Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

Senkovi floated by the tanks in the Aegean’s heart, trying to make sense of it all. Today he was working with a new generation, in an attempt to replicate up here what was still happening down there. His subject was Paul 58, of a hatching slightly more tempered by the Rus-Califi virus than the last.

“Which makes you brighter,” he told Paul. “Or should do. Lets you make those neural connections quicker. Learning, memory…” He stared into the tank where Paul clung to an interface pad, constricting it with sudden flurries of movement as he navigated the virtual spaces Senkovi had created. Like the octopi on Damascus, Paul had been given repair tasks to perform, a series of broken installations flagged up to engage his curiosity. So far, that curiosity remained unengaged. Senkovi felt as though he was performing a weird balancing act or playing some odd Tower of Hanoi game where to progress he was constantly moving pieces backwards. Earlier generations had been able to perform complex tasks by rote, but as he let the virus complicate the octopi neurology, they became less predictable, less knowable. I thought the idea of an uplift virus was to make something human.

He sent instructions through to Paul again, resetting the virtual environment. I’ve overbred them, maybe. They’re unstable. Paul certainly seemed to be having cerebral issues. The mollusc’s skin was in constant strobing motion, flickering and dancing with jittery patterns as he became more and more anxious for no reason Senkovi could understand.

Sooner or later, Baltiel was going to want answers. “Just do this for me,” he told the unhearing side of the tank. “Let’s just give them a circus they can understand, and we can go back to just you and me. Come on, Paul.”

Paul abruptly released the interface and jetted across the tank. His skin was raised into diabolic spires and horns, which normally meant aggression, but at the same time he was pale with fear, the chromatophores about his eyes and siphon pulsing with nervous patterns. Senkovi regarded him unhappily. I’ve pushed you too far, haven’t I? This is goddamn unnatural, is what it is. But they won’t just let me sit up here and keep pets. That’s not how it goes. Everyone has to work. And it’ll be your planet one day, Paul. Or your descendants’. Or the descendants of some other octopus that keeps it together long enough to have any.

Paul had apparently got over his fit, creeping back to the interface. It wasn’t as though he was ignoring the test, but within the virtual environment his presence went everywhere except where it was supposed to, prowling around the edges of the notional space as though trying to see out of it. One of his eyes was always tilted towards Senkovi, regarding him through the tank’s clear wall.

And now an error message had popped up, the system feeding impulses into his cybernetic implants that projected them into his visual field. Senkovi frowned at it: Error [RestateIntent]. It was a warning flag he had put in for himself, because he sometimes forgot what he was supposed to be accomplishing mid-code, leaving him with digital chimeras that did something entirely untoward. The system had detected part of the test design going off the rails and wanted him to redefine its goals. He began hunting through the nodes of the limited test environment to find out what had crashed.

Error[RestateIntent].

“Yes, yes.” He had been working with this generation of octopi for seventeen hours and change, he realized. Time to chalk up another failure and get some sleep.

User[SenkoviD] Error[RestateIntent].

Just simple building blocks of system communication, the toys he used when he was building the virtual architecture. He hunted down where it was coming from.

It was coming from Paul 58.

The octopus had hacked into the limited system, its virtual consciousness escaping from the test environment to send a signal to him.

Error[RestateIntent] TestSubject[Paul58] Error[RestateIntent] User[SenkoviD]. Just strings of identifiers: the code that identified him as programmer, the code that referred to Paul, and the error code he used to prompt himself if he was leaving the task parameters he’d set for himself. Restate your intent. Go back and remind yourself why you’re doing this.

Paul’s eye was on him, but he was used to the octopi watching him work. They were naturally curious creatures.

Error[RestateIntent] Error[RestateIntent] Subject[Paul58] Error[RestateIntent] User[SenkoviD] Error[RestateIntent].

Senkovi and Paul looked at each other, and this time perhaps it was the octopus waiting patiently for the human to catch on.

Restate intent. Tell me why.

Why is there Senkovi? Why is there Paul? Why? Why the test, why these nonsense games, why any of it? Why, O creator, why?

Ten minutes later and Senkovi had scrambled all the way into the outer ring, the place that humans went and octopi mostly didn’t (barring the swim tank and some industrious escapees). He sat there, back against a wall, hyperventilating, with a bitter understanding of what sort of man he was. Because he liked octopi, he did, but they had always been pets. Try as he might, travel as many light years as they were, he had not left that part of him behind. He had bred them and mutated them and played all sorts of God, and now they wanted to know why and he had no answer.