"Peter Watts - Blindsight" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watts Peter)

Helen telling me (and telling me) how difficult it was to adjust.
Like you had a whole new personality, she said, and why not?
There's a reason they call it radical hemispherectomy: half the
brain thrown out with yesterday's krill, the remaining half press-
ganged into double duty. Think of all the rewiring that one lonely
hemisphere must have struggled with as it tried to take up the
slack. It turned out okay, obviously. The brain's a very flexible
piece of meat; it took some doing, but it adapted. I adapted. Still.
Think of all that must have been squeezed out, deformed, reshaped
by the time the renovations were through. You could argue that
I'm a different person than the one who used to occupy this body.
The grownups showed up eventually, of course. Medicine was
bestowed, ambulances called. Parents were outraged, diplomatic
volleys exchanged, but it's tough to drum up neighborhood outrage
on behalf of your injured baby when playground surveillance from
three angles shows the little darlingтАФand five of his buddiesтАФ
kicking in the ribs of a disabled boy. My mother, for her part,
recycled the usual complaints about problem children and absentee
fathersтАФDad was off again in some other hemisphereтАФbut the
dust settled pretty quickly. Pag and I even stayed friends, after a
short hiatus that reminded us both of the limited social prospects
open to schoolyard rejects who don't stick together.
So I survived that and a million other childhood experiences. I
grew up and I got along. I learned to fit in. I observed, recorded,
derived the algorithms and mimicked appropriate behaviors. Not
much of it wasтАФheartfelt, I guess the word is. I had friends and
Peter Watts 10 Blindsight

enemies, like everyone else. I chose them by running through
checklists of behaviors and circumstances compiled from years of
observation.
I may have grown up distant but I grew up objective, and I have
Robert Paglino to thank for that. His seminal observation set
everything in motion. It led me into Synthesis, fated me to our
disastrous encounter with the Scramblers, spared me the worse fate
befalling Earth. Or the better one, I suppose, depending on your
point of view. Point of view matters: I see that now, blind, talking
to myself, trapped in a coffin falling past the edge of the solar
system. I see it for the first time since some beaten bloody friend
on a childhood battlefield convinced me to throw my own point of
view away.
He may have been wrong. I may have been. But that, that
distanceтАФthat chronic sense of being an alien among your own
kindтАФit's not entirely a bad thing.
It came in especially handy when the real aliens came calling.
Peter Watts 11 Blindsight