PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 303 Blindsight
I fall along an endless futile parabola, all gravity and inertia.
Charybdis couldn't reacquire the antimatter stream; Icarus has
either been knocked out of alignment or shut off entirely. I
suppose I could radio ahead and ask, but there's no hurry. I'm still
a long way out. It will be years before I even leave the comets
behind.
Besides, I'm not sure I want anyone to know where I am.
Charybdis doesn't bother with evasive maneuvers. There'd be no
point even if it had the fuel to spare, even if the enemy's still out
there somewhere. It's not as though they don't know where Earth
is.
But I'm pretty sure the scramblers went up along with my own
kin. They played well. I admit it freely. Or maybe they just got
lucky. An accidental hiccough tickles Bates' grunt into firing on an
unarmed scrambler; weeks later, Stretch & Clench use that body in
the course of their escape. Electricity and magnetism stir random
neurons in Susan's head; further down the timeline a whole new
persona erupts to take control, to send Theseus diving into
Rorschach's waiting arms. Blind stupid random chance. Maybe
that's all it was.
But I don't think so. Too many lucky coincidences. I think
Rorschach made its own luck, planted and watered that new
persona right under our noses, safely hidden—but for the merest
trace of elevated oxytocin— behind all the lesions and tumors
sewn in Susan's head. I think it looked ahead and saw the uses to
which a decoy might be put; I think it sacrificed a little piece of
itself in furtherance of that end, and made it look like an accident.
Blind maybe, but not luck. Foresight. Brilliant moves, and subtle.
Not that most of us even knew the rules of the game, of course.
We were just pawns, really. Sarasti and the Captain—whatever
hybridized intelligence those two formed—they were the real
players. Looking back, I can see a few of their moves too. I see
Theseus hearing the scramblers tap back and forth in their cages; I
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