> MISSION_CLOCK: SACCADIC_BLINDNESS

If I can but make the words awake the feeling

— Ian Anderson, Stand Up

Night shift. Not a creature was stirring.

Not in [Theseus], anyway. The Gang hid in their tent. The transient lurked weightless and silent below the surface. [Bates] was in the bridge­— she more or less lived up there now, vigilant and conscientious, nested in camera angles and tactical overlays. There was nowhere she could turn without seeing some aspect of the cipher off our starboard bow. She did what good she could, for the good it would do.

The drum turned quietly, lights dimmed in deference to a diel cycle that a hundred years of tweaks and retrofits hadn't been able to weed from the genes. I sat alone in the galley, squinting from the inside of a system whose outlines grew increasingly hazy, trying to compile my latest—how had Isaac put it?— postcard to posterity. [Cunningham] worked upside-down on the other side of the world.

Except Cunningham wasn't working. He hadn't even moved for at least four minutes. I'd assumed he was reciting the Kaddish for [Szpindel]—ConSensus said he'd be doing it twice daily for the next year, if we lived that long—but now, leaning to see around the spinal bundles in the core, I could read his surfaces as clearly as if I'd been sitting beside him. He wasn't bored, or distracted, or even deep in thought.

Robert Cunningham was petrified.

I stood and paced the drum. Ceiling turned into wall; wall into floor. I was close enough to hear his incessant soft muttering, a single indistinct syllable repeated over and over; then I was close enough to hear what he was saying—

"fuck fuck fuck fuck..."

—and still Cunningham didn't move, although I'd made no attempt to mask my approach.

Finally, when I was almost at his shoulder, he fell silent.

"You're blind," he said without turning. "Did you know that?"

"I didn't."

"You. Me. Everyone." He interlocked his fingers and clenched as if in prayer, hard enough to whiten the knuckles. Only then did I notice: no cigarette.

"Vision's mostly a lie anyway," he continued. "We don't really see anything except a few hi-res degrees where the eye focuses. Everything else is just peripheral blur, just— light and motion. Motion draws the focus. And your eyes jiggle all the time, did you know that, [Keeton]? Saccades, they're called. Blurs the image, the movement's way too fast for the brain to integrate so your eye just—shuts down between pauses. It only grabs these isolated freeze-frames, but your brain edits out the blanks and stitches an — an illusion of continuity into your head."

He turned to face me. "And you know what's really amazing? If something only moves during the gaps, your brain just—ignores it. It's invisible."

I glanced at his workspace. The usual splitscreen glowed to one side—realtime images of the [scramblers] in their pens—but Histology, ten thousand times larger than life, took center stage. The paradoxical neural architecture of Stretch & Clench glistened on the main window, flensed and labeled and overlaid by circuit diagrams a dozen layers thick. A dense, annotated forest of alien trunks and brambles. It looked a little like [Rorschach] itself.

I couldn't parse any of it.

"Are you listening, Keeton? Do you know what I'm saying?"

"You've figured out why I couldn't—you're saying these things can somehow tell when our eyes are offline, and..."

I didn't finish. It just didn't seem possible.

Cunningham shook his head. Something that sounded disturbingly like a giggle escaped his mouth. "I'm saying these things can see your nerves firing from across the room, and integrate that into a [crypsis] strategy, and then send motor commands to act on that strategy, and then send other commands to stop the motion before your eyes come back online. All in the time it would take a mammalian nerve impulse to make it halfway from your shoulder to your elbow. These things are fast, Keeton. Way faster than we could have guessed even from that high-speed whisper line they were using. They're bloody superconductors."

It took a conscious effort to keep from frowning. "Is that even possible?"

"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."

Cunningham looked at her and snorted. "You think you'd be able to fight the strings? You think you'd even feel them? I could apply a transcranial magnet to your head right now and you'd raise your middle finger or wiggle your toes or kick Siri here in the sack and then swear on your sainted mother's grave that you only did it because you wanted to. You'd dance like a puppet and all the time swear you were doing it of your own free will, and that's just me, that's just some borderline OCD with a couple of magnets and an MRI helmet." He waved at the vast unknowable void beyond the bulkhead. Shreds of mangled cigarette floated sideways in front of him. "Do you want to guess what that can do? For all we know we've already given them Theseus' technical specs, warned them about the [Icarus array], and then just decided of our own free will to forget it all."

"We can cause those effects," Sarasti said coolly. "As you say. Strokes cause them. Tumors. Random accidents."

"Random? Those were experiments, people! That was vivisection! They let you in so they could take you apart and see what made you tick and you never even knew it."

"So what?" the [vampire] snapped invisibly. Something cold and hungry had edged into his voice. Human topologies shivered around the table, skittish.

"There's a blind spot in the center of your visual field," Sarasti pointed out. "You can't see it. You can't see the saccades in your visual timestream. Just two of the tricks you know about. Many others."

Cunningham was nodding. "That's my whole point. Rorschach could be—"

"Not talking about case studies. Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing— irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don't experience the world as it exists at all. You experience a simulation built from assumptions. Shortcuts. Lies. Whole species is agnosiac by default. Rorschach does nothing to you that you don't already do to yourselves."

Nobody spoke. It was several silent seconds before I realized what had happened.

Jukka Sarasti had just given us a pep talk.

He could have shut down Cunningham's tirade—could have probably shut down a full-scale mutiny—by just sailing into our midst and baring his teeth. By looking at us. But he wasn't trying to frighten us into submission, we were already nervous enough. And he wasn't trying to educate us either, fight fear with fact; the more facts any sane person gathered about Rorschach, the more fearful they'd become. Sarasti was only trying to keep us functional, lost in space on the edge of our lives, facing down this monstrous enigma that might destroy us at any instant for any reason. Sarasti was trying to calm us down: good meat, nice meat. He was trying to keep us from falling apart. There there.

Sarasti was practicing psychology.

I looked around the table. Bates and Cunningham and the Gang sat still and bloodless.

Sarasti sucked at it.

"We have to get out of here," Cunningham said. "These things are way beyond us."

"We've shown more aggression than they have," James said, but there was no confidence in her voice.

"Rorschach plays those rocks like marbles. We're sitting in the middle of a shooting gallery. Any time it feels like—"

"It's still growing. It's not finished."

"That's supposed to reassure me?"

"All I'm saying is, we don't know," James said. "We could have years yet. Centuries."

"We have fifteen days," Sarasti announced.

"Oh shit," someone said. Cunningham, probably. Maybe [Sascha].

For some reason everyone was looking at me.

Fifteen days. Who knows what had gone into that number? None of us asked aloud. Maybe Sarasti, in another fit of inept psychology, had made it up on the spur of the moment. Or maybe he'd derived it before we'd even reached orbit, held it back against the possibility—only now expired— that he might yet send us back into the labyrinth. I'd been half blind for half the mission; I didn't know.

But one way or another, we had our Graduation Day.