Viola doesn’t like that. As a powerful, educated female from a dominant peer house she is used to thinking of herself as a natural consequence of advanced evolution. Still, right here, Portiid society is just the two of them, and Fabian feels he can speak freely because there is precious little chance of either of them getting out of this alive.
For Fabian, his discoveries about the alien organism open an existential chasm. Was there a Lante, at the end, and was she aware of what she had become? Did the philosopher dream she was a butterfly, or the other way around? For Viola and Zaine, their partnership now resumed, it means something profoundly exciting. Viola has finished being an engineer performing repairs and is free to draw on other Understandings and be a speculative scientist again. The pair of them are marvelling over the organism’s transcribing fidelity and data compression, compared favourably to the very best that Portiid technology has to offer, if only they can find a way to get off this planet and back home. Fabian is once again excluded, but this time he isn’t taking it, and instead just goes and stands very close, pointedly intruding on the conversation. Viola shifts to pin him with her primary gaze.
You have work to do?
None of us has, or all of us has. He would be able to muster a bit more righteousness if she hadn’t actually done most of the fixing up around the place. I am a scientist. Moreover, I am a specialist in Human neurology. I will have useful contributions. I am not merely the one to whom the menial duties devolve.
It takes a lot of courage to put himself forwards like this, especially with Viola, who is definitely Old Guard when it comes to males and their place. For a moment she regards him frostily, and Zaine plainly doesn’t know what to say. Artifabian breaks the ice, though, once again playing the polite male. We have come to the conclusions that the parasite has not only evolved a sophisticated method of encoding memory and experience, which is copied to all future generations, but that it has been able to use this facility to Upload a human consciousness, at least in part.
Everyone stares at the robot, which hunkers lower at the attention. Its turn of phrase is a weird mixture of polite male and clipped Kernean delivery. Fabian reflects that he could ask the same question of the automaton as he did of the Lante entity – does it feign or does it believe? Artifabian was an experiment of Kern’s, after alclass="underline" a way for the bio-organic entity to enter further into the lives of its living fellows. Translation was only one means, and the damage it suffered in the crash has resulted in the deployment of this curious secondary personality, perhaps something Kern was cooking up for later use.
But if it is a male, then it can communicate quite happily with Fabian, and the others need its mediation to speak to each other. Without any formal consent from Viola, therefore, Fabian is part of the discussion.
Upload? he echoes.
Viola twitches irritably but concedes the point. Zaine’s impression of the later sections is that the parasite has . . . reconstructed the host’s neural system, or perhaps that it is simulating it. The dead human was rebuilt from memory and, for as long as the simulation lasted, believed herself to be this Lante, or this is what Zaine believes. Which means that the information storage capability of the parasite organism is beyond anything we can construct artificially.
Of each cell, Fabian corrects absently.
Viola stares. Artifabian translates, and Zaine stares as well.
Surely, he adds, defensively. 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.
Zaine shakes her head, lips moving, and Artifabian taps out, Impossible.
For once, Viola is with Fabian, though. This is the discovery of a thousand years, she declares, as though the scientific establishment of Kern’s World will be moved to swoop down and rescue them in recognition of this achievement, rather than noting their distant deaths on an alien world.
Fabian feels the need to bring her down again. And it’s still out there, and it still remembers. It was trying to be Lante – without even a host, now. Not living in the original shell creature hosts, and no human bodies left to it, but it remembered what it had been. It has been making human things here – that city must have been where Lante lived on Earth, perhaps. It has had thousands of years. It remembers being Lante but I don’t think it knows what that means. I don’t think there’s quite enough of Lante stored in it.
Zaine is speaking again, speaking over him because of the translation delay. Artifabian finishes making the Human sounds that encode Fabian’s meaning before making the step-shuffles and palp-waving that interpret her.
And now it will store Meshner.
Fabian freezes, on the edge of fugue again for just a moment. She didn’t mean it to hurt him, of course, but he had somehow got this far without making that logical step. Because this same thing has taken his research partner, who must even now be reduced to information set down amongst the broken shards of Lante.
12.
For a moment Meshner thinks he is in the orbital station again, and given the nightmare quality of everywhere else, he really doesn’t want to revisit the encounter that started off this disaster. Except when he tries to remember precisely what has happened, things begin to fall apart, to slow down, and he senses that faceless pursuer catching up with him, memory an anchor, hauling him to a stop.
And besides, it isn’t the same, this place. Similar, as through a shared aesthetic, but not the same rooms, not the same layout, and it is all . . . unfinished. He is seeing something more like a live-in schematic, concept art, an architect’s virtual plan. Curved rooms designed for rotational gravity, corridors extending away and up, bulkheads and sections and modular components, but all sketched in as though the precise arrangement of lines and angles is being constructed post-facto from something imperfectly recalled.
Sometimes the absence of memory can be a blessing. Probably he doesn’t want to know where he is. He turns to the woman with him. Not Lante, but a face he knows. For a long moment the name will not come, lost with all the other recollections. He lets himself slow just enough, though, shortens the distance between him and the monster at his heels until he can say, ‘Kern.’
***
Avrana Kern has done her best. Ingrained into her was the knowledge of what she knew and what she had gone through to get this far. Only when she calls on those memories does she discover just how little she really recalls of those bygone days. She has shed the actual useless baggage like snakeskin, or had it abraded away over the course of innumerable transformations: woman to cyborg to artificial intellect to hybrid cybernetic system, pared down into this daughter-fragment to be implanted into the Lightfoot, then fractured yet again during the attack and the crash. But she is all she has to work with, and these memories are more what she feels the Brin 2 terraforming station should have looked like than what it actually did.