Children of Memory (Children of Time, #3)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

You will fail, and when you do, you must do everything you can to fail as little as possible. Don’t let the failure get its teeth into you. You will make decisions that come with a cost. That is Command. Do not let the cost consume you.

‘What have we got down there?’ Holt asked, because this was how you did it. This was Command. You did not mourn. You moved forwards.

She’s learning that getting a proper education doesn’t answer questions, it just teaches you to ask them.

‘Someone’s got to say it.’ A statement only made, in Miranda’s experience, by the sole person with any interest in saying a given thing.

there was a regrettable incident that left the remnants of the Octopus civilization existing purely in orbit, and we’re telling you this in a spirit of free and frank disclosure. Mistakes, on a very grand level and with terrible consequences, were made. We didn’t understand. We lacked, in a very real sense, perspective.

At the same time, there were certain technological developments the Octopuses had been working on that proved useful to a burgeoning civilization of intrepid explorers, and everyone got to go on an adventure that we’re all still on.

They call us an Interlocutor, because we are the communion between all things that have decided to become a part of us. We are the thing from Nod.

She is our wave-form sister, who might be anything, up until the point when we meet with her again, open the box and discover what’s inside. That is how our society must work now.

We seek for every possibility of life and sentience, because the universe is vast and cold and mostly empty, and variance from that void is to be treasured.

‘That is not very scientific,’ the AI complained. ‘I’m still not convinced it isn’t a biological Eliza.’ She scowled at the thought, accessing old memories. Miranda had to dig deep for that one. Eliza was a virtual entity designed to feign humanity, and proof of how little you really needed to generate empathy in the human mind. Just like seeing faces in objects, people would read personalities into anything that spoke to them.

She has the definite sense of moving into something like a story. Not a book-story, but something like a page torn from one, ragged edged, starting and ending mid-sentence, forever lost from its proper place.

They jostle and joke amongst themselves, and whoop and say in over-loud voices how this’ll show them. She knows they don’t even know who they are. But that’s not important once you’ve decided there’s an us and a them. Only the fact of the division matters.

Oxygen was – to quote Mikhail Elesco, the team’s top geologist – a needy bastard that couldn’t stand not to be in a relationship, no matter how toxic. You didn’t get lots of oxygen unless something was separating it from its romantic partners and kicking it out into the street. So they had spent a lot of valuable terraforming time not finding the locals.

Some birds had become hyper-obsessive about detail, their natural curiosity for the new honed to an almost preternatural awareness. Coasting high over the blasted landscape of Rourke, they noted every little thing, each discontinuity and novelty leaping out at them. They had in their little brains a perfect recollection of how things had been, so that every change screamed in their minds, demanding attention.

Then there were the others, who could see none of this. So unable to focus on their surroundings that they should surely have died to marauding raccoons in a moment, had they not had another pair of eyes watching their feathered backs. Instead they were monomaniac problem solvers, who would still be trying to get a treat out of a bottle just as the frothing raccoon ate them, unable to stop until they’d found the precise angle that would solve their difficulties.

So, two stable sets of neuropathies, equally non-viable, save that if you ended up with a matching pair, the recognizer and the solver, you had something like a complete unit.

But then blame is just credit for something that’s gone wrong. And everything here’s gone wrong already. All we can do is find ways to make it go wrong differently, in the hopes we might zero in on something actually right.

There’s a story about how to measure infinity by a bird wearing down a mountain the size of a universe with its beak. And by the end we felt like that bird.

We will have to merely imagine her waking with the information in her mind, as though we’d left a book at the foot of her bed. Turning the pages to discover the tale of other worlds . . . Once upon a time . .

The big discussion they would all have to have, sooner rather than later. They needed to reveal themselves to the people of Imir, and show their true faces: the many legs, the palps, the tentacles, the beady bird eyes. And the moment they did so, for the best possible reasons, they would exterminate absolutely everything that the Imiri had built up on this world. The entire history of the human colony here would become merely a temporary holding vessel for humans until their well-heeled cousins from a different version of events swanned in to lend a high-tech hand.

Sometimes tomorrow’s just a today that got lost.

They were, after all, from a culture that had struggled out of the gravity well, out of need and want, and into a realm where they could go anywhere, with all the time the universe had to offer. Curiosity was one of the few drives still unsatisfied. It bred a certain complacency.

But now we’re borrowing, and what we’re borrowing is more us. Mimicry is what we’re good at, after all. So we mimic ourselves over and over until we – if I might make the pun – inflict a great unkindness on Imir. An attempted murder, perhaps.

‘Your approach to the problem was novel. I wouldn’t have arrived at it.’ She thinks of problem-solving AI algorithms from back in her day, which could often find remarkably unintuitive but effective solutions to things whilst being dumb as bricks in all other respects.

‘The essential fallacy,’ Gothi picks up, ‘is that humans and other biologically evolved, calculating engines feel themselves to be sentient, when sufficient investigation suggests this is not so. And that sentience, as imagined by the self-proclaimed sentient, is an illusion manufactured by a sufficiently complex series of neural interactions. A simulation, if you will.’

‘They’re as real as anyone,’ is the position Miranda won’t budge from. She gives them one of the old quotes that Gothi dug up for her. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.