Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

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 greatest 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…