Bates looked skeptical. “Plastic skin is ‘nothing special’?”
“Given the environment I was half-expecting a Sanduloviciu plasma. Plastic’s simply refined petroleum. Organocarbon. This thing is carbon-based. It’s even protein based, although its proteins are a great deal tougher than ours. Numerous sulphur cross-bonds for lateral bracing, as far as I could tell from what your grunts didn’t denature.” Cunningham’s eyes looked past us all; his consciousness was obviously far aft, haunting remote sensors. “The thing’s tissues are saturated with magnetite. On earth you find that material in dolphin brains, migratory birds, even some bacteria—anything that navigates or orients using magnetic fields. Moving up to macrostructures we’ve got a pneumatic internal skeleton, which as far as I can tell doubles as musculature. Contractile tissue squeezes gas through a system of bladders that stiffen or relax each segment in the arms.”
The light came back into Cunningham’s eyes long enough to focus on his cigarette. He brought it to his mouth, dragged deeply, set it down again. “Note the invaginations around the base of each arm.” Flaccid balloons glowed orange on the virtual carcass. “Cloacae, you could call them. Everything opens into them: they eat, breathe, and defecate through the same little compartment. No other major orifices.”
The Gang made a face that said Sascha, grossed out. “Don’t things get—clogged up? Seems inefficient.”
“If one gets plugged, there’s eight other doors into the same system. You’ll wish you were so inefficient the next time you choke on a chicken bone.”
“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 Cunningham’s mouth and nose. “There’s nothing central about it, as it transpires. No cephalisation, not even clustered sense organs. The body’s covered with something like eyespots, or chromatophores, or both. There are setae everywhere. And as far as I can tell—if all those little cooked filaments I’ve been able to put back together after your malfunction really are nerves and not something completely different—every one of those structures is under independent control.”
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?”
Cunningham opened a new window and played grainy looped imagery of Siri Keeton and his unseen dance partner. The creature I hadn’t noticed was ominously solid to the cameras: a floating discoid twice as wide as my own torso, arms extending from its edges like thick knotted ropes. Patterns rippled across its surface in waves; sunlight and shadow playing on a shallow seabed.
“As you can see, the background doesn’t match the pattern,” Cunningham said. “It’s not even close.”
“Can you explain Siri’s blindness to it?” Sarasti said.
“I can’t,” Cunningham admitted. “It’s beyond ordinary crypsis. But Rorschach makes you see all sorts of things that aren’t there. Not seeing something that is there might come down to essentially the same thing.”
“Another hallucination?” I asked.
Another shrug while Cunningham sucked smoke. “There are many ways to fool the human visual system. It’s interesting that the illusion failed when multiple witnesses were present, but if you want a definitive mechanism you’ll have to give me more to work with than that.” He stabbed his cigarette hand at the crisped remains.
“But—” James took a breath, bracing herself—“We’re talking about something… sophisticated, at least. Something very complex. A great deal of processing power.”
Cunningham nodded again. “I’d estimate nervous tissue accounts for about thirty percent of body mass.”
“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 running the suckers.”
“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.
Cunningham rolled his tongue around it. “Very well. That scrambler is an absolute miracle of evolutionary engineering. It’s also dumb as a stick.”
A moment’s silence.
“So what is it?” James asked at last. “Somebody’s pet?”