1n1REzE

Peter Watts 101 Blindsight
you can't help but feel that somehow, the structure itself is in pain.
Now make it the size of a city.
It flickered as we watched. Lightning arced from recurved
spines a thousand meters long. ConSensus showed us a strobe-lit
hellscape, huge and dark and twisted. The composites had lied. It
was not the least bit beautiful.
"Now it's too late," something said from deep inside. "Now
every last one of you is dead. And Susan You there, Susan
"We're taking you first."
"Life's too short for chess."
— Byron
They never sealed the hatch behind them. It was too easy to get
lost up there in the dome, naked infinite space stretching a hundred
eighty degrees on every axis. They needed all that emptiness but
they needed an anchor in its midst: soft stray light from astern, a
gentle draft from the drum, the sounds of people and machinery
close by. They needed to have it both ways.
I lay in wait. Reading a dozen blatant cues in their behavior, I
was already squirreled away in the forward airlock when they
passed. I gave them a few minutes and crept forward to the
darkened bridge.
"Of course they called her by name," Szpindel was saying. "That
was the only name they had. She told them, remember"
"Yes." Michelle didn't seem reassured.
"Hey, it was you guys said we were talking to a Chinese Room.
You saying you were wrong"
"We—no. Of course not."
"Then it wasn't really threatening Suze at all, was it It wasn't
threatening any of us. It had no idea what it was saying."
"It's rule-based, Isaac. It was following some kind of flowchart
it drew up by observing Human languages in action. And