Get it. Are you damaged further?
I will have to get outside service.
I can see your damage from here. Vexing.
Troublesome. And with these jobs, it is not the parts, it is the labor.
It still emits acoustically. Painfully.
And pitifully narrow-band.
Listen—bleeps and jots in acoustic wave packets. Cries for help?
The song of the genes.
You wax rhapsodic over these crude blurts?
Listen! Serial confabulation—so strange.
So coarse.
We know that thinking must be serial. But—connection? Serially?
Obviously they have that backward as well. Their talk is serial, their thinking parallel. Nature is a witless inventor.
Listen: their codes are so linear. Straight little sentences. Guileless.
So free of nuance. Where is the cross talk all intelligence requires?
This must make them grasp their world in a fashion utterly different from ours.
I have read a slab of perception from it, rather interesting. Catch this data-group:
Received, digested. They at least clasp visual pictures in parallel, I see. But what a curious, stunted view.
Exactly. They see in a narrow little region of the electromagnetic.
A squeezed single octave in the optical range.
They were designed by chance for a specific environment and cannot escape from that programming.
Surely a little tinkering? Look how it prowls the confines we have set for it. Impatient to get out. Its neurons flare with plans, ideas, fitful flashes that come and go like weather.
And about as predictable. No, I fear they cannot be reengineered. Too clumsy.
You are biased against them because they carry their complete instructions with them.
Well, you must admit that is a conspicuously dangerous strategy. More pointless redundancy, like their thinking patterns.
In every cell they hold a set of their individual design plans. So from any one tiny fragment—
Yes yes, you could rebuild them. But equally well, that copy can be damaged by its surroundings. Then you would copy a mistake.
Admittedly, a flaw. I am happy my own copy is safely stored, not dangling out here in the fearsome naturalness of it all.
Here, grasp the creature again.
Ah! It struggles so.
Mortality lends energy, I suppose. Here—a slice.
Tubes, motors, pumps—all squeezed together.
Piled on top of each other.
Every one different shapes and sizes. No common specifications. How difficult they must be to repair.
I doubt that they do it often. Probably evolution prefers to build another one instead.
Ah, their reproduction obsession. They use the plans they carry around in every cell.
Growing a fresh copy, perhaps whenever they feel threatened?
They make a small one and then it enlarges from the inside out.
Like plants.
True, but a little smarter.
