"Every nerve impulse generates an electromagnetic field. That makes it detectable."
"But Rorschach's EM fields are so—I mean, reading the firing of a single optic nerve through all that interference—"
"It's not interference. The fields are part of them, remember? That's probably how they do it."
"So they couldn't do that here."
"You're not listening. The trap you set wouldn't have caught anything like that, not unless it wanted to be caught. We didn't grab specimens at all. We grabbed spies."
Stretch and Clench floated in splitscreen before us, arms swaying like undulating backbones. Cryptic patterns played slowly across their cuticles.
"Supposing it's just— instinct," I suggested. "Flounders hide against their background pretty well, but they don't think about it."
"Where are they going to get that instinct from, Keeton? How is it going to evolve? Saccades are an accidental glitch in mammalian vision. Where would scramblers have encountered them before now?" Cunningham shook his head. "That thing, that thing Amanda's robot fried— it developed that strategy on its own, on the spot. It improvised."
The word intelligent barely encompassed that kind of improvisation. But there was something else in Cunningham's face, some deeper distress nested inside what he'd already told me.
"What?" I asked.
"It was stupid," he said. "The things these creatures can do, it was just dumb."
"How do you mean?"
"Well it didn't work, did it? Couldn't keep it up in front of more than one or two of us."
Because people's eyes don't flicker in synch, I realized. Too many witnesses stripped it of cover.
"— many other things it could have done," Cunningham was saying. "They could've induced Anton's or, or an agnosia: then we could have tripped over a whole herd of scramblers and it wouldn't even register in our conscious minds. Agnosias happen by accident, for God's sake. If you've got the senses and reflexes to hide between someone's saccades, why stop there? Why not do something that really works?"
"Why do you think?" I asked, reflexively nondirective.
"I think that first one was—you know it was a juvenile, right? Maybe it was just inexperienced. Maybe it was stupid, and it made a bad decision. I think we're dealing with a species so far beyond us that even their retarded children can rewire our brains on the fly, and I can't tell you how fucking scared that should make you."
I could see it in his topology. I could hear it in his voice. His nerveless face remained as calm as a corpse.
"We should just kill them now," he said.
"Well, if they're spies, they can't have learned much. They've been in those cages the whole time, except—" for the way up. They'd been right next to us the whole trip back…
"These things live and breath EM. Even stunted, even isolated, who knows how much of our tech they could have just read through the walls?"
"You've got to tell Sarasti," I said.
"Oh, Sarasti knows. Why do you think he wouldn't let them go?"
"He never said anything about—"
"He'd be crazy to fill us in. He keeps sending you down there, remember? Do you think for a second he'd tell you what he knows and then set you loose in a labyrinth full of mind-reading minotaurs? He knows, and he's already got it factored a thousand ways to Sunday." Cunningham's eyes were bright manic points blazing in an expressionless mask. He raised them to the center of the drum, and didn't raise his voice a decibel. "Isn't that right, Jukka?"
I checked ConSensus for active channels. "I don't think he's listening, Robert."
Cunningham's mouth moved in something that would have been a pitying smile if the rest of his face had been able to join in. "He doesn't have to listen, Keeton. He doesn't have to spy on us. He just knows."
Ventilators, breathing. The almost-subliminal hum of bearings in motion. Then Sarasti's disembodied voice rang forth through the drum.
"Everyone to Commons. Robert wants to share."
Cunningham sat to my right, his plastic face lit from beneath by the conference table. He stared down into that light, rocking slightly. His lips went through the ongoing motions of some inaudible incantation. The Gang sat across from us. To my left Bates kept one eye on the proceedings and another on intelligence from the front lines.
Sarasti was with us only in spirit. His place at the head of the table remained empty. "Tell them," he said.
"We have to get out of h—"
"From the beginning."
Cunningham swallowed and started again. "Those frayed motor nerves I couldn't figure out, those pointless cross-connections—they're logic gates. Scramblers time-share. Their sensory and motor plexii double as associative neurons during idle time, so every part of the system can be used for cognition when it isn't otherwise engaged. Nothing like it ever evolved on Earth. It means they can do a great deal of processing without a lot of dedicated associative mass, even for an individual."
"So peripheral nerves can think?" Bates frowned. "Can they remember?"
"Certainly. At least, I don't see why not." Cunningham pulled a cigarette from his pocket.
"So when they tore that scrambler apart—"
"Not civil war. Data dump. Passing information about us, most likely."
"Pretty radical way to carry on a conversation," Bates remarked.
"It wouldn't be their first choice. I think each scrambler acts as a node in a distributed network, when they're in Rorschach at least. But those fields would be configured down to the Angstrom, and when we go in with our tech and our shielding and blowing holes in their conductors—we bollocks up the network. Jam the local signal. So they resort to a sneakernet."
He had not lit his cigarette. He rolled the filtered end between thumb and forefinger. His tongue flickered between his lips like a worm behind a mask.
Hidden in his tent, Sarasti took up the slack. "Scramblers also use Rorschach's EM for metabolic processes. Some pathways achieve proton transfer via heavy-atom tunneling. Perhaps the ambient radiation acts as a catalyst."
"Tunneling?" Susan said. "As in quantum?"
Cunningham nodded. "Which also explains your shielding problems. Partly, at least."
"But is that even possible? I mean, I thought those kind of effects only showed up under cryonic—"
"Forget this," Cunningham blurted. "We can debate the biochemistry later, if we're still alive."
"What do we debate instead, Robert?" Sarasti said smoothly.
"For starters, the dumbest of these things can look into your head and see what parts of your visual cortex are lighting up. And if there's a difference between that and mind-reading, it's not much of one."
"As long as we stay out of Rorschach—"
"That ship has sailed. You people have already been there. Repeatedly. Who knows what you already did down there for no better reason than because Rorschach made you?"
"Wait a second," Bates objected. "None of us were puppets down there. We hallucinated and we went blind and—and crazy even, but we were never possessed."