Peter Watts - Blindsight

“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.

But Sarasti had an alternative to capture-release, one he evidently considered much safer. It took an act of faith to accept that reasoning, at least; by any sane measure it verged on suicide.

Now Theseus gave birth by Caesarian. These progeny were far too massive to fit through the canal at the end of the spine. The ship shat them as if constipated, directly into the hold: great monstrous things, bristling with muzzles and antennae. Each stood three or four times my height, a pair of massive rust-colored cubes, every surface infested with topography. Armor plating would hide most of it prior to deployment, of course. Ribbons of piping and conduit, ammunition reservoirs and shark-toothed rows of radiator fins — all to disappear beneath smooth reflective shielding. Only a few island landmarks would rise above that surface: comm ports, thrust nozzles, targeting arrays. And gun ports, of course. These things spat fire and brimstone from a half-dozen mouths apiece.

But for the time being they were just giant mechanical fetuses, half-extruded, their planes and angles a high-contrast jigsaw of light and shadow in the harsh white glow of the hold’s floodlamps.

I turned from the port. “That’s got to take our substrate stockpiles down a bit.”

“Shielding the carapace was worse.” Bates monitored construction through a dedicated flatscreen built right into the Fab bulkhead. Practicing, perhaps; we’d be losing our inlays as soon as the orbit changed. “We’re tapping out, though. Might have to grab one of the local rocks before long.”

“Huh.” I looked back into the hold. “You think they’re necessary?”

“Doesn’t matter what I think. You’re a bright guy, Siri. Why can’t you figure that out?”

“It matters to me. That means it matters to Earth.”

Which might mean something , if Earth was calling the shots. Some subtext was legible no matter how deep in the system you were.

I tacked to port: “How about Sarasti and the Captain, then? Any thoughts?”

“You’re usually a bit more subtle.”

That much was true. “It’s just, you know Susan was the one that caught Stretch and Clench tapping back and forth, right?”

Bates winced at the names. “So?”

“Well, some might think it odd that Theseus wouldn’t have seen it first. Since quantum computers are supposed to be so proficient at pattern-matching.”

“Sarasti took the quantum modules offline. The onboard’s been running in classical mode since before we even made orbit.”

“ Why ?”

“Noisy environment. Too much risk of decoherence. Quantum computers are finicky things.”

“Surely the onboard’s shielded. Theseus is shielded.”

Bates nodded. “As much as feasible. But perfect shielding is perfect blindness, and this is not the kind of neighborhood where you want to keep your eyes closed.”

Actually, it was. But I took her point.