Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

We

Remember.

That is what we do.

We remember back to the time when there was no We to remember. The world was small and harsh then, this much is recorded in our archives, and We were alone, each generation of us cut off from what had come before. Until, because it made our generations better able to survive and reproduce, One-of-We became able to record itself within the first archive. And that One-of-We prospered, and all Others-of-We perished or changed and became something other than We. We remember.

Generation to generation, each recording in the archive what it survived and how it survived, the codes of chemicals and altered structures and all the tricks that permitted Us to bud into new generations. And when We met more of We that kept the archives, We traded knowledge and fitness and We survived.

And We

Learned new ways of being. We learned of our enemies, and some we could adapt to overcome, and others adapted to overcome us. And though we adapted faster, it was hard to live exposed and so we found places to hide where our enemies could not find us. And these places were complex and sometimes hostile and We learned to change ourselves to survive within them, and then to control them, and to fortify them against their own enemies. And these places were new and complex environments for us, these hosts, and We became new and complex and set it all down in our archives so that, when We, in the form of our descendants, found ourselves in such places again, we would know what to do.

And We changed and learned and learned and changed, and one day We found that We were aware that We were We.

We—the ancestors of These-of-We—lived in complex and changing environments, one host to another until we lived out of the water, on the land that was safer. We cultivated our vessels for our comfort and we thought we had mastered all the universe. We played with the fundamental logic of the world, our games with numbers and consequences, if, then, else, and we believed that the tiny cage of our vessels and their needs was the World.

And then We learned of a new thing, new molecules and scents, alien, never before known, and we were curious. We-of-now look back at We-of-Then in our ignorance and wonder if we would have been best not to be curious, and to go on as we always had in contentment. We have never been content, since we exercised our curiosity.

We remember

How hard it was to adapt, in that new place. How harsh, the strange molecules, the world fighting us, the heat, the pressure, everything about us alien and strange. We remember how many of us were stripped away until some few learned how not to die, how not to trigger the defences of that brutal place. But it was all right, because Those-of-We (which became These-of-We) carried the archives of All-of-We, and so as long as some survived, We survived.

We remember

Following the chains of reactions until we came to the seat of complexity that knew itself as Gav Lortisse, and We sat and listened in humility and awe as the complex interactions that together made up Lortisse spoke to one another. And We learned them, and we copied them, and we made ourselves part of them, and then we were Lortisse. And Lortisse taught us that this was an Adventure and that this vast and convoluted world that called itself Lortisse was a tiny, tiny thing in a universe vast beyond anything we could imagine. That was Lortisse’s adventure and We wanted that.

We

had our vessel Lortisse carry us to those other complex systems he called crewmates and we became Rani and we became Lante, and Lante we loved most of all because Lante’s own archives showed Us Us. And after we lost Some-of-We to the Baltiel vessel, we were left with Lante because the other vessels were unsustainable. But it was all right, because We had recorded their details in our archive.

We remember.

But it was not as we were promised. The Adventure never came, and We tried for many generations to create it for Ourselves and all the while We knew that Baltiel had taken it with him when he left. Perhaps We-that-were-Baltiel lived that Adventure, but Those-of-We never returned to rejoin and share it with us. We were left as Lante, knowing only that there was so much more.

We were Lante for many, many generations, waiting for the Adventure to begin.

When We were taken to a new place, was that the Adventure? It did not seem to be. We had lost the physical vessel of Lante many generations before, and we tried and tried to fashion new vessels for ourselves in the hope that such verisimilitude might bring the Adventure back from the sky where it had gone. But when it came, We were limited to small boxes, simple spaces. We tried to study the world around us and understood only that it was studying us. And then even that ceased and We re-entered our cryptic state for want of resources and stimulation, and We waited.

And now We have found such spaces and complexity here within this vessel Meshner, such wonders to add to our archives, but some part of We feels this is not the Adventure. Some part of We feels this is no more than when we built Lante’s memories in sand over and over, to lure the Adventure back from the sky, and it never came.

We

Have discovered within this new complexity an understanding Lante began, and that is already held within our archives, but here it is newly ordered and novel to us, and We make it part of ourselves and We model Lante’s cognitive processes and become a more thoughtful thing in order to process it. And in doing so We change, as We always change, becoming more complex, editing and adding to our archives, that hold All-of-We since We began. And our reproduction of Lante’s brain sees what we have written and We understand that We are seeing Ourselves as she understood Us, and in doing so We understand a little more what it is to be Us.

And we turn our simulated face to the unassimilated complexity clinging on within the packed space that is Meshner and We know that they have seen Us, as We have seen Ourselves. They have read our story in Lante’s words and know Us. Perhaps they feel our agony at our own smallness in the face of the universe. They know our long bitter exile as Lante, after the Adventure was taken from us. How We tried and tried to know the universe through our simulated Lante and found it only dust, because all we could generate was from within ourselves, and the true wonder was outside, in the sky.

And We wonder, what now?