The Island - Peter Watts

Peter Watts 23 The Island
that one of the things the admins had anticipated was mutiny.
I try another tack. "Consider the threat potential."
"There's no evidence of any."
"Look at the synapse estimate! That thing's got orders of mag
more processing power than the whole civilization that sent us out
here. You think something can be that smart, live that long,
without learning how to defend itself? We're assuming it's asking
us to move the gate. What if that's not a request? What if it's just
giving us the chance to back off before it takes matters into its own
hands?"
"Doesn't have hands," Dix says from the other side of the tank,
and he's not even being flippant. He's just being so stupid I want to
bash his face in.
I try to keep my voice level. "Maybe it doesn't need any."
"What could it do, blink us to death? No weapons. Doesn't even
control the whole membrane. Signal propagation's too slow."
"We don't know. That's my point. We haven't even tried to find
out. We're a goddamn road crew; our onsite presence is a bunch of
construction vons press-ganged into scientific research. We can
figure out some basic physical parameters but we don't know how
this thing thinks, what kind of natural defenses it might have—"
"What do you need to find out?" the chimp asks, the very voice
of calm reason.
We can't find out! I want to scream. We're stuck with what
we've got! By the time the onsite vons could build what we need
we're already past the point of no return! You stupid fucking
machine, we're on track to kill a being smarter than all of human
history and you can't even be bothered to move our highway to the
vacant lot next door?
But of course if I say that, the Island's chances of survival go
from low to zero. So I grasp at the only straw that remains: maybe
the data we've got in hand is enough. If acquisition is off the table,
maybe analysis will do.
"I need time," I say.
"Of course," the chimp tells me. "Take all the time you need."
*