Peter Watts is an awkward hybrid of biologist and science-fiction author, knownfor pioneering the technique of appending extensive technical bibliographiesonto his novels; this serves both to confer a veneer of credibility and tocover his ass against nitpickers. Described by the Globe & Mail as one of thebest hard-sf authors alive, his debut novel (Starfish) was a NY Times NotableBook. His most recent (Blindsight) — a rumination on the nature of consciousnesswhich actually became a required text in occasional undergrad courses onphilosophy and neuropsych — made the final ballot for a whole shitload of genreawards including the Hugo, winning exactly none of them (although it has wonmultiple awards in Poland). This may reflect a certain critical divideregarding Watts' work in general; his bipartite novel behemoth, for example,was praised by Publisher’s Weekly as an "adrenaline-charged fusion of Clarke’sThe Deep Range and Gibson’s Neuromancer" and "a major addition to 21st-centuryhard SF", while being simultaneously decried by Kirkus as "utterly repellent"and "horrific porn". (Watts happily embraces the truth of both views.) His workhas been extensively translated, and both Watts and his cat have appeared inthe prestigious journal Nature.

Watts is currently working on a number of projects, including a sidequel toBlindsight, and fighting bogus criminal charges trumped up by the US BorderPatrol. Depending both on the success of these latter efforts and the diligencewith which you follow Clarkesworld, he may be in jail by the time you readthis.

I am being Blair. I escape out the back as the world comes in through thefront.

I am being Copper. I am rising from the dead.

I am being Childs. I am guarding the main entrance.

The names don’t matter. They are placeholders, nothing more; all biomass isinterchangeable. What matters is that these are all that is left of me. Theworld has burned everything else.

I see myself through the window, loping through the storm, wearing Blair.MacReady has told me to burn Blair if he comes back alone, but MacReady stillthinks I am one of him. I am not: I am being Blair, and I am at the door. I ambeing Childs, and I let myself in. I take brief communion, tendrils writhingforth from my faces, intertwining: I am BlairChilds, exchanging news of theworld.

The world has found me out. It has discovered my burrow beneath the tool shed,the half-finished lifeboat cannibalized from the viscera of dead helicopters.The world is busy destroying my means of escape. Then it will come back for me.

There is only one option left. I disintegrate. Being Blair, I go to share theplan with Copper and to feed on the rotting biomass once called Clarke; so manychanges in so short a time have dangerously depleted my reserves. Being Childs,I have already consumed what was left of Fuchs and am replenished for the nextphase. I sling the flamethrower onto my back and head outside, into the longAntarctic night.

I will go into the storm, and never come back.

I was so much more, before the crash. I was an explorer, an ambassador, amissionary. I spread across the cosmos, met countless worlds, took communion:the fit reshaped the unfit and the whole universe bootstrapped upwards injoyful, infinitesimal increments. I was a soldier, at war with entropy itself.I was the very hand by which Creation perfects itself.

So much wisdom I had. So much experience. Now I cannot remember all the thingsI knew. I can only remember that I once knew them.

I remember the crash, though. It killed most of this offshoot outright, but alittle crawled from the wreckage: a few trillion cells, a soul too weak to keepthem in check. Mutinous biomass sloughed off despite my most desperate attemptsto hold myself together: panic-stricken little clots of meat, instinctivelygrowing whatever limbs they could remember and fleeing across the burning ice.By the time I’d regained control of what was left the fires had died and thecold was closing back in. I barely managed to grow enough antifreeze to keep mycells from bursting before the ice took me.

I remember my reawakening, too: dull stirrings of sensation in real time, thefirst embers of cognition, the slow blooming warmth of awareness as body andsoul embraced after their long sleep. I remember the biped offshootssurrounding me, the strange chittering sounds they made, the odd uniformity oftheir body plans. How ill-adapted they looked! How inefficient theirmorphology! Even disabled, I could see so many things to fix. So I reached out.I took communion. I tasted the flesh of the world —

— and the world attacked me. It attacked me.

I left that place in ruins. It was on the other side of the mountains — theNorwegian camp, it is called here — and I could never have crossed that distancein a biped skin. Fortunately there was another shape to choose from, smallerthan the biped but better adapted to the local climate. I hid within it whilethe rest of me fought off the attack. I fled into the night on four legs, andlet the rising flames cover my escape.

I did not stop running until I arrived here. I walked among these new offshootswearing the skin of a quadruped; and because they had not seen me take anyother shape, they did not attack.

And when I assimilated them in turn — when my biomass changed and flowed intoshapes unfamiliar to local eyes — I took that communion in solitude, havinglearned that the world does not like what it doesn’t know.

I am alone in the storm. I am a bottom-dweller on the floor of some murky aliensea. The snow blows past in horizontal streaks; caught against gullies oroutcroppings, it spins into blinding little whirlwinds. But I am not nearly farenough, not yet. Looking back I still see the camp crouched brightly in thegloom, a squat angular jumble of light and shadow, a bubble of warmth in thehowling abyss.

It plunges into darkness as I watch. I’ve blown the generator. Now there’s nolight but for the beacons along the guide ropes: strings of dim blue starswhipping back and forth in the wind, emergency constellations to guide lostbiomass back home.

I am not going home. I am not lost enough. I forge on into darkness until eventhe stars disappear. The faint shouts of angry frightened men carry behind meon the wind.

Somewhere behind me my disconnected biomass regroups into vaster, more powerfulshapes for the final confrontation. I could have joined myself, all in one:chosen unity over fragmentation, resorbed and taken comfort in the greaterwhole. I could have added my strength to the coming battle. But I have chosen adifferent path. I am saving Child’s reserves for the future. The present holdsnothing but annihilation.

Best not to think on the past.

I’ve spent so very long in the ice already. I didn’t know how long until theworld put the clues together, deciphered the notes and the tapes from theNorwegian camp, pinpointed the crash site. I was being Palmer, then;unsuspected, I went along for the ride.

I even allowed myself the smallest ration of hope.

But it wasn’t a ship any more. It wasn’t even a derelict. It was a fossil,embedded in the floor of a great pit blown from the glacier. Twenty of theseskins could have stood one atop another, and barely reached the lip of thatcrater. The timescale settled down on me like the weight of a world: how longfor all that ice to accumulate? How many eons had the universe iterated onwithout me?

And in all that time, a million years perhaps, there’d been no rescue. I neverfound myself. I wonder what that means. I wonder if I even exist any more,anywhere but here.