PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 106 Blindsight
back into black mass. Occasional protuberances swelled and burst
and released clouds of microparticulates, seeding the radiation
belts like spores. Rorschach resembled nothing so much as a nest
of half-naked cyclotrons, tangled one with another.
Neither Jack below nor Theseus above could find any points of
entry, beyond those impassable gaps that spat out streams of
charged particles or swallowed them back down. No airlocks or
hatches or viewports resolved with increasing proximity. The fact
that we'd been threatened via laser beam implied some kind of
optical antennae or tightcast array; we weren't even able to find that
much.
A central hallmark of von Neumann machines was selfreplication.
Whether Rorschach would meet that criterion—
whether it would germinate, or divide, or give birth when it passed
some critical threshold—whether it had done so already—
remained an open question.
One of a thousand. At the end of it all—after all the
measurements, the theorizing and deduction and outright
guesswork—we settled into orbit with a million trivial details and
no answers. In terms of the big questions, there was only one thing
we knew for sure.
So far, Rorschach was holding its fire.
"It sounded to me like it knew what it was saying," I remarked.
"I guess that's the whole point," Bates said. She had no one to
confide in, partook of no intimate dialogs that could be overheard.
With her, I used the direct approach.
Theseus was birthing a litter, two by two. They were nastylooking
things, armored, squashed egg-shapes, twice the size of a
human torso and studded with gardening implements: antennae,
optical ports, retractable threadsaws. Weapons muzzles.
Bates was summoning her troops. We floated before the primary
fab port at the base of Theseus' spine. The plant could just as
easily have disgorged the grunts directly into the hold beneath the
carapace—that was where they'd be stored anyway, until called
*