1
Blindsight
Peter Watts
For Lisa
If we're not in pain, we're not alive.
Prologue
Theseus
Rorschach
Charybdis
Acknowledgments
Notes and References
Creative Commons Licensing Information
"This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real."
--Philip Gourevitch
"You will die like a dog for no good reason."
--Ernest Hemingway
Prologue
"Try to touch the past. Try to deal with the past. It's not real. It's just a dream."
--Ted Bundy
It didn't start out here. Not with the scramblers or Rorschach, not with Big Ben or Theseus or the vampires. Most people would say it started with the Fireflies, but they'd be wrong. It ended with all those things.
For me, it began with Robert Paglino.
At the age of eight, he was my best and only friend. We were fellow outcasts, bound by complementary misfortune. Mine was developmental. His was genetic: an uncontrolled genotype that left him predisposed to nearsightedness, acne, and (as it later turned out) a susceptibility to narcotics. His parents had never had him optimized. Those few TwenCen relics who still believed in God also held that one shouldn't try to improve upon His handiwork. So although both of us could have been repaired, only one of us had been.
I arrived at the playground to find Pag the center of attention for some half-dozen kids, those lucky few in front punching him in the head, the others making do with taunts of mongrel and polly while waiting their turn. I watched him raise his arms, alm