PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 223 Blindsight
mosaics. There might even be something in the way they move
those bristles. But I can't find the pattern, I can't even follow how
they count, much less tell them I'm...sorry..."
Nobody spoke for a while. Bates watched us from the galley on
our ceiling, but made no attempt to join the proceedings. On
ConSensus the reprieved scramblers floated in their cages like
multiarmed martyrs.
"Well," Cunningham said at last, "since this seems to be the day
for bad news, here's mine. They're dying."
James put her face in her hand.
"It's not your interrogation, for whatever that's worth," the
biologist continued. "As far as I can determine, some of their
metabolic pathways are just missing."
"Obviously you just haven't found them yet." That was Bates,
speaking up from across the drum.
"No," Cunningham said, slowly and distinctly, "obviously those
parts aren't available to the organism. Because they're falling apart
pretty much the same way you'd expect one of us to, if—if all the
mitotic spindles in our cells just vanished out of the cytoplasm, for
example. As far as I can tell they started deteriorating the moment
we took them off Rorschach."
Susan looked up. "Are you saying they left part of their
biochemistry behind?"
"Some essential nutrient?" Bates suggested. "They're not eating
—"
"Yes to the linguist. No to the major." Cunningham fell silent;
I glanced across the drum to see him sucking on a cigarette. "I
think a lot of the cellular processes in these things are mediated
externally. I think the reason I can't find any genes in my biopsies
is because they don't have any."
"So what do they have instead?" Bates asked.
"Turing morphogens."
Blank looks, subtitling looks. Cunningham explained anyway:
"A lot of biology doesn't use genes. Sunflowers look the way they
do because of purely physical buckling stress. You get Fibonacci
sequences and Golden ratios everywhere in nature, and there's no
gene that codes for them; it's all just mechanical interactions. Take