Szpindel shook his head. "Hey, Mandy. Rorschach talking to Jack at all?"
"If it is, I'm not seeing it. No incident light, no directed EM of any kind." She smiled grimly. "Seems to have snuck in under the radar. And don't call me Mandy."
Theseus groaned, twisting. I staggered in the low pseudograv, reached out to steady myself. "Course correction," Bates reported. "Unplotted rock."
"Rorschach to Theseus. Please respond. Your current heading is unacceptable, repeat, your current heading is unacceptable. Strongly advise you change course."
By now the probe coasted just a few kilometers off Rorschach's leading edge. That close it served up way more than magnetic fields: it presented Rorschach itself in bright, tactical color codes. Invisible curves and spikes iridesced in ConSensus across any number of on-demand pigment schemes: gravity, reflectivity, blackbody emissions. Massive electrical bolts erupting from the tips of thorns rendered in lemon pastels. User-friendly graphics had turned Rorschach into a cartoon.
"Rorschach to Theseus. Please respond."
Theseus growled to stern, fishtailing. On tactical, another just-plotted piece of debris swept by a discreet six thousand meters to port.
"Rorschach to Theseus. If you are unable to respond, please—holy shit!"
The cartoon flickered and died.
I'd seen what had happened in that last instant, though: Jack passing near one of those great phantom hoops; a tongue of energy flicking out, quick as a frog's; a dead feed.
"I see what you're up to now, you cocksuckers. Do you think we're fucking blind down here?"
Sascha clenched her teeth. "We—"
"No," Sarasti said.
"But it fi—"
Sarasti hissed, from somewhere in the back of his throat. I had never heard a mammal make a noise quite like that before. Sascha fell immediately silent.
Bates negotiated with her controls. "I've still got—just a sec—"
"You pull that thing back right fucking now, you hear us? Right fucking now."
"Got it." Bates gritted as the feed came back up. "Just had to reacquire the laser." The probe had been kicked wildly off-course—as if someone fording a river had been caught in sudden undertow and thrown over a waterfall—but it was still talking, and still mobile.
Barely. Bates struggled to stay the course. Jack staggered and wobbled uncontrollably though the tightly-wound folds of Rorschach's magnetosphere. The artefact loomed huge in its eye. The feed strobed.
"Maintain approach," Sarasti said calmly.
"Love to," Bates gritted. "Trying."
Theseus skidded again, corkscrewing. I could have sworn I heard the bearings in the drum grind for a moment. Another rock sailed past on Tactical.
"I thought you'd plotted those things," Szpindel grumbled.
"You want to start a war, Theseus? Is that what you're trying to do? You think you're up for it?"
"It doesn't attack," Sarasti said.
"Maybe it does." Bates kept her voice low; I could see the effort it took. "If Rorschach can control the trajectories of these—"
"Normal distribution. Insignificant corrections." He must have meant statistically: the torque and grind of the ship's hull felt pretty significant to the others.
"Oh, right," Rorschach said suddenly. "We get it now. You don't think there's anyone here, do you? You've got some high-priced consultant telling you there's nothing to worry about."
Jack was deep in the forest. We'd lost most of the tactical overlays to reduced baud. In dim visible light Rorschach's great ridged spines, each the size of a skyscraper, hashed a nightmare view on all sides. The feed stuttered as Bates struggled to keep the beam aligned. ConSensus painted walls and airspace with arcane telemetry. I had no idea what any of it meant.
"You think we're nothing but a Chinese Room," Rorschach sneered.
Jack stumbled towards collision, grasping for something to hang on to.
"Your mistake, Theseus."
It hit something. It stuck.
And suddenly Rorschach snapped into view—no refractory composites, no profiles or simulations in false color. There it was at last, naked even to Human eyes.
Imagine a crown of thorns, twisted, dark and unreflective, grown too thickly tangled to ever rest on any human head. Put it in orbit around a failed star whose own reflected half-light does little more than throw its satellites into silhouette. Occasional bloody highlights glinted like dim embers from its twists and crannies; they only emphasized the darkness everywhere else.
Imagine an artefact that embodies the very notion of torture, something so wrenched and disfigured that even across uncounted lightyears and unimaginable differences in biology and outlook, you can't help but feel that somehow, the structure itself is in pain.
Now make it the size of a city.
It flickered as we watched. Lightning arced from recurved spines a thousand meters long. ConSensus showed us a strobe-lit hellscape, huge and dark and twisted. The composites had lied. It was not the least bit beautiful.
"Now it's too late," something said from deep inside. "Now every last one of you is dead. And Susan? You there, Susan?
"We're taking you first."
"Life's too short for chess."
— Byron
They never sealed the hatch behind them. It was too easy to get lost up there in the dome, naked infinite space stretching a hundred eighty degrees on every axis. They needed all that emptiness but they needed an anchor in its midst: soft stray light from astern, a gentle draft from the drum, the sounds of people and machinery close by. They needed to have it both ways.
I lay in wait. Reading a dozen blatant cues in their behavior, I was already squirreled away in the forward airlock when they passed. I gave them a few minutes and crept forward to the darkened bridge.
"Of course they called her by name," Szpindel was saying. "That was the only name they had. She told them, remember?"
"Yes." Michelle didn't seem reassured.
"Hey, it was you guys said we were talking to a Chinese Room. You saying you were wrong?"
"We—no. Of course not."
"Then it wasn't really threatening Suze at all, was it? It wasn't threatening any of us. It had no idea what it was saying."
"It's rule-based, Isaac. It was following some kind of flowchart it drew up by observing Human languages in action. And somehow those rules told it to respond with threats of violence."
"But if it doesn't even know what it was saying—"
"It doesn't. It can't. We parsed the phrasing nineteen different ways, tried out conceptual units of every different length…" A long, deep breath. "But it attacked the probe, Isaac."
"Jack just got too close to one of those electrode thingies is all. It just arced."
"So you don't think Rorschach is hostile?"
Long silence—long enough to make me wonder if I'd been detected.
"Hostile," Szpindel said at last. "Friendly. We learned those words for life on Earth, eh? I don't know if they even apply out here." His lips smacked faintly. "But I think it might be something like hostile."
Michelle sighed. "Isaac, there's no reason for—I mean, it just doesn't make sense that it would be. We can't have anything it wants."