Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

Avrana Kern, or this failing part of her, does indeed understand. The implant has been going mad with images, and some of those images are of places that she and Meshner can grasp and understand, and others are… other. Images of the interior of things, of the microcosm as experienced by a native, simulations of things that human-derived consciousness was never intended to partake of.

The entity has devoured its own young, meaning Lante’s natural history of the parasite that the long-dead woman completed only posthumously. What can it possibly make of being confronted with such an objective account, an entity that has never come across objectivity before? She clings to the maxim of the philosopher: The unexamined life is not worth living.

“Adventure,” the creature said, and Kern has seen the stars through the imaginations of things invisible to the naked eye.

She feels she understands.

“Meshner,” she says. “I require room to work. You’re only going to get in the way, now. You’re surplus to requirements.” She borrows heavily from the implant’s resources to make her manner cold and dismissive, the way she always used to be. Inside, she saves a little purloined processing power to feel noble and tragic and bitter, and that, too, is good.

He seems to be riding the tragic train himself. She has the sense of him gathering his composure. “Just do it, whatever you’re planning. Stop this thing. Save the others.” He knows his own self, the one he was born with, is a lost cause. She could tell him that isn’t the drawback he thinks it is, but there isn’t time, and if she doesn’t do something then their remaining corner of his implant really won’t be big enough for the both of them.

He thinks she’s going to extinguish him to free up some memory, but she has other plans, already prepared and put in motion. Consider it penance, she considers, luxuriating in the possibility of sacrifice and heroic gestures. If she was a living woman she’d have the back of her hand to her forehead in ostentatious grief, but she’s having to make do with a shoestring budget of processing power right now, beating back the mindless encroach of the organism into the implant’s spaces for just long enough to throw down with it, philosophically at least.

And then Meshner is gone, the implant cleared of him, and she has room to be herself one last time.

“You! Lante, or however you’re calling yourself. Or are you Meshner, even?”

They are in the shadow-city, caught in pools of lamplight like detectives in the films that were old even when she was young.

Lante—there is a lot of Meshner there but the organism has been Lante for several thousand years and old habits die hard—turns her head, craning past the neck-ring of her spacesuit. “I know you,” comes the voice of a woman millennia-dead. “You’re Doctor Avrana Kern.”

“Meshner knew me, certainly,” Kern confirms, and then has a moment of disorientation, because Lante was part of the terraforming programme, so maybe Lante knows her, back from some time that Kern no longer recalls. I’m old, she thinks, although she’s not, not really. Old is for humans and other mortal things. Kern has gone past old and out the other side.

“Whatever.” She waves aside the thought. “Am I even speaking to it, the thing behind you? If I talk to Lante, does it understand? Or am I just wasting my time?” But of course all Lante can do is stick a frown on that fuzzed-out face because Lante cannot know she’s a simulation running on a bacterial alien mainframe. Lante, when Lante is called upon to have an opinion, thinks she’s still alive. And, for those moments, she is. And when that thinking’s done she’s gone like a blown candle until the organism wants her again, and that is exactly the problem.

“I’m just going to talk, then.” Kern is aware of how hard her sub-systems are having to fight just to keep operating at this level, as an emotional entity and not just a calculating engine. Soon she’s going to have to retreat to the corner of the implant she has fortified, encrypt herself and hope to weather the storm. Not yet, though. She’s still reconfiguring the implant around them, invisibly. She must buy herself time.

“You opened your own eyes when you infected the terraforming team, didn’t you? When you became Lante, and you realized that the great big world that was her neocortex was just a window onto something bigger, that must have really whipped the ground out from under you. You’re tiny, but Lante knew she was tiny, and compared to the universe one of your cells and Lante’s whole body aren’t so different. And it’s big, that universe. Lante knew she’d never see more than a few grains of sand out of that whole beach. Did it eat at her? At you? It ate at me. And I grasped more of it than any human being before or since. I was the queen of the human space colonization programme, and I knew it was just drops of spit into an infinite hurricane.”

Lante is just staring at her, and who knows what is going on behind those unresolved features?

“But you got Lante and some others, whatever their names were,” Kern goes on. Not really caring about the names of other people was never one of her best qualities, but it was one of her most defining features and she clings to it. “And you wanted what they had, and you took it, all of it, so that they just became things locked away inside you, to pop up for your entertainment whenever you opened their boxes, right? How’d that work out for you?” Vitriol, ah, I remember that. It feels good to be scathing and unpleasant again. She never got the chance when she was running the Lightfoot. The crew wouldn’t have appreciated it.

“Infinite variety and complexity, forever and forever,” Lante says conversationally, the indistinct motions of her lips in no way syncing with the words.

“Yeah, but you didn’t actually get that, did you?” Kern replies. “I’ve seen the pictures from the planet, what you made down there. Bits of city, over and over, stuck in a loop without any outside input to freshen things up. I bet you wish you never learned what it was to get bored.” She can feel her efforts failing. The organism, using Meshner’s brain, is throwing open all the doors of the implant in its quest for novelty.

“So, you’ve got Meshner now, another conquest. And you’ll get the others, no doubt, the Humans and the Portiids. And it sounds as though you screwed up with the octopus planet somehow, but maybe you’ll get them too.” Feeling is draining out of her, her inner world paling into shades of grey. She can no longer sustain that tide of glorious emotion that was carrying her. She has no more time.

“See how it is for you.” And she falls back, not the ordered retreat but a rout with the enemy nipping at her heels, until she is encapsulated in a tiny corner of the implant, just a set of protocols waiting for the chance to bootstrap themselves back into existence.

Unchecked, the organism does what it does best, or at least what it does now, since it discovered the wider world outside its hosts and vessels. It reaches for the stars.

Kern—or that recording subroutine that is all that is left of her—watches impassively as it goes to work. Meshner is already lost to it. His personality is archived, brought back, put through its paces like a dancing bear. He meets Lante, over and over, in various configurations, different versions, variant surroundings. They play through the gamut of their personal and emotional ranges with one another. It is not enough, of course. The whole devolves into little more than a squawking Punch and Judy show for the puppeteer’s own amusement. This is not infinite complexity. It is not the stars.

The organism reaches further, adapts and gains more mastery over its environment, as it always has. It uses the technology of the station and Kern’s own discarded relay drone and returns to the planet, where it finds the Lightfoot wreckage. Here are new puppets for it. It adds them to its repertoire one by one, and Portiid neurology turns out to be far more susceptible to its hacking than ever human minds were, given how uniform their brains are. It discovers the Understandings, and a whole new world opens up before it. Viola and Fabian are sources of great wonder and entertainment and it simulates them, having them interact with each other, with the humans, with the environment. Time passes: this is a festival of variety that must last forever, save that one day all the permutations are stale and cold, and the organism is left with the ghosts that are all it can conjure up, the stilled husks of its vessels, like clocks stopped the moment it got its pseudopods into their brains. Let it jiggle their strings all it likes, there is nothing they can do that does not come from within it. Where is the novelty it sought, the variety of the universe?

And it has the technology, or it can make do using the knowledge of its puppets. It can go elsewhere—perhaps it will finally master the octopus neurology, though Those-of-Them that went before were never able to. Or there is the Voyager that it decoys in with the voices of that ship’s devoured crew and takes over—all those Portiids and Humans, all those different points of view, so many new minds to subsume within itself and record in its archives. And there is a world out there, Kern’s World as Meshner knows it. When the boundaries of the Voyager pall it takes the ship and travels there. It unleashes itself across a world of millions of minds ripe for assimilation, becoming them as they become no more than it, each individual just a book on the shelf of its vast library. How many it has now, that it can conjure up and trot through their paces. So many configurations, such a wealth of variety. It expands and expands and…

One day it finds itself on some far orb, utterly alone despite all its plurality, every possible variation of its archives plumbed, the stars still out of reach, knowing only that it has encountered cultures and civilizations and individuals of indescribable difference and diversity, and made them all into its own image. It is a child reaching for a soap bubble in innocent wonder, and finding only an oily residue on its hands, and the world cheapened and coarsened. And it weeps, if such a thing can weep. Perhaps, by then and after so many bodies, it has finally learned.

“You see?” Kern asks it. She and Lante/Meshner sit on a beach Kern remembers from the world that bears her name, in this closing scene of the fast-forward narrative she has run for it. There are lights deep in the water, a city of stomatopods extending all the way to where the deep water starts. Behind them are trees shrouded in glittering strands, the Great Nest by the Western Ocean, still one of the key metropolises of the Portiid world. Kern had anticipated the much-abused implant failing before now, but the joy of working with an organism evolved to dwell and multiply in the microcosm of a drop of water is that simulations can be very low resolution and yet still entirely engrossing.

“You see the problem?” she prompts.

Lante keens, a sound just this side of human that expresses the grief and frustration of something as far from human as Kern has ever met, herself included.

“Let me tell you a story,” Kern says. She is still rebuilding herself, and she cannot find the acid sarcasm she would prefer. Instead she actually sounds calm and consoling, and barely recognizes herself. “There was a planet once, that humans made for themselves, but that instead was the domain of spiders. I will tell you about them, and about the humans that came to it, and how they could have destroyed each other, and been infinitely the poorer for it. But they found another way. There’s always another way. Even for you.”