Work

Blindsight

<b>Two months since the stars fell...</b><br><br>Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown. <br><br>Two months of silence, while a world holds its breath.<br><br>Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something <i>en route</i>.<br><br>So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet?<br><br>You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed, and the fainter one she'll do any good if she is. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called <i>vampire</i>, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a <i>synthesist</i>--an informational topologist with half his mind gone--as an interface between <i>here </i>and <i>there</i>, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge.<br><br>You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find.<br><br>But you'd give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them... <br>