He refers to creative insights that come from dreams, and musicians who are told not to focus on their actions, as examples. As such, the Scramblers, according to the narrator, show that the very thing that makes humans unique is a crippling flaw that will make the species extinct in the end.Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash.
The narrator says that this is superior to conscious thought, as sentience is an 'evolutionary flaw', interfering with quicker, more effective subconscious processes. Scramblers have blindsight over all of their senses, and do not have conscious sensation. Blindsight is a mental disorder where somebody believes that they are blind and does not experience visual sensations, but can still use their sight to move around and perform tasks. The crew later discovers that Scramblers are not truly sentient, as they have difficulty solving a linguistic problem involving self-awareness. They show sufficient intelligence to discover and exploit a flaw in human vision to appear invisible, hiding between eye movements, a feat which also requires extremely acute senses and fast reflexes. When the aliens are tortured to find the true extent of their abilities, they solve the hardest problems the crew can give them easily. When a dead body is examined by the crew's biologist, it is first thought that the Scramblers are 'dumb as a stick', because most of their nervous system seemed to be dedicated to controlling their many eyes and their limbs. Many of their metabolic functions appear to be regulated by the Rorschach, not the scramblers themselves.
Scramblers do not require oxygen, as they are born with a store of energy, but require strong magnetic fields or else they become sick and die. To reproduce, they use a form of budding. They do not have any genome and instead the shape of their body emerges from complex interactions between the cells, and the body seems to be 'at war' with itself. They are covered in hundreds of eyes which can focus and adjust independently, acting as a single visual array that gives them excellent vision. The species looks similar to starfish, and they constantly move their arms in order to circulate fluid, which gives them the name.
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