Something has long bothered me about Blindsight: What was Big Ben?
Warning: there are massive spoilers in this post about the book Blindsight.
If you've read the book, you know the basics: the human species kinda-sorta spans the inner solar system, with a few expeditions to Jupiter and Saturn and the outer planets. Humanity one day gets scanned. 65536 satellites suddenly decloak over the globe and emit one long, cryptographically secure and unreadable but definitely loud and detectable signal. We name this event The Fireflies. We freak out.
We detect a visitor, a "ship" we name Burns-Caufield moving through space between Saturn and Uranus' orbit, and send a ship, Theseus, out to meet it with "a boatload of freaks" (to quote one of them) in cryogenic suspension, people so enhanced by technology or genetic engineering some of them don't even qualify as human. When they awaken, the mission is four years overdue and way past Pluto. They don't meet the visitor they expected.
Instead, they find Big Ben.
Ben isn't a creature. Ben is a planet. It's a sub-stellar Jovian planet, a gas giant bigger than Jupiter, not part of any solar system, and it's just moving fast in a glancing pass of our solar system's gravitational well.
Ben is surrounded by millions of "skimmers," rocky objects about 400 meters long with a conical scoop in the front and stubby control vanes at the rear, diving and dipping into Ben's atmosphere for reasons the crew never figure out. The skimmers pull 50gs at the perigee of their activities, and their trajectories are seemingly random. Some trajectories travel out as far as 50AU, and it could have been that the original visitor they were sent to meet was one of these skimmers. The biologist on board says "Too fast for meat. Theoretically, you could reinforce meat to survive that, but at that point, may as well call it a machine." This from one of the two crew people who are mostly cyborgs.
And then they meet Rorschach.
Rorschach they understand. Rorschach rises out of Ben's swirling gasses looking like a massive space station 50 kilometers across. It's circular, and it looks like the crown of thorns made out of pain. The crew invade Rorschach and find the "scramblers," creatures that mass slightly more than a human being but are, at least, explicable. A scrambler resembles a flattened octopus with five radial arms. The crew capture two of them and, eventually, cruelly, learn to communicate with them.
Scramblers they understand even more.
Throughout the book, they try to make sense of what they're experiencing. Even the hyper-cognitive post-human Sarasti struggles to make sense of it all. They come to the conclusion that the scramblers aren't "crew" to Rorschach (although each scrambler is even smarter and faster-thinking than Sarasti). They discover that there is no negotiating. Rorschach is a gestalt entity in its own right. Rorschach is a quasi-organic machine programmed to destroy its competition. There is no one "there" with which to negotiate. Rorschach is what they understand they're here to fight.
I think they all misunderstood.
I think Ben is the hostile entity. Ben is the creature that heard a competitor, Terra, emerging in its neighborhood and decided to come see if it needed to do something about it. Ben is an organism, a living thing that transits between the stars, idling most of the time, not even thinking deep thoughts. The skimmers are part of its biology. They maintain, they clean, they gather, and some of them get flung far, far out to sense.
Rorschach is basically a white blood cell. That's what Theseus sacrifices itself in a nuclear explosion near the end of the book over: a single antibody from a gas giant full of millions and millions of Rorschach "buds" it keeps in storage. For all we know, just as the human body has many different immune system mechanisms, Burns-Caufield (which was not a skimmer) and The Fireflies were just two more parts of Ben's "metabolism."
It takes awhile for Rorschach to come to full combat capability, and the crew of Theseus exploit that time to study it, all the while Rorschach studies them. At one point the ship's linguist says of Rorschach and its scramblers: "The ship grows them, in stacks! It grows its own crew." To which the combat specialist replies, "If it's a ship. If they're crew."
In this reading, Ben also grows its own defenses. It pushed our Rorschach, a 50-km wide corpuscle built from the architecture of pain and loaded to the gills with creatures who could individually out-think Theseus, crew and onboard AI alike, as a least-effort response to see what Theseus could do, because good evolutionary biology always tries the least-effort response first to preserve vital energy reserves.
The crew can't see past its own biases. Human-sized aliens? Sure. City-sized alien? Well, Earth has city-spanning AIs, that doesn't seem implausible. But the crew of Theseus just cannot imagine a planet with cognitive capacity, with the capability to craft technological responses to technological threats, and also accept that Ben has no self-awareness whatsoever. It is, in one sense, mindless; a super-computer on a super-Jovian scale. Maybe it's fighting for its survival in a galaxy full of others just like it, or maybe it was dispatched as a defense mechanism for a cosmic "body" so enormous the human mind cannot grasp it. But Ben has no self-awareness, no consciousness, no I at all. It doesn't need it. Having it would be a waste of resources.
The final implication of Blindsight is, well, maybe galaxies are the apex life form. Maybe galaxies compete with one another on some scale and for some resources we're just too small and too insignificant to even grasp.
Or maybe there's something that treats whole galaxies the way Ben treats Rorschach: just an important organelle in some trans-cosmic organism.
Every level of organizational scale in the universe is alive and reactive in some way, and in a truly infinite many-worlds universe like the kind seen in the sequel, Echopraxia, some of them are playing at scales where Relativity is just a resource. Consciousness is, as Sarasti and Cunningham drive home, just a hack that our prejudice overvalues because, well, because it is what we are.
In the Blindsight universe, it's turtles all the way up.