Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

For a moment Meshner thinks he is in the orbital station again, and given the nightmare quality of everywhere else, he really doesn’t want to revisit the encounter that started off this disaster. Except when he tries to remember precisely what has happened, things begin to fall apart, to slow down, and he senses that faceless pursuer catching up with him, memory an anchor, hauling him to a stop.

And besides, it isn’t the same, this place. Similar, as through a shared aesthetic, but not the same rooms, not the same layout, and it is all… unfinished. He is seeing something more like a live-in schematic, concept art, an architect’s virtual plan. Curved rooms designed for rotational gravity, corridors extending away and up, bulkheads and sections and modular components, but all sketched in as though the precise arrangement of lines and angles is being constructed post-facto from something imperfectly recalled.

Sometimes the absence of memory can be a blessing. Probably he doesn’t want to know where he is. He turns to the woman with him. Not Lante, but a face he knows. For a long moment the name will not come, lost with all the other recollections. He lets himself slow just enough, though, shortens the distance between him and the monster at his heels until he can say, “Kern.”

****

Avrana Kern has done her best. Ingrained into her was the knowledge of what she knew and what she had gone through to get this far. Only when she calls on those memories does she discover just how little she really recalls of those bygone days. She has shed the actual useless baggage like snakeskin, or had it abraded away over the course of innumerable transformations: woman to cyborg to artificial intellect to hybrid cybernetic system, pared down into this daughter-fragment to be implanted into the Lightfoot, then fractured yet again during the attack and the crash. But she is all she has to work with, and these memories are more what she feels the Brin 2 terraforming station should have looked like than what it actually did.

“Don’t try to remember too much,” she tells Meshner. “Just listen to me.” And then he is actually listening to her, desperately waiting for the answers, and she has nothing to tell him. The silence stretches between them until he snaps it, stating:

“I was attacked.”

Her virtual persona can only nod, while the wheels spin behind it, trying to find a way to deal with him now she has isolated him from everything else.

She sees him thinking more, and that is a problem because Meshner’s thoughts are like a network of roots that lead to a dark and corrupted place. At the same time, without his thoughts, what is the point in trying to rescue him? The thoughts make the man. She does her best to throw up barriers that restrict him to the cognitive resources immediately around them, feeling that other presence sniffing about the boundaries, like a wolf at the cave mouth of her Palaeolithic ancestors.

“This is… the implant,” Meshner says. She feels a weird stab of pride that he’s worked it out so quickly with his limited means. “Everything I’m experiencing is just thrown up by the implant. It must be malfunctioning.”

“It is functioning well beyond its intended capacity. You and Fabian did well to design it.” And Kern feels like kicking herself because the reference to his Portiid collaborator will just trigger more memory pathways better left silent.

“My mind isn’t working properly.” There is a real anguish trying to claw its way through his baffled tone. Meshner is a creature of intellect, after all. Take away his mind, what has he got left? “Why are you here, Avrana?”

“I got you out.” Technically true, to the letter of the law, for a given value of “you”.

“Out… inside the implant? I’m trapped in the implant. It’s gone wrong, I can’t get back to my body.” His voice trembles a little. “So what’s chasing me? I can feel it, just behind me.”

“There’s nothing behind you.” Not in my simulation. Not yet.

“I can feel it there. Why am I trapped in the implant? Avrana, Doctor Kern, please.”

And as he gets more agitated, the heightened emotion begins to supplant all the thin lines and angles of the Brin 2, a beacon to the thing that waits outside. She knows she must say something of the truth and hope that knowledge, even dreadful knowledge, will calm him.

“This implant drew inspiration from a variety of past technologies including the most sophisticated neuralware my own people produced. Although it was not designed as an Upload system, its ability to record and replicate experience has resulted in a facility similar enough to function as one. In your and Fabian’s design this was intended only as a buffering state to allow a temporary copy of the biological persona to interact with the qualia of the Understanding, as a filter to permit the original to assimilate the information. Are you with me so far?”

Meshner’s eyes say No, but he nods.

“However, it is possible with minimal reworking to extend the buffering period indefinitely and run an uploaded copy of the personality as part of the implant’s experiential program. A facility that, I might add, is profoundly swifter to upload and more resource-efficient than the original that I used. You really should be very proud.”

Meshner looks at her bleakly. She suspects that the smile she has slapped on her avatar has probably missed reassuring and gone straight to grotesque.

“I see,” he says flatly. “So what you’re telling me—if I’ve got this right—is that I’m the upload. That’s right, isn’t it? I can’t think properly or remember things because I’m not… me.”

“That is substantially correct, yes.” She ratchets up the smile another notch. She feels like she has never had need of reassuring smiles in life, not part of her minimal people-skills toolset, and now she cannot simulate one properly. She is giving her virtual face expressions that no human visage should have to bear.

“Could you maybe reunite me with the rest of me, you know, the real me? Stop buffering, or whatever?” He is really taking this very well, but they have come to the crux and she suddenly hears voices from her very distant past: her own peevish tones snapping, Just give me something to get my memories back together, and a calm, fake woman’s voice replying, That is not recommended, because the knowledge would drive her mad, and had in time. Perhaps she is still missing a core of sanity because of it. And now she has become the calm, artificial voice playing psychopomp to poor Meshner, telling him things he does not want to hear.

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” Kern says. “Meshner, your suit was compromised by an alien life form that entered your system.”

“The implant’s system?”

“Your biological system.” And was the interior of the Brin 2 station always this cramped? She looks down the curved corridors and sees only closed doors, blank walls. Everything is smaller than it used to be. Claustrophobia is not something computers are prone to, but it was the close companion of the woman she once was, for thousands and thousands of years. “Meshner,” she soldiers on, “the entity is some manner of endoparasite. It is within your body and has encapsulated itself within your brain.” That part of her still within the Lightfoot is drawing off the research Fabian is putting together, the collected works of Erma Lante, or the thing that Lante became: where natural history became navel-gazing. “It has interfaced with your brain in some manner, using behavioural adaptations it must have developed when it encountered the terraforming crew here thousands of years ago.”

Meshner is still staring at her and the Brin 2 is just this one room and shrinking, and she knows with a terrible certainty that it is becoming the sentry pod, that tiny prison that degraded her and uplifted her and made her what she is today in all her broken glory. She is experiencing emotions now, courtesy of Meshner’s implant, and she wishes she wasn’t.

“I…” he says, and then he blinks and says, “We…” and she knows it’s too late. The simulation has been compromised because of her, because of him. The other presence has found them. So she grabs his wrist again and tears away the uplifted persona, abandoning the Brin 2 before it can clench tight about her once more, heading somewhere, anywhere else.

They are at a party. Meshner cannot understand why. This stern, pale woman has his arm and everyone else has no face. He reaches into his mind for a reason and it is like searching fog.

Kern, she is Avrana Kern. The chain of logic builds with a sense that the pieces only just disarticulated in some moment-before-now he cannot quite recall. Avrana Kern is dead. She isn’t real. He is in the implant. He is in the implant still. This is not the first time he has done this. Only the place has changed. Why has the place changed? Because they are on the run.

They don’t seem to be on the run right now. Kern glides through the crowd, a tall, severe woman in a long gown of unfamiliar, impractical cut, surrounded by other people, mostly tall, more than half as corpse-pale as she, but none of them have features, and even their bodies are sketchy, see-through. Beyond them only a hint of walls and potted greenery; on the air, the ghost of a long-dead tune.

“It’s odd to find what you don’t remember,” Kern remarks. “To be honest, this isn’t a memory. My records tell me such a gathering occurred, but it’s no more than a bullet point. This was important to me, once. It’s in my honour. I get confirmed as the head of the terraforming program here. I also turn down one proposition and end up clandestinely breaking the nose of the Dean of… I don’t know—Someplace College, Nowheresville.”

“I don’t understand anything of what you just said.” Meshner feels that this admission has been drawn from him quite a lot, recently. “How can you clandestinely break someone’s nose?”

“In a cupboard, with his hand on my breast and beer on his breath. Wanted to show me his research,” Kern says, with very human venom. To Meshner’s surprise, her face splits into a smile. “I remember the hate,” she tells him gaily. “It’s good, to feel it again. Thank you. And I broke his nose with my elbow and didn’t spill my wine, and then I told him that he would never go near me or any other damn woman or I’d make sure he’d never work in the discipline again. Because I could. Because that threat, that he’d used on so many bright young things to get their skirts up, could now be turned on him.” She laughs, a harsh crow noise.

“This feels good. Even if I’m making it up from whole cloth it feels good.”

“Kern…”

Because there is a spectre at the feast. In the midst of all these oddly imprecise people stands a woman who was plainly handed a very different dress code because she is wearing an environment suit, heavy duty, Old Empire standard. The helmet sits in the crook of her arm and her face is… also weirdly imprecise, blurry, as though imperfectly recalled.

There is a name on her suit. In Old Empire characters it spells “Lante,” and Meshner knows that the hunter has caught them up.

“I…” he starts, but then the world behind his eyes is coming apart like cotton candy between childrens’ sticky fingers. “I…” Meeting those out-of-focus eyes feels like coming home to a terrible place. “We…”

But Kern has his arm still and they are running, the party receding behind them, like station lights from a departing train, until they are in some kind of institution with windowless, slate-grey corridors. Underground? Secret, certainly. A sense of habitation, of movement, but no figures at all here, and the texture of the walls is like smoke held in by invisible boundaries, some place Kern remembers even less well than the party.

“You do things, to get where you need to go,” Kern mutters. “And I don’t mean humping the odd Dean.” There are small rooms off the corridor. Meshner sees metal tables, chairs, some with restraints, the furniture recalled with far more clarity than whoever might have sat there. “It was a bad time,” Kern adds, then stops because, rounding the corner ahead of them is that same clumping, suited figure, the same slightly-fuzzed features.

Meshner finds himself being pulled away. That figure should be nightmarish, he knows, but he has no context—he’d need to stand still and remember for that, and remembering has become an exhausting activity.

“You’re an expensive date,” Kern tells him. “I’m running out of places to take you.”

“Why can’t I remember?” he asks her.

“I’m not having this conversation with you again.”

They back up quickly and Lante’s heavy-booted progress is leaden, yet the distance between them only contracts. Memory drops on Meshner like stones from the sky.

“We’re in the implant,” he declares.

“Not now, Meshner!”

“I’m… a copy. This isn’t me.”

“It’s all the you there is, now stop remembering things!”

“Why are you even bothering?” He stops just passively drifting, hauls back on his arm. “I’m a copy. I’m not me. There’s no point in any of this. Get me back, the real me. What’s the point in your just having me as a fake upload?” And perhaps it is not the most politic thing to say to a woman who is herself nothing more than a copy of a copy of a copy, rebuilt by spiders and filled with ants and who knows what other transformations, but she is too busy to take offence.

“You are still linked to the organic original. That’s how it’s finding you, even now. You are your personality, projected into and modelled by the implant’s simulation software, but you’re still you. And besides, there are worse things.”

Then they are somewhere else (again, and how many times?) but Meshner cannot process it. All he sees are lines and angles, jutting and jagging from all sides, an abstract geometry that might be a computer’s glitching or the mind of God.

“Here,” Kern grabs his arm and hauls him close again, wrenching at his perspective until he sees lines that might be the trunks of trees, angles that might be webs, curves that are the irregular lumps of peer houses, but all abstracted, simplified.

“This is the first time I saw it,” Kern says. “It’s all I have left. I need to think of somewhere else to run to.”

“Saw what? Is this…?”

“They sent me the picture, some of the earliest Portiid visual recording. They wanted to show their Messenger what their world was like. They showed me a picture of Seven Trees, their home city. It was when I discovered what they were. That I’d been running my circus for an audience of monkeys who weren’t even there.”

“I don’t understand anything of what you’ve just said,” Meshner tells her, then remembers saying just that, not so long ago. “How can this be all you have?”

“Because we have been everywhere else I can make from my memories. I’ve ransacked them. I’ve taken the most spurious references and built worlds around them. And it lasts until it doesn’t. Until she follows the connections you keep making to your organic brain. Because that’s where she is. In your brain.”

“I remember.”

“Then stop it.”

“I’m an upload.”

Kern sags. “Yes.” She holds to his arm, eyes closed. “It’s been good.”

Meshner twitches. “What?”

“Fear, desperation, headlong flight. Regrets, anger, sadness. Knowing I can’t keep this up forever. It’s been good to experience these things again. It’s good to feel sad that soon I won’t be able to, because there’s nowhere else I can take this copy of you. But then, when you’re gone, it won’t be good, and I won’t even be able to look back on it and smile. Because I need you and your implant to access those sensations.”

“Um…” Meshner manages.

“I am not making decisions appropriate to my level of responsibility,” Kern explains, seeming to shrink, to become greyer and further away without ever moving. “I sent you to the station. It could have just been Zaine. But I wanted to meet something like me. I wanted to feel what that was like. And it was a trap. I made this happen to you. And I can’t save you. We have been running for days now, Meshner. The parasite is firmly entrenched in your brain, by whatever means it uses. All of your biological actions and sensations are being run past that censor, that can substitute its own alternatives for anything it doesn’t like, or just let you dance around on its strings without ever knowing you’re a puppet. I feel sorry for what I’ve done to you, and that, too, is good.”

“I don’t understand anything of what you’ve just said.” But even as the words trot out, they aren’t true any more. He feels the Meshner-ness coming back to him. He isn’t just a copy. He remembers the spikes and spasms of his implant, the synaesthesia, the errors. He remembers meeting Kern during the attack, in the darkness within the Lightfoot.

“This is all for your amusement,” he accuses her.

“No.” And he cannot tell if she is sincere or if that sincerity is just another thing she is leaching from him. “No. I was trying to save the ship. I am trying to save you. But I want things for myself too. Now you have to forget it all. You have to forget so we can go somewhere else.”

“We don’t go anywhere,” Meshner says, because he finds the whole topology of the implant opening up around him, as though he is standing on a high hill and surveying a landscape stretching out on every side. “We stand still, and you move the world, and it gives the illusion of progress.”

“Yes.” Kern is one step further away from him. He can feel her plucking on his emotions so that she can resonate with the sound. Bitterness, defeat, sadness, and all of these things are good, to her. “Yes, and I have kept you from understanding that for so long. Days and days, you have run, and I have moved the scenery. Inevitable that you would notice eventually. And now that you know it, the parasite knows it, too.”

And then there are three of them, standing in that overexposed image, that landmark in Portiid history. Lante stares about herself, and the expression on her face (as poorly rendered as the image of the spider city of Seven Trees around them) captures something of human wonder.

“What happens now?” Meshner waits for his sense of self to ebb, for a gnawing inside his mind, for fungal growths to spring from his simulated skin—but the thing, the woman, Lante, she is just standing there in her antiquated encounter suit, breathing in the non-air, looking at the weirdly skewed two-dimensional image stretched out around them. Her lips part.

“We…” An alien entity simulating a human in the first person plural; Meshner has no idea if the word has meaning for the speaker. As an artificial entity simulating a Human, himself, he cannot escape the assumption that something speaks, rather than just echoes sounds it once heard.

“Where is the space the geometry the complexity?” it says. “There were worlds… We were promised… We… do not understand.”