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Notes -
My takeaway from the two books was this:
Beginning of Blindsight
Theseus arrives at Big Ben.
The Captain/Jukka Sarasti realizes almost immediately upon encountering Big Ben that all current life in the Solar System is fucked.
Big Ben is the alien. The Scramblers are just antibodies or pieces of the larger hivemind that is Big Ben/Rorschach.
The rest of the plot of Blindsight plays out, with The Captain knowing in advance that Theseus and its crew will be inevitably reprogrammed and consumed by the Scramblers.
The Captain executes a dead man’s hand strategy where whatever information Big Ben inevitably sends back down the telematter stream to Icarus is going to be edited/hacked.
End of Blindsight/Beginning of Echopraxia
Big Ben sends information back down the telematter stream to Icarus. Under normal circumstances, this would start the process of creating Big Ben 2, except now with access to all the matter and energy of the Sun, rather than the brown dwarf Big Ben 1 was found orbiting.
The Captain’s dead man’s hand strategy results in this information not beginning the process of making Big Ben 2, but rather Portia, which has similar capabilities to Big Ben 1 but is a competing organism. This hack was what the Captain was working on the whole time Theseus was engaging with Big Ben.
The Captain expects Portia to consume all life in the Solar System, but in a hivemind kind of way similar to the Bicams, thus allowing humanity and vampires to continue existing, sort of, while also being able to compete against entities like Big Ben.
End of Echopraxia
Portia is humanity. The human shaped bodies are just antibodies or pieces of the larger hivemind that is Portia.
Book 3 would be a war of super-intelligences between the alien Big Ben and the nearly as alien Portia, with all remaining human-esque entities caught in the middle.
I find it interesting to think that under this interpretation, the Captain is an exquisitely well-aligned super-intelligence. Its strategy is the only way to save anything of what humanity was, given the circumstances and universe as presented.
Anyways, to answer your question with my personal interpretation, the alien’s plan took a left turn when the Captain was able to execute some kind of Hail Mary man-in-the-middle attack on their information transfer to Icarus.
Incidentally, this all implies that almost all of the character actions in Blindsight are irrelevant to the plot, and even actively counterproductive, because the single most important thing occurring is the Captain making sure that Big Ben never susses out that there is another super-intelligence in the mix.
I actually kind of like this interpretation of the plot, that Rorschach initially intended to build another version of itself around the sun but Captain turned it into an advantage for itself instead. Actually a pretty good resolution of the apparent contradiction.
The crew in Blindsight even without this interpretation are mostly irrelevant to the Captain's plan - they spend most of their time following Captain's orders or being manipulated by Captain, and even then much of what they do doesn't end up directly contributing to the resolution of the story. Most of the events in the story were planned by Captain long beforehand. I actually think this is a theme of the story - your amount of actual agency in the plot inversely correlates with your level of consciousness.
Susan James is probably the most conscious individual on Theseus, and Rorschach easily turns her against herself and co-opts her for its own plans. Isaac Szpindel, who boasts a huge amount of augmented senses that elevate his sensory world far beyond an average baseline, gets unceremoniously killed early on in the book before he even has any time to put his skillset to use. Amanda Bates, the combat "specialist", is pretty much entirely useless and is just a glorified safety-catch to make sure her automated drones aren't as effective as they could be without her. Siri Keeton, the famously un-self-aware protagonist who does his job without realising how he does it, ends up being one of the least co-opted or affected by Rorschach, and ends up being a surprisingly relevant part of Captain's plan when it turns out his role is to play stenographer and relay all the information to the public (And how do they get him to do this? They break him to make him more human and more manipulable).
The critical revelation that the aliens are not conscious and are hostile was made by the vampire, who has a reduced level of consciousness compared to your baseline human - or Captain itself, depending on how you interpret their neural link. Literally everything else was planned by Captain, an automaton that likely operates in a manner not too dissimilar to how Rorschach itself does.
The fact that very few of the characters actually had any agency at all in Blindsight is a feature, not a bug. You're not reading about plucky oddballs making decisions and saving the world, you're reading about an extended game of 4D chess between two non-conscious gods in which the humans are a footnote at best. Theseus itself is an analogy for how the book says the human brain works, with the conscious actors being irrelevant at best and actively harmful at worst, and the non conscious actors being responsible for almost everything in spite of the fact they’re usually backgrounded in the plot.
Yeah, and this is where I will defend Watt’s writing in these two books, where Blindsight is his masterpiece and will probably go down as a classic of 21st-century science fiction. Sure, his characters are frequently more like plot coupons, but they’re not really the story. The story is about titanic forces moving around in the background, between the lines on the page, which is pretty cool when he pulls it off and the reader figures it out.
I think that’s basically the theme he’s always writing about, even his early Rifters series was like a first stab at that idea.
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