The Island - Peter Watts

Peter Watts 13 The Island
I arrive at my suite, treat myself to a gratuitous meal, jill off.
Three hours after coming back to life I'm relaxing in the starbow
commons. "Chimp."
"You're up early," it says at last, and I am; our answering shout
hasn't even arrived at its destination yet. No real chance of new
data for another two months, at least.
"Show me the forward feeds," I command.
DHF428 blinks at me from the center of the lounge: Stop. Stop.
Stop.
Maybe. Or maybe the chimp's right, maybe it's pure physiology.
Maybe this endless cycle carries no more intelligence than the
beating of a heart. But there's a pattern inside the pattern, some
kind of flicker in the blink. It makes my brain itch.
"Slow the time-series," I command. "By a hundred."
It is a blink. 428's disk isn't darkening uniformly, it's eclipsing.
As though a great eyelid were being drawn across the surface of
the sun, from right to left.
"By a thousand."
Chromatophores, the chimp called them. But they're not all
opening and closing at once. The darkness moves across the
membrane in waves.
A word pops into my head: latency.
"Chimp. Those waves of pigment. How fast are they moving?"
"About fifty-nine thousand kilometers per second."
The speed of a passing thought.
And if this thing does think, it'll have logic gates, synapses— it's
going to be a net of some kind. And if the net's big enough, there's
an I in the middle of it. Just like me, just like Dix. Just like the
chimp. (Which is why I educated myself on the subject, back in the
early tumultuous days of our relationship. Know your enemy and
all that.)
The thing about I is, it only exists within a tenth-of-a-second of
all its parts. When we get spread too thin— when someone splits
your brain down the middle, say, chops the fat pipe so the halves
have to talk the long way around; when the neural architecture
diffuses past some critical point and signals take just that much
longer to pass from A to B— the system, well, decoheres. The