1n1REzE

Peter Watts 107 Blindsight
upon—but Bates was giving each a visual inspection before
sending it through one of the airlocks a few meters up the
passageway. Ritual, perhaps. Military tradition. Certainly there
was nothing she could see with her eyes that wouldn't be glaringly
obvious to the most basic diagnostic.
"Would it be a problem" I asked. "Running them without your
interface"
"Run themselves just fine. Response time actually improves
without spam in the network. I'm more of a safety precaution."
Theseus growled, giving us more attitude. The plating trembled
to stern; another piece of local debris, no longer in our path. We
were angling towards an equatorial orbit just a few miniscule
kilometers above the artefact; insanely, the approach curved right
through the accretion belt.
It didn't bother the others. "Like surviving traffic in a high speed
lane," Sascha had said, disdainful of my misgivings. "Try creeping
across and you're road kill. Gotta speed up, go with the flow." But
the flow was turbulent; we hadn't gone five minutes without a
course correction since Rorschach had stopped talking to us.
"So, do you buy it" I asked. "Pattern-matching, empty threats
Nothing to worry about"
"Nobody's fired on us yet," she said. Meaning: Not for a
second.
"What's your take on Susan's argument Different niches, no
reason for conflict"
"Makes sense, I guess." Utter bullshit.
"Can you think of any reason why something with such different
needs would attack us"
"That depends," she said, "on whether the fact that we are
different is reason enough."
I saw playground battlefields reflected in her topology. I
remembered my own, and wondered if there were any other kind.
Then again, that only proved the point. Humans didn't really
fight over skin tone or ideology; those were just handy cues for
kin-selection purposes. Ultimately it always came down to
bloodlines and limited resources.
"I think Isaac would say this is different," I said.