PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 209 Blindsight
tissue liquefied and banded into chemical strata. "They're
sprinting."
Rotate that if you can.
I couldn't. "How do you mean?"
He sighed. "Biochemistry is a tradeoff. The faster you
synthesize ATP, the more expensive each molecule becomes. It
turns out scramblers are a lot more energy-efficient at making it
than we are. They're just extremely slow at it, which might not be
a big drawback for something that spends most of its time inactive.
Rorschach—whatever Rorschach started out as— could have
drifted for millennia before it washed up here. That's a lot of time
to build up an energy reserve for bouts of high activity, and once
you've laid the groundwork glycolysis is explosive. Two-thousandfold
boost, and no oxygen demand."
"Scramblers sprint. Their whole lives."
"They may come preloaded with ATP and burn it off throughout
their lifespan."
"How long would that be?"
"Good question," he admitted. "Live fast, die young. If they
ration it out, stay dormant most of the time—who knows?"
"Huh." The free-floating scrambler had drifted away from the
center of its pen. One extended arm held a wall at bay; the others
continued their hypnotic swaying.
I remembered other arms, their motion not so gentle.
"Amanda and I chased one into a crowd. It—"
Cunningham was back at his samples. "I saw the record."
"They tore it to pieces."
"Uh huh."
"Any idea why?"
He shrugged. "Bates thought there might be some kind of civil
war going on down there."
"What do you think?"
"I don't know. Maybe it's right, or maybe scramblers are ritual
cannibals, or—they're aliens, Keeton. What do you want from
me?"
"But they're not really aliens. At least not intelligent ones. War
implies intelligence."