{"id":2564,"date":"2011-12-07T15:44:42","date_gmt":"2011-12-07T23:44:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=2564"},"modified":"2012-11-28T10:29:24","modified_gmt":"2012-11-28T18:29:24","slug":"bright-eyes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=2564","title":{"rendered":"Bright Eyes."},"content":{"rendered":"

It was a window in the crudest possible sense: a solid pane of transparent alloy, set into the rear bulkhead.\u00a0 You couldn’t zoom it or resize it or lay a tactical false-color overlay across its surface.\u00a0 You couldn’t even turn it off, unless someone on the other side brought down the blast shield.\u00a0 It was a clear, impenetrable hole<\/em> in the ship:\u00a0 a circular viewport into an alien terrarium where, out past the ghostly reflection of his own face, strange hyperbaric creatures built monstrous and incomprehensible edifices out of sand and coral.<\/p>\n

Six of the monks were resting, suspended in medical cocoons like dormant grubs waiting out the winter.\u00a0 The others moved purposeful as ants across a background full of shadows and the looming shapes of half-built machinery:\u00a0 a jumbled cityscape of tanks and stacked ceramic superconductors and segments of pipe big enough to walk through. Br\u00fcks was pretty sure that the patchwork sphere coming together near the center of the hold was shaping up to be the fusion chamber.<\/p>\n

Off to one side two of the Bicams huddled in whatever passed for conversation.\u00a0 A glistening gelatinous orb floated between them.\u00a0 They ended their communion as he watched; each in turn plunged hands into the sphere (water<\/em>, Br\u00fcks realized: it’s just a blob of water<\/em>) withdrew, dried off on a towel leashed to the bulkhead.\u00a0 Their eyes twinkled like green stars in the gloom.<\/p>\n

How had Moore put it?\u00a0 Cognitive subspecies<\/em>.\u00a0 But the Colonel didn’t get it.\u00a0 Neither did Leona; she’d shared her enthusiastic blindness with Br\u00fcks over breakfast that very morning, ticked off in hushed and reverent tones the snips and splices that had so improved <\/em>her masters: No xenophobia, no confirmation biases, no Semmelweis reflex.\u00a0 They don’t suffer from scope insensitivity. They’re immune to the inattentional blindness and hyperbolic discounting.\u00a0 The Concorde Fallacy doesn’t even slow them down\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

As if those were good <\/em>things.<\/p>\n

In a way, of course, they were.\u00a0 All those gut feelings that kept the breed alive, right or wrong, on the Pleistocene savannah\u2014 and they were<\/em> wrong, so much of the time. \u00a0Fossil feelings.\u00a0 Better off without them, once you’d outgrown the savannah and decided that Truth mattered after all.\u00a0 But humanity wasn’t defined by arms and legs and upright posture. Humanity evolved at the synapse as well as at the opposable thumb \u2014 and those gut feelings, right or wrong, were the very groundwork on which the whole damn clade had been built.\u00a0 Capuchins felt empathy.\u00a0 Chimps had an innate sense of fair play.\u00a0 You could look into the eyes of any cat or dog and see a connection there, a legacy of common subroutines and shared emotions.<\/p>\n

The Bicamerals had cut away all that kinship in the name of something their stunted progenitors called Truth<\/em>, and replaced it with \u2014 something else.\u00a0 They might look human, their cellular metabolism might lie dead on the Kleiber curve, but to merely call them a cognitive sub<\/em>species was denial to the point of delusion.\u00a0 The wiring in those skulls wasn’t even mammalian any more.\u00a0 A look into those<\/em> sparkling eyes would show you nothing but\u2014<\/p>\n

“Hey.”<\/p>\n

Leona’s reflection bobbed upside-down next to his in the window.\u00a0 He turned as she reached past and unhooked her pressure suit from its alcove. “Hey.”<\/p>\n

“Everything’s still on track?”<\/p>\n

“More or less.\u00a0 I can’t keep track of all the parts but Beenish says we’ll be ready on time.”<\/p>\n

His eyes wandered back to the window as she began to suit up.\u00a0 “I didn’t know,” he said, too quietly.\u00a0 As if afraid they’d hear him through the bulkhead.<\/p>\n

“Know what?”<\/p>\n

“How they work.\u00a0 What they\u2014 are.”<\/p>\n

“Really?” She paused, one leg halfway into the suit.\u00a0 “I would’ve thought the eyes’d be a giveaway.”<\/p>\n

“I just assumed that was for night vision.\u00a0 Hell, I know people who retro fluorescent proteins as a fashion <\/em>statement.”<\/p>\n

“Yeah, now<\/em>.\u00a0 Back in the day they were\u2014”<\/p>\n

“Diagnostic markers.\u00a0 I figured it out.”\u00a0 After wondering why a bioweapon targeted on Bicamerals would have its roots in a cure for cancer.\u00a0 “Doesn’t it bother you?”<\/p>\n

The suit had swallowed her to the waist. “Why should it?”<\/p>\n

“They\u2014 they’re tumors<\/em>, Leona.\u00a0 Literally.\u00a0 Thinking tumors.”<\/p>\n

“That’s a pretty gross oversimplication.”<\/p>\n

“Maybe.”\u00a0 He wasn’t clear on the details.\u00a0 Hypomethylation, CpG islands, methylcytosine \u2014 black magic, all of it.\u00a0 The precise and deliberate rape of certain methylating groups to turn interneurons cancerous, just so<\/em>:\u00a0 a hyperproliferation of dendrites, a synaptic superbloom that multiplied every circuit a thousandfold.\u00a0 It was no joyful Baptism, as far as Br\u00fcks could tell.\u00a0 There would be no ecstasy in that rebirth.\u00a0 It was a breakneck overgrowth of weedy electricity that nearly killed its initiates outright, pulled circuits with sixty million years of residency out by the roots.<\/p>\n

Leona was right:\u00a0 the path was subtle and complex beyond human imagining, controlled with molecular precision, tamed by whatever drugs and dark arts the Bicams used to keep all that chaotic overgrowth from running rampant.\u00a0 But when all the rites and incantations had been spoken, when the deed had been done and the patient sewn up, it all came down to one thing:<\/p>\n

They’d turned their brains into cancer.<\/p>\n

“I was so worked up about Luckett.” Br\u00fcks shook his head at his own stupidity.\u00a0 “We just left him back there to die, you know, we left all of them\u2014 but he would have died anyway, wouldn’t he? As soon as he graduated.\u00a0 Every synapse that ever made him what he was, the cancer would eat it all and replace it with something\u2026”<\/p>\n

“Something better,” Leona said.<\/p>\n

“That’s a matter of opinion.”<\/p>\n

“You make it sound so horrible,” she said. “But you know, you’ve gone through pretty much the same thing yourself and you don’t seem any the worse for it.”<\/p>\n

He imagined coming apart.\u00a0 He imagined every thread of conscious experience fraying and dissolving and being eaten away<\/em>.\u00a0 He imagined dying, while the body lived on.<\/p>\n

“I don’t think so,” he said.<\/p>\n

“Sure you did.\u00a0 When you were a baby.” Leona laid a gloved hand on his shoulder.\u00a0 “We all<\/em> start out with heads full of mush and random wiring; it’s the neural pruning afterward that shapes who we are.\u00a0 It’s like, like sculpture.\u00a0 You start with a block of granite, chip away the bits that don’t belong, end up with a work of art.\u00a0 The Bicams just start over with a bigger block.”<\/p>\n

“But it’s not you<\/em>!”<\/p>\n

“Enough of it is.”<\/p>\n

“Sure, the memories<\/em> stick.”\u00a0 It was true enough.\u00a0 Some things were spared:\u00a0 thalamus and cerebellum, hippocampus and brain stem all left carefully unscathed by a holocaust with the most discriminating taste.\u00a0 “Something else is remembering them.”<\/p>\n

“Perhaps.”\u00a0 She shrugged, a gesture barely visible under the suit. “If it’s God’s will.”<\/p>\n

“Jesus Christ<\/em>, Leona, will you stop saying that!\u00a0 You’re way too smart for this.\u00a0 There’s not the slightest shred of evidence\u2014”<\/p>\n

“Really.”\u00a0 Her voice hardened.\u00a0 “And what kind of evidence<\/em> would be good enough for you, Dan?\u00a0 Voices in the clouds?\u00a0 Fiery letters in the sky proclaiming I Am The Lord Thy God You Insignificant Weasel<\/em>?\u00a0 Would you believe then<\/em>, or would you just chalk everything up to hoaxes and hallucinations?” \u00a0She lowered the helmet over her head, yanked it counterclockwise until it clicked into place.\u00a0 His fisheye reflection slid bulging across her faceplate as she turned.<\/p>\n

She paused, hand on the latch.\u00a0 Turned back.\u00a0 Her face faded back into view as she dialed down the reflectivity.<\/p>\n

“Sorry.\u00a0 I get a little defensive sometimes.\u00a0 It’s just, you know.\u00a0 I’ve heard that argument a few times before.”<\/p>\n

“What about you, Leona?” he asked softly.<\/p>\n

“What about<\/em> me?”<\/p>\n

“You aspiring to the same fate?”<\/p>\n

She eyed him sadly from the bowl of her helmet.\u00a0 “It’s not like you think.\u00a0 Really.” And passed on to some farther shore.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was a window in the crudest possible sense: a solid pane of transparent alloy, set into the rear bulkhead.\u00a0 You couldn’t zoom it or resize it or lay a tactical false-color overlay across its surface.\u00a0 You couldn’t even turn it off, unless someone on the other side brought down the blast shield.\u00a0 It was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dumbspeech","category-fiblet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2564"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2564\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3770,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2564\/revisions\/3770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}