PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 120 Blindsight
Taking my leave of Heaven, it occurred to me that omnipotent
though she was, there was only be one way my mother would ever
be truly happy in her own personal creation.
The rest of creation would have to go.
"This shouldn't keep happening," Bates said. "The shielding was
good."
The Gang was up across the drum, squaring away something in
their tent. Sarasti lurked offstage today, monitoring the
proceedings from his quarters. That left me with Bates and
Szpindel in the Commons.
"Maybe against direct EM." Szpindel stretched, stifled a yawn.
"Ultrasound boots up magnetic fields through shielding sometimes,
in living tissue at least. Any chance something like that could be
happening with your electronics?"
Bates spread her hands. "Who knows? Might as well be black
magic and elves down there."
"Well, it's not a total wash. We can make a few smart guesses,
eh?"
"Such as."
Szpindel raised one finger. "The layers we cut through couldn't
result from any metabolic process I know about. So it's not 'alive',
not in the biological sense. Not that that means anything these
days," he added, glancing around the belly of our beast.
"What about life inside the structure?"
"Anoxic atmosphere. Probably rules out complex multicellular
life. Microbes, maybe, although if so I wish to hell they show up
in the samples. But anything complex enough to think, let alone
build something like that"—a wave at the image in ConSensus
—"is gonna need a high-energy metabolism, and that means
oxygen."
"So you think it's empty?"
"Didn't say that, did I? I know aliens are supposed to be all
mysterious and everything, but I still don't see why anyone would
build a city-sized wildlife refuge for anaerobic microbes."
*