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Peter Watts 232 Blindsight
with unpracticed fingers, cursed his own clumsiness. Stimulus and
response flowed through lasers across six kilometers of ionized
vacuum. The ever-present nicotine stick hung from one corner of
his mouth for want of a free hand. Every now and then flecks of
ash broke free and drifted obliquely towards the ventilators.
He spoke before I could. "It's all in ConSensus." When I didn't
leave he relented, but wouldn't look at me: "Magnetite flecks
lined up as soon as they got past the wavefront, more or less.
Membranes started to fix themselves. They're not failing as fast.
But it's Rorschach's internal environment that will be optimized
for scrambler metabolism. Out here, I think the most we can do is
slow the rate of dying."
"That's something, at least."
Cunningham grunted. "Some of the pieces are coming together.
Others—their nerves are frayed, for no good reason. Literally.
Signal leakage along the cables."
"Because of their deterioration" I guessed.
"And I can't get the Arrhenius equation to balance, there's all this
nonlinearity at low temperatures. The preexponential value's
completely fucked up. It's almost as though temperature doesn't
matter, and —shit—"
Some critical value had exceeded a confidence limit on one of
his displays. He glanced up the drum, raised his voice: "Need
another biopsy, Susan. Anywhere central."
"What—oh. Just a second." She shook her head and tapped off
a brief spiral of icons, as listless as the captives she commanded.
On one of Cunningham's windows Stretch viewed her input with
its marvelous sighted skin. It floated unresponsive for a moment.
Then it folded back the arms facing one wall, opening a clear path
for Cunningham's teleops.
He called two of them from their burrows like prehensile
serpents. The first wielded a clinical core-sampler; the second
wielded the threat of violence in case of foolish resistance. It was
hardly necessary. Blindsighted or not, scramblers were fast
learners. Stretch exposed its belly like a victim resigned to
imminent rape. Cunningham fumbled; the teleops bumped
together, briefly entangled. He cursed and tried again, every move