The blindness isn’t total. He still sees light, vague shapes in constant motion. It’s like watching the world through wax paper. The eyes jiggle when you’re a Passenger. Of course the eyes always jiggle, endlessly hopping from one momentary focus to the next—saccades, they’re called—but your brain usually edits out those motions, splices the clear bits together in post to serve up an illusion of continuity.
Not up here, though. Up here the sacc rate goes through the roof and nothing gets lost. Total data acquisition. To Asante it’s all blizzard and blur, but that’s okay. There’s something in here with him that can see just fine: his arms and legs are moving, after all, and Kodjo Asante isn’t moving them.
His other senses work fine; he feels the roughness of the rope against his palms as he climbs the wall, smells the earth and pine needles bedding the trail. Still tastes a faint hint of copper from that bite on the inside of his cheek a couple klicks back. He hears with utmost clarity the voice on his audio link. His inner zombie sucks all that back too, but eardrums don’t saccade. Tactile nerves don’t hop around under the flesh. Just the eyes: that’s how you tell. That and the fact that your whole body’s been possessed by Alien Hand Syndrome.
He calls it his Evil Twin. It’s a name first bestowed by his Dad, after catching eight-year-old Kodjo sleepwalking for the third time in a week. Asante made the mistake of mentioning that once to the squad over breakfast. He’s still trying to live it down.
Now he tries for the hell of it, wills himself to stop for just an instant. ET runs and leaps and crawls as it has for the past two hours, unnervingly autonomous. That’s the retrosplenial bypass they burned into his neocortex a month ago, a little dropgate to decouple mind from self. Just one of the mods they’ve etched into him with neural lace and nanotube mesh and good old-fashioned zap’n’tap. Midbrain tweaks to customize ancient prey stalking routines. An orbitofrontal damper to ensure behavioral compliance (can’t have your better half deciding to keep the keys when you want them back, as Maddox puts it).
His scalp itches with fresh scars. His head moves with a disquieting inertia, as if weighed down by a kilogram of lead and not a few bits of arsenide and carbon. He doesn’t understand a tenth of it. Hasn’t quite come to grips with life after death. But dear God, how wonderful it is to be so strong. He feels like this body could take on a whole platoon single-handed.
Sometimes he can feel this way for five or ten whole minutes before remembering the names of other corpses who never got in on the deal.
Without warning ET dances to one side, brings its arms up and suddenly Asante can see.
Just for a millisecond, a small clear break in a sea of fog: a Lockheed Pit Bull cresting the granite outcropping to his left, legs spread, muzzle spinning to bear. In the next instant Asante’s blind again, recoil vibrating along his arm like a small earthquake. His body hasn’t even broken stride.
“Ah. Target acquisition,” the instructor remarks. “Enjoy the view.” It takes this opportunity to summarize the basics—target lock’s the only time when the eyes focus on a single point long enough for passengers to look out— before segueing into a spiel on line-of-sight networking.
Asante isn’t sure what the others are hearing. Tiwana, the only other raw recruit, is probably enduring the same 101 monologue. Kalmus might have moved up to field trauma by now. Garin’s on an engineering track. Maddox has told Asante that he’ll probably end up in bioweapons, given his background.
It takes nineteen months to train a field-ready specialist. ZeroS do it in seven.
Asante’s legs have stopped moving. On all sides he hears the sound of heavy breathing. Lieutenant Metzinger’s voice tickles the space between his ears: “Passengers, you may enter the cockpit.”
The switch is buried in the visual cortex and tied to the power of imagination. They call it a mandala. Each recruit chooses their own and keeps it secret; no chance of a master key for some wily foe to drop onto a billboard in the heat of battle. Not even the techs know the patterns, the implants were conditioned on double-blind trial-and-error. Something personal, they said. Something unique, easy to visualize.
Asante’s mandala is a sequence of four words in sans serif font. He summons it now—
ALL TAUTOLOGIES
ARE TAUTOLOGIES
—and the world clicks back into sudden, jarring focus. He stumbles, though he wasn’t moving.
Right on cue, his left hand starts twitching.
They’re halfway up the mountain, in a sloping sunny meadow. There are flowers here. Insects. Everything smells alive. Silano raises trembling arms to the sky. Kalmus flumps on the grass, recovering from exertions barely felt when better halves were in control, exertions that have left them weak and wasted despite twice-normal mito counts and AMPK agonists and a dozen other tweaks to put them in the upper tail of the upper tail. Acosta drops beside her, grinning at the sunshine. Garin kicks at a punky log and an actual goddamn snake slithers into the grass, a ribbon of yellow and black with a flickering tongue.
Tiwana’s at Asante’s shoulder, as scarred and bald as he is. “Beautiful, eh?” Her right eye’s a little off-kilter; Asante resists the impulse to stare by focusing on the bridge of her nose.
“Not beautiful enough to make up for two hours with a hood over my head.” That’s Saks, indulging in some pointless bitching. “Would it kill them to give us a video feed?”
“Or even just put us to sleep,” Kalmus grumbles. They both know it’s not that simple. The brain’s a tangle of wires looping from basement to attic and back again; turn off the lights in the living room and your furnace might stop working. Even pay-per-view’s a nonstarter. In theory, there’s no reason why they couldn’t
