Starfish (Rifters, #1)

by Peter Watts

Lenie Clarke rests on the bottom of the ocean and watches the abyss sparkle around her. And she almost laughs as she realizes, three thousand meters from the nearest sunlight, that it’s only dark when the lights are on.

This is how you fall asleep when you can’t close your eyes; you stare into the dark, and when you start seeing things you know you’re dreaming.

“A starfish,” Acton tells her, “is the ultimate democracy.” Clarke stares, quietly repelled. “This is how they move,” Acton is saying. “They walk along on all these tube feet. But the weird thing is, they have no brains at all. Not surprising for a democracy.”

It turns out that protein microtubules, permeating each and every neuron, act as receivers for certain weak signals at the quantum level. It turns out that consciousness itself is a quantum phenomenon. It turns out that under certain conditions conscious systems can interact directly, bypassing the usual sensory middlemen.

“Life evolves. Parasites evolve. Sex evolves to counter the parasites. Shuffles the genes so the parasites have to shoot for a moving target. Everything else—species diversity, density-dependence, everything—it all follows from those three laws. You get a self-replicating string past a certain threshold, it’s like a nuclear reaction.”