Children of Ruin

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Fabian thinks this is just an example of Lante no longer being a rational operator, but Viola rebukes him when he says so.

  Understandings, she tells him. This is what I wanted in the first place. These are their Understandings. She takes time out from repairs for a few rough calculations on just how much data might be contained in such a trove of genetic code, and essentially runs out of numbers. Every cell a vast archive, but for what, for why?

  Days and nights have gone by during all this work, and they remain undestroyed—Helena and Portia staving off the inevitable, resetting the hourglass on the hour. The Lightfoot crew are low on food and the water recycler is showing alarming signs of wear. Zaine sleeps a lot but is plainly suffering when awake. The air composition is slowly shifting, for all Viola can do to fix the scrubbers. And yes, there is a breathable atmosphere out there, but there are other things out there, too. Fabian sent the flying drone high for some longer-range reconnaissance. The land around them is inscribed with fragments of city, repeated over and over. Too high to see any shambling denizens, but something carved out those ready-made ruins.

  And now it is night, and although Portiids see better in the dark, they are daytime creatures like humans are, visual first and foremost, and this is an alien night filled with all manner of monsters.

  Fabian stares at Lante’s rambling, bizarre account and parts of him are trying to spin conclusions that the rest of him doesn’t like at all. In his head is a shambling figure slowly ascending the altiplano. He dreads a knock at the door.

  Fabian makes his final report to Viola. They have the best picture they can of how life works on the planet they are stranded on, and in particular one specific part of that life.

  You were right, after all, Fabian concedes. Understandings, here. Not as we have them, but something analogous.

  Convergent evolution, Viola decides. Perhaps it is something that any life would attain, eventually.

  Fabian is tired enough and unsettled enough to stamp out a sharp answer. Except we did not evolve it, not really. It is a part of the virus the humans used to “uplift” our forebears. Earth life never developed such a facility. This is the motherlode, here. We are… artificial pretenders to it.

  Viola doesn’t like that. As a powerful, educated female from a dominant peer house she is used to thinking of herself as a natural consequence of advanced evolution. Still, right here, Portiid society is just the two of them, and Fabian feels he can speak freely because there is precious little chance of either of them getting out of this alive.

  For Fabian, his discoveries about the alien organism open an existential chasm. Was there a Lante, at the end, and was she aware of what she had become? Did the philosopher dream she was a butterfly, or the other way around? For Viola and Zaine, their partnership now resumed, it means something profoundly exciting. Viola has finished being an engineer performing repairs and is free to draw on other Understandings and be a speculative scientist again. The pair of them are marvelling over the organism’s transcribing fidelity and data compression, compared favourably to the very best that Portiid technology has to offer, if only they can find a way to get off this planet and back home. Fabian is once again excluded, but this time he isn’t taking it, and instead just goes and stands very close, pointedly intruding on the conversation. Viola shifts to pin him with her primary gaze.

  You have work to do?

  None of us has, or all of us has. He would be able to muster a bit more righteousness if she hadn’t actually done most of the fixing up around the place. I am a scientist. Moreover, I am a specialist in Human neurology. I will have useful contributions. I am not merely the one to whom the menial duties devolve.

  It takes a lot of courage to put himself forwards like this, especially with Viola, who is definitely Old Guard when it comes to males and their place. For a moment she regards him frostily, and Zaine plainly doesn’t know what to say. Artifabian breaks the ice, though, once again playing the polite male. We have come to the conclusions that the parasite has not only evolved a sophisticated method of encoding memory and experience, which is copied to all future generations, but that it has been able to use this facility to Upload a human consciousness, at least in part.

  Everyone stares at the robot, which hunkers lower at the attention. Its turn of phrase is a weird mixture of polite male and clipped Kernean delivery. Fabian reflects that he could ask the same question of the automaton as he did of the Lante entity—does it feign or does it believe? Artifabian was an experiment of Kern’s, after all: a way for the bio-organic entity to enter further into the lives of its living fellows. Translation was only one means, and the damage it suffered in the crash has resulted in the deployment of this curious secondary personality, perhaps something Kern was cooking up for later use.

  But if it is a male, then it can communicate quite happily with Fabian, and the others need its mediation to speak to each other. Without any formal consent from Viola, therefore, Fabian is part of the discussion.

  Upload? he echoes.

  Viola twitches irritably but concedes the point. Zaine’s impression of the later sections is that the parasite has… reconstructed the host’s neural system, or perhaps that it is simulating it. The dead human was rebuilt from memory and, for as long as the simulation lasted, believed herself to be this Lante, or this is what Zaine believes. Which means that the information storage capability of the parasite organism is beyond anything we can construct artificially.

  Of each cell, Fabian corrects absently.

  Viola stares. Artifabian translates, and Zaine stares as well.

  Surely, he adds, defensively. According to Lante’s own notes, this is something like a bacterial culture. Individual cells are duplicated and reproduce themselves and then die off, but the information they contain is also duplicated. A single cell could produce a huge colony if allowed to reproduce unchecked, and bequeath to all its descendants all the information it contained. There is no suggestion of hierarchy or sharing out of information—that would take a level of organization I don’t read it as being capable of. Therefore, if this thing can reproduce Lante it is because she is contained within every part of it that came into contact with her.

  Zaine shakes her head, lips moving, and Artifabian taps out, Impossible.

  For once, Viola is with Fabian, though. This is the discovery of a thousand years, she declares, as though the scientific establishment of Kern’s World will be moved to swoop down and rescue them in recognition of this achievement, rather than noting their distant deaths on an alien world.

  Fabian feels the need to bring her down again. And it’s still out there, and it still remembers. It was trying to be Lante—without even a host, now. Not living in the original shell creature hosts, and no human bodies left to it, but it remembered what it had been. It has been making human things here—that city must have been where Lante lived on Earth, perhaps. It has had thousands of years. It remembers being Lante but I don’t think it knows what that means. I don’t think there’s quite enough of Lante stored in it.

  Zaine is speaking again, speaking over him because of the translation delay. Artifabian finishes making the Human sounds that encode Fabian’s meaning before making the step-shuffles and palp-waving that interpret her.

  And now it will store Meshner.

  Fabian freezes, on the edge of fugue again for just a moment. She didn’t mean it to hurt him, of course, but he had somehow got this far without making that logical step. Because this same thing has taken his research partner, who must even now be reduced to information set down amongst the broken shards of Lante.

  12.

  For a moment Meshner thinks he is in the orbital station again, and given the nightmare quality of everywhere else, he really doesn’t want to revisit the encounter that started off this disaster. Except when he tries to remember precisely what has happened, things begin to fall apart, to slow down, and he senses that faceless pursuer catching up with him, memory an anchor, hauling him to a stop
.

  And besides, it isn’t the same, this place. Similar, as through a shared aesthetic, but not the same rooms, not the same layout, and it is all… unfinished. He is seeing something more like a live-in schematic, concept art, an architect’s virtual plan. Curved rooms designed for rotational gravity, corridors extending away and up, bulkheads and sections and modular components, but all sketched in as though the precise arrangement of lines and angles is being constructed post-facto from something imperfectly recalled.

  Sometimes the absence of memory can be a blessing. Probably he doesn’t want to know where he is. He turns to the woman with him. Not Lante, but a face he knows. For a long moment the name will not come, lost with all the other recollections. He lets himself slow just enough, though, shortens the distance between him and the monster at his heels until he can say, “Kern.”

  Avrana Kern has done her best. Ingrained into her was the knowledge of what she knew and what she had gone through to get this far. Only when she calls on those memories does she discover just how little she really recalls of those bygone days. She has shed the actual useless baggage like snakeskin, or had it abraded away over the course of innumerable transformations: woman to cyborg to artificial intellect to hybrid cybernetic system, pared down into this daughter-fragment to be implanted into the Lightfoot, then fractured yet again during the attack and the crash. But she is all she has to work with, and these memories are more what she feels the Brin 2 terraforming station should have looked like than what it actually did.

  “Don’t try to remember too much,” she tells Meshner. “Just listen to me.” And then he is actually listening to her, desperately waiting for the answers, and she has nothing to tell him. The silence stretches between them until he snaps it, stating:

  “I was attacked.”

  Her virtual persona can only nod, while the wheels spin behind it, trying to find a way to deal with him now she has isolated him from everything else.

  She sees him thinking more, and that is a problem because Meshner’s thoughts are like a network of roots that lead to a dark and corrupted place. At the same time, without his thoughts, what is the point in trying to rescue him? The thoughts make the man. She does her best to throw up barriers that restrict him to the cognitive resources immediately around them, feeling that other presence sniffing about the boundaries, like a wolf at the cave mouth of her Palaeolithic ancestors.

  “This is… the implant,” Meshner says. She feels a weird stab of pride that he’s worked it out so quickly with his limited means. “Everything I’m experiencing is just thrown up by the implant. It must be malfunctioning.”

  “It is functioning well beyond its intended capacity. You and Fabian did well to design it.” And Kern feels like kicking herself because the reference to his Portiid collaborator will just trigger more memory pathways better left silent.

  “My mind isn’t working properly.” There is a real anguish trying to claw its way through his baffled tone. Meshner is a creature of intellect, after all. Take away his mind, what has he got left? “Why are you here, Avrana?”

  “I got you out.” Technically true, to the letter of the law, for a given value of “you”.

  “Out… inside the implant? I’m trapped in the implant. It’s gone wrong, I can’t get back to my body.” His voice trembles a little. “So what’s chasing me? I can feel it, just behind me.”

  “There’s nothing behind you.” Not in my simulation. Not yet.

  “I can feel it there. Why am I trapped in the implant? Avrana, Doctor Kern, please.”

  And as he gets more agitated, the heightened emotion begins to supplant all the thin lines and angles of the Brin 2, a beacon to the thing that waits outside. She knows she must say something of the truth and hope that knowledge, even dreadful knowledge, will calm him.

  “This implant drew inspiration from a variety of past technologies including the most sophisticated neuralware my own people produced. Although it was not designed as an Upload system, its ability to record and replicate experience has resulted in a facility similar enough to function as one. In your and Fabian’s design this was intended only as a buffering state to allow a temporary copy of the biological persona to interact with the qualia of the Understanding, as a filter to permit the original to assimilate the information. Are you with me so far?”

  Meshner’s eyes say No, but he nods.

  “However, it is possible with minimal reworking to extend the buffering period indefinitely and run an uploaded copy of the personality as part of the implant’s experiential program. A facility that, I might add, is profoundly swifter to upload and more resource-efficient than the original that I used. You really should be very proud.”

  Meshner looks at her bleakly. She suspects that the smile she has slapped on her avatar has probably missed reassuring and gone straight to grotesque.

  “I see,” he says flatly. “So what you’re telling me—if I’ve got this right—is that I’m the upload. That’s right, isn’t it? I can’t think properly or remember things because I’m not… me.”

  “That is substantially correct, yes.” She ratchets up the smile another notch. She feels like she has never had need of reassuring smiles in life, not part of her minimal people-skills toolset, and now she cannot simulate one properly. She is giving her virtual face expressions that no human visage should have to bear.

  “Could you maybe reunite me with the rest of me, you know, the real me? Stop buffering, or whatever?” He is really taking this very well, but they have come to the crux and she suddenly hears voices from her very distant past: her own peevish tones snapping, Just give me something to get my memories back together, and a calm, fake woman’s voice replying, That is not recommended, because the knowledge would drive her mad, and had in time. Perhaps she is still missing a core of sanity because of it. And now she has become the calm, artificial voice playing psychopomp to poor Meshner, telling him things he does not want to hear.

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” Kern says. “Meshner, your suit was compromised by an alien life form that entered your system.”

  “The implant’s system?”

  “Your biological system.” And was the interior of the Brin 2 station always this cramped? She looks down the curved corridors and sees only closed doors, blank walls. Everything is smaller than it used to be. Claustrophobia is not something computers are prone to, but it was the close companion of the woman she once was, for thousands and thousands of years. “Meshner,” she soldiers on, “the entity is some manner of endoparasite. It is within your body and has encapsulated itself within your brain.” That part of her still within the Lightfoot is drawing off the research Fabian is putting together, the collected works of Erma Lante, or the thing that Lante became: where natural history became navel-gazing. “It has interfaced with your brain in some manner, using behavioural adaptations it must have developed when it encountered the terraforming crew here thousands of years ago.”

  Meshner is still staring at her and the Brin 2 is just this one room and shrinking, and she knows with a terrible certainty that it is becoming the sentry pod, that tiny prison that degraded her and uplifted her and made her what she is today in all her broken glory. She is experiencing emotions now, courtesy of Meshner’s implant, and she wishes she wasn’t.

  “I…” he says, and then he blinks and says, “We…” and she knows it’s too late. The simulation has been compromised because of her, because of him. The other presence has found them. So she grabs his wrist again and tears away the uplifted persona, abandoning the Brin 2 before it can clench tight about her once more, heading somewhere, anywhere else.

  They are at a party. Meshner cannot understand why. This stern, pale woman has his arm and everyone else has no face. He reaches into his mind for a reason and it is like searching fog.

  Kern, she is Avrana Kern. The chain of logic builds with a sense that the pieces only just disarticulated in some moment-before-now he cannot quite recall. Avrana Kern is dea
d. She isn’t real. He is in the implant. He is in the implant still. This is not the first time he has done this. Only the place has changed. Why has the place changed? Because they are on the run.

  They don’t seem to be on the run right now. Kern glides through the crowd, a tall, severe woman in a long gown of unfamiliar, impractical cut, surrounded by other people, mostly tall, more than half as corpse-pale as she, but none of them have features, and even their bodies are sketchy, see-through. Beyond them only a hint of walls and potted greenery; on the air, the ghost of a long-dead tune.

  “It’s odd to find what you don’t remember,” Kern remarks. “To be honest, this isn’t a memory. My records tell me such a gathering occurred, but it’s no more than a bullet point. This was important to me, once. It’s in my honour. I get confirmed as the head of the terraforming program here. I also turn down one proposition and end up clandestinely breaking the nose of the Dean of… I don’t know—Someplace College, Nowheresville.”