PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 59 Blindsight
it?"
"Diver farts. Those bastards are dumping complex organics into
the atmosphere."
"How complex?"
"Hard to tell, so far. Faint traces, and they dissipate like that.
But sugars and aminos at least. Maybe proteins. Maybe more."
"Maybe life? Microbes?" An alien terraforming project...
"Depends on how you define life, eh?" Szpindel said. "Not even
Deinococcus would last long down there. But it's a big
atmosphere. They better not be in any hurry if they're reworking
the whole thing by direct inoculation."
If they were, the job would go a lot faster with self-replicating
inoculates. "Sounds like life to me."
"Sounds like agricultural aerosols, is what it sounds like. Those
fuckers are turning the whole damn gas ball into a rice paddy
bigger than Jupiter." He gave me a scary grin. "Something's got a
beeeg appetite, hmm? You gotta wonder if we aren't gonna be a
teeny bit outnumbered."
Szpindel's findings were front and center at our next gettogether.
The vampire summed it up for us, visual aids dancing on the
table: "Von Neumann self-replicating r-selector. Seed washes up
and sprouts skimmers, skimmers harvest raw materials from the
accretion belt. Some perturbations in those orbits; belt's still
unsettled."
"Haven't seen any of the herd giving birth," Szpindel remarked.
"Any sign of a factory?"
Sarasti shook his head. "Discarded, maybe. Decompiled. Or
the herd stops breeding at optimal N."
"These are only the bulldozers," Bates pointed out. "There'll be
tenants."
"A lot of 'em, eh?" Szpindel added. "Outnumber us by orders of
mag."
James: "But they might not show up for centuries."
*