Rorschach — segment 6

Szpindel had rattled off dementias like raindrops. I went to ConSensus for enlightenment and found a whole other self buried below the limbic system, below the hindbrain, below even the cerebellum. It lived in the brain stem and it was older than the vertebrates themselves. It was self-contained: it heard and saw and felt, independent of all those other parts layered overtop like evolutionary afterthoughts. It dwelt on nothing but its own survival. It had no time for planning or abstract analysis, spared effort for only the most rudimentary sensory processing. But it was fast, and it was dedicated, and it could react to threats in a fraction of the time it took its smarter roommates to even become aware of them.

And even when it couldn't—when the obstinate, unyielding neocortex refused to let it off the leash—still it tried to pass on what it saw, and Isaac Szpindel experienced an ineffable sense of where to reach. In a way, he had a stripped-down version of the Gang in his head. Everyone did.

I looked further and found God Itself in the meat of the brain, found the static that had sent Bates into rapture and Michelle into convulsions. I tracked Gray Syndrome to its headwaters in the temporal lobe. I heard voices ranting in the brains of schizophrenics. I found cortical infarcts that inspired people to reject their own limbs, imagined the magnetic fields that must have acted in their stead when Cruncher tried to dismember himself. And off in some half-forgotten pesthole of Twentieth-century case studies—filed under Cotard's Syndrome—I found Amanda Bates and others of her kind, their brains torqued into denial of the very self. "I used to have a heart," one of them said listlessly from the archives. "Now I have something that beats in its place." Another demanded to be buried, because his corpse was already stinking.

There was more, a whole catalog of finely-tuned dysfunctions that Rorschach had not yet inflicted on us. Somnambulism. Agnosias. Hemineglect. ConSensus served up a freak show to make any mind reel at its own fragility: a woman dying of thirst within easy reach of water, not because she couldn't see the faucet but because she couldn't recognize it. A man for whom the left side of the universe did not exist, who could neither perceive nor conceive of the left side of his body, of a room, of a line of text. A man for whom the very concept of leftness had become literally unthinkable.

Sometimes we could conceive of things and still not see them, although they stood right before us. Skyscrapers appeared out of thin air, the person talking to us changed into someone else during a momentary distraction— and we didn't notice. It wasn't magic. It was barely even misdirection. 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.

I found the opposite of Szpindel's blindsight, a malady not in which the sighted believe they are blind but one in which the blind insist they can see. The very idea was absurd unto insanity and yet there they were, retinas detached, optic nerves burned away, any possibility of vision denied by the laws of physics: bumping into walls, tripping over furniture, inventing endless ludicrous explanations for their clumsiness. The lights, unexpectedly turned off by some other party. A colorful bird glimpsed through the window, distracting attention from the obstacle ahead. I can see perfectly well, thank you. Nothing wrong with my eyes.

Gauges in the head, Szpindel had called them. But there were other things in there too. 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 refreshed by input from the senses. What happens when those senses go dark, but the model—thrown off-kilter by some trauma or tumor—fails to refresh? How long do we stare in at that obsolete rendering, recycling and massaging the same old data in a desperate, subconscious act of utterly honest denial? How long before it dawns on us that the world we see no longer reflects the world we inhabit, that we are blind?

Months sometimes, according to the case files. For one poor woman, a year and more.

Appeals to logic fail utterly. How could you see the bird when there is no window? How do you decide where your seen half-world ends if you can't see the other half to weigh it against? If you are dead, how can you smell your own corruption? If you do not exist, Amanda, what is talking to us now?

Useless. When you're in the grip of Cotard's Syndrome or hemineglect you cannot be swayed by argument. When you're in thrall to some alien artefact you know that the self is gone, that reality ends at the midline. You know it with the same unshakeable certainty of any man regarding the location of his own limbs, with that hardwired awareness that needs no other confirmation. Against that conviction, what is reason? What is logic?

Inside Rorschach, they had no place at all.

++*++

On the sixth orbit it acted.

"It's talking to us," James said. Her eyes were wide behind the faceplate, but not bright, not manic. Around us Rorschach's guts oozed and crawled at the corner of my eye; it still took effort to ignore the illusion. Foreign words scrabbled like small animals below my brainstem as I tried to focus on a ring of finger-sized protrusions that picketed a patch of wall.

"It's not talking," Szpindel said from across the artery. "You're hallucinating again."

Bates said nothing. Two grunts hovered in the middle of the space, panning across three axes.

"It's different this time," James insisted. "The geometry—it's not so symmetrical. Looks almost like the Phaistos disk." She spun slowly, pointed down the passage: "I think it's stronger down here…"

"Bring Michelle out," Szpindel suggested. "Maybe she can talk some sense into you."

James laughed weakly. "Never say die, do you?" She tweaked her pistol and coasted into deeper gloom. "Yes, it's definitely stronger here. There's content, superimposed on—"

Quick as a blink, Rorschach cut her off.

I'd never seen anything move so fast before. There was none of the languor we'd grown accustomed to from Rorschach's septa, no lazy drift to contraction; the iris snapped shut in an instant. Suddenly the artery just ended three meters ahead, with a matte-black membrane filigreed in fine spiral.

And the Gang of Four was on the other side.

The grunts were on it immediately, lasers crackling through the air. Bates was yelling Get behind me! Stick to the walls!, kicking herself into space like an acrobat in fast-forward, taking some tactical high ground that must have been obvious to her, at least. I edged towards the perimeter. Threads of superheated plasma sliced the air, shimmering. Szpindel, at the corner of my eye, hugged the opposite side of the tunnel. The walls crawled. I could see the lasers taking a toll; the septum peeled back from their touch like burning paper, black oily smoke writhing from its crisping edges and—

Sudden brightness, everywhere. A riot of fractured light flooded the artery, a thousand shifting angles of incidence and reflection. It was like being trapped in the belly of a kaleidoscope, pointed at the sun. Light—

—and needle-sharp pain in my side, in my left arm. The smell of charred meat. A scream, cut off.

Susan? You there, Susan?

We're taking you first.

Around me, the light died; inside me, a swarm of floaters mixed it up with the chronic half-visions Rorschach had already planted in my head. Alarms chirped irritatingly in my helmet— breach, breach, breach—until the smart fabric of the suit softened and congealed where the holes had been. Something stung maddeningly in my left side. I felt as if I'd been branded.

"Keeton! Check Szpindel!" Bates had called off the lasers. The grunts closed for hand-to-hand, reaching with fiery nozzles and diamond-tipped claws to grapple with some prismatic material glowing softly behind that burnt-back skin.

Fibrous reflector, I realized. It had shattered the laser light, turned it to luminous shrapnel and thrown it back in our faces. Clever.

But its surface was still alight, even with the lasers down; a diffuse glow, dipping and weaving, filtered through from the far side of the barrier while the drones chewed doggedly through the near one. After a moment it struck me: James's headlamp.

"Keeton!"

Right. Szpindel.

His faceplate was intact. The laser had melted the Faraday mesh laminated onto the crystal, but the suit was sealing that tiny hole even now. The hole behind, drilled neatly through his forehead, remained. The eyes beneath stared at infinity.

"Well?" Bates asked. She could read his vitals as easily as I, but Theseus was capable of post-mortem rebuilds.

Barring brain damage. "No."

The whine of drills and shredders stopped; the ambience brightened. I looked away from Szpindel's remains. The grunts had cut a hole in the septum's fibrous underlayer. One of them nosed its way through to the other side.

A new sound rose into the mix, a soft animal keening, haunted and dissonant. For a moment I thought Rorschach was whispering to us again; its walls seemed to contract slightly around me.

"James?" Bates snapped. "James!"

Not James. A little girl in a woman's body in an armored spacesuit, scared out of her wits.

The grunt nudged her curled-up body back into our company. Bates took it gently. "Susan? Come back, Suze. You're safe."

The grunts hovered restlessly, alert in every direction, pretending everything was under control. Bates spared me a glance—"Take Isaac."—and turned back to James. "Susan?"

"N—n-no," whimpered a small voice, a little girl's voice.

"Michelle? Is that you?"

"There was a thing," the little girl said. "It grabbed me. It grabbed my leg."

"We're out of here." Bates pulled the Gang back along the passage. One grunt lingered, watching the hole; the other took point.

"It's gone," Bates said gently. "There's nothing there now. See the feed?"

"You can't s-see it." Michelle whispered. "It's in—it's in—visible.."

The septum receded around a curve as we retreated. The hole torn through its center watched us like the ragged pupil of some great unblinking eye. It stayed empty as long as it stayed in sight. Nothing came out after us. Nothing we could see. A thought began cycling through my head, some half-assed eulogy stolen from an eavesdropped confessional, and try as I might I couldn't shut it down.

Isaac Szpindel hadn't made the semifinals after all.

++*++

Susan James came back to us on the way up. Isaac Szpindel did not.

We stripped wordlessly in the decon balloon. Bates, first out of her suit, reached for Szpindel but the Gang stopped her with a hand and a headshake. Personae segued one into another as they stripped the body. Susan removed helmet and backpack and breastplate. Cruncher peeled away the silvery leaded skin from collar to toe. Sascha stripped the jumpsuit and left the pale flesh naked and exposed. Except for the gloves. They left his feedback gloves in place; their fingertips forever tactile, the flesh inside forever numb. Through it all, Szpindel stared unblinking beneath the hole in his forehead. His glazed eyes focused on distant quasars.

I expected Michelle to appear in her turn and close them, but she never did.

"You have eyes, but you do not see"

—Jesus the Nazorean

I don't know how to feel about this, I thought. He was a good man. He was decent, he was kind to me, even when he didn't know I was listening in. I didn't know him long— he wasn't a friend exactly— but still. I should miss him. I should mourn.

I should feel more than this sick sinking fear that I could be next...

Sarasti hadn't wasted any time. Szpindel's replacement met us as we emerged, freshly thawed, nicotine-scented. The rehydration of his flesh was ongoing— saline bladders clung to each thigh—although it would never entirely erase the sharpness of his features. His bones cracked when he moved.

He looked past me and took the body. "Susan—Michelle...I—"

The gang turned away.

He coughed, began fumbling a body condom over the corpse. "Sarasti wants everyone in the drum."

"We're hot," Bates said. Even cut short, the excursion had piled up a lethal Seivert count. Faint nausea tickled the back of my throat.

"Decontaminate later." One long pull of a zipper and Szpindel was gone, engulfed in an oily gray shroud. "You—" he turned in my direction, pointed at the scorched holes in my jumpsuit. "With me."

Robert Cunningham. Another prototype. Dark-haired, hollow-cheeked, a jaw you could use as a ruler. Both smoother and harsher than the man he had replaced. Where Szpindel had ticced and jerked as if static-charged, Cunningham's face held all the expression of a wax dummy's. The wetware that ran those muscles had been press-ganged into other pursuits. Even the tremors that afflicted the rest of his body were muted, soothed by the nicotine he drew with every second breath.

He held no cigarette now. He held only the shrouded body of his hard-luck primary and his ongoing, freshly thawed distaste for the ship's synthesist. His fingers trembled.

Bates and the Gang moved silently up the spine. Cunningham and I followed, guiding the Shroud of Szpindel between us. My leg and side were stinging again, now that Cunningham had reminded them to. There wouldn't be much he could do about them, though. The beams would have cauterized the flesh on their way through, and if they'd hit anything vital I'd have been dead already.

At the hatch we broke into single-file: Szpindel first, Cunningham pushing at his heels. By the time I emerged into the drum Bates and the gang were already down on deck and taking their usual seats. Sarasti, in the flesh, watched them from the end of the conference table.

His eyes were naked. From this angle the soft, full-spectrum light of the drum washed the shine from them. If you didn't look too closely, for too long, you might almost think those eyes were Human.

BioMed had been spun down for my arrival. Cunningham pointed to a diagnostic couch on a section of the stilled deck that served as our infirmary; I floated over and strapped myself in. Two meters away, past a waist-high guard rail that had risen from the deck, the rest of the drum rolled smoothly past. It slung Bates and the Gang and Sarasti around like weights on a string.

I tapped ConSensus to hear them. James was speaking, quietly and without expression. "I noticed a new pattern in the form-constants. Something in the grating. It looked like a signal. It got stronger as I went down the tunnel, I followed it, I blacked out. I don't remember anything more until we were on our way back. Michelle filled me in, as much as she could. That's all I know. I'm sorry."

A hundred degrees away in the no-gee zone, Cunningham maneuvered his predecessor into a coffin with different options than those up front. I wondered if it would embark on an autopsy during the debriefing. I wondered if we'd be able to hear the sounds it made.

"Sascha," Sarasti said.

"Yeah." Sascha's trademark drawl infected the voice. "I was riding Mom. Went deaf dumb and stark fucking blind when she passed out. I tried to take over but something was blocking me. Michelle, I guess. Never thought she had it in her. I couldn't even see."

"But you don't lose consciousness."

"I was awake the whole time, far as I know. Just completely in the dark."

"Smell? Tactile?"

"I could feel it when Michelle pissed in the suit. But I didn't notice anything else."

Cunningham was back at my side. The inevitable cigarette had appeared between his lips.

"Nothing touches you," the vampire surmised. "Nothing grabs your leg."

"No," Sascha said. She didn't believe Michelle's stories about invisible monsters. None of us did; why bother, when dementia could so easily explain anything we experienced?

"Cruncher."

"Don't know anything," I still wasn't used to the maleness of the voice now emanating from James's throat. Cruncher was a workaholic. He hardly ever surfaced in mixed company.