Blindsight

"What does it eat?" Bates asked.

"I couldn't say. I found gizzard-like contractiles around the cloacae, which implies they chew on something, or did at some point in their history. Other than that…" He spread his hands; the cigarette left faint streamers in its wake. "Inflate those contractiles enough and you create an airtight seal, by the way. In conjunction with the cuticle, that would allow this organism to survive briefly in vacuum. And we already know it can handle the ambient radiation, although don't ask me how. Whatever it uses for genes must be a great deal tougher than ours."

"So it can survive in space," Bates mused.

"In the sense that a dolphin survives underwater. Limited time only."

"How long?"

"I'm not certain."

"Central nervous system," Sarasti said.

Bates and the Gang grew suddenly, subtly still. James's affect seeped out over her body, supplanting Sascha's.

Smoke curled from Cu

Bates sat up straight. "Seriously?"

He nodded. "It would be akin to independently controlling the movement of each individual hair on your head, although this creature is covered with little hairs from tip to tip. The same thing applies to the eyes. Hundreds of thousands of eyes, all over the cuticle. Each one is barely more than a pinhole camera, but each is capable of independent focus and I'm guessing all the different inputs integrate somewhere up the line. The entire body acts like a single diffuse retina. In theory that gives it enormous visual acuity."

"A distributed telescope array," Bates murmured.

"A chromatophore underlies each eye—the pigment's some kind of cryptochrome so it's probably involved in vision, but it can also diffuse or contract through the local tissue. That implies dynamic pigment patterns, like a squid or a chameleon."

"Background pattern-matching?" Bates asked. "Would that explain why Siri couldn't see it?"

Cu

"As you can see, the background doesn't match the pattern," Cu

"Can you explain Siri's blindness to it?" Sarasti said.

"I can't," Cu

"Another hallucination?" I asked.

Another shrug while Cu

"But—" James took a breath, bracing herself— "We're talking about something… sophisticated, at least. Something very complex. A great deal of processing power."

Cu

"So it's intelligent." Her voice was almost a whisper.

"Not remotely."

"But—thirty percent—"

"Thirty percent motor and sensory wiring." Another drag. "Much like an octopus; an enormous number of neurons, but half of them get used up ru

"My understanding is that octopi are quite intelligent," James said.

"By molluscan standards, certainly. But do you have any idea how much extra cabling you'd need if the photoreceptors in your eye were spread across your entire body? You'd need about three hundred million extension cords to begin with, ranging from half a millimeter to two meters long. Which means all your signals are staggered and out of synch, which means billions of additional logic gates to cohere the input. And that just gets you a single static image, with no filtering, no interpretation, no time-series integration at all." Shiver. Drag. "Now multiply that by all the extra wiring needed to focus all those eyespots on an object, or to send all that information back to individual chromatophores, and then add in the processing power you need to drive those chromatophores one at a time. Thirty percent might do all that, but I strongly doubt you'd have much left over for philosophy and science." He waved his hand in the general direction of the hold. "That—that—"

"Scrambler," James suggested.

Cu

A moment's silence.

"So what is it?" James asked at last. "Somebody's pet?"

"Canary in a coal mine," Bates suggested.

"Perhaps not even that," Cu

"Maybe they don't use ATP," Bates said as I thumbnailed: adenosine triphosphate. Cellular energy source.

"It was crammed with ATP," Cu

Nobody offered any suggestions.

"Anyway," he said, "So endeth the lesson. If you want gory details, check ConSensus." He wiggled the fingers of his free hand: the spectral dissection vanished. "I'll keep working, but if you want any real answers go get me a live one." He butted out his cigarette against the bulkhead and stared defiantly around the drum.

The others hardly reacted; their topologies still sparkled from the revelations of a few minutes before. Perhaps Cu

Because the scrambler was dead at our hands, no doubt about it. But it wasn't an alien, not really. It wasn't intelligent. It was just a blood cell with waldoes. It was dumb as a stick.

And property damage is so much easier to live with than murder.