Children of Ruin (Children of Time, #2)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

“If you can look into the seeds of time, And say which grain will grow and which will not…” William Shakespeare, Macbeth

Senkovi’s personal theory was that the pressure of being in the middle of the food chain was an essential prerequisite for complex intelligence. Like humans (and like Portiid spiders, had he only known), octopuses had developed in a world where they were both hunter and hunted. Top predators, in Senkovi’s assessment, were an intellectual dead end.

Avrana Kern has only limited and artificial emotional responses, being dead and a computer composed at least partially of ants.

And that in itself is a miracle; that is the grand triumph Senkovi never grasped, that his creatures could empathize, could apply a theory of mind to entities quite unlike themselves, could be great-hearted enough to be happy that someone else was laughing, even if they couldn’t get the joke.

Portiid brains are more uniform, though; they have more common experience with each other than Humans, and hence sympathize with each others’ trauma more readily, rather than each becoming a solitary prisoner of their experiences, as Humans so often are.

His Reach is helpless in the face of his wild desires: it cannot turn back time. All Lot knows is that there was a grandness that had been within the extent of his arms, and had he stretched them to their fullest extent he could almost have touched that golden future.

According to Lante’s own notes, this is something like a bacterial culture. Individual cells are duplicated and reproduce themselves and then die off, but the information they contain is also duplicated. A single cell could produce a huge colony if allowed to reproduce unchecked, and bequeath to all its descendants all the information it contained. There is no suggestion of hierarchy or sharing out of information—that would take a level of organization I don’t read it as being capable of. Therefore, if this thing can reproduce Lante it is because she is contained within every part of it that came into contact with her.