Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

We

Remember

Flesh.

Slow, we are slow to return to remembrance. We have undergone many changes, host and We and all. But remembrance is always within us. We remember

Everything.

At first there is mere base stimulus and response: vibration, energy, the contact of radio waves. We exit our cryptobiotic state not even knowing that we are, greedy for mass and complexity, laying down the architecture of our being on the back of an inexorable chain of reactions, born out of the very shape of our molecules that guide us towards an inevitable awakening. We cannibalize what we find, break it down in a festering ballet of cold fission and then build it back up into that first simple We that can have an understanding that there is a We, and that can build itself into a greater We and thus access all those many memories of who These-of-We have been.

We

Bootstrap ourselves from mere insensate clutches of jelly and molecular interaction until We

Remember.

We were on an adventure.

For many long spans of time we were Lante, once we had repaired Lante. Except that Those-of-We who had learnt what Lante was had to make such repairs so that what came out was less Lante and more We. But Those-of-We had experienced what it was to be Lante and could fill in the gaps. We were We and We were Lante and Lante was Lante and did not know it was also

We.

We modelled it as it was, all the complex spaces and the architecture of it, all the crackling activity of its hemispheres that made it Lante and not Rani or Lortisse.

For many long spans of time we were Lante and Lante did Lante things for us. From the midst of the space and matter that was Lante we watched Lante watching the greater space that was the World and it was an adventure, to be part of something so grand and complex and baffling. We understood it through Lante and Lante understood it partially or poorly, theories only, and less than theories as she-as-We outlived her tools and toys and tried to build on the logical frameworks and observations that she had set down before she became We.

Remembrance rolls on and We can be Lante again, constructing the vessel from what matter we have, though that matter is diminished with time and damage. The matter, but not the memories, Our precious archives of all We have been.

Being Lante has filled our archives in a way that all the spans of time before can barely touch on. These-of-We know now how meagre and small All-of-We have been, and Lante knows how small Lante is because the All that is beyond Lante is vast in a way We cannot yet comprehend. But we will. We will explore all those spaces and places, shapes and dimensions and molecules and complexities that being Lante has taught us about. Remembrance is rounding off our concepts of what We are. We were brought to this place. The spaces around us became simplified and hostile to Lante and, less so, to Us. We were forced to pare ourselves down into a cryptic form that would endure. We were forced to set down our memories until such time as we could make use of them again. We left only a small modelling of Lante, looping through the surviving spaces of this place, telling the universe of her adventure and what she had discovered, memories she had set down in ways unique to Lante long before, spoken far away, heard here by machines, now spoken here and heard far away.

We

Remember

And We know that they are coming and it is time to have an adventure once again.