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Peter Watts 105 Blindsight
Never there. Couldn't be there. Impossible.
"Did you hear that" Szpindel asked, but I'd fled to stern before
Michelle could answer him.
We'd fallen so far that the naked eye didn't see a disk, barely
even saw curvature any more. We were falling towards a wall, a
vast roiling expanse of dark thunderclouds that extended in all
directions to some new, infinitely-distant horizon. Ben filled half
the universe.
And still we fell.
Far below, Jack clung to Rorschach's ridged surface with bristly
gecko-feet fenders and set up camp. It sent x-rays and ultrasound
into the ground, tapped enquiring fingers and listened to the echos,
planted tiny explosive charges and measured the resonance of their
detonations. It shed seeds like pollen: tiny probes and sensors by
the thousands, self-powered, near-sighted, stupid and expendable.
The vast majority were sacrificial offerings to random chance; only
one in a hundred lasted long enough to return usable telemetry.
While our advance scout took measure of its local neighborhood,
Theseus drew larger-scale birdseye maps from the closing sky. It
spat out thousands of its own disposable probes, spread them
across the heavens and collected stereoscopic data from a thousand
simultaneous perspectives.
Patchwork insights assembled in the drum. Rorschach's skin
was sixty percent superconducting carbon nanotube. Rorschach's
guts were largely hollow; at least some of those hollows appeared
to contain an atmosphere. No earthly form of life would have
lasted a second in there, though; intricate topographies of
radiation and electromagnetic force seethed around the structure,
seethed within it. In some places the radiation was intense enough
to turn unshielded flesh to ash in an instant; calmer backwaters
would merely kill in the same span of time. Charged particles
raced around invisible racetracks at relativistic speeds, erupting
from jagged openings, hugging curves of magnetic force strong
enough for neutron stars, arcing through open space and plunging
*