> MISSION_CLOCK: SCRAMBLER_METABOLISM

He stood at his post in BioMed, though his empty chair was barely a meter away. The ubiquitous cigarette hung from between the fingers of one hand, burned down and burned out. His other hand played with itself, fingers tapping against thumb in sequence, little to index, index to little. Windows crawled with intelligence in front of him; he wasn't watching.

I approached from behind. I watched his surfaces in motion. I heard the soft syllables rising from his throat:

"Yit-barah v'yish-tabah v'yit-pa-ar v'yit-romam..."

Not his usual litany. Not even his usual language; Hebrew, [ConSensus] said.

It sounded almost like a prayer...

He must have heard me. His topology went flat and hard and almost impossible to decipher. It was increasingly difficult getting a fix on anyone these days, but even through those topological cataracts [Cunningham]— as always— was a tougher read than most.

"[Keeton]," he said without turning.

"You're not Jewish," I said.

"It was." [Szpindel], I realized after a moment. Cunningham didn't do gender pronouns.

But Isaac Szpindel had been an atheist. All of us were. We'd all started out that way, at least.

"I didn't know you knew him," I said. It certainly wasn't policy.

Cunningham sank into his chair without looking at me. In his head, and in mine, a new window opened within a frame marked Electrophoresis.

I tried again. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to intru—"

"What can I do for you, Siri?"

"I was hoping you could bring me up to speed on your findings."

A periodic chart of alien elements scrolled through the feed. Cunningham logged it and started another sample. "I've documented everything. It's all in ConSensus."

I made a play for ego: "It would really help to know how you'd thumbnail it, though. What you think is important can be just as vital as the data themselves."

He looked at me a moment. He muttered something, repetitive and irrelevant.

"What's important is what's missing," he said after a moment. "I've got good samples now and I still can't find the genes. Protein synthesis is almost prionic—reconformation instead of the usual transcription pathways—but I can't figure out how those bricks get slotted into the wall once they're made."

"Any progress on the energy front?" I asked.

"Energy?"

"Aerobic metabolism on an [anaerobe] budget, remember? You said they had too much ATP."

"That I solved." He puffed smoke; far to stern a fleck of alien tissue liquefied and banded into chemical strata. "They're sprinting."

Rotate that if you can.

I couldn't. "How do you mean?"

He sighed. "Biochemistry is a tradeoff. The faster you synthesize ATP, the more expensive each molecule becomes. It turns out [scramblers] are a lot more energy-efficient at making it than we are. They're just extremely slow at it, which might not be a big drawback for something that spends most of its time inactive. [Rorschach]— whatever Rorschach started out as— could have drifted for millennia before it washed up here. That's a lot of time to build up an energy reserve for bouts of high activity, and once you've laid the groundwork glycolysis is explosive. Two-thousand-fold boost, and no oxygen demand."

"Scramblers sprint. Their whole lives."

"They may come preloaded with ATP and burn it off throughout their lifespan."

"How long would that be?"

"Good question," he admitted. "Live fast, die young. If they ration it out, stay dormant most of the time—who knows?"

"Huh." The free-floating scrambler had drifted away from the center of its pen. One extended arm held a wall at bay; the others continued their hypnotic swaying.

I remembered other arms, their motion not so gentle.

"Amanda and I chased one into a crowd. It—"

Cunningham was back at his samples. "I saw the record."

"They tore it to pieces."

"Uh huh."

"Any idea why?"

He shrugged. "[Bates] thought there might be some kind of civil war going on down there."

"What do you think?"

"I don't know. Maybe it's right, or maybe scramblers are ritual cannibals, or—they're aliens, Keeton. What do you want from me?"

"But they're not really aliens. At least not intelligent ones. War implies intelligence."

"Ants wage war all the time. Proves nothing except that they're alive."

"Are scramblers even alive?" I asked.

"What kind of question is that?"

"You think Rorschach grows them on some kind of assembly line. You can't find any genes. Maybe they're just biomechanical machines."

"That's what life is, Keeton. That's what you are." Another hit of nicotine, another storm of numbers, another sample. "Life isn't either/or. It's a matter of degree."

"What I'm asking is, are they natural? Could they be constructs?"

"Is a termite mound a construct? Beaver dam? Space ship? Of course. Were they built by naturally-evolved organisms, acting naturally? They were. So tell me how anything in the whole deep multiverse can ever be anything but natural?"

I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice. "You know what I mean."

"It's a meaningless question. Get your head out of the Twentieth Century."

I gave up. After a few seconds Cunningham seemed to notice the silence. He withdrew his consciousness from the machinery and looked around with fleshly eyes, as if searching for some mosquito that had mysteriously stopped whining.

"What's your problem with me?" I asked. Stupid question, obvious question. Unworthy of any [synthesist] to be so, so direct.

His eyes glittered in that dead face. "Processing without comprehension. That's what you do, isn't it?"

"That's a colossal oversimplification."

"Mmm." Cunningham nodded. "Then why can't you seem to comprehend how pointless it is to keep peeking over our shoulders and writing home to our masters?"

"Someone has to keep Earth in the loop."

"Seven months each way. Long loop."

"Still."

"We're on our own out here, Keeton. You're on your own. The game's going to be long over before our masters even know it's started." He sucked smoke. "Or perhaps not. Perhaps you're talking to someone closer, hmm? That it? Is the Fourth Wave telling you what to do?"

"There is no Fourth Wave. Not that anyone's told me, anyway."

"Probably not. They'd never risk their lives out here, would they? Too dangerous even to hang back and watch from a distance. That's why they built us."

"We're all self-made. Nobody forced you to get the rewire."

"No, nobody forced me to get the rewire. I could have just let them cut out my brain and pack it into Heaven, couldn't I? That's the choice we have. We can be utterly useless, or we can try and compete against the [vampires] and the constructs and the AIs. And perhaps you could tell me how to do that without turning into a—an utter freak."

So much in the voice. Nothing at all on the face. I said nothing.

"See what I mean? No comprehension." He managed a tight smile. "So I'll answer your questions. I'll delay my own work and hold your hand because [Sarasti]'s told us to. I guess that superior vampire mind sees some legitimate reason to indulge your constant ankle-nipping, and it's in charge so I'll play along. But I'm not nearly that smart, so you'll forgive me if it all seems a bit naff."

"I'm just—"

"You're just doing your job. I know. But I don't like being played, Keeton. And that's what your job is."

Even back on Earth, Robert Cunningham had barely disguised his opinion of the ship's commissar. It had been obvious even to the topologically blind.

I'd always had a hard time imagining the man. It wasn't just his expressionless face. Sometimes, not even the subtler things behind would show up in his topology. Perhaps he repressed them deliberately, resenting the presence of this mole among the crew.

It would hardly have been the first time I'd encountered such a reaction. Everyone resented me to some extent. Oh, they liked me well enough, or thought they did. They tolerated my intrusions, and cooperated, and gave away far more than they thought they did.

But beneath Szpindel's gruff camaraderie, beneath James's patient explanations—there was no real respect. How could there be? These people were the bleeding edge, the incandescent apex of hominid achievement. They were trusted with the fate of the world. I was just a tattletale for small minds back home. Not even that much, when home receded too deeply into the distance. Superfluous mass. Couldn't be helped. No use getting bothered over it.

Still, Szpindel had only coined commissar half-jokingly. Cunningham believed it, and didn't laugh. And while I'd encountered many others like him over the years, those had only tried to hide themselves from sight. Cunningham was the first who seemed to succeed.

I tried to build the relationship all the way through training, tried to find the missing pieces. I watched him working the simulator's teleops one day, exercising the shiny new interfaces that spread him through walls and wires. He was practicing his surgical skills on some hypothetical alien the computer had conjured up to test his technique. Sensors and jointed teleops sprouted like the legs of an enormous spider crab from an overhead mount. Spirit-possessed, they dipped and weaved around some semiplausible holographic creature. Cunningham's own body merely trembled slightly, a cigarette jiggling at the corner of its mouth.

I waited for him to take a break. Eventually the tension ebbed from his shoulders. His vicarious limbs relaxed.

"So." I tapped my temple. "Why'd you do it?"

He didn't turn. Above the dissection, sensors swiveled and stared back like dismembered eyestalks. That was the center of Cunningham's awareness right now, not this nicotine-stained body in front of me. Those were his eyes, or his tongue, or whatever unimaginable bastard-senses he used to parse what the machines sent him. Those clusters aimed back at me, at us—and if Robert Cunningham still possessed anything that might be called vision, he was watching himself from eyes two meters outside his own skull.

"Do what, exactly?" he said at last. "The enhancements?"

Enhancements. As though he'd upgraded his wardrobe instead of ripping out his senses and grafting new ones into the wounds.

I nodded.

"It's vital to keep current," he said. "If you don't reconfigure you can't retrain. If you don’t retrain you're obsolete inside a month, and then you're not much good for anything except Heaven or dictation."

I ignored the jibe. "Pretty radical transformation, though."

"Not these days."

"Didn't it change you?"

His body dragged on the cigarette. Targeted ventilation sucked away the smoke before it reached me. "That's the whole point."

"Surely you were affected personally, though. Surely—"

"Ah." He nodded; at the far end of shared motor nerves, teleops jiggled in sympathy. "Change the eyes that look at the world, change the me does the looking?"

"Something like that."

Now he was watching me with fleshly eyes. Across the membrane those snakes and eyestalks returned to their work on the virtual carcass, as if deciding they'd wasted enough time on pointless distractions. I wondered which body he was in now.

"I'm surprised you'd have to ask," the meat one said. "Doesn't my body language tell you everything? Aren't jargonauts supposed to read minds?"

He was right, of course. I wasn't interested in Cunningham's words; those were just the carrier wave. He couldn't hear the real conversation we were having. All his angles and surfaces spoke volumes, and although their voices were strangely fuzzed with feedback and distortion I knew I'd be able to understand them eventually. I only had to keep him talking.

But Jukka Sarasti chose that moment to wander past and surgically trash my best-laid plans.

"Siri's best in his field," he remarked. "But not when it gets too close to home."