The mastery of any art begins with the art of... imitation

So, I've recently read Peter Watts's anthology and it was _great_. And after reading it, I wrote an excerpt wherein I tried to imitate his style.
Unfortunately, it neither fits in my current fic (almost done, I swear!) nor does it make any sense out of context.
Therefore I'll just post it out here for posterity, and perhaps those few who enjoy both pony-words and Watts's nihilistic-biopunk-hard-sci-fi can appreciate it:

I have made my own preparations, today. Something procured on my way to the Count's whore, a bit of this, and a touch of that, harmless ingredients blended into a pearl-sized drop, swallowed on the way to the ballroom.

Social cues are just pattern recognition. Semantics need not apply: the ancient lizard part of my brain could do it, millions of years of evolution, a game of chance sharpened by culling those who did not survive the endless Prisoners Dilemma of herd dynamics. If my amygdala was not up for the task, I'd just have to repurpose some bits of neocortex

I sat quietly in a corner of the room, hidden behind a glass I was slowly nursing in my magic, like a spider crouched in the hidden part of the web, my potion making me sharp and hyperaware. The new routines, overclocked in my brain noted every vasomotoric shift, every change in the pitch, every touch and every twitch of the facial muscles, running allometric compensation algorithms in my mind on the go.

A griffon lord waved his wing, alulas spread, well-oiled, well-preened, and the chick near him laughed, high-pitched, giggly. Her face flushed, tips of her ears red: Dopamine and oxytocin are vasodilators. Her eyes saccade faster, and if I could see them the pupils would have been dilated and nostrils flared, searching for the tell-tale signs of good phenotype for breeding. Animal instincts run rampant, the words and gestures irrelevant when the hindbrain takes control.

I turn away and keep looking.

I watch invisible connections build and fall, glacial to my overcharged mind, like a shifting of epochs. Civilisations rise within a dialogue, their own language of touches, expressions and gestures, their own culture of shared meaning, and fall in a badly timed touch or inopportune word. Empires of small companies band together and drift apart as the climate of the dancing hall moves and shifts.

It's a chaotic system: too many variables to predict, too much sensitivity to random noise, even overclocked my brain falls before the inevitability of Ashby's law. But there are eddies in the flow, the strange attractors, and regularities rise from the seas of chaos.

There is the Prince. Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, and he has it in spades. Biology makes everyone single him out, but he is more than that, not just the size or the social cues of the high-ranking tercel, not the peacock-signaling of the silver and gemstones. It's how he moves, puffing himself bigger with wings and feathers, crowding in and filling the space, making others back away, a waxing-waning tide of dominant body language. His self-confidence, the magic of griffons, the shadow of Boreas behind his back --  pure mana he has over everypony else bends the manifold of social interactions, like gravity bends spacetime.

I turn away, and I keep looking.

There's Bluette, playing the crowd around her like a fiddle. She notices me, and smiles, the way only she could -- the way that is meant just for me, and as my heart melts, the part of my brain that sees everything decomposes her perfect smile into stretches of the facial muscles, flutter of eyelashes, angle of her craning neck. She is like a predator in the middle of the herd, almost inequine in her grace. I want to own her, to be her, to belong to her.

I turn away, and I keep looking.

I see the Count. For a second our eyes meet, and I feel again, the second time in my life, the abyss of infinite recursion: I run a model of him, running a model of me, running a model of him, theory of mind amped up to eleven. I take a drink, a small sip to chase away the scratching in my throat, and we look away from each other, breaking the spell.

Kings and Princes, Counts and Ladies, all move together like playing cards, and there is a the hidden law of probable outcomes that guides them, and I can almost understand it, almost see the invisible web that connects us all, more subtle than spiders silk, harder than steel, untils something clicks and comes together and the understanding of it fills me to the brim.

It's a revelation, like a Royal Canterlot Voice booming from the flaming heavens. I can no longer discern where I end and others begin, I am one with them all, I am them all, without distinction, seeing everything as-is and as it will be a second hence. Some confused subroutine in my brain knows that it's the spell; the alchemical solutions I've imbibed seeping into the temporal lobe, messing with the spatial perceptions and kinesthetic feedback, but my head already throbs with beautiful pain, like knowledge is bursting from my skull, and the power burns through me.

Like a titaness I rise, higher than the spires of the castle, the bastions and rampants and ancient walls unable to contain the multitude that is me. My vision is growing dark, as I spread in every direction filling the space to its depth and its heights, my awareness becoming complete.

I turn away, and the floor suddenly hits me in the face.

Then there is only darkness and finally I look no more.

Comments

[Feather Book]

I've never heard of Peter Watts or read any of his stuff, but that was an interesting style. I could see similarities to your normal one, but this felt really... padded? Not sure how to describe it.

But it wasn't bad.