Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)
Children of Ruin: Past 1 – Chapter 4

Terraforming gave them all time to think. Yes, they were hurrying the planet’s changes along at a ludicrous rate, compared to geological time: from iceball to ocean within a small slice of a human lifetime. Still, humans had evolved to live with days and months and seasons. The waiting was hard. Nobody wanted to just fall back into cold sleep the moment the opportunity arose, telling the Aegean to wake them in a decade. They wanted to see the world below them start to germinate before they closed their eyes. And so they practised art, music, read the ship’s stored library front to back, played procedurally generated strategy games advertised never to repeat themselves. And almost everyone became obsessive, now and then. The Earth link was what got most of them. Poullister, Han, Maylem, they had all spent time trying to discuss what was happening back home. People were fighting. There were localized war zones—mostly the traditional sort where the big players’ soldiers got to go play in the back yards of their neighbours, to minimize the property damage of friendly allies. Proxy wars, and keeping it clean so far, but everyone knew that there were stocks of chemical and biological agents just sitting around waiting for someone to lose patience with polite and limited wars. And the news was old, of course, over three decades. They were out here on the edge of humanity’s sphere of influence, their ability to communicate with home crippled by the insuperable laws of relativity.

Senkovi had heard Poullister and Maylem in full-blown argument—one of those pointless rows where both of them were effectively arguing the same case, where the argument itself was the point, not the winning of it. He hadn’t realized, before then, just how riled up everyone was about Earth and the growing conflict they were hearing about, a generation late. And probably it was all settled now, peace and harmony, but that old demon relativity brought an end to any difference in acceleration between good news and bad, truth and rumour. None of it could get to them faster than the light of their home world’s distant sun, leaving them to endlessly speculate about how bad things might have got.

Senkovi himself kept out of the discussion and kept out of their way. He was already obsessive, a trait he had proudly smuggled onto the Aegean long before it had become de rigueur, and he was using the waiting time to indulge in his own personal schemes.

When Han came to see him—this was months after his brittle détente with Baltiel over Paul—her first comment was, “You’re supposed to be in the freezer by now.”

“Don’t wanna,” Senkovi told her, sticking out his bottom lip because he’d learned that with some people a veneer of feigned childishness could transform his peculiarities from obnoxiously antisocial to charming. “Busy.”

“Busy keeping us out of here,” she noted. “This was Payload Bay Seven, wasn’t it? Only none of this looks like payload, Disra.”

“It is payload. Of a sort.” He was already being defensive, and he’d hoped to keep that in reserve when charmingly childish wore thin. “I filed a plan with Baltiel. He’s all over this like a rash, believe me.”

“Disra, I saw the plan you filed. It was… thin. And you must have pushed past its parameters an age ago. Preliminary testing, it said.”

“And it went very well, so I made an executive decision. Baltiel will back me.”

Han was a tall, slender woman who looked as though she should be an aesthete, all impromptu haiku and abstract paintings. In fact her paintings were all of robots, fantastical, impractical metal humanoids lit by industrial fires or explosions, as though she had a window onto a world where cybernetics had gone in very different directions. On top of that, perhaps despite that, she was the best engineer on the terraforming team, a genius mathematician and a pilot. And all of that, Senkovi had thought, should have been enough to keep her busy and not send her snooping around here. He felt like a boy caught doing something untoward after lights out, sitting on the floor of Bay Seven with a half-gutted virtual console, lit by the azure radiance of the big tank he’d had constructed.

Han put a hand to the transparent plastic, seeing the occupants detach from the fake coral and rocks he’d given them, drifting towards her fingers to see if they would give any entertainment value. “I’m guessing you’re not sending them planetside any time soon,” she noted. “Unless you’ve engineered the fuck out of them to not need oxygen or Earth-style temperatures or pH.”

“As it happens they aren’t ready for deployment, no,” Senkovi told her shortly, wishing she’d just go away and, if possible, forget everything she was currently looking at. “I’m still very much in the R&D phase of the project, as you must know if you’ve read—”

“Why squid?”

“Not squid. Octopi. Octopuses if you want to be a slave to the dictionary. And why not? What’s wrong with them?”

Han glanced down at him. “You’ve got a genetic library that’s a good slice of Earth biodiversity, Disra. You’ve got the kit here to hatch out anything, un-extinct it. Poullister was talking about making a dog.”

Disra, not much of a dog person, shrugged. “Why not? I mean, what would you do? Let me guess, you had a cat, back home? Fish?” He decided Han probably had owned a cat, or had wanted to own a cat but hadn’t lived somewhere she could get a pet permit. Maybe she’d had a robot cat, one of those good little machines that purred and sat on your lap and then its ears fell off the moment its warranty expired.

“I’d make a tiger,” Han said.

Senkovi was speechless for a long time, enough that his console began lighting up with frustrated red error messages as his fellow game player got annoyed with his inaction. “Huh,” he managed eventually.

Han grinned down at him—it was the first time he had ever seen her smile, perhaps. He suddenly found his opinion of her completely revised. She wanted to recreate a tiger, here on the Aegean, where the narrow corridors and enclosed workspaces would lead to an interesting work-life balance for the humans having to share the ship with a large carnivore. And, of course, she’d never go ahead and actually do it. Senkovi was frankly the only person on the ship who would just live the dream and to hell with the opinions or even permissions of others. But the thought was there and Senkovi decided he liked Han a lot better for it.

“I had a tiger when I was a kid,” she said candidly, and he wondered if that meant a stuffed toy, or if she came from an income bracket considerably above even his own rather privileged one. “But you, you’ve got a whole load of these… octopi. And no tigers.”

“Ah well, the key failing with tigers is that their performance drops off sharply when you get them to mend coolant pipes a kilometre below the surface of the ocean.”

Han stared at him for long enough to make him uncomfortable, then the grin was back. “That’s not what this is about,” she pointed out.

Senkovi thought about keeping up the presence but decided she was too sharp for it. “Oh, well, it is. I mean, that’s the end goal. But I had an octopus when I was a kid.” Rather more than one, but the narrative was simpler that way. Then his console beeped sharply at him and he hurriedly made a move to keep it quiet.

Too late, though, for Han was crouching down beside him. “Who are you playing against? Is that Poullister? He can’t play worth a damn.” The console was displaying a tile-laying game, a little idealized landscape half-constructed from squares, linking roads, rivers, cities. And it was a mess, pieces all over, roads spiralling to nowhere, the spiky walls of towns clustering like sea urchins.

“It’s… Not Poullister, no.”

Han’s eyes were following where the cables from the console led. And yes, he could have just run the whole thing in virtual space on the Aegean’s system, and that was the logical next step. Right now he was trying to keep his games private, because the others would mock.

Han wasn’t mocking, though. He could see the wheels of her mind turning. “You’re…”

“Paul,” Senkovi explained. “Well, Paul 5. He’s the most successfully modified. He likes the console and experiencing virtual space. I’d thought… well, there are humans who never really take to a virtuality, but the octopi are all about manipulating space. There’s no tactile element for them yet, and I thought that would be the sticking point, but they get it very quickly, Paul 5 especially. So I’m trying some simple games. With debatable success. He makes moves, and he’s understood the limits the game places on when he can move and what moves can be made, but as far as strategy or points or winning, that seems to be outside his range at the moment.”

“Tell him he doesn’t get fed if he loses,” Han suggested, staring into the tank.

Senkovi had tried that. Pavlovian motivation wasn’t terribly useful for training an octopus. Once they were fed, food became a lesser motivator than curiosity. Also, when Senkovi had contrived to communicate that the game hid a shrimp inside it somehow, Paul 2 had broken the game trying to take it apart.

“We’re going to need this space back for payload sooner rather than later,” Han remarked eventually, even somewhat regretfully.

“Firstly, this is payload, albeit highly experimental. Secondly, we don’t. Look, I’ve reorganized. We can get by on the other bays. I’ve even gained us some space.” He sent over his changes, which were in fact just as advertised, to the virtual space their mind’s eyes shared. The designers of the Aegean had been slacking somewhat, leaning on their large budget. Senkovi had improved on their work to provide the ship with improved economy of space and movement of matériel, the sort of thing that someone might have achieved genuine commendations for. The entire elaborate operation looked good on paper to anyone who didn’t suspect he’d gone through it solely because he wanted more space for fishtanks.

After Han had gone, he finished the game and fed his pets, hoping that the rest of the ship wasn’t already tittering behind his back about crazy Senkovi and his performing molluscs. The console was already flashing, though, despite Paul being busy dismantling a crab.

It was one of the others, Salome. She had been watching Paul, and now she had used her own newly implanted connection to break into the game system. She had moved as much as she could but now needed him to take his own turn before she could continue playing.

Senkovi suspected he should probably get away from the tanks and go have human contact or something healthy like that. On the other hand, he’d just had an actual conversation, which was quite wearying, and he could hardly disappoint such a keen experimental subject.

He sat down again, dropping a tile into the virtual space and waiting to see what Salome would do.

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