Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

Avrana Kern, or her facsimile, is keeping an eye on activity within the bubble, partly visually through the transparent wall (which nonetheless is filtering out harmful radiation through a structure or composition she does not quite appreciate). Partly she is relying on the life support feedback from Helena and Portia’s internal implants and suit systems, because if they become anxious, she will know it, and that is a more efficient way of reading the situation than trying to analyse it herself. Being human, for the operating system that knows itself as Doctor Avrana Kern, is often a matter of such short-cuts. She is only wires and ants and some notional business that arises from their interactions, after all. And I was only neural impulses once. She suspects that would seem qualitatively different to her, if she could become complex enough, but right now it is merely a statement of fact.

Keeping tabs on the diplomatic party is not consuming much of her attention—and in the region of multitasking she is far in excess of her anthropoid exemplar; the Portiids’ ant colony computing systems excel at parallel trains of calculation. She is devoting more time to studying the signals of the alien civilization—especially those coming from the three ships, in case this is a trap.

The ships are constantly broadcasting to each other, a never-ending stream of visual junk supported by low-level mechanical status reports, or so Kern translates them. She has hunted for meaning, using Helena’s notes and her own problem-solving capability, but has come down to a simple conclusion: They just never shut up. She considers this in light of the alien visitor who has joined Helena and Portia in the pool. If colour is its language then it, too, is constantly blathering, but does that mean it cannot obfuscate; is that epilepsy-inducing colour show unconscious display? Insufficient data. Kern picks over signals from further afield, fragmentary transmissions from the distant planet rolling towards them along its Newtonian track. She is already working on sources, all of which have been orbital. Perhaps this constant chatter is a primal response to these marine astronauts finding themselves in space.

There is another signal.

Kern processes it, and then more of her processes it, and then an alarm is tripped because she is trying to deal with this one input, amongst so many, and it is hogging a disproportionate amount of her attention. For a moment she remembers that there was, back in the last days (day?) of her own civilization, a virus that killed all the toys and machines and electronic minds of her time, all except her.

But such an attack would be useless against her now, because she does not run on a platform the old virus would even recognize, and if these aliens have devised such a vector to infect her so swiftly, their capabilities must be little short of godlike. She bristles, readying herself for a new fight. But her enemy is nothing of the sort. Her enemy is herself. And not even some rogue Kern fragment but her own understanding of who she is.

There is a single signal. She had not noticed it before because of all the rest of the chaos, and because it comes from neither the ships nor that watery planet they apparently originate from. It comes from further in-system. It is being broadcast from another world entirely, rising to prominence only because the combined orbits of the two orbs are bringing them towards their mutual closest point, so that the signal waxes until its very familiarity makes it leap out from the general alien chatter.

Kern runs some quick and dirty scans and her best guess is that the next world in is somewhat Earth-like in general composition. Arguably more so than the water world these molluscs come from, so why did her ancient kin not go there? Answer: they did. Answer: they may still be there. The signal she is receiving is unambiguous in its coding and signature, instantly translatable because it is in her native language, that these johnny-come-lately Humans call “Imperial C”. And it is not a distress call; it is not a simple automatic transmission, though nor is it a targeted attempt to communicate with her.

And she tries to react. She, Avrana Kern, feels a void within her that should contain an emotional response. She has found her people, after so long (and her “so long” encompasses the rise of entire sentient species). She has found her peers, insofar as she ever admitted to any—a survival from the otherwise extinct civilization whose culmination and high point was the production of one Doctor Avrana Kern. She is aware of the impact this discovery should have, and yet she is cheated of it. What she can muster, in comparison to what she should be feeling, is what a child’s open-mouthed drawing of a face is to real surprise. She feels the lack twice over, once that she is only a poor splinter-instance of her master copy, but once again because even the best version of Avrana Kern now available to the universe has lost so much that those human depths are no longer present in her.

She is, of course, a computer, and so it shouldn’t matter. But she is a computer that believes itself human, and so it does, like an insoluble logic problem gnawing away at her capacity to deal with anything else. She devotes more and more of her capacity towards attempting to recapture some sense of genuine shock, surprise, delight, the rattling thesaurus of genuine experience that she didn’t realize she was missing until now.

More internal alarms get tripped, and thankfully she is sophisticated enough—as a computer or a genuine intelligence, and who’s drawing lines in the sand anyway?—to stop herself before she decides the ship can do without life support or anything vital. But she cannot forget, the emotional void like a subroutine she can’t abandon: she cannot know what should fill it, and yet she knows something should be there.

And so she takes an action that she shouldn’t. Strictly speaking her relationship with the crew and their wider species is one of partnership, and the Portiids are not good with hard boundaries anyway, running their lives on social opprobrium rather than rigid legalities. But all the same, Kern is damned sure this particular violation is not something anyone is going to approve of. She connects to Meshner via his still-open implant and walks into his brain.

It is of course an utter nonsense to say that a Human or Portiid (or any living thing) only uses some small percentage of its brain capacity. Evolution is not known for laying in stores for some notional future. Meshner, however, might be the exception. Not in being simple; he is not. However, he has augmented his brain with a lot of extra processing power in his quest for Portiid Understandings, and if he’s not currently accessing it then he surely won’t begrudge Kern the chance to paddle in his pool? She expands her logic structures into the spaces of his implant and spreads out, trying to feel.

Seven seconds later—a long time, relatively—Kern realizes she has gotten carried away, because this is emotional space. Meshner has his implant specifically configured to translate sensory and experiential data, and that carries with it a burden of emotional meaning, Human and Portiid both. Kern opens herself to her emotions, organs that perished along with the rest of her long ago. In their absence she lets a facsimile of Meshner feel for her, creating a scenario that might generate a comparable response from him. Meshner has already solved the problem of translating the messy, chemical business of emotions into electronic qualia, and he never even realized the breakthrough he had made.

In the process she also finds several roadblocks that have been stymying his attempt to stream Portiid experience into a Human mind and, absently, patches them up. Kern has been working with the spiders for longer than Meshner’s entire species, after all.

The experience of shock, hope, awe and dread exceeds her expectations. Meshner’s emotions are an addictive brew even though his crewmates would probably say he was inward and distant. More usage alarms go off, and then some external ones. Kern overrides herself and disengages, clearing out of Meshner’s implant like a burglar hearing police sirens.

Now, what is the disaster? Ships? Still where they were. Ambassadors? A spike of alarm from Portia at some rubbery octopoid groping but otherwise unharmed. The Lightfoot? Currently seeing the second emergency treatment of Meshner Osten Oslam in recent memory.

Kern troubleshoots immediately, comparing Meshner’s (recovering) neural activity with her own experience of being in his implant. She comes to a profoundly awkward but inescapable conclusion, one she will have to discuss with Meshner, and possibly the entire crew. Currently they are blaming Meshner again, and that is not entirely fair, but Kern feels that setting the record straight while engaging in first contact diplomacy will be counterproductive.

And besides, she needs to find a way to phrase her confession so that she gets to do the forbidden thing again, because it was… She reaches into herself because she knows that she should feel something about the experience she had in Meshner’s brain, but all she finds is the unsatisfying knowledge that it was intellectually fulfilling, and that just isn’t the same.

Because her attention is now just about full with all of these things, her knee-jerk impulse to reply to the Imperial C signal is allowed to go ahead and she sends a simple Received and acknowledged.

Moments later everything goes to hell.