Blindsight, Peter Watts [books under 200 pages TXT] 📗

It was no skin off Cunningham’s nose. He was happier leaving his body in pseudogravity anyway, while his consciousness flitted between the waldoes and sensors and bric-a-brac surrounding his new pets.

Theseus saw me coming and pushed a squeezebulb of sugary electrolytes from the galley dispenser. The Gang didn’t look up as I passed. One forefinger tapped absently against their temple, the lips pursed and twitched in the characteristic mode that said internal dialog in progress. I could never tell who was on top when they were like that.

I sucked on the squeezebulb and looked in on the pens. Two cubes suffused in pale red light: in one a scrambler floated center stage, waving its segmented arms like seaweed in gentle surge. The occupant of the other cage was squeezed into a corner, four arms splayed across the converging walls; four others extended, waving again, into open space. The bodies from which those arms sprouted were spheroids, not flattened disks as our first—sample had been. They were only slightly compressed, and their arms sprouted not from a single equatorial band but from across the whole surface.

Fully-extended, the floating scrambler was over two meters across. The other seemed roughly the same size. Neither moved, except for those drifting arms. Navy-blue mosaics, almost black in the longwave, rippled across their surfaces like the patterns of wind on grass. Superimposed graphics plotted methane and hydrogen at reassuring Rorschach norms. Temperature and lighting, ditto. An icon for ambient electromagnetics remained dark.

I dipped into the archives, watched the arrival of the aliens from two days past; each tumbling unceremoniously into its pen, balled up, hugging themselves as they bounced gently around their enclosures. Fetal position, I thought—but after a few moments the arms uncoiled, like the blooming of calcareous flowers.

“Robert says Rorschach grows them,” Susan James said behind me.

I turned. Definitely James in there, but—muted, somehow. Her meal remained untouched. Her surfaces were dim.

Except for the eyes. Those were deep, and a little hollow.

“Grows?” I repeated.

“In stacks. They have two navels each.” She managed a weak smile, touched her belly with one hand and the small of her back with the other. “One in front, one behind. He thinks they grow in a kind of column, piled up. When the top one develops to a certain point, it buds off from the stack and becomes free-living.”

The archived scramblers were exploring their new environment now, climbing gingerly along the walls, unrolling their arms along the corners where the panels met. Those swollen central bodies struck me again. “So that first one, with the flattened…”

“Juvenile,” she agreed. “Fresh off the stack. These ones are older. They, they plump out as they mature. Robert says,” she added after a moment.

I sucked the dregs from my squeezebulb. “The ship grows its own crew.”

“If it’s a ship.” James shrugged. “If they’re crew.”

I watched them move. There wasn’t much to explore; the walls were almost bare, innocent of anything but a few sensor heads and gas nozzles. The pens had their own tentacles and manipulators for more invasive research needs, but those had been carefully sheathed during introduction. Still, the creatures covered the territory in careful increments, moving back and forth along parallel, invisible paths. Almost as if they were running transects.

James had noticed it too. “It seems awfully systematic, doesn’t it?”

“What does Robert say about that?”

“He says the behavior of honeybees and sphex wasps is just as complex, and it’s all rote hardwiring. Not intelligence.”

“But bees still communicate, right? They do that dance, to tell the hive where the flowers are.”

She shrugged, conceding the point.

“So you still might be able to talk to these things.”

“Maybe. You’d think.” She massaged her brow between thumb and forefinger. “We haven’t got anywhere, though. We played some of their pigment patterns back to them, with variations. They don’t seem to make sounds. Robert synthesized a bunch of noises that they might squeeze out of their cloacae if they were so inclined, but those didn’t get us anywhere either. Harmonic farts, really.”

“So we’re sticking to the blood-cells-with-waldoes model.”

“Pretty much. But you know, they didn’t go into a loop. Hardwired animals repeat themselves. Even smart ones pace, or chew their fur. Stereotyped behaviors. But these two, they gave everything a very careful once-over and then just—shut down.”

They were still at it in ConSensus, slithering across one wall, then another, then another, a slow screw-thread track that would leave no square centimeter uncovered.

“Have they done anything since?” I asked.

She shrugged again. “Nothing spectacular. They squirm when you poke them. Wave their arms back and forth—they do that pretty much constantly, but there’s no information in it that we can tell. They haven’t gone invisible on us or anything. We blanked the adjoining wall for a while so they could see each other, even piped audio and air feeds—Robert thought there might be some kind of pheromonal communication—but nothing. They didn’t even react to each other.”

“Have you tried, well, motivating them?”

“With what, Siri? They don’t seem to care about their own company. We can’t bribe them with food unless we know what they eat, which we don’t. Robert says they’re in no immediate danger of starvation anyway. Maybe when they get hungry they can deal.”

I killed the archival feed and reverted to realtime. “Maybe they eat—I don’t know, radiation. Or magnetic energy. The cage can generate magnetic fields, right?”

“Tried it.” She took a breath, then squared her shoulders. “But I guess these things take time. He’s only had a couple of days, and I only got out of the crypt myself a day ago. We’ll keep trying.”

“What about negative reinforcement?” I wondered.

She blinked. “Hurt them, you mean.”

“Not necessarily anything extreme. And if they’re not sentient anyway…”

Just like that, Susan went away. “Why, Keeton. you just made a suggestion. You giving up on this whole noninterference thing?”

“Hello, Sascha. No, of course not. Just—making a list of what’s been tried.”

“Good.” There was an edge to her voice. “Hate to think you were slipping. We’re going to grab some down time now, so maybe you could go and talk to Cunningham for a bit. Yeah, do that.

“And be sure to tell him your theory about radiation-eating aliens. I bet he could use a laugh.”

*

He stood at his post in BioMed, though his empty chair was barely a meter away. The ubiquitous cigarette hung from between the fingers of one hand, burned down and burned out. His other hand played with itself, fingers tapping against thumb in sequence, little to index, index to little. Windows crawled with intelligence in front of him; he wasn’t watching.

I approached from behind. I watched his surfaces in motion. I heard the soft syllables rising from his throat:

“Yit-barah v’yish-tabah v’yit-pa-ar v’yit-romam…”

Not his usual litany. Not even his usual language; Hebrew, ConSensus said.

It sounded almost like a prayer…

He must have heard me. His topology went flat and hard and almost impossible to decipher. It was increasingly difficult getting a fix on anyone these days, but even through those topological cataracts Cunningham— as always— was a tougher read than most.

“Keeton,” he said without turning.

“You’re not Jewish,” I said.

“It was.” Szpindel, I realized after a moment. Cunningham didn’t do gender pronouns.

But Isaac Szpindel had been an atheist. All of us were. We’d all started out that way, at least.

“I didn’t know you knew him,” I said. It certainly wasn’t policy.

Cunningham sank into his chair without looking at me. In his head, and in mine, a new window opened within a frame marked Electrophoresis.

I tried again. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to intru—”

“What can I do for you, Siri?”

“I was hoping you could bring me up to speed on your findings.”

A periodic chart of alien elements scrolled through the feed. Cunningham logged it and started another sample. “I’ve documented everything. It’s all in ConSensus.”

I made a play for ego: “It would really help to know how you’d thumbnail it, though. What you think is important can be just as vital as the data themselves.”

He looked at me a moment. He muttered something, repetitive and irrelevant.

“What’s important is what’s missing,” he said after a moment. “I’ve got good samples now and I still can’t find the genes. Protein synthesis is almost prionic—reconformation instead of the usual transcription pathways—but I can’t figure out how those bricks get slotted into the wall once they’re made.”

“Any progress on the energy front?” I asked.

“Energy?”

“Aerobic metabolism on an anaerobe budget, remember? You said they had too much ATP.”

“That I solved.” He puffed smoke; far to stern a fleck of alien tissue liquefied and banded into chemical strata. “They’re sprinting.”

_Rotate that if you can_.

I couldn’t. “How do you mean?”

He sighed. “Biochemistry is a tradeoff. The faster you synthesize ATP, the more expensive each molecule becomes. It turns out scramblers are a lot more energy-efficient at making it than we are. They’re just extremely slow at it, which might not be a big drawback for something that spends most of its time inactive. Rorschach—whatever Rorschach started out as— could have drifted for millennia before it washed up here. That’s a lot of time to build up an energy reserve for bouts of high activity, and once you’ve laid the groundwork glycolysis is explosive. Two-thousand-fold boost, and no oxygen demand.”

“Scramblers sprint. Their whole lives.”

“They may come preloaded with ATP and burn it off throughout their lifespan.”

“How long would that be?”

“Good question,” he admitted. “Live fast, die young. If they ration it out, stay dormant most of the time—who knows?”

“Huh.” The free-floating scrambler had drifted away from the center of its pen. One extended arm held a wall at bay; the others continued their hypnotic swaying.

I remembered other arms, their motion not so gentle.

“Amanda and I chased one into a crowd. It—”

Cunningham was back at his samples. “I saw the record.”

“They tore it to pieces.”

“Uh huh.”

“Any idea why?”

He shrugged. “Bates thought there might be some kind of civil war going on down there.”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s right, or maybe scramblers are ritual cannibals, or—they’re aliens, Keeton. What do you want from me?”

“But they’re not really aliens. At least not intelligent ones. War implies intelligence.”

“Ants wage war all the time. Proves nothing except that they’re alive.”

“Are scramblers even alive?” I asked.

“What kind of question is that?”

“You think Rorschach grows them on some kind of assembly line. You can’t find any genes. Maybe they’re just biomechanical machines.”

“That’s what life is, Keeton. That’s what you are.” Another hit of nicotine, another storm of numbers, another sample. “Life isn’t either/or. It’s a matter of degree.”

“What I’m asking is, are they natural? Could they be constructs?”

“Is a termite mound a construct? Beaver dam? Space ship? Of course. Were they built by naturally-evolved organisms, acting naturally? They were. So tell me how anything in the whole deep multiverse can ever be anything but natural?”

I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice. “You know what I mean.”

“It’s a meaningless question. Get your head out of the Twentieth Century.”

I gave up. After a few seconds Cunningham seemed to notice the silence. He withdrew his consciousness from the machinery and looked around with fleshly eyes, as if searching for some mosquito that had mysteriously stopped whining.

“What’s your problem with me?” I asked. Stupid question, obvious question. Unworthy of any synthesist to be so, so direct.

His eyes glittered in that dead face. “Processing without