Blindsight (Firefall, #1)

by Peter Watts

Among those who remembered the tale, alter was codespeak for betrayal and Human sacrifice. Alter meant cannon fodder.

Why? question

Susan’s still the only one with a surname.

Haha

displays documenting the relentless growth of the leviathan beneath us,

As far as Earth was concerned, everyone on Theseus was an alter.

Sarasti stayed behind. He hadn’t come with a backup.

Haha

“What if there’s nobody there?” What if there is, and they don’t like us?

But I could feel the radiation slicing through our armor as if it were tissue paper.

the charred canopy of some firestormed alien forest,

What kind of creatures would choose to live in such a place?

Haha

Haha

In a friendlier universe

Grey syndrome.

Not living, not by a long shot. Haunted.

Simile double

an inevitable consequence of meat and magnetism brought too close together.

Simile

—vampires—

Simile, then metaphor

“They’re here,” James whispered.

“It’s in the EM fields,” James said. “That’s how they communicate. The whole structure is full of language, it’s—”

Nine tesla, and the ghosts were everywhere. I smelled asphalt and honeysuckle.

Simile not helpful

Cruncher

Something laughed hysterically, right inside my helmet.

Bates moved aside as I dove in after them. Amazing, the way she held it together.

Simile nice

Chelsea

She could hotwire happiness in the time it took to fix a sandwich,

Or every experience you had would turn you into a different person.” I thought about that. “Maybe it does.”

Cf. The Silver Trumpet by Owen Barfield (1925) which suggests that one is not the same person from one time to another.

“Why would you do this to me?”

Somehow, when I was with Chelsea, I mattered.

They're condemned to repeat it. George Santayana wrote in 1905 that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

“Not blind chance. Blindsight.

“Blindsight?”

“We weren’t hallucinating,” James said quietly.

“There was a pattern there,” James insisted. “In the fields. In my head. Rorschach was talking. Maybe not to us, but it was talking.”

“Maybe now we can finally learn to talk back.” “Maybe we can learn to listen,” James said.

Simile

a tunnel into the haunted mansion;

simile metaphor

Simile ewww

I had only theory and the assurances of fellow machinery that I would ever be born again.

nice

I opened my eyes. Something like an arm. Gray and glistening, far too—too attenuate to be Human.

Simile creepy

It didn’t reflect, I remembered. The mirror didn’t show it.

Vampire! (Different from Sarasti? question

Haha

Simile

“It was real,” James was saying. “We all saw it.” No. Couldn’t have been.

A sketch pad, I realized. An interactive eyewitness reconstruction, without the verbiage.

It was a big step up from that half-assed work-around called language.