Starfish

"Hey," Brander realizes. "You haven't seen this before, have you?"

"No. Alice told me about it, though."

"The lasers lure them in sometimes, when they wobble."

Clarke eyes the carcass. Neurons hiss faintly inside it. The body's dead, but it can take hours for the cells to run down.

She glances back at the machinery that killed them. "Lucky none of us touched that thing," she buzzes.

"I was keeping my distance anyway. Lubin said it wasn't hot enough to be dangerous, but, well…"

"I was tuned in to the gel, when it happened," she says. "I don't think it —»

"The gel never even notices. I don't think it's hooked into the defense system." Brander looks up at the metal structure. "No, our head cheese has far too much on its mind to waste its time worrying about fish."

She looks at him. "You know what it is, don't you?"

"I don't know. Maybe."

"Well?"

"I said I don't know. Just got some ideas."

"Come on, Mike. If you've got ideas, it's only because the rest of us have been out here taking notes for the past two weeks. Give."

He floats above her, looking down. "Okay," he says at last. "Let me just dump what you got today and run it against the rest. Then, if it pans out…"

"About time." Clarke grabs her squid off the bottom and tweaks the throttle. "Good."

Brander shakes his head. "I don't think so. Not at all."

* * *

"Okay, then. Smart gels are especially suited for coping with rapid changes in topography, right?"

Brander sits at the library. In front of him, one of the flatscreens cycles through a holding pattern. Behind, Clarke and Lubin and Nakata do the same.

"So there are two ways for your topographic environment to change rapidly," he continues. "One, you move quickly through complex surroundings. That's why we're getting gels in muckrakers and ATVs these days. Or you could sit still, and let your surroundings change."

He looks around. Nobody says anything. "Well?"

"So it's thinking about earthquakes," Lubin remarks. "The GA told us that much."

Brander turns back to the console. "Not just any earthquake," he says, a sudden edge in his voice. "The same earthquake. Over and over again."

He touches an icon on the screen. The display rearranges itself into a pair of axes, x and y. Emerald script glows adjacent to each line. Clarke leans forward: time, says the abscissa. Activity, says the ordinate.

A line begins to crawl left to right across the display.

"This is a mean composite plot of every time we ever watched that thing," Brander explains. "I tried to pin some sort of units onto the y-axis, but of course all we can tune in is now it's thinking hard, or now it's slacking off. So you'll have to settle for a relative scale. What you're seeing now is just baseline activity."

The line shoots about a quarter of the way up the scale, flattens out.

"Here it's started thinking about something. I can't correlate this to any real events like local tremors, it just seems to start on its own. An internally-generated loop, I think."

"Simulation," Lubin grunts.

"So it's thinking along like this for a while," Brander continues, ignoring him, "and then, voila…" Another jump, to halfway up the y-axis. The line holds its new altitude for a few pixels, slides into a gentle decline for a pixel or two, then jumps again. "So here it started thinking quite hard, starts to relax, then starts thinking even harder." Another, smaller jump, another gradual decline. "Here it's even more lost in thought, but it takes a nice long break afterwards." Sure enough, the decline continues uninterrupted for almost thirty seconds.

"And right about now…"

The line shoots almost to the top of the scale, fluctuates near the top of the graph. "And here it just about gives itself a hemorrhage. It goes on for a while, then —»

The line plummets vertically.

" — drops right back to baseline. Then there's some minor noise, I think it's storing its results or updating its files or something, and the whole thing starts all over again." Brander leans back in his chair, regards the rest with his hands clasped behind his head. "That's all it's been doing. As long as we've been watching it. The whole cycle takes about fifteen minutes, give or take."

"That's it?" Lubin says.

"Some interesting variations, but that's the basic pattern."

"So what does it mean?" Clarke asks.

Brander leans forward again, towards the library. "Suppose you were an earthquake tremor, starting here on the rift and propagating east. Guess how many faults you'd have to cross to get to the mainland."

Lubin nods and says nothing.

Clarke eyes the graph, guesses: five.

Nakata doesn't even blink, but then, Nakata hasn't done much of anything for days.

Brander points to the first jump. "Us. Channer Vent." The second: "Juan de Fuca, Coaxial Segment." Third: "Juan de Fuca, Endeavour Segment." Fourth: "Beltz minifrac." The last and largest: "Cascadia Subduction Zone."