Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

“You must edit your memories to forget this, and we will find some other place to exclude the entity from. We need time,” Kern says, and Meshner feels a great wave of weariness, and wonders if it is real weariness or just the implant fabricating the sensation the way the Lightfoot’s factory units printed food and machine parts.

“I can’t do that, Doctor Kern,” he says, sitting down, his back against one of the abstract lines of the image they are inhabiting. “I’m… real.”

“You are a copy, Meshner. You don’t have to be limited to—”

“How long did it take you, to come to terms with what you became?” Meshner shoots the words back at her, and Kern’s face—no, the whole of her—freezes for a second. Then she steps back, expressionless, conceding the point. How many thousand years do we have?

“I feel real,” he tells the world, or the simulation that is his world now. He looks into the blurred face of the other woman. “Do you feel real, you in there? Lante, is it?”

“Lante. Yes.” The woman seems to fill out, become more substantial. “Terraforming engineer, biologist and medical specialist,” she reels off, like someone reading notes. “The Aegean. The Aegean was my ship.” She speaks the language Meshner just thinks of as “Human”, but he can hear the Imperial C like a ghost underneath it, informing her word choices. So where did it learn my speech? Oh yes, it’s in my brain. I’m not speaking to Lante. I’m speaking to myself.

“What’s Lante, though?” he demands, aware of Kern still hovering there. “What’s left except the name and a personnel file?”

She crouches down by him—the transition from standing is uncomfortable, the joints not quite working as intended, the form not as immutable as a human body should be, but maybe that is just a glitch in the simulation. The implant must be working overtime, after all.

“I’m Erma Lante,” she insists. “I came from Earth. We were paving the way for the new colonies. Except everything went wrong. The war… and Baltiel, he… I wanted to go home, but it would have been decades and the others said home wouldn’t even be there. A radioactive cinder, a toxic wasteland.” Without intermediate steps she is standing again, and the errant lines and angles of the Portiid image fall away, muscled aside by a landscape cast in shadows and harsh artificial lights, shrouded in twilight and smog—but perhaps that is just to save processing power. Meshner stares at it for a long time before realizing he is looking at a cityscape, tall buildings rising on every side until the sky is just as invisible as it would be from the lowest reaches of a Portiid conurbation. He reaches out a simulation of a hand and the implant returns to him the gritty sensation of cold concrete under the memory of his fingers.

“Meshner,” says Kern warningly.

“This is…?” Not my memory. Certainly not Fabian’s, and not Kern’s from the way she’s acting. “Kern, what is Lante? What is she now?”

“A simulation. A memory.”

“And this is a memory’s memory? How is that even possible?” Meshner demands, as Lante stares about them.

“I’m home now,” she says. “Such complexity.” Meshner knows that sentiment must come from somewhere beyond Lante, from the puppeteer rather than the puppet. Except perhaps computer and program is a better analogy, because what would be the point of the alien parasite just waddling around in a Lante-suit? Why is it dredging Lante up, and where from?

“Based on Fabian and Viola’s research,” Kern says, “the individual cells of the organism are capable of encoding and retrieving its whole history. Lante is part of that history. It infested her. It mirrored the firings of her neurons. It…”

Meshner looks at her sidelong, finding her expressionless. Ah, tact. Because that’s what it’s doing with me, right now. “Go on.”

Kern grimaces. “I don’t think it, the thing itself, understands what Lante is, but it can play her back, simulate her, and the Lante being simulated wouldn’t know, would think that she is just Lante. She is recorded in the organism, imperfectly but enough to be conjured up when it wishes.”

“But why does it wish it?” Meshner watches Lante wandering, staring up at the bright lights, the tall darknesses of the buildings. “What’s the purpose?” And then, because Kern has no answer, he shouts at Lante, “What do you want?”

She turns, her features diffuse and shifting. Because Lante didn’t look in the mirror much, maybe, and all it has is her memory of her face. “We’re going on an adventure,” she tells him calmly. “We have found such new rules and ideas. Worlds. Stars.” A creeping change is stealing upon the creature, and Meshner feels that some of these intonations, some of its body language is his own.

“It is expanding into the implant’s data-space, unpacking Lante’s memories,” Kern says tightly. “That is our first problem.”

Meshner misses why that is any more of a problem than the rest of it, but fixes on the key word “first”. “So, what’s the second?”

“There is a warship. Helena and Portia are trying to persuade it not to destroy the orbital and the Lightfoot. Because of this organism. The octopuses’ encounters with it have been entirely destructive. If we are to dissuade them we must give them a reason to keep us intact, or a reason not to fear. A weapon.”

Meshner eyes her sidelong. “A weapon,” he echoes. “Really?” He feels something akin to a headache, a pressure around him. “And you’ve turned one up in Fabian’s research?”

“No.” Kern’s voice is flattening audibly. “I am trying to hinder the organism’s encroachment into the implant.”

“I don’t see that it matters now. Besides, it’s not attacking us.” He indicates the oblivious organism, part him, part Lante.

“It is consuming the space and processing power here, which I require to continue to function at my current level. Which you require because this is the only place you exist. I am losing ground, Meshner. The implant is intended for use by your brain, not external access by me.”

And my brain is not my own. “So I could have locked you out at any time, if I’d known what was going on?” He expects a snarl, a glower, even a frosty look of disdain from Kern, but that would be an extra load on the implant and Kern is fighting a valiant rearguard action at the expense of her own ability to feel. “So what’s the plan?” he asks, but they are at the end of all plans, now. She can only slow it. And even if we hold it off forever, the octopuses are coming to blow us all up. And with good reason, now I’ve seen what this monster can do. But he looks at it, the personification of the monster, and it is anything but monstrous. When it glances from the lights, the buildings, back at him, its smile is almost childlike in wonder. “An adventure,” it had said.

“Kern, I need you to do something that is going to strain our space in here a bit more.”

“Speak.”

“Import the study, the Lante study Fabian hacked into shape. Upload it to the implant, where this thing can see it. Let’s hold the mirror up to nature, shall we?”

Kern’s expression is… without expression, but she nods.