PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 39 Blindsight
string. Our autonomous microprobes measure everything our
masters anticipated; tiny onboard assembly lines can build tools
from the atoms up, to assess the things they did not. Atoms,
scavenged from where we are, join with ions beamed from where
we were: thrust and materiel accumulate in our bellies.
This extra mass has slowed us, but midpoint braking maneuvers
have slowed us even more. The last half of this journey has been a
constant fight against momentum from the first. It is not an
efficient way to travel. In less-hurried times we would have built
early to some optimal speed, perhaps slung around a convenient
planet for a little extra oomph, coasted most of the way. But time
is pressing, so we burn at both ends. We must reach our
destination; we cannot afford to pass it by, cannot afford the
kamikaze exuberance of the first wave. They merely glimpsed the
lay of the land. We must map it down to the motes.
We must be more responsible.
Now, slowing towards orbit, we see everything they saw and
more. We see the scabs, and the impossible iron core. We hear
the singing. And there, just beneath the comet's frozen surface, we
see structure: an infiltration of architecture into geology. We are
not yet close enough to squint, and radar is too long in the tooth
for fine detail. But we are smart, and there are three of us, widely
separated in space. The wavelengths of three radar sources can
be calibrated to interfere at some predetermined point of
convergence—and those tripartite echoes, hologramatically
remixed, will increase resolution by a factor of twenty-seven.
Burns-Caulfield stops singing the moment we put our plan into
action. In the next instant I go blind.
It's a temporary aberration, a reflexive amping of filters to
compensate for the overload. My arrays are back online in
seconds, diagnostics green within and without. I reach out to the
others, confirm identical experiences, identical recoveries. We are
all still fully functional, unless the sudden increase in ambient ion
density is some kind of sensory artefact. We are ready to continue
our investigation of Burns-Caulfield.
The only real problem is that Burns-Caulfield seems to have
disappeared...