Blindsight, page 79 by Peter Watts
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"Well, that's the official story." He fell silent a moment, cracked a crooked grin. "Then again, we didn't have any trouble fixing the protocadherin pathways when it suited us."
I subtitled. Context-sensitive, ConSensus served up protocadherin γ-Y: the magical hominid brain protein that vampires had never been able to synthesize. The reason they hadn't just switched to zebras or warthogs once denied Human prey, why our discovery of the terrible secret of the Right Angle had spelled their doom.
"Anyway, I just think he's--cut off." A nervous tic tugged at the corner of Szpindel's mouth. "Lone wolf, nothing but sheep for company. Wouldn't you feel lonely?"
"They don't like company," I reminded him. You didn't put vampires of the same sex together, not unless you were taking bets on a bloodbath. They were solitary hunters and very territorial. With a minimum viable pred-prey ratio of one to ten--and human prey spread so sparsely across the Pleistocene landscape--the biggest threat to their survival had been competition from their own kind. Natural selection had never taught them to play nicely together.
That didn't cut any ice with Szpindel, though. "Doesn't mean he can't be lonely," he insisted.
"Just means he can't fix it."
"They know the music but not the words."
-- Hare, Without Conscience
We did it with mirrors, great round parabolic things, each impossibly thin and three times as high as a man. Theseus rolled them up and bolted them to firecrackers stuffed with precious antimatter from our dwindling stockpiles. With twelve hours to spare she flung them like confetti along precise ballistic trajectories, and when they were safely distant she set them alight. They pinwheeled off every which way, gamma sleeting in their wake until they burned dry. Then they coasted, unfurling mercurial insect wings across the void.
In the greater distance, four hundred thousand alien machines looped and burned