Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

Kern, Avrana Kern, formerly of the Lightfoot and now with her consciousness situated, by her own estimation, somewhere between that vessel’s crashed remains and her orbital telepresence, probes the live comms channels of the station carefully. The infestation looked to be purely an organic thing, but something was transmitting the xenobiology lesson which drew her here. Was the amorphous entity that attacked Meshner also the sender of that signal? Had it once been Erma Lante, or indeed had there ever been such an individual?

Memory pieces fall into place as her ants replenish enough for her to recover and access them. Detail level is coarse but, very shortly before the attack, Helena had been talking about the cautionary recordings the octopuses had retained. There had been a human woman named Lante. That was thousands of years ago.

So: Lante had been studying the alien ecosphere and her work was recorded in the station, preserved from the elder days, until some random system began playing those recordings…? Kern backtracks on her own logic, even as other parts of her are feeling out the electronic architecture of the station, cautious as a bomb disposal expert, while still other parts of her are trying to regenerate the systems of the Lightfoot, one such system being herself.

She relegates the possibility of some errant automatic system because whatever was transmitting had reacted and changed its behaviour in apparent response to her queries. A computer, then, following some corrupted programming, except she had searched exhaustively for any such system and found none. Perhaps it had gone into hiding, cut off somewhere in the orbiting hulk. Perhaps not.

The organic thing had been in that room, with that terminal. It had been confined to a human shape, with a console designed (roughly) for that shape. And yet it had been… ooze. Not a mollusc, not an arachnid, not a thing of Earth at all, but in any event a thing whose closest analogue might be some kind of slime mould.

More ants, more pieces, a greater breadth of thought, backup archives located and enabled. Kern is feeling more herself.

Slime moulds on Earth were a common research subject. Scientists had studied them for centuries because of their self-organizing capability, that enabled a loose mass of individual cells to act as a macro-organism, a predator even, all without any neurology whatsoever.

She diverts valuable attention to access the Lante Diaries. The content is garbled, partly incomprehensible. Kern delegates part of herself to assimilate this trove of knowledge but she is short of resources and analysing the contradictory, garbled document requires human- or Portiid-level functioning. She is stretching herself too thin.

She wants Meshner back. It is not a good use of her stretched resources. She is not acting on the instruction of her crew, who are rather more concerned about their own survival right now. Why, then, is she set on this path? She tells herself that solving this question is not a good use of her resources, and even as she does she recognizes the stance as purely self-serving.

Theory 1: her artificial decision-making processes (the ones that feel, to her, like real decision-making processes because that is what it is like to be this attenuated autonomous outgrowth of the original living woman Avrana Kern) have become dangerously compromised by the experience of simulated emotion within Meshner’s implant and brain, so that she is prioritizing the recovery of that facility over other more germane capabilities like long-term life support.

Theory 2: guilt. She drove Meshner to his doom, because of her obsession with not only finding something like herself in the station, but experiencing that finding through the medium of Meshner’s mind. Of course, guilt is not something she can actually feel right now, beyond a logical acknowledgement of her culpability, but if she could locate and retrieve Meshner then she would be able to feel all the guilt she wanted, all the self-indulgent, cloying, marvellous guilt she just knows is out there ready to be experienced…

Theory 3: Kern is damaged. She damaged herself by playing with qualia she should have left well alone, and that has been compounded by the crash, during which she prioritized the survival of the crew over her own integrity. Repairs are underway, but right now she is not in a position to make fully informed decisions, including the decision to tell Viola of that incapacity. So: she will find Meshner, if Meshner is to be found, because it is a bad decision and right now that is indicative of her state of repair.

And then she finds him, or she finds his implant—still live, still riddled with those open comms vulnerabilities that made it so useful to her.

It comes down to a simple calculation. If the thing that holds the station is capable of setting such a trap, then this could definitely be a trap. If Kern wants to discover the fate of Meshner she will have to risk that trap and rely on her own ability to extricate herself or turn it back on its creator.

She considers that she is not in a position to reliably make that simple calculation of risk.

She goes in.

Not heedlessly. She accesses the implant like a swimmer easing herself into the water, with as few ripples as possible. Meshner himself would not know. She does not interface with the sensorium within, no matter how much certain parts of her are prompting her to do so. She accesses its lowest operating level, calling up status reports. Is there any activity in the implant; is there any activity in Meshner’s brain?

She re-sends the query three times because the answer seems outside reasonable parameters, but Meshner’s brain is very active indeed. The implant is working at capacity, far too busy to cause her any difficulties. In fact it is reconfiguring itself, following its own rules, making its use of computing power more efficient so that it can spoof more sensory data to its user; that elegant little flourish of Fabian’s that allows the implant to restructure its Human-tech electronic architecture as though it was Portiid organic engineering.

But what is it doing? An odd time for Meshner to be reliving his memories or accessing Portiid Understandings.

She only has one way of finding out, and that is to access the higher level functioning of the implant, and thereby become part of the madness, whatever that madness might be. And it’s crowded in there. If she goes in, she will be stretching her consciousness in an arc that encompasses the downed ship, the drone and the implant, lending out her meagre, scavenged processing power to become part of the greater whole. That is a trap of a whole other kind, a set of jaws she will be putting her head into of her own volition. If she cannot extricate her logic from that of the virtual environment she enters (for reasons of, for example, deep and enduring damage to her own decision-making processes) then she will be dooming Fabian, Viola and Zaine as well as herself. And there may not be anything of Meshner to save. The activity she is witnessing, for all it has the shape of meaning, might just be a storm of defective synapses, natural and artificial. It might just be screaming.

But she is Avrana Kern, and one part of her that is very much intact, front and centre is her sense of her own ability to master any situation. Those safeguards and gatekeepers that should have tempered this faith in herself are offline, and so she does what an Avrana Kern does in the circumstances. She takes charge. She goes in.