"We didn't know about that. Not until the alarm went off."

"Alarm?"

"When he changed the gas mix. You must have heard it. Isn't that why you were there?"

"He called me to his tent. He told me to watch."

She regarded me from a face full of shadow. "You didn't try to stop him?"

I couldn't answer the accusation in her voice. "I just—observe," I said weakly.

"I thought you were trying to stop him from—" She shook her head. "That's why I thought he was attacking you."

"You're saying that wasn't an act? You weren't in on it?" I didn't believe it.

But I could tell she did.

"I thought you were trying to protect them." She snorted a soft, humorless laugh at her own mistake and looked away. "I guess I should have known better."

She should have. She should have known that taking orders is one thing; taking sides would have done nothing but compromise my integrity.

And I should have been used to it by now.

I forged on. "It was some kind of object lesson. A, a tutorial. You can't torture the nonsentient or something, and — and I heard you, Susan. It wasn't news to you, it wasn't news to anyone except me, and…"

And you hid it from me. You all did. You and your whole gang and Amanda too. You've been hashing this out for days and you went out of your way to cover it up.

How did I miss it? How did I miss it?

"Jukka told us not to discuss it with you," Susan admitted.

"Why? This is exactly the kind of thing I'm out here for!"

"He said you'd—resist. Unless it was handled properly."

"Handled—Susan, he assaulted me! You saw what he—"

"We didn't know he was going to do that. None of us did."

"And he did it why? To win an argument?"

"That's what he says."

"Do you believe him?"

"Probably." After a moment she shrugged. "Who knows? He's a vampire. He's—opaque."

"But his record—I mean, he's, he's never resorted to overt violence before—"

She shook her head. "Why should he? He doesn't have to convince the rest of us of anything. We have to follow his orders regardless."

"So do I," I reminded her.

"He's not trying to convince you, Siri."

Ah.

I was only a conduit, after all. Sarasti hadn't been making his case to me at all; he'd been making it through me, and—

— and he was planning for a second round. Why go to such extremes to present a case to Earth, if Earth was irrelevant? Sarasti didn't expect the game to end out here. He expected Earth to do something in light of his—perspective.

"But what difference does it make?" I wondered aloud.

She just looked at me.

"Even if he's right, how does it change anything? How does this—" I raised my repaired hand—"change anything? Scramblers are intelligent, whether they're sentient or not. They're a potential threat either way. We still don't know. So what difference does it make? Why did he do this to me? How does it matter?"

Susan raised her face to Big Ben and didn't answer.

Sascha returned her face to me, and tried to.

"It matters," she said, "because it means we attacked them before Theseus launched. Before Firefall, even."

"We attacked the—"

"You don't get it, do you? You don't." Sascha snorted softly. "If that isn't the fucking funniest thing I've heard in my whole short life."

She leaned forward, bright-eyed. "Imagine you're a scrambler, and you encounter a human signal for the very first time."

Her stare was almost predatory. I resisted the urge to back away.

"It should be so easy for you, Keeton. It should be the easiest gig you've ever had. Aren't you the user interface, aren't you the Chinese Room? Aren't you the one who never has to look inside, never has to walk a mile in anyone's shoes, because you figure everyone out from their surfaces?"

She stared at Ben's dark smoldering disk. "Well, there's your dream date. There's a whole race of nothing but surfaces. There's no inside to figure out. All the rules are right up front. So go to work, Siri Keeton. Make us proud."

There was no contempt in Sascha's voice, no disdain. There wasn't even anger, not in her voice, not in her eyes.

There was pleading. There were tears.

"Imagine you're a scrambler," she whispered again, as they floated like tiny perfect beads before her face.

Imagine you're a scrambler.

Imagine you have intellect but no insight, agendas but no awareness. Your circuitry hums with strategies for survival and persistence, flexible, intelligent, even technological—but no other circuitry monitors it. You can think of anything, yet are conscious of nothing.

You can't imagine such a being, can you? The term being doesn't even seem to apply, in some fundamental way you can't quite put your finger on.

Try.

Imagine that you encounter a signal. It is structured, and dense with information. It meets all the criteria of an intelligent transmission. Evolution and experience offer a variety of paths to follow, branch-points in the flowcharts that handle such input. Sometimes these signals come from conspecifics who have useful information to share, whose lives you'll defend according to the rules of kin selection. Sometimes they come from competitors or predators or other inimical entities that must be avoided or destroyed; in those cases, the information may prove of significant tactical value. Some signals may even arise from entities which, while not kin, can still serve as allies or symbionts in mutually beneficial pursuits. You can derive appropriate responses for any of these eventualities, and many others.

You decode the signals, and stumble:

I had a great time. I really enjoyed him. Even if he cost twice as much as any other hooker in the dome—

To fully appreciate Kesey's Quartet—

They hate us for our freedom—

Pay attention, now—

Understand.

There are no meaningful translations for these terms. They are needlessly recursive. They contain no usable intelligence, yet they are structured intelligently; there is no chance they could have arisen by chance.

The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message; only after wasting time and effort does the deception becomes apparent. The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. The signal is a virus.

Viruses do not arise from kin, symbionts, or other allies.

The signal is an attack.

And it's coming from right about there.

"Now you get it," Sascha said.

I shook my head, trying to wrap it around that insane, impossible conclusion. "They're not even hostile." Not even capable of hostility. Just so profoundly alien that they couldn't help but treat human language itself as a form of combat.

How do you say We come in peace when the very words are an act of war?

"That's why they won't talk to us," I realized.

"Only if Jukka's right. He may not be." It was James again, still quietly resisting, still unwilling to concede a point that even her other selves had accepted. I could see why. Because if Sarasti was right, scramblers were the norm: evolution across the universe was nothing but the endless proliferation of automatic, organized complexity, a vast arid Turing machine full of self-replicating machinery forever unaware of its own existence. And we—we were the flukes and the fossils. We were the flightless birds lauding our own mastery over some remote island while serpents and carnivores washed up on our shores. Susan James could not bring herself to concede that point—because Susan James, her multiple lives built on the faith that communication resolves all conflict, would then be forced to admit the lie. If Sarasti was right, there was no hope of reconciliation.