SEQ_420 // STATUS: LINKED
[Cunningham] didn't like to be played.
No one does. But most people don't think that's what I'm doing. They don't know how much their bodies betray when they close their mouths. When they speak aloud, it's because they want to confide; when they don't, they think they're keeping their opinions to themselves. I watch them so closely, customize each word so that no system ever feels used— and yet for some reason, that didn't work with Robert Cunningham.
I think I was modeling the wrong system.
Imagine you are a [synthesist]. You deal in the behavior of systems at their surfaces, infer the machinery beneath from its reflections above. That is the secret of your success: you understand the system by understanding the boundaries that contain it.
Now imagine you encounter someone who has ripped a hole in those boundaries and bled beyond them.
Robert Cunningham's flesh could not contain him. His duties pulled him beyond the meat sack; here in the Oort, his topology rambled all over the ship. That was true of all of us, to some extent; [Bates] and her drones, Sarasti and his limbic link—even the ConSensus inlays in our heads diffused us a bit, spread us just slightly beyond the confines of our own bodies. But Bates only ran her drones; she never inhabited them. [The Gang of Four] may have run multiple systems on a single motherboard, but each had its own distinct topology and they only surfaced one at a time. And Sarasti—
Well, [Sarasti] was a whole different story, as it turned out.
Cunningham didn't just operate his remotes; he escaped into them, wore them like a secret identity to hide the feeble Human [baseline] within. He had sacrificed half of his neocortex for the chance to see x-rays and taste the shapes hiding in cell membranes, he had butchered one body to become a fleeting tenant of many. Pieces of him hid in the sensors and manipulators that lined the scrambler's cages; I might have gleaned vital cues from every piece of equipment in the subdrum if I'd ever thought to look. Cunningham was a topological jigsaw like everyone else, but half his pieces were hidden in machinery. My model was incomplete.
I don't think he ever aspired to such a state. Looking back, I see radiant self-loathing on every remembered surface. But there in the waning years of the twenty-first century, the only alternative he could see was the life of a parasite. Cunningham merely chose the lesser evil.
Now, even that was denied him. Sarasti's orders had severed him from his own sensorium. He no longer felt the data in his gut; he had to interpret it, step by laborious step, through screens and graphs that reduced perception to flat empty shorthand. Here was a system traumatized by multiple amputations. Here was a system with its eyes and ears and tongue cut out, forced to stumble and feel its way around things it had once inhabited, right down in the bone. Suddenly there was nowhere else to hide, and all those far-flung pieces of Robert Cunningham tumbled back into his flesh where I could see them at last.
It had been my mistake, all along. I'd been so focused on modelling other systems that I'd forgotten about the one doing the modelling. Bad eyes are only one bane of clear vision: bad assumptions can be just as blinding, and it wasn't enough to imagine I was Robert Cunningham.
I had to imagine I was [Siri Keeton] as well.
Of course, that only raises another question. If my guess about Cunningham was right, why did my tricks work on [Isaac Szpindel]? He was every bit as discontinuous as his replacement.
I didn't think about it much at the time. Szpindel was gone but the thing that had killed him was still there, hanging right off the bow, a vast swelling enigma that might choose to squash us at any instant. I was more than a little preoccupied.
Now, though—far too late to do anything about it—I think I might know the answer.
Maybe my tricks didn't work on Isaac either, not really. Maybe he saw through my manipulations as easily as Cunningham did. But maybe he just didn't care. Maybe I could read him because he let me. Which would mean— I can't find another explanation that fits— that he just liked me, regardless.
I think that might have made him a friend.