PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 217 Blindsight
A buzz, definitely. A vibration.
"Way down."
A click train, squirted from a dolphin's forehead. Farting lips.
"No, let me." James bulled into Cunningham's headspace and
yanked the slider to the left.
Tick tick...tick...tick tick tick...tick...tick tick tick...
Dopplered down near absolute zero, it went on for almost a
minute. Total elapsed real time was about half a second.
Cunningham zoomed the splitscreen. The huddled scrambler
had remained motionless, except for the rippling of its cuticle and
the undulation of its free arms. But before I'd only seen eight arms
—and now I could make out the bony spur of a ninth peeking from
behind the central mass. A ninth arm, curled up and hidden from
view, tick tick ticking while another creature casually leaned
against the other side of the wall...
Now, there was nothing. The floating scrambler had drifted
aimlessly back to the center of its enclosure.
James's eyes shone. "We've got to check the rest of—"
But Theseus had been watching, and was way ahead of us. It had
already searched the archives and served up the results: three
similar exchanges over two days, ranging in duration from a tenth
of a second to almost two.
"They're talking," James said.
Cunningham shrugged, a forgotten cigarette burning down
between his fingers. "So do a lot of things. And at that rate of
exchange they're not exactly doing calculus. You could get as
much information out of a dancing honeybee."
"That's nonsense and you know it, Robert."
"What I know is that—"
"Honeybees don't deliberately hide what they're saying.
Honeybees don't develop whole new modes of communication
configured specifically to confound observers. That's flexible,
Robert. That's intelligent."
"And what if it is, hmm? Forget for a moment the inconvenient
fact that these things don't even have brains. I really don't think
you've thought this through."
"Of course I have."