PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 189 Blindsight
of them get used up running the suckers."
"My understanding is that octopi are quite intelligent," James
said.
"By molluscan standards, certainly. But do you have any idea
how much extra cabling you'd need if the photoreceptors in your
eye were spread across your entire body? You'd need about three
hundred million extension cords to begin with, ranging from half a
millimeter to two meters long. Which means all your signals are
staggered and out of synch, which means billions of additional
logic gates to cohere the input. And that just gets you a single
static image, with no filtering, no interpretation, no time-series
integration at all." Shiver. Drag. "Now multiply that by all the
extra wiring needed to focus all those eyespots on an object, or to
send all that information back to individual chromatophores, and
then add in the processing power you need to drive those
chromatophores one at a time. Thirty percent might do all that, but
I strongly doubt you'd have much left over for philosophy and
science." He waved his hand in the general direction of the hold.
"That—that—"
"Scrambler," James suggested.
Cunningham rolled his tongue around it. "Very well. That
scrambler is an absolute miracle of evolutionary engineering. It's
also dumb as a stick."
A moment's silence.
"So what is it?" James asked at last. "Somebody's pet?"
"Canary in a coal mine," Bates suggested.
"Perhaps not even that," Cunningham said. "Perhaps no more
than a white blood cell with waldoes. Maintenance bot, maybe.
Teleoperated, or instinct-driven. But people, we're ignoring far
greater questions here. How could an anaerobe even develop
complex multicellular anatomy, much less move as fast as this
thing did? That level of activity burns a great deal of ATP."
"Maybe they don't use ATP," Bates said as I thumbnailed:
adenosine triphosphate. Cellular energy source.
"It was crammed with ATP," Cunningham told her. "You can
tell that much even with these remains. The question is, how can it
synthesize the stuff fast enough to keep up with demand. Purely