Blindsight (Firefall, #1)

by Peter Watts

Haha

“No,” Szpindel said, “It’s a Klüver constant.” “A—” “It’s a hallucination, Suze.”

“It’s an artifact of deep brain structure. Even congenitally blind people see them sometimes.”

BLINDSIGHT! title

“But it was so vivid! Not that flickering corner-of-your-eye stuff we saw everywhere.

“Wet sample’s still best for some things.”

“Call it a quality-control test. Keep the ship on its toes.”

Simile

“Some cells along your brainpan going into overdrive. More in your bladder and kidney.”

I shook my head at remembered nightmares.

He hadn’t said blindsight.

Imagine you are a prisoner of war.

Under other circumstances, Lieutenant Amanda Bates would have been court-martialed and executed within the month.

Still, it was hard to argue with results:

it was hard to argue with results:

Still. Results.

We’re breaking and entering, Siri

We crept through Rorschach’s belly in fits and starts,

ectoplasm coursing down the intestine of some poltergeist god.

Simile haha

Together they guarded against an opposition that had not yet shown its face.

We worked through it all, through fits and hallucinations and occasional convulsions.

Every incursion was an exercise in reckless endangerment. We did it anyway.

Simile

over those five orbits Rorschach grew by another 8 percent, as mindless and mechanical as a growing crystal.

Every observation was contaminated by my own confounding presence in the mix.

My nonsights accumulated on schedule and piled up in Theseus’s transmission stack,

Blindsights? Question

more than once I saw boney headless phantoms with too many arms, nested in the scaffolding.

ALIENS!!

a whole other self buried below the limbic system,

older than the vertebrates themselves.

In a way, he had a stripped-down version of the Gang in his head. Everyone did.

I heard voices ranting in the brains of schizophrenics.

twentieth-century case studies—filed under Cotard’s syndrome—

ConSensus served up a freak show to make any mind reel at its own fragility:

They called it inattentional blindness, and it had been well-known for a century or more: a tendency for the eye to simply not notice things that evolutionary experience classed as unlikely.

blindsight,

Gauges in the head, Szpindel had called them.

There was a model of the world, and we didn’t look outward at all;

our conscious selves saw only the simulation in our heads, an interpretation of reality, endlessly refre...

a desperate, subconscious act of utterly honest denial?

How long before it dawns on us

that we are...

you cannot be swayed by argument.

that hardwired awareness that needs no other confirmation.

Around us Rorschach’s guts oozed and crawled at the corner of my eye; it still took effort to ignore the illusion.

The walls crawled.

—sudden brightness, everywhere.

Simile

We’re taking you first.

inside me, a swarm of floaters mixed it up with the chronic half-visions Rorschach had already planted in my head.

James’s headlamp.

The eyes beneath stared at infinity.