Blindsight, page 159 by Peter Watts
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he other's unaccounted for."
"Just a minute," Cunningham said. "If you can see it through all that, why didn't Su--why didn't Michelle see anything?"
"Synesthesiac," Sarasti reminded him. "You see. She feels."
BioMed jerked slightly, locking into spin-synch with the drum; the guard rail sank back into the deck. Off in some far-off corner, something without eyes watched me watching it.
"Shit," Bates whispered. "There's someone home."
*
They never really talked like that, by the way. You'd hear gibberish--a half-dozen languages, a whole Babel of personal idioms--if I spoke in their real voices.
Some of the simpler tics make it through: Sascha's good-natured belligerence, Sarasti's aversion to the past tense. Cunningham lost most of his gender pronouns to an unforeseen glitch during the work on his temporal lobe. But it went beyond that. The whole lot of them threw English and Hindi and Hadzane into every second sentence; no real scientist would allow their thoughts to be hamstrung by the conceptual limitations of a single language. Other times they acted almost as synthesists in their own right, conversing in grunts and gestures that would be meaningless to any baseline. It's not so much that the bleeding edge lacks social skills; it's just that once you get past a certain point, formal speech is too damn slow.
Except for Susan James. The walking contradiction, the woman so devoted to Communication As Unifier that she'd cut her own brain into disunified chunks to make the point. She was the only one who ever seemed to care who she was talking to. The others spoke only for themselves, even when they spoke to each other. Even James's other cores would speak their own minds in their own way, and let everyone else translate as best they could. It wasn't a problem. Everyone on Theseus could read everyone else.
But that didn't matter to Susan James. She fit each of her words to their intended recipient, she acc