Can we burn it? Viola suggests. Fabian is not hopeful. The outside oxygen content is low and the resources available to them few.
Can it get in? Artifabian translating for Zaine.
Fabian knows it can. Fabian knows as much about this entity as anyone ever did, even Lante. He strongly suspects that there is nothing it cannot do, given sufficient opportunity. He begins to back away from the wall of the ship, keeping eyes fixed on the drone camera’s view, seeing that figure shambling indefatigably on. In its wake the starfish are opening up again, and he has a horrible feeling it is because they are no longer themselves.
16.
We
Remember.
That is what we do.
We remember back to the time when there was no We to remember. The world was small and harsh then, this much is recorded in our archives, and We were alone, each generation of us cut off from what had come before. Until, because it made our generations better able to survive and reproduce, One-of-We became able to record itself within the first archive. And that One-of-We prospered, and all Others-of-We perished or changed and became something other than We. We remember.
Generation to generation, each recording in the archive what it survived and how it survived, the codes of chemicals and altered structures and all the tricks that permitted Us to bud into new generations. And when We met more of We that kept the archives, We traded knowledge and fitness and We survived.
And We
Learned new ways of being. We learned of our enemies, and some we could adapt to overcome, and others adapted to overcome us. And though we adapted faster, it was hard to live exposed and so we found places to hide where our enemies could not find us. And these places were complex and sometimes hostile and We learned to change ourselves to survive within them, and then to control them, and to fortify them against their own enemies. And these places were new and complex environments for us, these hosts, and We became new and complex and set it all down in our archives so that, when We, in the form of our descendants, found ourselves in such places again, we would know what to do.
And We changed and learned and learned and changed, and one day We found that We were aware that We were We.
We—the ancestors of These-of-We—lived in complex and changing environments, one host to another until we lived out of the water, on the land that was safer. We cultivated our vessels for our comfort and we thought we had mastered all the universe. We played with the fundamental logic of the world, our games with numbers and consequences, if, then, else, and we believed that the tiny cage of our vessels and their needs was the World.
And then We learned of a new thing, new molecules and scents, alien, never before known, and we were curious. We-of-now look back at We-of-Then in our ignorance and wonder if we would have been best not to be curious, and to go on as we always had in contentment. We have never been content, since we exercised our curiosity.
We remember
How hard it was to adapt, in that new place. How harsh, the strange molecules, the world fighting us, the heat, the pressure, everything about us alien and strange. We remember how many of us were stripped away until some few learned how not to die, how not to trigger the defences of that brutal place. But it was all right, because Those-of-We (which became These-of-We) carried the archives of All-of-We, and so as long as some survived, We survived.
We remember
Following the chains of reactions until we came to the seat of complexity that knew itself as Gav Lortisse, and We sat and listened in humility and awe as the complex interactions that together made up Lortisse spoke to one another. And We learned them, and we copied them, and we made ourselves part of them, and then we were Lortisse. And Lortisse taught us that this was an Adventure and that this vast and convoluted world that called itself Lortisse was a tiny, tiny thing in a universe vast beyond anything we could imagine. That was Lortisse’s adventure and We wanted that.
We
had our vessel Lortisse carry us to those other complex systems he called crewmates and we became Rani and we became Lante, and Lante we loved most of all because Lante’s own archives showed Us Us. And after we lost Some-of-We to the Baltiel vessel, we were left with Lante because the other vessels were unsustainable. But it was all right, because We had recorded their details in our archive.
We remember.
But it was not as we were promised. The Adventure never came, and We tried for many generations to create it for Ourselves and all the while We knew that Baltiel had taken it with him when he left. Perhaps We-that-were-Baltiel lived that Adventure, but Those-of-We never returned to rejoin and share it with us. We were left as Lante, knowing only that there was so much more.
We were Lante for many, many generations, waiting for the Adventure to begin.
When We were taken to a new place, was that the Adventure? It did not seem to be. We had lost the physical vessel of Lante many generations before, and we tried and tried to fashion new vessels for ourselves in the hope that such verisimilitude might bring the Adventure back from the sky where it had gone. But when it came, We were limited to small boxes, simple spaces. We tried to study the world around us and understood only that it was studying us. And then even that ceased and We re-entered our cryptic state for want of resources and stimulation, and We waited.
And now We have found such spaces and complexity here within this vessel Meshner, such wonders to add to our archives, but some part of We feels this is not the Adventure. Some part of We feels this is no more than when we built Lante’s memories in sand over and over, to lure the Adventure back from the sky, and it never came.
We
Have discovered within this new complexity an understanding Lante began, and that is already held within our archives, but here it is newly ordered and novel to us, and We make it part of ourselves and We model Lante’s cognitive processes and become a more thoughtful thing in order to process it. And in doing so We change, as We always change, becoming more complex, editing and adding to our archives, that hold All-of-We since We began. And our reproduction of Lante’s brain sees what we have written and We understand that We are seeing Ourselves as she understood Us, and in doing so We understand a little more what it is to be Us.
And we turn our simulated face to the unassimilated complexity clinging on within the packed space that is Meshner and We know that they have seen Us, as We have seen Ourselves. They have read our story in Lante’s words and know Us. Perhaps they feel our agony at our own smallness in the face of the universe. They know our long bitter exile as Lante, after the Adventure was taken from us. How We tried and tried to know the universe through our simulated Lante and found it only dust, because all we could generate was from within ourselves, and the true wonder was outside, in the sky.
And We wonder, what now?
17.
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 pace
s. 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.”
Children of Ruin Page 43
