1n1REzE

Peter Watts 54 Blindsight
give you a tweak or two, I bet you'd grow right out of it."
Pag admitted afterward, a bit sheepishly, that maybe I should
have read that as a warning sign. Live and learn.
"Leaders are visionaries with a poorly developed sense of fear
and no concept of the odds against them."
—Robert Jarvik
Our scout fell towards orbit, watching Ben. We fell days behind,
watching the scout. And that was all we did: sit in Theseus' belly
while the system streamed telemetry to our inlays. Essential,
irreplaceable, mission-critical—we might as well have been ballast
during that first approach.
We passed Ben's Rayleigh limit. Theseus squinted at a meager
emission spectrum and saw a rogue halo element from Canis Major
—a dismembered remnant of some long-lost galaxy that had
drifted into ours and ended up as road kill, uncounted billions of
years ago. We were closing on something from outside the Milky
Way.
The probe arced down and in, drew close enough for false-color
enhance. Ben's surface brightened to a seething parfait of highcontrast
bands against a diamond-hard starscape. Something
twinkled there, faint sparkles on endless overcast.
"Lightning" James wondered.
Szpindel shook his head. "Meteorites. Must be a lot of rock in
the neighborhood."
"Wrong color," Sarasti said. He was not physically among us—
he was back in his tent, hardlined into the Captain—but ConSensus
put him anywhere on board he wanted to be.
Morphometrics scrolled across my inlays: mass, diameter,
mean density. Ben's day lasted seven hours twelve minutes.
Diffuse but massive accretion belt circling the equator, more torus