“They all said it. It’s not intentional, Von.”
“The sunfish NASA found said they were Top Clan Four-Eight, Pods Two and Six. They’re organizing themselves by tribes, then by squads.”
“Are they?” Dawson asked. “The AI is assigning identifiers like ’clan’ and ’pod’ for our benefit, and not with a lot of confidence. Check the scores. The AI won’t guarantee the accuracy of our transcripts. Most are ranked lower than seventy percent.”
True again, she thought. Their AIs had interpreted the sunfishes’ carvings with a fair amount of certainty, but following the shape-based language in real time was a work in progress. Too much of it was open to guesswork.
“The sunfish appear to use their pronouns interchangeably,” Dawson said. “’I,’ ’we,’ ’ours,’ ’mine’ — there’s no differentiation. Their arm shrugs may not be counting at all. I don’t dispute that the manner in which they show ’eight’ or ’four’ is unique to each group, but those postures look like displays of conformity and aggression to me.”
“Then they’ll keep destroying our probes,” Koebsch said.
“An animal doesn’t learn, it merely reacts,” Dawson said. “That’s why every encounter is the same. I’m grateful for the data brought to us by NASA and our own probes, but I question if we can afford to let the sunfish keep smashing mecha.”
You bastard, she thought. You despicable, pretentious bastard.
Why was he doing this? Because it would put him at the forefront of the academic debate and the latest news feeds? Dawson didn’t care how much money the ESA spent on probes and spies. Like the Brazilians, he wanted to generate his own notoriety and enjoy its rewards.
“Granted, the sunfish have extraordinary ratios of brain to body mass,” he said. “Their ratio is actually greater than ours. But with eight arms, too much of their brain mass is dedicated to motor control. An elephant uses a considerable portion of its brain to operate its trunk. We use much of ours to operate our fingers and arms. The sunfish developed enough brain mass to gain sentience for a time, but their undoing was their need for multi-sensory input. Allow me to demonstrate.”
Accessing the group feed, Dawson opened a sim of a sunfish brain. It had two hemispheres like a human brain, although it was flatter and wider.
Dawson highlighted several internal structures.
“Here is an olfactory cortex,” he said. “Here is an auditory cortex. Here is a second auditory cortex, and this is no less than a third auditory cortex.”
“So what?” Vonnie said impatiently.
“So in addition to the scent-and-taste organ of their tube feet and their ability to use broadband sonar calls in atmosphere environments, the sunfish are also capable of generating and processing narrow-band high frequency clicks underwater. That’s why they possess these cartilage nares beside their larynx. It’s why these fatty lobes share the same nerve bundles as their cochleae. The lobes are for echolocation.”
“I’ll say it again — so what?”
Dawson smiled at her, unperturbed. “The sunfish also possess a shark-like ability to perceive bioelectrical impulses and subtle changes in temperature and pressure. The tiny pores commingled with their pedicellaria can sense living creatures, even those hiding behind rock or underwater. That’s how they followed you no matter what you tried, Von. They sensed your body through your suit.”
“Impossible,” Frerotte said. “Scout suits are insulated plastisteel.”
“The sunfish have had to become remarkably sensitive to find prey in the ice,” Dawson said. “Perhaps they reacted to the suit itself. Sharks were known to attack phone cables in the earliest years of telecommunications. One of the suit’s systems could have attracted them, but I think not. You were hurt. Wounded creatures emit stronger signals than normal as the electrical activity controlling their heart rate and respiration increases.”
Vonnie felt her face lose its color. Her memories of screaming and killing would always be with her, and Dawson had unlocked that terror with a few words.
Then she got mad. Why is he smiling? she thought. Is he deliberately trying to weaken me? She was the loudest proponent of treating the sunfish like equals. If he dominated her, he might win this argument.
“Finely-developed sensory inputs are what elevated the sunfish to sentience,” she said.
“On the contrary,” Dawson said. “They no longer have enough mass left for higher thinking. Certainly they don’t have the emotional quotient we do. They might be smart like our spies are smart — like termites or bees or prairie dogs. They’re able to build structures in a step-by-step manner as a group, but without real initiative or independence. Too much of their capacity is dedicated to pure survival.”
“I disagree,” Metzler said. “They have spindle cells like human beings and the great apes.”
“Dolphins, elephants, and giraffes have spindle cells in similar concentrations,” Dawson said. “No one considers giraffes intelligent.”
Vonnie glanced at Metzler, who said, “Spindle cells are neurons without extensive branching, sort of like free-floating processors. They play a crucial role in the development of cognition and decision-making.” He turned back to Dawson. “Sunfish brains are also more convoluted than ours, and they have faster brain stem transmission times.”
“So do rats,” Dawson said. “Their brain stem transmission time is an adaptation to living in eternal darkness, not evidence of superhuman thinking. That their brain mass ratio is greater than ours also means nothing. It’s a necessary result of their hemispheric asymmetry during sleep.”
“They don’t sleep.”
“They do, Dr. Metzler.” Dawson opened a series of medical imaging scans of the sunfish. He turned to Vonnie and said, “In addition to motor function, most of any creature’s brain is dedicated to involuntary functions such as heartbeat, digestion, and respiration. In sunfish, breathing is voluntary. They must decide to inhale or use their gills or hold their breath.” He looked at Metzler. “We’ve recorded EEG patterns which very much resemble REM activity, but only in one hemisphere at a time.”
“Then they’re technically awake.”
“Indeed. Because the sunfish are voluntary breathers, they would asphyxiate as soon as they relaxed and failed to breathe. They must also remain vigilant for predators. Therefore it’s uncommon that both of their hemispheres are simultaneously awake. In essence, they have two small brains, not a single large one. They alternate between which small brain they use throughout the day.”
Enough, Vonnie thought.
“Their carvings talk about the future and the past,” she said. “They had laws. Some of it looks like philosophy! At the very least, there was tribal rule, and a warlord strong enough to form an empire.”
“It’s interesting that their carvings invariably show perfect sunfish,” Pärnits added. “They never exhibit wounds or age. That suggests a desire for beauty.”
“We’ve dated the youngest carvings at nine thousand years,” Dawson said. “Something happened between now and then. Perhaps the sunfish didn’t always have such dependence on dual forms of sonar or their bioelectric sensing organs.”
“You think they evolved away from sentience?” Pärnits asked. “That would be unprecedented.”
“Everything in this world is unprecedented,” Dawson said.
“Nine thousand years is too quick,” Metzler said. “It’s not enough time for the sunfish to degenerate without an outside cause like massive radiation, and they don’t have the resources or the technology for a nuclear war.”