Peter Watts - Firefall

“Could be splinter skills.” Cunningham had joined us in ConSensus, although his body remained halfway around BioMed.

“Splinter skills,” she repeated dully.

“Savantism. Hyperperformance at one kind of calculation doesn’t necessarily connote high intelligence.”

“I know what splinter skills are, Robert. I just think you’re wrong.”

“Prove it.”

So she gave up on geometry and told the scramblers that one plus one equaled two. Evidently they knew that already: ten minutes later they were predicting ten-digit prime numbers on demand.

She showed them a sequence of two-dimensional shapes; they picked the next one in the series from a menu of subtly-different alternatives. She denied them multiple choice, showed them the beginning of a whole new sequence and taught them to draw on the touch-sensitive interface with the tips of their arms. They finished that series in precise freehand, rendered a chain of logical descendants ending with a figure that led inexorably back to the starting point.

“These aren’t drones .” James’s voice caught in her throat.

“This is all just crunching,” Cunningham said. “Millions of computer programs do it without ever waking up.”

“They’re intelligent , Robert. They’re smarter than us. Maybe they’re smarter than Jukka . And we’re—why can’t you just admit it?”

I could see it all over her: Isaac would have admitted it.

“Because they don’t have the circuitry,” Cunningham insisted. “How could—”

“ I don’t know how! ” she cried. “That’s your job! All I know is that I’m torturing beings that can think rings around us…”

“Not for much longer, at least. Once you figure out the language—”

She shook her head. “Robert, I haven’t a clue about the language. We’ve been at it for—for hours, haven’t we? The Gang’s all here, language databases four thousand years thick, all the latest linguistic algorithms. And we know exactly what they’re saying, we’re watching every possible way they could be saying it. Right down to the Angstrom.”

“Precisely. So—”

“I’ve got nothing . I know they’re talking through pigment mosaics. There might even be something in the way they move those bristles. But I can’t find the pattern , I can’t even follow how they count , much less tell them I’m…sorry…”

Nobody spoke for a while. Bates watched us from the galley on our ceiling, but made no attempt to join the proceedings. On ConSensus the reprieved scramblers floated in their cages like multiarmed martyrs.

“Well,” Cunningham said at last, “since this seems to be the day for bad news, here’s mine. They’re dying.”

James put her face in her hand.

“It’s not your interrogation, for whatever that’s worth,” the biologist continued. “As far as I can determine, some of their metabolic pathways are just missing .”

“Obviously you just haven’t found them yet.” That was Bates, speaking up from across the drum.

“ No ,” Cunningham said, slowly and distinctly, “ obviously those parts aren’t available to the organism. Because they’re falling apart pretty much the same way you’d expect one of us to, if—if all the mitotic spindles in our cells just vanished out of the cytoplasm, for example. As far as I can tell they started deteriorating the moment we took them off Rorschach .”

Susan looked up. “Are you saying they left part of their biochemistry behind ?”

“Some essential nutrient?” Bates suggested. “They’re not eating—”

“Yes to the linguist. No to the major.” Cunningham fell silent; I glanced across the drum to see him sucking on a cigarette. “I think a lot of the cellular processes in these things are mediated externally. I think the reason I can’t find any genes in my biopsies is because they don’t have any.”

“So what do they have instead?” Bates asked.

“Turing morphogens.”

Blank looks, subtitling looks. Cunningham explained anyway: “A lot of biology doesn’t use genes. Sunflowers look the way they do because of purely physical buckling stress. You get Fibonacci sequences and Golden ratios everywhere in nature, and there’s no gene that codes for them; it’s all just mechanical interactions. Take a developing embryo—the genes say start growing or stop growing , but the number of digits and vertebrae result from the mechanics of cells bumping against other cells. Those mitotic spindles I mentioned? Absolutely essential for replication in every eukaryotic cell, and they accrete like crystals without any genetic involvement. You’d be surprised how much of life is like that.”

“But you still need genes ,” Bates protested, walking around to join us.

“Genes just establish the starting conditions to enable the process. The structure that proliferates afterwards doesn’t need specific instructions. It’s classic emergent complexity. We’ve known about it for over a century.” Another drag on the stick. “Or even longer. Darwin cited honeycomb way back in the eighteen hundreds.”

“Honeycomb,” Bates repeated.

“Perfect hexagonal tubes in a packed array. Bees are hardwired to lay them down, but how does an insect know enough geometry to lay down a precise hexagon? It doesn’t. It’s programmed to chew up wax and spit it out while turning on its axis, and that generates a circle. Put a bunch of bees on the same surface, chewing side-by-side, and the circles abut against each other—deform each other into hexagons, which just happen to be more efficient for close packing anyway.”

Bates pounced: “But the bees are programmed. Genetically .”

“You misunderstand. Scramblers are the honeycomb .”

“ Rorschach is the bees,” James murmured.

Cunningham nodded. “ Rorschach is the bees. And I don’t think Rorschach ’s magnetic fields are counterintrusion mechanisms at all. I think they’re part of the life-support system. I think they mediate and regulate a good chunk of scrambler metabolism. What we’ve got back in the hold is a couple of creatures dragged out of their element and holding their breath. And they can’t hold it forever.”

“How long?” James asked.

“How should I know? If I’m right, I’m not even dealing with complete organisms here.”

“Guess,” Bates said.

He shrugged. “A few days. Maybe.”

“YOU STILL DON’T vote,” Sarasti said.

We would not be releasing the prisoners. Too risky. Out here in the endless wastelands of the Oort there was no room for live and let live . Never mind what the Other has done, or what it hasn’t : think of what it could do, if it were just a little stronger. Think of what it might have done, if we’d arrived as late as we were supposed to. You look at Rorschach and perhaps you see an embryo or a developing child, alien beyond comprehension perhaps but not guilty , not by default. But what if those are the wrong eyes? What if you should be seeing an omnipotent murdering God, a planet-killer, not yet finished? Vulnerable only now, and for a little longer?

There was no vampire opacity to that logic, no multidimensional black boxes for humans to shrug at and throw up their hands. There was no excuse for the failure to find fault with Sarasti’s reasoning, beyond the fact that his reasoning was without fault. That made it worse. The others, I knew, would rather have had to take something on faith.