Blindsight

This looks like a good beginning to a novel

I just stood there. I didn't even especially want to help him.



That didn't make sense. Even if he hadn't been my best friend, I should at least have empathized. I'd suffered less than Pag in the way of overt violence; my seizures tended to keep the other kids at a distance, scared them even as they incapacitated me. Still. I was no stranger to the taunts and insults, or the foot that appears from nowhere to trip you up en route from A to B. I knew how that felt.



Or I had, once.



But that part of me had been cut out along with the bad wiring. I was still working up the algorithms to get it back, still learning by observation. Pack animals always tear apart the weaklings in their midst. Every child knows that much instinctively. Maybe I should just let that process unfold, maybe I shouldn't try to mess with nature. Then again, Pag's parents hadn't messed with nature, and look what it got them: a son curled up in the dirt while a bunch of engineered superboys kicked in his ribs.



In the end, propaganda worked where empathy failed. Back then I didn't so much think as observe, didn't deduce so much as remember—and what I remembered was a thousand inspirational stories lauding anyone who ever stuck up for the underdog.



So I picked up a rock the size of my fist and hit two of Pag's assailants across the backs of their heads before anyone even knew I was in the game.

It's by a fellow named Peter Watts - he's released it under the creative commons license. So far .. it's pretty good. Scalzi claims "it's got all the hard SF goodness you'd want" which sentence alone will keep me reading for a chapter or two.



Amazing world we live in. Twenty years ago this book might have dropped out of sight no one would have ever heard of it. Bits are cheap and we all benefit.