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This domain is blocked due to content filtering. message
Started by
Sylveon Fetish
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4 replies to this topic
Sylveon Fetish
I am unable to visit NSFW related websites anymore. I get an OpenDNS message
This domain is blocked due to content filtering.
This site was categorized in: Pornography, Nudity, Anime/Manga/Webcomic
every time. I have never had this issue on my laptop before and I have always been able to go onto this site. Now it no longer works. Nothing has changed on my laptop. It just started today. I do not know what an OpenDNS is nor have I ever heard of it.
I am trying to access: hxxp://rule34.paheal.net/ (link removed due to NSFW)
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Phantom010
Looks like you've changed your DNS settings in the past to OpenDNS.
Edited by Phantom010, 14 September 2015 - 07:10 AM.
Please stick around after posting. Helpers are never far. Don't disappear for a week!Our help is free, so please have the courtesy to reply in a timely manner. Thank you!
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CodeSmasha
He said he has never heard of/or OpenDNS
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Phantom010
Maybe he doesn't remember setting it up? Or, maybe it's not him who set it up?
Sylveon Fetish,
Go to your TCP/IP settings:
Do you see the following OpenDNS servers?
208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220
Edited by Phantom010, 14 September 2015 - 09:05 AM.
Please stick around after posting. Helpers are never far. Don't disappear for a week!Our help is free, so please have the courtesy to reply in a timely manner. Thank you!
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I'm thinking it is a computer on a private/ business/ school network that is using OpenDNS filtering rules.
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当前位置：>>>Blindsight......
"If you can see it, chances are it doesn't exist."
—Kate Keogh, Grounds for Suicide
Five times we did it. Over five consecutive orbits we threw ourselves between the monster's jaws, let it chew at us with a trillion microscopic teeth until Theseus reeled us in and stitched us back together. We crept through Rorschach's belly in fits and starts, focusing as best we could on the tasks at hand, trying to ignore the ghosts that tickled our midbrains. Sometimes the walls flexed subtly around us. Sometimes we only thought they did. Sometimes we took refuge in our diving bell while waves of charge and magnetism spiraled languidly past, like boluses of ectoplasm coursing down the intestine of some poltergeist god.
Sometimes we got caught in the open. The Gang would squabble amongst itself, uncertain which persona was which. Once I fell into a kind of waking paralysis while alien hands dragged m fortunately other hands brought me home, and voices that claimed to be real told me I'd made the whole thing up. Twice Amanda Bates found God, saw the fucker right there in front of her, knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that the creator not only existed but spoke to her, and her alone. Both times she lost her faith once we got her into the bell, but it was touc her warrior drones, drunk on power but still under line-of-sight control, staggered from their perimeters and pointed their weapons along bearings too close for comfort.
The grunts died fast. Some barely l a few died in minutes. The longest-lived were the slowest on the draw, half-blind, thick-witted, every command and response bottlenecked by raw high-frequency sound buzzing across their shielded eardrums. Sometimes we backed them up with others that spoke optically: faster but nervous, and even more vulnerable. Together they guarded against an opposition that had not yet shown its face.
It hardly had to. Our troops fell even in the absence of enemy fire.
We worked through it all, through fits and hallucinations and occasional convulsions. We tried to watch each others' backs while magnetic tendrils tugged our inner ears and made us seasick. Sometimes we vomi then we'd just hang on, white-faced, sucking sour air through clenched teeth while the recyclers filtered chunks and blobs from our headspace. And we'd give silent thanks for the small mercy of nonstick, static-repellent faceplates.
It rapidly became obvious that my presence served as more than cannon fodder. It didn't matter that I lacked the Gang's linguistic skills or Szpindel's
I was another set of hands, in a place where anyone could be laid out at a moment's notice. The more people Sarasti kept in the field, the greater the odds that at least one of them would be halfway functional at any given moment. Even so, we were in barely any condition to accomplish anything. Every incursion侵犯,入侵 was an exercise in reckless 鲁莽的；轻率的 endangerment.
We did it anyway. It was that or go home.
The work proceeded in infinitesimal increments, hamstrung割断…的腿筋；使残废 腿筋on every front. The Gang wasn't finding any evidence of signage or speech to decipher译解(密码等), 解释, but the gross mechanics of this thing were easy enough to observe. Sometimes Rorschach partitioned itself, extruded与from连用）挤出 ridges
脊；屋脊；山脊 around its passageways like the cartilaginous [解剖]软骨的, 软骨质的 hoop箍s encircling a human trachea〈解〉气管. Over hours some of them might develop into contracting iris
虹膜s〈植〉鸢尾, into complete septa
pl.隔片, 隔壁(seprum的复数形式), lazy as warm candle wax. We seemed to be witnessing the growth of the structure in discrete 离散的；分立的；不连续的segments.Rorschach grew mainly from the tips of its thorns 荆棘；蒺藜; we'd made our incursion hundreds of meters from the nearest, but evidently the process extended at least this far back.
If it was part of the normal growth process, though, it was a feeble echo of what must have been going on in the heart of the apical
顶点的,在顶点的 zones. We couldn't observe those directly, barely a hundred meters towards the thorn the tube grew too lethal even for suicidal flesh. But over those five orbits Rorschach grew by another eight percent, as mindless and mechanical as a growing crystal.
Through it all I tried to do my job. I compiled and collated, massaged data I would never understand. I watched the systems around me as best I could, factored each tic and trait into the mix. One part of my mind produced synopses and syntheses
综合体, 综合性 while another watched, incredulous不相信的,不可轻信的 and uncomprehending. Neither part could trace where those insights had come from.
It was difficult, though. Sarasti wouldn't let me back outside the system. Every observation was contaminated by my own confounding 使惊讶；使疑惑；使混淆 presence in the mix. I did my best. I made no suggestions that might affect critical decisions. In the field I did what I was told to, and no more. I tried to be like one of Bates's drones, a simple tool with no initiative and no influence on the group dynamic. I think I pulled it off, for the most part.
My nonsights accumulated on schedule and piled up in Theseus's transmission传动；传送 stack摞；叠, unsent. There was too much local interference to get a signal through to Earth.
Szpindel was right: the ghosts followed us back. We began to hear voices other than Sarasti's, whispering up the spine. Sometimes even the brightly-lit wraparound裹着身体的（衣服） 视野宽广的，视角宽广的world of the drum would warp使翘棱；使弯曲 and jiggle轻轻摇晃 from the corner of my eye—and more than once I saw boney headless phantoms 幻影；幻像 with too many arms, nested in the scaffolding搭脚手架用的支柱与木板. They seemed solid enough from the corner of my eye but any spot I focused on faded to shadow, to a dark translucent 半透明的 stain against the background. They were so very fragile, these ghosts. The mere act of observation drilled holes through them.
Szpindel had rattled off
急促背诵地dementias 痴呆like raindrops. I went to ConSensus for enlightenment and found a whole other self buried below the limbic边的, 缘的 system, below the hindbrain, below even the cerebellum
小脑. It lived in the brain stem and it was older than the vertebrates有脊椎的（动物） 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 基本的；初步的
未充分发展的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不顺从的顽固的；固执的, unyielding
固执的，坚定的 不能弯曲的，坚硬的neocortex [解]新(大脑) 皮层refused to let it off the leash—still it tried to pass on what it saw, and Isaac Szpindel experienced an ineffable
说不出的；难以言语形容的 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抽搐, 哄堂大笑, 社会动乱. I tracked Gray Syndrome to its headwaters in the temporal lobe. I heard voices ranting 大声说，夸张地讲 in the brains of schizophrenics[心]精神分裂症的. I found cortical皮层的, 皮质的, 有关脑皮层的 infarcts 〈医〉梗塞，梗死 that inspired people to reject their own limbs, imagined the magnetic fields that must have acted in their stead 替代,用处,好处 when Cruncher tried to dismember himself. And off in some half-forgotten pesthole
易发生传染病的场所, 瘟疫区 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 处以（刑罚），加（刑） （亦作： inflict upon） 予以（打击等），使受（痛苦等）on us. Somnambulism 梦行症，梦游症. 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水龙头，水嘴 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想象 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
不注意,疏忽 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 缺点；弊病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
视网膜detached, optic nerves burned away, any possibility of vision denied by the laws of physics: bumping into walls, tripping over furniture, inventing endless ludicrous 可笑的；滑稽的 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 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 良好状态) 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孤注一掷的；拼死的艰难的；危难的, 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 摇摆， 摇动 by argument. When you're in thrall （常与of, to连用）奴隶；农奴to some alien artefact you know that the self is gone, that reality ends at the midline. You know it with the same unshakeable 不可动摇的, 坚定不移的certainty of any man regarding the location of his own limbs, with that hardwired awareness that needs no other confirmation. Against that conviction 犯罪有罪判决；判罪
坚信；信念；确信, 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 ooze渗出；分泌出d and crawled at
it still took effort to ignore the illusion. Foreign words scrabbled(将石)粗加整修,(使石)初具形态 like small animals below my brainstem as I tried to focus on a ring of finger-sized protrusions伸出, 突出 that picketed用尖桩把…围起来 a patch of wall.
"It's not talking," Szpindel said from across the artery动脉. "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 置于他物之上；添加 on—"
Quick as a blink, Rorschach cut her off.
I'd never seen anything move so fast before. There was none of the languor疲倦；身心疲惫 沉闷；抑郁we'd grown accustomed to from Rorschach's septa, no lazy
the iris snapped shut in an instant. Suddenly the artery just ended three meters ahead, with a matte-black membrane filigreed饰有金银丝细工的 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周；周围；周界. Threads of superheated plasma血浆 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
the septum
〈解〉隔膜；中隔peeled back from their touch like burning paper, black oily smoke writhing from its crisping
使变脆；使发硬edges and—
Sudden brightness, everywhere. A riot of fractured light flooded the artery, a thousand shifting angles of incidence（常与of连用）发生率 and reflection. It was like being trapped in the belly of a kaleidoscope万花筒 千变万化的事物, 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, inside me, a swarm of floaters mixed it up with the chronic half-visions Rorschach had already planted in my head. Alarms chirped（鸟）吱吱叫；（虫）唧唧叫 irritatingly in my helmet— breach, breach, breach—until the smart fabric of the suit softened and congealed （液体）凝结，凝固，冻结where the holes had been. Something stung 刺痛， 引起刺痛 maddeningly
令人发狂地, 使人恼火地in my left side. I felt as if I'd been branded打上烙印.
"Keeton! Check Szpindel!" Bates had called off
取消 the lasers. The grunts closed for hand-to-hand, reaching with fiery 燃烧的；如火的 nozzles 喷嘴；管嘴and diamond-tipped claws （用爪子）撕，拉to grapple with 扭打, 抓住some prismatic 用三棱镜的 material glowing softly behind that burnt-back skin.
Fibrous reflector, I realized. It had shattered the laser light, turned it to luminous shrapnel炮弹片 and thrown it back in our faces. Clever.
But its surface was still alight, even
a diffuse glow, dipping and weaving编织, filtered through from the far side of the barrier while the drones chewed doggedly固执地, 顽强地 through the near one. After a moment it struck me: James's headlamp.
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 钻；锥 and shredders
切菜器, 撕碎机 the ambience brightened. I looked away from Szpindel's remains. The grunts had cut a hole in the septum's fibrous纤维的，纤维状的 underlayer. One of them nosed its way through to the other side.
A new sound rose into the mix, a soft animal keening 哭丧, 哀恸, haunted and dissonant 刺耳的不协调的，不和谐的. For a moment I thought Rorschach was wh 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 轻触；轻推 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 呜咽，抽泣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（常与on连用）苟延残喘 逗留；徘徊, 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. 撤退；退却 The hole torn through its center watched us like the ragged 不完善的；有缺陷的pupil（眼睛的）瞳孔，瞳仁 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 颂词 stolen from an eavesdropped 偷听者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
[用作指示语][音]继续 (in music and film) move without interruption from one song, melody, or scene to anotherone 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 feed 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 〈天〉类星体.
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（常与out连用）融解；融化, nicotine，尼古丁-scented. The rehydration [化] 再水化, 再水合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 摸索；搜寻a body condom over the corpse. "Sarasti wants everyone in the drum."
"We're hot," Bates said. Even cut short, the excursion游览；短途旅行 had piled up a lethal Seivert count. Faint nausea tickled the back of my throat.
"Decontaminate清除毒气；净化；消毒 later." One long pull of a zipper and Szpindel was gone, engulfed in an oily gray shroud尸衣，寿衣；裹尸布遮蔽物，覆盖物. "You—" he turned in my direction, pointed at the scorched烧焦， 烤焦，烘焦 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震动；地震 that afflicted the rest of his body were muted, soothed 使平息；抚慰，安慰；使安静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（常与for连用）不喜欢；厌恶；不悦 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〈医〉烧灼；烙；腐蚀 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医务所; I floated over and strapped（常与down, up连用）用带捆；用皮带束 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.（门窗的）格栅，格子 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 （常与on, in连用）开始；从事on an autopsy 验尸；尸检 during the debriefing任务报告, 任务报告中提出的情报. 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. N 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（与from连用）散发，发射，发出 from James's throat. Cruncher was a workaholic. He hardly ever surfaced in mixed company.
"You're there," Sarasti reminded him. "You must remember some—"
"Mom sent me patterns to parse. I was working on them. I'm still working on them," he added pointedly. "I didn't notice anything. Is that all'"
I'd never been able to get a good read on him. Sometimes Cruncher seemed to have more in common with the dozens of nonconscious modules working in James's head than with sentient有感觉的，有知觉的 hubs comprising the rest of the Gang. "You feel nothing'" Sarasti pressed.
"Just the patterns."
"Anything significant'"
"Standard phenomath spirals and gratings. But I haven't finished. Can I go now'"
"Yes. Call Michelle, please."
Cunningham stabbed at my wounds with anabolisers, muttering
低声说出 （生气或抱怨的话 to himself. Faint blue smoke curled between us. "Isaac found some tumors," he observed.
I nodded and coughed. My throat was sore. The nausea had grown heavy enough to sink below my diaphragm横隔膜.光圈；光阑
隔膜片；振动板
"Michelle." Sarasti repeated.
"I see some more here," Cunningham continued. "Along the bottom of your brain pan. Only a few dozen cells so far, they're not worth burning yet."
"Here." Michelle's voice was barely audible, even through ConSensus, but at least it was the voice of an adult. "I'm here."
"What do you remember, please'"
"I—I felt—I was just riding Mom, and then she was gone and there was no one else, so I had to—take over…"
"Do you see the septum close'"
"Not really. I felt it going dark, but when I turned around we were already trapped. And then I felt something behind me, it wasn't loud or harsh it just sort of bumped, and it grabbed me, and—and—
"I'm sorry," she said after a moment. "I'm a bit—woozy 糊里糊涂的，昏头昏脑的..."
Sarasti waited.
"Isaac," Michelle whispered. "He..."
"Yes." A pause. "We're very sorry about that."
"Maybe—can he be fixed'"
"No. There's brain damage." There was something like sympathy in the vampire's voice, the practiced affectation of an accomplished mimic. There was something else, too, an all-but-imperceptible(觉察不到的) hunger, a subtle edge of temptation. I don't think anyone heard it but me.
We were sick, and getting sicker. Predators are drawn to the weak and injured.
Michelle had fallen silent again. When she continued, her voice only faltered a little: "I can't tell you much. It grabbed me. It let me go. I went to pieces, and I can't explain why except that fucking place just does things to you, and I was—weak. I'm sorry. There's not much else to tell you."
"Thank you," Sarasti said after a long moment.
"Can I—I'd like to leave if that's okay."
"Yes," Sarasti said. Michelle sank below the surface as the Commons rotated past. I didn't see who took her place.
"The grunts didn't see anything," Bates remarked. "By the time we broke through the septum the tunnel behind was empty."
"Any bogey 妖怪；鬼怪〈高尔夫〉每洞的标准杆数would have had plenty of time to hightail拼命逃走, 追赶," Cunningham said. He planted his feet on the deck an the subdrum began to move. I drifted obliquely against my restraints.
"I don't disagree," Bates said, "But if there's anything we've learned about that place, it's that we can't trust our senses."
"Trust Michelle's," Sarasti said. He opened a window as I grew heavier: a grunt's-eye view of a fuzzy, bright blob weaving behind the translucent waxed-paper fibers of the skinned septum. James's headlight, from the wrong side of the barrier. The image wobbled a bit as the drone staggered through some local pocket of magnetism, then replayed. Wobbled, replayed. A six-second loop.
"See something next to the Gang."
Non-vampires saw no such thing. Sarasti froze the image, evidently realizing as much. "Diffraction衍射, 宽龟裂状的 patterns aren't consistent with a single light source in open space. I see dimmer elements, reflective elements. Two dark objects close together, similar size, scattering使分散，驱散，分散 light here—" a cursor appeared at two utterly nondescript points on the image— "and here. One's the Gang. The other's unaccounted for."
"Just a minute," Cunningham said. "If you can see it through all that, why didn't Su—why didn't Michelle see anything'"
"Synesthesiac," Sarasti reminded him. "You see. She feels."
BioMed jerked 急拉；猛扯slightly, locking into spin- the guard rail sank back into the deck. Off in some far-off corner, something without eyes watched me watching it.
"Shit," Bates whispered. "There's someone home."
They never really talked like that, by the way. You'd hear gibberish 难理解的话，无意义的声音—a half-dozen languages, a whole Babel of personal idioms—if I spoke in their real voices.
Some of the simpler tics make it through: Sascha's good-natured belligerence
交战状态, Sarasti's aversion to the past tense. Cunningham lost most of his gender pronouns to an unforeseen 意外的；偶然的 glitch突然的不规则运转，突然的失灵 during the work on his temporal lobe. But it went beyond that. The whole lot of them threw English and Hindi and Hadzane into e no real scientist would allow their thoughts to be hamstrung by the conceptual limitations of a single language. Other times they acted almost as synthesists in their own right, conversing in grunts and gestures that would be meaningless to any baseline. It's not so much that the bleeding edge it's just that once you get past a certain point, formal speech is too damn slow.
Except for Susan James. The walking contradiction, the woman so devoted to Communication As Unifier that she'd cut her own brain into disunified chunks to make the point. She was the only one who ever seemed to care who she was talking to. The others spoke only for themselves, even when they spoke to each other. Even James's other cores would speak their own minds in their own way, and let everyone else translate as best they could. It wasn't a problem. Everyone on Theseus could read everyone else.
But that didn't matter to Susan James. She fit each of her words to their intended recipient, she accommodated.
I am a conduit. I exist to bridge the gap, and I'd bridge nothing if I only told you what these people said. So I am telling you what theymeant, and it will mean as much to you as you can handle.
Except for Susan James, linguist and Ringleader, whom I trust to speak for herself.
Fifteen minutes to apogee: maximum safe distance, in case Rorschach decided to hit back. Far below, the artefact's magnetic field pressed into Ben's atmosphere like God's little finger. Great dark thunderheads turbulent moon-sized curlicues（字的）花体 （图案的）花饰collided in its wake.
Fifteen minutes to apogee, and Bates was still hoping Sarasti would change his mind.
In a way, this was her fault. If she had just treated this new travail as one more cross to bear, perhaps things would have gone on more or less as before. There would have been some faint hope that Sarasti would have let us grit 发出磨擦声 our teeth and keep on going, besieged now by spring-loaded trapdoors （屋顶、天花板或地板上的）活门，暗门as well as the usual gauntlet
长手套，防护手套of Seiverts and magnets and monsters from the id. But Bates had made an issue out of it. It wasn't just another piece of shit in the sewer to her: it was the one that clogged the pipe.
We're on the brink as it is, just surviving the baseline environment of this thing. If it's started taking deliberate countermeasures对策；应付；反对手段…I don't see how we can risk it.
Fourteen minutes to apogee, and Amanda Bates was still regretting those words.
On previous expeditions we'd charted twenty-six septa in various stages of development. We'd x-rayed them. We'd done ultrasound. We'd watched them ooze their way across passages or ebb slowly back into the walls. The iris that had snapped shut behind the Gang of Four had been a whole different animal.
And what are the odds that the first one with a hair-trigger just happened to also come with antilaser prismatics用三棱镜的棱柱形的' That was no routine growth event. That thing was set for us.
That was the other thing. Thirteen minutes to apogee, and Bates was worried about the tenants.
It had always been breaking and entering, of course. That much hadn't changed. But when we'd jimmied 用铁撬撬开the lock we'd thought we were vandalizing
故意破坏（公共财产an empty summer cottage, still under construction. We'd thought the owners would be out of the picture for a while. We hadn't been expecting one of them to catch us on his way to take a late-night piss. And now that one had, and vanished into the labyrinth, it was natural to wonder what weapons it might keep stashed
贮藏；隐藏 under the pillow…
Those septa could spring on us any time. How many are there' Are they fixed, or portable' We can't proceed without knowing these things..
At first, Bates had been surprised and delighted when Sarasti agreed with her.
Twelve minutes to apogee. From this high ground, well above the static, Theseus peered（常与into连用）凝视；盯着看 down through Rorschach's wrenched 拧；扭；扭转and twisted anatomy to keep rock-steady eyes on the tiny wound we'd burned in its side. Our limpet 〈动〉帽贝 tent cover inside, Jack fed us a second, first-person view of the unfolding experiment.
Sir. We know Rorschach is inhabited. Do we want to risk further provoking the inhabitants' Do we want to risk killing them'
Sarasti hadn't quite looked at her, and hadn't quite spoken. If he had, he might have said I do not understand how meat like you survived to adulthood.
Eleven minutes to apogee, and Amanda Bates was lamenting the fact—not for the first time— that this mission was not under military jurisdiction
权限；管辖范围.（常与over, of连用）司法权；裁判权
We were waiting for maximum distance before performing the experiment. Rorschach might interpret this as a hostile act, Sarasti had conceded 承认（为真或正确）
让；让与；容许in a voice that contained no trace of irony whatsoever. Now he stood before us, watching ConSensus play on the table. Reflections writhed across his naked eyes, not quite masking the deeper reflections behind them.
Ten minutes to apogee. Susan James was wishing that Cunningham would put out that goddamned cigarrette. The smoke stank on its way to the ventilators通风设备；通风机；电扇, and anyway, it wasn't necessary. It was just an anabolism 合成代谢affectation, an attention- if he needed the nicotine a patch could have soothed his tremors just as easily, without the smoke and the stink.
That wasn't all she was thinking, though. She was wondering why Cunningham had been summoned〈法〉传唤，传唤到庭
召唤，召呼to Sarasti's quarters earlier in the shift, why he'd looked at her so strangely afterward. I wondered about that myself. A quick check on ConSensus timestamps showed that her medical file had been accessed during that period. I checked those stats, let the shapes bounce between hemispheres: part of my brain locked on elevated oxytocin as the probable reason for that conference. There was an eighty-two percent chance that James had become too trusting for Sarasti's liking.
I had no idea how I knew that. I never did.
Nine minutes to apogee.
Barely a molecule of Rorschach's atmosphere had been lost on our account. That was all about to change. Our view of base camp split like a dividing bacterium: one window now focused on the limpet tent, the other on a wide-angle tactical enhance of the space around it.
Eight minutes to apogee. Sarasti pulled the plug.
Down on Rorschach, our tent burst like a bug beneath a boot. A geyser er a snowstorm swirled at its edges, its charged curlicues intricate as lace. Atmosphere gushed into vacuum, spread thin, crystallized. Briefly, the space around base campsparkled. It was almost beautiful.
Bates didn't think it was beautiful at all. She watched that bleeding wound with a face as expressionless as Cunningham's, but her jaw was clenched unto tetanus 〈医〉破伤风 . Her eyes darted between views: watching for things gasping 喘气的in the shadows.
Rorschach convulsed震动；震撼.
Vast trunks and arteries shuddered, a seismic
地震的，有关地震的，地震引起的 tremor radiating out along the structure. The epicenter began to twist, a vast segment rotating on its axis, the breach midway along its length. Stress lines appeared where the length that rotated sheared 剪（羊毛）against the lengths to either side that didn't; the structure seemed to soften and stretch there, constricting
压缩；收缩 like a great elongate延长；拉长 balloon torqueing itself into sausage links.
Sarasti clicked. Cats made something like that sound when they spied a bird on the far side of a windowpane.
ConSensus groaned with the sound of worlds scraping against each other: telemetry
遥感勘测；遥测技术 from the onsite sensors, their ears to the ground. Jack's camera controls had frozen again. The image it sent was canted to talk hypocriticallyand grainy粒状的, 木纹状的, 多粒的. The pickup stared blankly at the edge of the hole we'd bored into the underworld.
The groaning subsided（土地）下 陷，凹陷. 下沉；落下；坐下A final faint cloud of crystalline水晶般的；清澈透明的；清晰的 stardust虚无飘渺的事物； 梦幻般的魅力；朦胧的感觉 dissipated
放荡的；浪费的 into space, barely visible even on max enhance.
No bodies. None visible, anyway.
Sudden motion at base camp. At first I thought it was static on Jack's feed, playing along lines of high contrast—but no, something was definitely moving along the edges of the hole we'd burned. Something almost wriggled 扭来扭去；蠕动there, a thousand gray mycelia〈生〉菌丝（体） extruding（与from连用）挤出 from the cut surface and writhing（因剧痛）扭动身体，折腾 (writhing笔迹；字迹)slowly into the darkness. "It's—huh," Bates said. "Triggered by the pressure drop, I guess. That's one way to seal a breach."
Two weeks after we'd wounded it, Rorschach had begun to heal itself.
Apogee behind us now. All downhill from here. Theseus began the long drop back into enemy territory.
"Doesn't use septa," Sarasti said.
"My genes done gone and tricked my brainBy making fucking feel so greatThat's how the little creeps attainTheir plan to fuckin' replicateBut brain's got tricks itself, you seeTo get the bang but not the biteI got this here vasectomyMy genes can fuck themselves tonight."
—The r-selectors, Trunclade
First-person sex—real sex, as Chelsea insisted on calling it—was an acquired taste: jagged breathing, the raw slap and stink of sweaty skin full of pores（皮肤上的）毛孔 and blemishes瑕疵, a whole other person with a whole other set of demands and dislikes. There was definite animal appeal, no doubt about it. This was, after all, how we'd done it for millions of years. But this, this third-world carnality had always carried an element of struggle, of asynchronous不同时的,[电]异步的 patterns in conflict. There was no convergence here. There was only the rhythm of bodies in collision, a struggle for dominance, each trying to force the other into synch同时；同步.
Chelsea regarded it as love in its purest form. I came to think of it as hand-to-hand combat. Before, whether fucking creations from my own menu or slip-on skins from someone else's, I had always selected the contrast and the rez, the texture and the attitude. The bodily functions, the resistance of competing desires, the endless foreplay that wears your tongue to the root and leaves your face sticky and glistening—just kinks 怪念头；乖僻，古怪（管子、头发等的）纽结，纠缠, today. Options for the masochistic.
But there were no options with Chelsea. With her, everything came standard.
I indulged her. I guess I was no more patient with her perversions性欲倒错；性变态 than she was with my ineptitude 愚蠢的动作；不适当的动作 at them. Other things made it worth the effort. Chelsea would argue about anything under the sun, wry and insightful and curious as a cat. She would pounce without warning. Retired to the redundant majority, she still took such simple joy in the very act of being alive. She was impulsive 易冲动的,感情用事的 and impetuous. 冲动的,鲁莽的 She cared about people. Pag. Me. She wanted to know me. She wanted in.
That was proving to be a problem.
"We could try it again," she said once in an aftermath of sweat and pheromones〈生化〉信息素. "And you won't even remember what you were so upset about. You won't even remember you were upset, if you don't want to."
I sm suddenly the planes of her face were coarse粗的；粗糙的；未精炼的 and unappealing不吸引人的. "How many times is that now' Eight' Nine'"
"I just want you to be happy, Cyg. True happiness is one hell of a gift, and I can give it to you if you'll let me."
"You don't want me happy," I said pleasantly. "You want me customized."
She mmm'd into the hollow of my throat for a moment. Then: "What'"
"You just want to change me into something more, more accommodating."
Chelsea lifted her head. "Look at me."
I turned my head. She'd shut down the chromat the tattoo, transplanted, fluttered（鸟）拍翅振翼 now on her shoulder.
"Look at my eyes," Chelsea said.
I looked at the imperfect skin around them, at the capillaries 毛细管；微血管wriggling across the whites. I felt a distant bemusement困惑, 发呆 that such flawed产生裂缝，使有裂纹, decaying organs were still able to hypnotize使进入催眠状态 me on occasion.
"Now," Chelsea said. "What do you mean by that'"
I shrugged. "You keep pretending this is a partnership. We both know it's a competition."
"A competition."
"You're trying to manipulate me into playing by your rules."
"What rules'"
"The way you want the relationship run. I don't blame you, Chelse, not in the least. We've been trying to manipulate each other for as long as—hell, it's not even Human nature. It's mammalian."
"I don't believe it." She shook her head. Ropy tendrils（植物的）卷须 of hair swung across her face. "It's the middle of the twenty-first Century and you're hitting me with this war of the sexes bullshit'"
"Granted, your tweaks are a pretty radical iteration. Get right in there and reprogram your mate for optimum最好的，最佳的；最有利的 servility奴态, 卑屈."
"You actually think I'm trying to, to housebreak 侵入家庭盗取, 拆屋 you' You think I'm trying to train you like a puppy'"
"You're just doing what comes naturally."
"I can't believe you'd pull this shit on me."
"I thought you valued honesty in relationships."
"What relationship' According to you there's no such thing. This is just—mutual rape, or something."
"That's what relationships are."
"Don't pull that shit on me." She sat up, swung her feet over the edge of the bed. Putting her back to me. "I know how I feel. If I know anything I know that much. And I only wanted to make you happy."
"I know you believe that," I said gently. "I know it doesn't feel like a strategy. Nothing does when it's wired that deeply. It just feels right, it feels natural. It's nature's trick."
"It's someone's fucking trick."
I sat up next to her, let my shoulder brush hers. She leaned away.
"I know this stuff," I said after a while. "I know how people work. It's my job."
It was hers too, for that matter. Nobody who spliced brains for a living could possibly be unaware of all that basic wiring in the sub-basement. Chelsea had simply to have admitted anything would have compromised her righteous
正当的；公正的正直的；合法的anger.
I could have pointed that out too, I suppose, but I knew how much stress the system could take and I wasn't ready to test it to destruction. I didn't want to lose her. I didn't want to lose that feeling of safety, that sense that it made a difference whether I lived or died. I only wanted her to back off a bit. I only wanted room to breathe.
"You can be such a reptile sometimes," she said.
Mission accomplished.
Our first approach had been all caution and safety margins. This time we came in like a strike force.
Scylla burned towards Rorschach at over two gees, its trajectory a smooth and predictable arc ending at the ruptured base camp. It may have even landed there, for all I perhaps Sarasti had two-birded the mission, programmed the shuttle for some collecting of its own. If so, it wouldn't land with us on board. Scylla spat us into space almost fifty kilometers short of the new beachhead滩头阵地, left us naked and plummeting骤然跌落；垂直落下 on some wireframe contraption奇妙的装置；新发明的玩意儿 with barely enough reaction mass for a soft landing and a quick getaway. We didn't even have control over that: success depended on unpredictability, and how better to ensure that than to not even know ourselves what we were doing'
Sarasti's logic. Vampire logic. We could follow it partway: the colossal deformation that had sealed Rorschach's breach was so much slower, so much more expensive than the dropgate that had trapped the Gang. The fact that dropgates hadn't been used implied that they took time to deploy—to redistribute necessary mass, perhaps, or spring-load its reflexes. That gave us a window. We could still venture into the den so long as the lions couldn't predict our destination and set traps in advance. So long as we got out again before they could set them afterwards.
"Thirty-seven minutes," Sarasti had said, and none of us could fathom 推测；揣摩；领会how he'd come to that number. Only Bates had dared to ask aloud, and he had merely glinted at her: "You can't follow."
Vampire logic. From an obvious premise to an opaque conclusion. Our lives depended on it.
The retros
重新流行的旧款式followed some preprogrammed algorithm that mated Newton with a roll of the dice. Our vector wasn't completely random—once we'd eliminated raceways and growth zones, areas without line-of-sight escape routes, dead ends and unbranched segments ("Boring," Sarasti said, dismissing them), barely ten percent of the artefact remained in the running. Now we dropped towards a warren
养兔子的地方；养小动物的地方 of brambles荆棘；有刺灌木；野生黑莓 eight kilometers from our original landing site. Here in the midst of our final approach, there was no way that even we could predict our precise point of impact.
If Rorschach could, it deserved to win.
We fell. Ridged spires and gnarled 生节, 咆哮 使有节, 扭limbs sectioned the sky wherever I looked, cut the distant starscape and the imminent superJovian into a jagged mosaic
玛赛克镶嵌细工；玛赛克镶嵌工艺 veined in black. Three kilometers away or thirty, the tip of some swollen extremity burst in a silent explosion of charged particles, a distant fog of ruptured, freezing atmosphere. Even as it faded I could make out wisps一把；一束；一绺 and streamers 狭长的彩色饰带；旗幡 swirling旋转 into complex spirals: Rorschach's magnetic field, sculpting the artefact's very breath into radioactive sleet.
I'd never seen it with naked eyes before. I felt like an insect on a starry布满星星的，星光灿烂的 midwinter's night, falling through the aftermath of a forest fire.
The sled 雪橇fired its brakes. I snapped back against the webbing of my harness马具，挽具, bumped against the rebounding 弹回；跳回 armored装甲的 body next to me. Sascha. Only Sascha, I remembered. Cunningham had sedated 安详的，安静的；镇静的the rest of them, left this one core lonely and alone in the group body. I hadn't even realized that that was possible with multiple personalities. She stared back at me from behind her faceplate. None of her surfaces showed through the suit. I could see nothing in her eyes.
That was happening so often, these days.
Cunningham was not with us. Nobody had asked why, when Sarasti assigned the berths（船舶的）停泊地，泊位（船上的）卧铺. The biologist was first among equals now, a backup restored with no other behind him. The second-least replaceable of our irreplaceable crew.
It made me a better bargain. The odds I bought had increased to one in three.
A silent bump shuddered up the frame. I looked forward again, past Bates on the front pallet, past the anchored drones that flanked her two to each side. The sled had launched its assault, a prefab 预制房屋；活动房屋 inflatable可充气的，充气式的 vestibule
门厅；前厅 mounted 攀登；爬上 on an explosive injection assembly n.集合;集会 that would punch through Rorschach's skin like a virus penetrating a host cell. The spindle-legged contraption dwindled and disappeared from my sight. Moments later a pinpoint sodium sun flared向外展开的（裙、裤） and died against the ebony 乌木，黑檀landscape ahead—antimatter charge, so small you could almost count the atoms, shot directly into the hull. A lot rougher than the tentative foreplay of our first date.
We landed, hard, while the vestibule was still inflating使膨胀；打气. The grunts were off the sled an instant before contact, spitting tiny puffs 一股（气）；一阵（烟） of gas from their nozzles喷嘴；管嘴, arranging themselves around us in a protective rosette 玫瑰花结；蔷薇花缨穗. Bates was up next, leaping free of her restraints and sailing directly towards the swelling hab. Sascha and I unloaded the fiberop hub—a clamshell
蛤壳, 蛤壳式挖泥机drum half a meter thick and three times as wide—lugging 使劲拉；用力拖it between us while one of the grunts slipped through the vestibule's membranous airlock.
"Let's move, people." Bates was hanging off one of the inflatable's handholds可以作抓手的地方（或东西）. "Thirty minutes to—"
She fell silent. I didn't have to ask why: the advance grunt had positioned itself over the newly-blasted entrance and sent back its first postcard.
Light from below.
You'd think that would have made it easier. Our kind has al for millions of years we huddled in caves and burrows while unseen things snuffled 带鼻音地说 and growled（动物的）吼叫，咆哮—or just waited, silent and undetectable不可分开的,不可拆卸的—in the night beyond. You'd think that any light, no matter how meager贫乏的；不足的, might strip away some of the shadows, leave fewer holes for the mind to fill with worst imaginings.
You'd think.
We followed the grunt down into a dim soupy多愁善感的像汤的，汤似的 glow like blood-curdled 使凝结；变稠 milk. At first it seemed as though the atmosphere itself was alight, a luminous fog that obscured遮掩；使模糊；使朦胧 anything more than ten meters distant. An illusion, the tunnel we emerged into was about three meters wide and lit by rows of raised glowing dashes—the size and approximate shape of dismembered human fingers—wound in a loose triple helix around the walls. We'd recorded similar ridges at the first site, although the breaks had not been so pronounced and the ridges had been anything but luminous.
"Stronger in the near-infrared," Bates reported, flashing the spectrum to our HUDs. The air would have been transparent to pit vipers蝰蛇. Itwas transparent to sonar 声纳: the lead grunt sprayed the fog with click trains and discovered that the tunnel widened into some kind of chamber seventeen meters further along. Squinting in that direction I could just make out subterranean outlines through the mist. I could just make out jawed things, pulling back out of sight.
"Let's go," Bates said.
We plugged in the grunts, left one guarding the way out. Each of us took another as a guardian angel on point. The machines spoke to our HUD they spoke to each other along stiffened lengths of shielded fiberop that unspooled from the hub
轮轴,轴心trailing跟踪；尾随；追踪 in our wake. It was the best available compromise in an environment without any optima. Our tethered bodyguards would keep us all in touch during lone excursions around corners or down dead ends.
Yeah. Lone excursions. Forced to either split the group or cover less ground, we were to split the group. We were speed-cartographers panning for gold. Everything we did here was an act of faith: faith that the unifying principles of Rorschach's internal architecture could be derived from the raw dimensions we'd grab on the run逃走；躲藏；匆匆忙忙. Faith that Rorschach's internal architecture even had unifying 使一致；使统一 principles. Earlier generations had worshipped
崇拜； 仰慕 malign and capricious多变的；反覆无常的；任性的 spirits. Ours put its faith in an ordered universe. Here in the Devil's Baklava, it was easy to wonder if our ancestors hadn't been closer to the mark.
We moved along the tunnel. Our destination resolved to merely human eyes: not so much chamber as nexus, a knot of space formed by the convergence of a dozen tunnels angling in from different orientations. Ragged meshes of quicksilver 水银，汞 dots gleamed along several shiny protrusions poked through the substrate like a scattershot
漫无目标的 blast of ball-bearings pressed into wet clay.
I looked at Bates and Sascha. "Control panel'"
Bates shrugged. Her drones panned the throats around us, spraying sonar down each. My HUD sketched a patchy 不调和的；杂凑的；斑驳的 不完整的three-d model from the echoes: swathes （机器割的）一行草或谷物of paint thrown against invisible walls. We were dots near the center of a ganglion神经节，神经中枢, a tiny swarm一群人 一群动物of parasites寄生植物；寄生虫 食客，清客；依靠他人供养的人；寄生虫（指人）infesting some great hollowed host. Each tunnel curved away in a gradual spiral, each along a different orientation. Sonar could peep around those bends a few meters further than we could. Neither eyes nor ultrasonics saw anything to distinguish one choice from another.
Bates pointed down one of the passageways—"Keeton—" and another— "Sascha," before turning to coast off down her own unbeaten path.
I looked uneasily down mine. "Any particular—"
"Twenty-five minutes," she said.
I turned and jetted喷射； 喷出 slowly down my assigned passageway. The passage curved clockwise, a long after twenty meters that curvature would have blocked any view of its entrance even if the foggy atmosphere hadn't. My drone kept point across the tunnel, its sonar clicking like the chattering（牙齿）打战；（机器）咯咯作响 啁啾；（松鼠）吱吱叫of a thousand tiny teeth, its tether unspooling back to the distant drum in the nexus
联系；关系；连结；连锁.
It was a comfort, that leash. It was short. The grunts could stray ninety meters and no further, and we were under strict orders to stay under their wings at all times. This dim infested burrow might lead all the way to hell, but I would not be expected to follow it nearly so far. My cowardice 胆小，怯懦 had official sanction批准；允许；认可. 制裁 处罚 约束力
Fifty meters to go. Fifty meters and I could turn and run with my tail between my legs. In the meantime all I had to do was grit my teeth, and focus, and record: everything you see, Sarasti had said. As much as possible of what you can't. And hope that this new reduced time limit would expire before Rorschach spiked us into gibbering 猿或人）叽哩咕噜地叫，急促不清地说dementia 痴呆.
The walls around me twitched and shivered like the flesh of something just-killed. Something darted（常与out, in连用）投射；发出 in and out of sight with a faint cackle of laughter.
Focus. Record. If the grunt doesn't see it, it's not real.
Sixty-five meters in, one of the ghosts got inside my helmet.
I tried to ignore it. I tried to look away. But this phantom wasn't flickering a it hovered near the center of my faceplate, floating like a spot of swirling dizziness between me and the HUD. I gritted my teeth and tried to look past, stared into the dim bloody haze of the middle distance, watched the jerky unfolding travelogues旅行记录影片叙述旅行见闻的演讲 in the little windows labeled Bates and James. Nothing out there. But in here, floating before my eyes, Rorschach's latest headfuck smeared a fuzzy thumbprint right in front of the sonar feed.
"New symptom," I called in. "Nonperipheral hallucination, stable, pretty formless though. No spiking that I can—"
The inset 书中的）插页，插入物，附加物marked Bates skidded hard about. "Keet—"
Window and voice cut out together.
Not just Bates' window, either. Sascha's inset and the drone's-eye sonarscape flickered and died at the same moment, stripped my HUD bare except for in-suit feeds and a little red readout flashing Link Down. I spun but the grunt was still there, three meters off my right shoulder. Its optical port was clearly visible, a ruby thumbnail set into the plastron.
Its gun ports were visible too. Pointing at me.
I froze. The drone shivered in some local electromagnetic knot as if terrified. Of me, or—
Of something behind me…
I started to turn. My helmet filled with sudden static, and with what sounded—faintly—like a voice:
"—ucking move, Kee—not—"
"Bates' Bates'" Another icon had bloomed in place of Link Down. The grunt was using radio for some reason—and though almost close enough to touch, I could barely make out the signal.
A hash of Batespeak: "—to your—right in front of—" and Sascha as well, a bit more clearly: "—an't he see it'..."
"See what' Sascha! Someone tell me what—see what'"
"—read' Keeton, do you read'"
Somehow Bates ha static roared like an ocean, but I could hear the words behind it. "Yes! What—"
"Keep absolutely still, do you understand' Absolutely still. Acknowledge."
"Acknowledged." The drone kept me in its shaky摇晃的；摇摆的；不稳的 sights, dark stereocam irises spasming
痉挛 wide, stuttering to pinpoints. "Wha—"
"There's something in front of you, Keeton. Directly between you and the grunt. Can't you see it'"
"N-no. My HUD's down—"
Sascha broke in: "How can he not see it it's right th—"
Bates barked over her: "It's man-sized, radially symmetrical, eight, nine arms. Like tentacles, but—segmented. Spiky."
"I don't see anything," I said. But I did: I saw something reaching for me, in my pod back aboard Theseus. I saw something curled up motionless in the ship's spine, watching as we laid our best plans.
I saw Michelle the synesthesiac, curled into a fetal ball: You can't see it...it's in—visible...
"What's it doing'" I called. Why can't I see it' Why can't I see it'
"Just—floating there. Kind of waving. Oh, sh—Keet—"
The grunt skidded
车或车轮打滑，失控滑向一 侧sideways, as if slapped by a giant hand. It bounced off the wall and suddenly the laser link was back, filling the HUD with intelligence: first-person perspectives of Bates and Sascha racing along alien tunnels, a grunt's-eye view of a space suit with Keetonstenciled across its breastplate and there, right beside it, some thing like a rippling starfish with too many arms—
The Gang barreled drive or move fast, often heedless of surroundings or conditions桶，琵琶桶around the curve and now I almost could see something with my own eyes, flickering like heat-lightning off to one side. It was large, and it was moving, but somehow my eyes just slid off every time they tried to get a fix. It's not real, I thought, giddy with hysterical relief, it's just another hallucination but then Bates sailed into view and it was right there, no flickering, no uncertainty, nothing but a collapsed probability wave and solid, undeniable mass. Exposed, it grabbed the nearest wall and scrambled 攀登；爬上，登上over our heads, segmented arms flailing用连枷打 like whips. A sudden crackling 发劈啪声；发尖而轻的爆裂声buzz in the back of my head and it was drifting free again, charred 烧成炭；把…烧黑and smoking.
A stuttering click. The whine of machinery gearing down. Three grunts hovered 盘旋,翱翔in formation in the middle of the passageway. One faced the alien. I glimpsed the tip of some lethal proboscis （大象等的）长鼻sliding back into its sheath（刀、剑的）鞘，套. Bates shut the grunt down before it had finished closing its mouth.
Optical links and three sets of lungs filled my helmet with a roar of heavy breathing.
The offlined grunt drifted in the murky air. The alien carcass (动物)尸体, (船, 房)架子 bumped gently off the wall, twitching: a hydra of human backbones, scorched and fleshless. It didn't look much like my on-board visions after all.
For some reason I couldn't put my finger on, I found that almost reassuring.
The two active grunts panned the fog until Bates
then one turned to secure the carcass, the other to steady its fallen comrade. Bates grabbed the dead grunt and unplugged its tether. "Fall back. Slowly. I'm right behind you."
I tweaked my jets. Sascha hesitated. Coils of shielded cable floated about us like umbilical cords.
"Now," Bates said, plugging a feed from her own suit directly into the offlined grunt.
Sascha started after me. Bates took up the rear. I watched my HUD; a swarm of multiarmed monsters would appear there any moment.
They didn't. But the blackened thing against the belly of Bates' machine was real enough. Not a hallucination. Not even some understandable artefact of fear and synesthesia. Rorschach was inhabited居住. Its inhabitants were invisible.
Sometimes. Sort of.
And, oh yeah. We'd just killed one.
Bates threw the deactivated〈化〉使减活化，使灭活化 grunt into the sky as soon as we'd made vacuum. Its comrades 伙伴；战友 同志used it for target practice while we strapped in, firing and firing until there was nothing left but cooling vapor. Rorschach spun even that faint plasma into filigree金银细丝工艺 before it faded.
Halfway back to Theseus, Sascha turned to the Major: "You—"
"But— they do shit on their own, right' Autonomous."
"Not when they're slaved."
"Malfunction' Spike'"
Bates didn't answer.
She called ahead. By the time we made it back Cunningham had grown another little tumor on Theseus' spine, a remote surgery packed with teleops and sensors.传感器；灵敏元件 One of the surviving grunts grabbed the carcass(动物)尸体, (船, 房)架子 and jumped ship as soon as we passed beneath the carapace, completing the delivery as we docked.入坞 停靠码头 〈天〉（航天器）在外层空间对接We were born again to the fruits of a preliminary
预备的；初步的 necropsy验尸. The holographic ghost of the dissected
解剖 仔细分析；剖析alien rose from ConSensus like some flayed剥…的皮
严斥and horrific feast.宴会；筵席 宗教节日 Its splayed 外张，外扩；成八字形 arms looked like human spinal columns. We sat around the table and waited for someone else to take the first bite.
"Did you have to shoot it with microwaves'" Cunningham sniped 剪，剪开，剪断, tapping the table. "You completely cooked the animal. Every cell was blown out from the inside."
Bates shook her head. "There was a malfunction 故障；障碍."
He gave her a sour
酸的，有酸味的 坏脾气的；乖戾的look. "A malfunction that just happens to involve precise targeting of a moving object. It doesn't sound random to me."
Bates looked back evenly. "Something flipped autonomous自治的 有自治权的 targeting from off to on. A coin toss. Random."
"Random is—"
"Give it a rest, Cunningham. I don't need this shit from you right now."
His eyes rolled in that smooth dead face, focused suddenly on something overhead. I followed his gaze: Sarasti stared down at us like an owl猫}