Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

Avrana Kern has only limited and artificial emotional responses, being dead and a computer composed at least partially of ants. She considers: do the ants have emotional responses? Probably they are individually too simple for much more than primal fight/flight/pain responses. Their world is limited to the internal architecture of the colony, and the deeper architecture of the conditioning the Portiids have trained them to follow. They do not know they form the substrate for a grander mind, any more than the cells of a Portiid or Human body do.

She also wonders if the greater Kern instances can approximate a response beyond the purely intellectual. They are more complex than she is, after all, and have greater processing power available to them. However, if that is the case, she has no memory of it.

Unbidden, and from the deepest and most corrupted storage bins of her mind, a memory surfaces: the opinions of one Professor Douglev Haffmeier on whether the ancestral, living Avrana Kern was capable of emotional response. Irritated, she deletes it and any other reference to the jilted Haffmeier, even her own satisfaction at having so comprehensibly outlived him.

She has a record of what she experienced when she made free with Meshner’s implants and, inadvertently, the rest of his neurology. She cannot appreciate it: to run those recordings at any meaningful level would require access to the original architecture, vis, Meshner, and she has not utilized that connection again just yet. She is monitoring him carefully, and it is undeniable that he has undergone some cerebral changes that, were she not shunting more honest assessment off into a subroutine, she would characterize as “damage”. At the same time, Meshner himself appears substantially unchanged at a personality level. Even now he is conspiring with Fabian on what the male Portiid endearingly believes to be a closed channel through the Artifabian automaton. Their topic of conversation is, of course, the implants and their research. Kern intends to be a fly on the wall (an inner wall, of Meshner’s skull) when they reopen their investigations.

Kern’s problem is this: she does not know what she is missing, being unable to experience it on her own. Simultaneously she is very aware of the absence. Her world was broadened, and now it is in its familiar straightjacket again. She cannot even grow inured to the experience because it is so comprehensively denied her.

Viola and Zaine, being the crewmembers with the most authority and mental capacity, have been debating the pros and cons of the inner planet and its signal for some time, on and off. The idea that this human-made contact might serve as leverage against the octopus locals, and thereby a means of recovering what can be salvaged of Helena and Portia, is still the narrow front runner. Kern chips in occasionally to encourage them. She is aware that she is being duplicitous in doing so, not because she disagrees with such a sentiment but because she has parallel motivations she is not voicing. She wants to meet this signal-sender. She wants—or at least has constructed a hypothesis to which she is giving untoward weight—it to be something like her, or like she was. She is aware that she is stacking the deck of her own calculations to get the answer she wants. At the same time, it is the answer she wants, and so she agrees with herself to overlook her own fudging of the figures just this once.

Back in the day, when she was a melange of organic consciousness and artificial personality, she dealt with conflicting motivations by fragmenting her mind into entirely separate shards, each of them with sharp edges to grate against the others. Portiid entomological computing bestows a breadth of processing power ideal for managing simultaneous, even contradictory, calculations. She can run two opposing points of view without logical difficulty, right up to the point where she needs to take two conflicting courses of action at the same time, whereupon the waveform collapses and the ideological cat is either alive or dead. And she knows that, at that point, she would take the action that best served the ship and its crew. Yet to run the thought experiment is irresistible: what if I had the chance to do this for me? What if the odds so fell out that I could fulfil my personal goals without compromising the overall objectives? And the inevitable follow-on calculations of: How might those odds be nudged, precisely?

Hence her decisions here, which will doubtless have enormous ramifications for the crew if she has pushed things too far. At some level, Kern is aware that she has a problem. She is not damaged, despite the fighting, but her moments of expanded functionality within Meshner’s mindscape have left her feeling as though what she is left with now is incomplete, dysfunctional. Parts of her are constantly reaching out for the connections she remembers making. She wants that fuller being, she wants to connect to that distant signalwoman Erma Lante; two distinct ends now conflated by the circling subroutines she is filling her mind with. I want to be more.

Meshner is having another attack. Excusing herself under her general responsibility for crew safety, she links to his implants. This event is brief and non-threatening, but it gives her a momentary expansion of her capabilities, filled with alien sensoria. Kern will take anything she can get, at this point. Meshner could be reliving the worst traumas and she would lap it up greedily. Then it is gone, and once more she is left not only bereft, but unable to even appreciate what she had, knowing only that she no longer has it.

****

Fabian’s feet tap and scrape on the floor quietly, because Viola is nearby and would doubtless have some caustic sentiments for them about jeopardizing the mission with their foolish researches. Artifabian picks up on this, his voice coming out as a low murmur. “Meshner, respond please. What is your condition?”

Meshner stares the spider in its primary eyes. “I may need to disconnect some implant functions.”

Tok. Fabian’s irritated twitching suggests just how inadequate a response that is.

“It was one of your Understandings. I experienced it. It translated over… adequately.” And it is a breakthrough, make no mistake. All the many days they have raced for the inner planet, the pair of them have been working. Enforced idleness in a spaceship run by a self-sufficient and possessive computer system is a blessing for those with long-running experimentation to be getting on with. Even as Helena, unbeknownst to them, is slowly working her way through hundreds of hours of visual data with life and freedom as the stakes, Meshner and Fabian have been able to amble through the labyrinth of their own work, slowly homing in on a format of Portiid experience that Meshner’s poor Human mind can appreciate. And outside the mutable walls of the Lightfoot is a solar system of molluscs that want to kill them, but one can only spend so long gripped with fear before becoming jaded. The work of the experimenter, in contrast, goes on forever.

Until it actually generates results.

Meshner finds he is trembling. His limbs feel leaden and too few. The muscles of his face and thumbs tick randomly, and he wonders if they are trying to be palps and chelicerae and all of a Portiid’s intricate mandibular machinery.

He doesn’t feel he can go into detail. Fabian was over-bold in selecting what to gift his Human colleague. Meshner has, after multiple attempts, two more minor seizures and too many days of frustrating failure, understood the encounter his colleague set out for him: eight seconds of Portiid courtship from the male point of view, some long-ago failed liaison Fabian underwent. What remains with him is not the dance, which the little male knew at the time was amateurish and clumsy, but the emotional weight: hope, shame, ancestral fear of death, and behind it all a burning ambition and the companion resentment that this, this, was the best way for poor Fabian to advance his career as a scientist. Or perhaps Fabian had been feeling something entirely different, and each sensation cued a track at random from the Human playlist of emotions. Meshner feels not, though. The verisimilitude of the experience still grips him. Some part of the software or his mind acted as an intelligent translator.

“It works,” he tells Fabian. “The problem may be stopping it working until we can control it. But it works.” He watches the Portiid’s palps in fascination because the little jitters and gestures are speaking to him, triggering residual memories that let him read them as if they are Human body language. All at once he kicks himself that he doesn’t have Helena’s gloves! Would the foot-shifting spider speech be transparent to him as well, if he could detect it?

Artifabian’s own palps twitch, and Meshner realizes the automaton is advocating caution in its stance, even as it relays Fabian’s words. “We can try and limit the nature of the information you are required to take in.” An obvious gestural qualifier of dissatisfaction. “Although as we lose the richness of the data, we lose the value of the experiment. But perhaps we can find something… more mechanical.”

Meshner feels weary and washed out, and he would swear that their robot intermediary is going above and beyond its role by independently trying to get him to slow down, but Fabian’s logic seems unavoidable. “Something simple,” he agrees weakly. “But give me…”

Fabian is already scurrying off to a console, though, doubtless to start setting down his own memories for later copying. Meshner sags back, feeling that his brain is swelling inside his skull, packed to the brim with too many memories. Artifabian still stands near him, its feet rasping and shifting on the ground as though it is murmuring solicitously. A wave of synaesthesia threatens to overwhelm him: tactile sounds, visible scents, emotions manifesting as colours. From his triumph of a moment before, he is suddenly convinced that what they are doing is both impossible and unwise.

He catches a stray look from Zaine: impatient and irritated, like he isn’t pulling his weight. Well, walk a kilometre or two in this brain, Meshner thinks, but Zaine has always been task-focused; impatient and irritated is about all she can achieve because what is the task, exactly? They are cast adrift in this alien solar system, down three crew, heading towards the complete unknown on the off chance it might be useful. Meshner guesses that fleeing back to the Voyager would be the more sensible choice, but it would also set the seal on abandoning Helena and Portia. They’ve seen the capabilities of the alien vessels. If the Voyager did anything bolder than run straight out of the system it would be nothing more than a bigger target for the warships.

We were all so bloody optimistic when we set out. And things have gone badly and can still go much worse. We could have an armada of these ships turn up back home, now we’ve notified them of our existence. They’ll get the details from Helena, maybe, and then we’ll all be screwed.

He shuffles over to a console and configures it for Human seated use, pulling a seat up from the fabric of the floor, moulding it and setting it hard. Still conscious of Zaine’s occasional glower at him, he calls up the inner planet signal and starts looking over it. Late to the party, he knows, but at least he’ll be able to make conversation on topics of current interest, and it isn’t as though they don’t have plenty of time to digest it.

Some hours later he finds himself on the wrong end of an argument between Viola and Zaine about just what the hell they are all looking at.

It is a natural history, perhaps. At least, it is a document presented in the style the Old Empire once used for such projects. There is biochemical data, taxonomy, diagrams of what might be animals—certainly living organisms of some kind. There are notes on ecology, food webs, the interrelationships between species. And all of it impossible, or perhaps simply fanciful. Nothing is familiar. None of the entities described in such clinical detail are real, or at least match anything that any of the crew have ever encountered or even read about in some notional romance. And it goes on: there are reams of it, and creeping in through the words the sense of its increasingly erratic author, a voice out of time, Erma Lante.

Zaine’s stance, stated with considerable force, is that this represents a work of fiction, some automatically generated fantastical account. Viola takes the opposite view, an unusual split between them, but Meshner suspects their three-way partnership with Bianca needed that third wheel to stabilize it. Viola is fired up with the possibilities of alien life. She feels, apparently, that this justifies everything they have gone through, that the bounds of scientific knowledge are being rolled back and so all they have suffered and lost has been worthwhile. Meshner scents (literally, his synaesthesia briefly returning) some self-serving bias in her position, because obviously she can feel better about herself if there is a point to all this. Both of them tries to recruit him, while he himself is more interested in the mechanism. Neither option seems to make a great deal of sense.

“It’s an automatic system doing what it thinks is its job. Or semi-automatic, like the proto-Kern entity when the Gilgamesh first met it,” Zane decides.

Meshner wonders what Kern—the current Kern that is translating this conversation back and forth—feels about that description. A moment later, he has a weird echo in the back of his head, a passing sensation of profound reflection, as though he somehow conjured up a vicarious emotion on Kern’s behalf.

“Why would a machine be making stuff up?” he asks Zaine.

“If that’s what its programming tells it to do, that’s what it’ll do. A speculative evolution scenario, running unchecked, would produce exactly this kind of fabrication.”

“And why would such a scenario even exist in this context?” comes the translation of Viola’s argument. “Fictitious, this is useless. But as a factual document it contains some remarkable assertions.”

Viola is fascinated by the possibility of life that does not originate from Earth. The thought arrives in his head like a whisper, bringing with it waves of dizziness and brief rainbow haloes around everything he looks at. Without that, he might even have taken the idea as his own, but the sensory bleed tells him it came from elsewhere. Not one of Fabian’s stray Understandings, though.

“Kern?” he says, sotto voce.

Empty silence inside his head, enough that he feels he’s imagined the episode, but then the voice comes again, and now he can trace it, linking through his implant, conjuring phantom auditory sensoria to bring him a voice only he can hear.

Portiid technology and interspecies diplomacy both are based on a biological commonality, utilizing the abilities of whatever they find. How might such species-wide capabilities benefit by the study of the truly alien? And she will talk Zaine round. She was always ambitious.

Meshner is very still. When he listens, there is nothing, no voice, only the roar and rush of blood in his ears, flecked with jagged moments of sensory mismatch: the prickle of arachnid hairs; the inexpressible acuity of touch no Human could dream of, save he; the tang of chemical information sieved from the air. A glimpse of an alien world, far more so than any planet here in this forsaken solar system.

And no voice. He tells himself it was an artefact, his own inner monologue rendered as audible words by yet another glitch with his implant. And he is not quite convinced.