The Island - Peter Watts

Peter Watts 20 The Island
and fragile as an insect's wing: I'd gladly cash in some of my life
to learn its secrets. How does it work? How can it even live here
at the edge of absolute zero, much less think? What vast,
unfathomable intellect must it possess to see us coming from over
half a lightyear away, to deduce the nature of our eyes and our
instruments, to send a signal we can even detect, much less
understand?
And what happens when we punch through it at a fifth the speed
of light?
I call up the latest findings on my way to bed, and the answer
hasn't changed: not much. The damn thing's already full of holes.
Comets, asteroids, the usual protoplanetary junk careens through
this system as it does through every other. Infra picks up diffuse
pockets of slow outgassing here and there around the perimeter,
where the soft vaporous vacuum of the interior bleeds into the
harder stuff outside. Even if we were going to tear through the
dead center of the thinking part, I can't imagine this vast creature
feeling so much as a pinprick. At the speed we're going we'd be
through and gone far too fast to overcome even the feeble inertia of
a millimeter membrane.
And yet. Stop. Stop. Stop.
It's not us, of course. It's what we're building. The birth of a
gate is a violent, painful thing, a spacetime rape that puts out
almost as much gamma and X as a microquasar. Any meat within
the white zone turns to ash in an instant, shielded or not. It's why
we never slow down to take pictures.
One of the reasons, anyway.
We can't stop, of course. Even changing course isn't an option
except by the barest increments. Eri soars like an eagle between
the stars but she steers like a pig on the short haul; tweak our
heading by even a tenth of a degree and you've got some serious
damage at twenty percent lightspeed. Half a degree would tear us
apart: the ship might torque onto the new heading but the collapsed
mass in her belly would keep right on going, rip through all this
surrounding superstructure without even feeling it.
Even tame singularities get set in their ways. They do not take
well to change.