“Do you see the problem?” Sarasti asked, advancing.
[...]
The vampire came after me, his face split into something that would have been a smile on anyone else. “Conscious of pain, you’re distracted by pain. You’re fixated on it. Obsessed by the one threat, you miss the other.”
I flailed. Crimson mist stung my eyes.
“So much more aware, so much less perceptive. An automaton could do better.”
[...]
Sarasti shook me. “Are you in there, Keeton?”
My blood splattered across his face like rain. I babbled and cried.
“Are you listening? Can you see?”
And suddenly I could. Suddenly everything clicked into focus. Sarasti wasn’t talking at all. Sarasti didn’t even exist anymore. Nobody did. I was alone in a great spinning wheel surrounded by things that were made out of meat, things that moved all by themselves. Some of them were wrapped in pieces of cloth. Strange nonsensical sounds came from holes at their top ends, and there were other things up there, bumps and ridges and something like marbles or black buttons, wet and shiny and embedded in the slabs of meat. They glistened and jiggled and moved as if trying to escape.
I didn’t understand the sounds the meat was making, but I heard a voice from somewhere. It was like God talking, and that I couldn’t help but understand.
“Get out of your room, Keeton,” it hissed. “Stop transposing or interpolating or rotating or whatever it is you do. Just listen. For once in your goddamned life, understand something. Understand that your life depends on it. Are you listening, Keeton?”
And I cannot tell you what it said. I can only tell you what I heard.
Blindsight—Peter Watts