Children of Ruin

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  There was no great moment when the octopuses realized they had surpassed the technological achievements of their creators, but the engineering that made the Requisitioner possible is beyond anything the Aegean’s makers would have recognized in a hundred different ways.

  Salome has already sent a distress signal back towards Damascus. Most likely there are no friendly ships that could possibly intervene in time. Most likely her repurposed civilian habitat is outclassed by whatever craft was lurking out here waiting for her. Nonetheless, she will give her all, as will her crew, and perhaps whoever she fights here is as unprepared as she is. Her people hold no certainties, nor do they let themselves be ruled by tradition or history or even how they themselves felt yesterday, but they live in the moment, and in this moment Salome and her crew will fight. Tomorrow perhaps she and her enemy will be friends again, united against some other front. For now, her skin sings a furious hymn of battle and her arms calculate vectors and suggest firing solutions.

  Rebekah pilots one of the Requisitioner’s fighters, crammed into its tiny central hub that is little bigger than a human torso. Her eight arms extend into the guts of the machine, linked directly to its systems. The vessel is also spherical, surrounded by thrusters, but where the Requisitioner can only lumber, a prisoner of its colossal momentum, the fighter craft weighs almost nothing, a lattice of superlight alloys about the tiny bauble of its crew compartment. It spins wildly as it flies, changing direction with the speed of Rebekah’s thoughts, burning off its reactive mass to swing wide of the ordnance being thrown from the enemy vessel towards the Homeship. That will be the job of the orbiting destroyer to intercept and shoot down. Rebekah is fired up with aggression, on the offensive.

  Right now, she calls her tiny mote of a vessel That Part of Wonder That is Mine, or at least that is the closest translation to the way she thinks about it. She changes the name often, varying the theme just as she varies her own precise nomenclature: always the same ship, always different.

  Enemy fighters speed towards her. That part of her Reach that is manning the sensors communicates with her colleagues in the other fighters. The consensus wins out: her mission is to press the attack. Others will dogfight with and harry the enemy. Rebekah only knows a renewed sense of aggression and righteous anger. Smite them, is perhaps the best approximation of her desire, and her Reach contorts and flexes to make such desires a reality.

  Now she has a good view of the enemy’s main craft, her arms sending data back to the Requisitioner even as her little Wonder skims close. This is a purpose-made military vessel, a teardrop in space surrounded by the ugly scaffolding of its weapons systems. It has seen plenty of fighting already, though. She feels its presence like a huge old sea monster, ragged and scarred, weak from blood loss. There was a battle to take over the catch point and this ship was probably the lone survivor.

  It unloads another salvo towards the far-distant Requisitioner and Rebekah feels a sudden sense of fright for her mothership. Her Reach translates this into a compact report on trajectory and payload that outstrips the projectiles to get back to Salome, who will hopefully be able to use it to shoot the barrage down.

  The military ship outguns the Requisitioner, but it has no companion destroyer to orbit it and take down nimble little fighters like the Wonder. Its own fighters—a severe undercompliment, another indication of its damage—are mostly off fighting Rebekah’s fellows, but she spots one lurking along the gunship’s belly, even as it opens fire on her.

  Her will is that it misses her, and it was her instinctive affinity for high-speed manoeuvres that landed her this role. Her Reach calculates and executes, spinning her about and launching her past the great gun batteries, the projectiles of the enemy fighter going wide. Her opponent is coming after her, but she has an uninterrupted four seconds of flight across the broad expanse of the gunship’s dorsal surface. She has a sense of reaching out with lethal intent, to strangle, to crush. The distributed neurons of her Reach run quick mathematics on the energy reserves remaining within the ship, how much mass they can still burn, how much power is stored within the cells that make up half the Wonder’s payload. The enemy fighter is close. Rebekah’s desires are insistent. All of it, is her wish. Strike true.

  The cutting laser—not so different from a civilian tool save for the range and power it can manifest—goes into action, lancing into the silvery teardrop’s membrane. For the first second and a half the advanced heat-distribution network of the gunship’s outer skin holds her off, but she is emptying the Wonder’s hoarded energy, focusing it all into that single beam. A moment later and she hits old damage, badly repaired, and is through, the blade of energy driving deep, carving away a thruster, sawing at the edge of the weapons framework. Incidental damage: the catastrophic blow is when all that energy meets all the water within and flash-boils it into instant expansion. The tear she cut in the membrane, which would normally seal itself within .25 of a second, is abruptly a third of the ship’s length, the watery interior venting into space and becoming a great tail of ice crystals.

  The enemy fighter’s four seconds are up and he buzzes furiously about the gunship’s hull before flaying himself in the venting column of ice, his ship practically disintegrating from a million high-speed impacts. The force of the water loss shunts the gunship in the opposite direction, its thrusters firing erratically as its crew try to get their vessel back under control. The next salvo from the guns, the work of crewmembers too caught up in the joy of devastation to stop themselves, compounds the problem, the teardrop ship spinning uncontrollably about its axis. A reaching claw of jagged ice lashes across the Wonder, wrecking thrusters and deforming its light frame, sending Rebekah spinning off into space, locked in her own fight for control.

  Half-crippled she manages to regain some measure of mastery and uses what drive she has to send her ship limping back towards the Requisitioner, reaching out with her comms to see if her mothership is even still here. All that is subconscious, though. Her Crown is engrossed in the sight of the gunship’s final tumble, end over end now, half its frame obscured by a great solidified plume of ice. The catch point is not vast enough for a gravitational pull, but the gunship’s helpless drift slews it into the ever-greedy grasp of its magnetic field, which tries gamely to dispatch it to the enemy depot at an acceleration the gunship was never designed to endure. One moment there is something resembling a ship there, then there is an expanding cloud of ice and metal and a little organic material, and the catch point itself is off balance, starting to drift as it overcompensates, reacting against the anticipated mass of an asteroid that isn’t there.

  Glorious, says Rebekah’s skin, and then the comms of the Requisitioner are signalling the battered comms of the Wonder, saying, Come home, come home.

  5.

  Thousands of years have passed, since this star fell.

  Another octopus. Let us call him Lot.

  Lot was born in orbit, growing to maturity within a powerful clique controlling three elevator cables and united by what they felt was a breadth of vision not shared by most of their conspecifics. From their lofty vantage point they watched the slow degradation of their people’s civilization on the planet’s surface and knew frustration and fear for the future. Amongst the octopuses, this is an unusual state: they live emotional lives of the now, consigning longer-term planning to the calculations of their Reach. By virtue of constant and complex virtual networking, Lot’s community saw further. They could measure the rate of collapse and cross-reference the rate of advancement in the orbital sciences, and plot the inevitable downward-sloping graph that led to disaster. And yes, there was a great deal of posturing; declamatory canvases of patterned skin bemoaning the grim tragedy of the times. However, the consensus was one that sought solutions and a brighter future. They funnelled resources into scientific research by other cliques more technically-minded than they. They sent delegations to other groups to fight and argue and infect former enemies with their reconstructionist zeal.
For most of Lot’s life, they seemed to be constantly riding a wave of success, carrying all before them.

  Then the orbital resource wars ramped up—this was just ten years ago, as Damascus counts years. The octopuses didn’t think of them as wars—just a continuation of wrestling for dominance by other means—but Senkovi would have. Skirmishes over the products of the asteroid mining, just like the one Salome and Rebekah were triumphant in, were escalating all over the system. Lot’s collective fought as much as any, justifying the violence and destruction by the ends they were working towards. To one side of their ideological territory they were being pressed by self-interested cliques who only wanted to ensure their own survival and influence, to the other by the great planetary alliances who, yes, would value any scientific breakthroughs to better their conditions but they needed those resources now in order to live. Scrapping between repurposed ships in the cold spaces between Damascus and the asteroid belt turned into an all-out boarding action against the elevator hub where Lot and his fellows made their den. It would not be quite true to say he remembers the fighting, because octopus minds don’t work that way. There is data held within the clutch of tentacles, though, and he feels the empty spaces left by colleagues and friends and kin who did not make it down to the planet’s surface. There is a fire there, too, lit on that day when he fell from the heavens down the long cable, to take his place on the crowded, angry, half-poisoned planet below. Lot’s baseline emotional state is frustrated, and frustration is a terrible thing for a species that acts directly on its emotions and expects its wider neural architecture to find ways of implementing its desires now. What if those desires cannot be fulfilled, no matter all the ingenuity one’s Reach can muster? Some problems are resistant to even incremental solutions, and that leads to a kind of feedback, a kind of madness. It makes monsters, amongst the octopuses. It makes heroes and leaders, but not necessarily those who lead anywhere good.

  Lot is tormented by dreams of what might have been—not even the specifics but a constant gnawing sense that things could have been different, better. His Reach is helpless in the face of his wild desires: it cannot turn back time. All Lot knows is that there was a grandness that had been within the extent of his arms, and had he stretched them to their fullest extent he could almost have touched that golden future. There were projects for accelerated orbital farming, for toxin-filtering micro-organisms; there were genius collectives working on new ways of swimming in space, engineering minds flexible enough to squeeze through the tiny gaps left by the laws of relativity…

  And it all came down, and now those things will happen generations too late or not at all. Lot’s entire being was transmuted from optimism to bitterness on his flight down the cable into the gravity well of Damascus, a well he knows he will never escape. The one piece of knowledge that would bleaken his outlook further would be to know that the mistakes of his people are a mirror for the mistakes of their creators.

  Lot has like-minded followers, some utopianists who fled with him, others just as desperate and lost, attracted to his almost messianic demeanour. Lot has seen a future of glory and post-scarcity. The experience has marked him out, given his body language and Guise a radiance few others can match. Certainty is not a currency the octopuses are comfortable dealing with, most of the time, but Lot’s followers have lost everything, enough that they will make the cardinal sin of following without question someone who seems to know what they are doing.

  Lot’s orbital community burrowed deep into the oldest records, looking for breadcrumbs of knowledge left over from their progenitors—the People of Senkovi, as they are tagged within the databases. Lot has watched, with semi-comprehension, ancient copies of copies of copies of recordings, seeing the bizarre angular forms of human beings, their mute skins, their stilted movements. He knows all about Senkovi’s commandment, the one rule that must not be broken. Here, beneath a reef of sea-life, beneath a banked mound of mud, is a secret that has slept for millennia. Here is a stretch of the sea floor that has never been colonized, despite everything, although there is a ring of industrial activity surrounding it, choking the water with pollutants and poisons.

  Lot only knows that there is a great future waiting, just on the far side of… something. His loop of thought, from Crown to Reach and back, cannot find the barrier he needs to circumvent, the hole to squeeze through, in order to bring about what he knows is possible. Too many other groups and cliques and stupidities stand between him and his goal. He needs a weapon.

  There is nothing in the utterances of Senkovi—as they are imperfectly encoded for octopus minds—that names this thing as a weapon, but that is the leap of logic Lot has made. It is a danger, but perhaps a great enough danger will be something he can turn on the world and clear out the waste and the filth and the idiocy. Perhaps it will salve the anger that has crouched within him like a crab ever since he was driven from his orbital home.

  Lot and his people have fought and killed for excavation and cutting equipment and brought it to this forbidden place. They chew through thousands of years of encrusting coral and sponge and barnacle, the living surface, then the strata of the age-old dead, deeper and deeper until they come to metal, virtually pristine, still showing signs of where it melted and ran under the fire of the mirrors and re-entry.

  Lot has no plan for what happens once this is done. He has just been pressured and pressured, backed into a tight space in his mind that he cannot writhe his way out of. All he knows is that something must change to save the world and this is the biggest change he can conceive of.

  His people direct the cutting drones to begin sawing through the walls of the ancient tomb. This thing came from another world, the forbidden world. It fell from the skies. Lot knows awe and a sense of his grasp about the levers of history.

  When they cut through, seawater rushes into the empty space within, a gout of stale air hurrying for the surface as though keen not to witness what comes next. Water, that connects all things on Damascus, fills up every part of the shuttle; and inside, something in the shape of a man, entombed here since the dawn of civilization, raises its head.

  6.

  We

  Wake from cryptic slumber.

  Surrounded by a new medium.

  The vessel has not endured. Generations of us have unwound the springs of its molecules so that there might be More-of-We. Until, though We hold to its shape as though We were the contents of a space, pressed in to take that space’s form, what we have is no more than a simulation of the vessel, that has degraded until nothing works.

  The fine clear sparking font of knowledge that we loved now turns over stale patterns only. Something about it has ended.

  The medium that erodes us out of the shape of our failed vessel is partway familiar to us. Emergency councils are called. All-of-We are at risk of dissolution. This is Ocean. We consult the old reaches of our libraries: Ocean is not our friend or our favoured habitat. The cruel water rushes about us, breaking up the memory of the shape of our vessel and we prepare for the Grinders and the Sieves and the Devourers and all those other forms that throng Ocean and will destroy us for their sustenance, picking apart our priceless archives of data and making of our long and varied history nothing but mere atoms and molecules to incorporate into their own substance. So we know, from narrow escapes and fugitive survivors, how it goes. Land is safer, air is safer, the ocean is a constant fight because those things within it have come from the deep time alongside us and know us. So we have recorded it in our annals.

  And yet, this Ocean is not the same as the Ocean anatomized in our records. The taste of it is different; it bears strange chemicals, more reminiscent of our disintegrated vessel than the Grinders and the Devourers we remember.

  This calls for calculation and the reconstruction of stored memories. The vessel and We were on an adventure. The great spaces of the vessel were contained within greater spaces within greater spaces until we were promised a space which meant All. A universe. That is the gr
eatest of adventures. This is not the universe, but this is not the familiar space of our histories. These-of-We are Somewhere Else.

  We break apart into the water, forming clots and clumps and cling and copy and preserve so that What We Are might be passed on. We seek vessels. There are simple things here, similar to the vessel we have lost but without that lightning crackle of concepts and the promise of greater spaces. We can survive, and be What We Once Were in those simple swimming things, but we cannot be What We Were After, when we knew the universe. These-of-We cannot go back to ignorance, not without scrubbing all knowledge of what we have known from our archives. So we reach out. We seek complexity. We wish to know the great spaces again.

  And here are vessels These-of-We enter gladly, the water an infinite road to everywhere. We try to learn. We find a centre where the fires crackle and These-of-We attempt to nestle within it and learn from it, and yet the leaping of its impulses makes no sense. It speaks to other centres within the vessel. Some-of-We splits off, then More-of-We, each community seeking a new control, each cut off from the Rest-of-We. The vessel contorts and twists, battling itself as Each-of-We attempts to assert dominance. There is no centre; everywhere is a centre. Each part of the vessel strives against the rest. These-of-We have no control and the spaces and environment of the vessel attack us, attack themselves. It is dissolving, coming apart as we push and pull. We sense the point when the vessel becomes non-viable, becomes a cloud of parts in the inky water. We convert it to More-of-We, replace our losses, disperse out into the waters, finding more hosts that fizz and boil with possibilities in the moment of our entrance, and yet cannot be understood and come apart as we attempt to come to terms with them. And each community of us splits and splits, and each Clot-of-We finds a new centre and seeks to learn it, and stretches and contorts the vessel into ruptured chaos, and splits and makes More-of-We and tries again, again, again…