts of that time, multiple personalities arose spontaneously from unimaginable cauldrons of abuse—fragmentary personae offered up to suffer rapes and beatings while the child behind took to some unknowable sanctuary in the folds of the brain. It was both survival strategy and ritual self-sacrifice: powerless souls hacking themselves to pieces, offering up quivering chunks of self in the desperate hope that the vengeful gods called Mom or Dad might not be insatiable. None of it had been real, as it turned out. Or at least, none of it had been confirmed. The experts of the day had been little more than witch doctors dancing through improvised rituals: meandering free-form interviews full of leading questions and nonverbal cues, scavenger hunts through regurgitated childhoods. Sometimes a shot of lithium or haloperidol when the beads and rattles didn’t work. The technology to map minds was barely off the ground; the technology to edit them was years away. So the therapists and psychiatrists poked at their victims and invented names for things they didn’t understand, and argued over the shrines of Freud and Klein and the old Astrologers, doing their very best to sound like practitioners of Science.