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Peter Watts 240 Blindsight
Sarasti was with us only in spirit. His place at the head of the
table remained empty. "Tell them," he said.
"We have to get out of h—"
"From the beginning."
Cunningham swallowed and started again. "Those frayed motor
nerves I couldn't figure out, those pointless cross-connections—
they're logic gates. Scramblers time-share. Their sensory and
motor plexii double as associative neurons during idle time, so
every part of the system can be used for cognition when it isn't
otherwise engaged. Nothing like it ever evolved on Earth. It
means they can do a great deal of processing without a lot of
dedicated associative mass, even for an individual."
"So peripheral nerves can think" Bates frowned. "Can they
remember"
"Certainly. At least, I don't see why not." Cunningham pulled a
cigarette from his pocket.
"So when they tore that scrambler apart—"
"Not civil war. Data dump. Passing information about us, most
likely."
"Pretty radical way to carry on a conversation," Bates remarked.
"It wouldn't be their first choice. I think each scrambler acts as a
node in a distributed network, when they're in Rorschach at least.
But those fields would be configured down to the Angstrom, and
when we go in with our tech and our shielding and blowing holes
in their conductors—we bollocks up the network. Jam the local
signal. So they resort to a sneakernet."
He had not lit his cigarette. He rolled the filtered end between
thumb and forefinger. His tongue flickered between his lips like a
worm behind a mask.
Hidden in his tent, Sarasti took up the slack. "Scramblers also
use Rorschach's EM for metabolic processes. Some pathways
achieve proton transfer via heavy-atom tunneling. Perhaps the
ambient radiation acts as a catalyst."
"Tunneling" Susan said. "As in quantum"
Cunningham nodded. "Which also explains your shielding
problems. Partly, at least."
"But is that even possible I mean, I thought those kind of