Children of Ruin (Children of Time, #2)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

“Infinite variety and complexity, forever and forever,” Lante says conversationally, the indistinct motions of her lips in no way syncing with the words. “Yeah, but you didn’t actually get that, did you?” Kern replies. “I’ve seen the pictures from the planet, what you made down there. Bits of city, over and over, stuck in a loop without any outside input to freshen things up. I bet you wish you never learned what it was to get bored.”

variety that must last forever, save that one day all the permutations are stale and cold, and the organism is left with the ghosts that are all it can conjure up, the stilled husks of its vessels, like clocks stopped the moment it got its pseudopods into their brains. Let it jiggle their strings all it likes, there is nothing they can do that does not come from within it. Where is the novelty it sought, the variety of the universe?

One day it finds itself on some far orb, utterly alone despite all its plurality, every possible variation of its archives plumbed, the stars still out of reach, knowing only that it has encountered cultures and civilizations and individuals of indescribable difference and diversity, and made them all into its own image. It is a child reaching for a soap bubble in innocent wonder, and finding only an oily residue on its hands, and the world cheapened and coarsened. And it weeps, if such a thing can weep. Perhaps, by then and after so many bodies, it has finally learned.

Now she discovers, when it is too late, that the Lightfoot’s computer intellect was right in the cerebral Goldilocks zone all along, human enough to be mourned.

And Kern speaks: the intentions of an alien culture, filtered through a once-human computer now rapidly running out of thinking room, through a Portiid spider, through a Human and into the world of the cephalopods that even now have their arms about the trigger.