Adrian Tchaikovsky: Children of Time

She saw the flare not even in her mind’s eye, but through the brief flower of damage reports from the Brin 2’s computers, as all of her colleagues and her facility, and Sering the traitor, and all of her work became abruptly no more than a rapidly disassociating cloud of fragments, a ghost-breath of dissipating atmosphere, with some unrecognizable organic remains.

Correct course and stabilize . She had been expecting a shockwave, but the Sentry Pod was already far enough away, and the Brin 2’s energy and matter were so miniscule, compared to the distances involved, that barely any adjustment was required to ensure the Sentry Pod remained within its programmed orbit.

Show me. She braced herself for the image, but, really, at this remove it seemed almost nothing. A flash; a tiny burned boat of all her ideas and friends.

In the final analysis it had all been nothing more than a barrel of over-evolved monkeys, after all. From this distance, against the vast and heedless backdrop of Everything Else, it was hard to say why any of it had ever mattered at all.

Distress beacon , she ordered. Because they would need to know, on Earth, what had happened. They had to know that they must come and collect her, wake her like Sleeping Beauty. After all, she was Doctor Kern. She was the future of the human race, right here. They needed her.

Twenty long years for her signal to reach Earth. Far more than that for the rescue to come back, even with the best fusion engines employed to accelerate to three-quarter light speed. But her frail body would survive that long in cold sleep – and more than that.

Some hours later, she saw the end of it: she saw the Barrel hit atmosphere.

It was not on the planned trajectory, the conflagration of the Brin 2 having sent it off on a tangent so that it narrowly avoided being hurled forever into empty space. Its cargo would not care, in the long run. The Barrel burned, streaking like a meteor through the atmosphere of the green world. Somehow the thought of the insensate terror that its primate occupants must be going through, as they died in ignorance by fear and burning, touched her more than the death of her fellow humans. And wouldn’t Sering claim that as evidence that he was right?

From force of habit, a redundant professional thoroughness, she located the Flask, watching as the smaller canister fell through the atmosphere at a gentler angle, delivering its viral cargo to a world devoid of the simians it was intended for.

We can always get more monkeys . That was a curious mantra, but it made her feel better. The uplift virus would last for millennia. The project would survive the treachery and death of its creators. She herself would ensure it.

Listen for a change in radio signals. Wake me when you hear it , she instructed.

The pod computer was not happy about that. It required more exacting parameters. Kern thought over all the developments back home she might want to be appraised of. Listing them all was tantamount to trying to predict the future.

Then give me options.

Her HUD streamed with possibilities. The pod computer was a sophisticated piece of engineering, complex enough that it could feign sentience, if not quite own to it.

Upload facility , she noted. It was not the most pleasant thought in the world, but was she not always saying how much easier life would be if she could arrange everything herself? The pod could upload an image of her consciousness into itself. Albeit an imperfect copy, it would form a Kern-computer composite that would be able to react to external events in a simulation of her own best judgement. She scanned through the caveats and notes – more cutting-edge technology that they were due to have pioneered. Over time it was predicted that the AI network would further incorporate the uploaded Kern so that the composite would be able to make finer and finer distinctions. Potentially the end result would be something smarter and more capable than the simple sum total of human and machine combined.

Do it , she instructed, lying back and waiting for the pod to begin scanning her brain. Just let them be quick with the rescue party.

She is Portia, and she is hunting.

She is eight millimetres long but she is a tiger within her tiny world, fierce and cunning. Like all spiders, she has a body of two parts. Her small abdomen holds her book-lungs and the bulk of her gut. Her head-body is dominated by two huge eyes facing forwards for perfect binocular vision, beneath a pair of tiny tufts that crown her like horns. She is fuzzy with hair in broken patterns of brown and black. To predators, she looks more dead leaf than live prey.

She waits. Below her formidable eyes her fangs are flanked by limb-like mouthparts: her palps, coloured a startling white like a quivering moustache. Science has named her Portia labiata , just another unassuming species of jumping spider.

Her attention is fixed on another spider at home in its web. This is Scytodes pallida , longer-limbed and hunchbacked and able to spit toxic webbing. Scytodes specializes in catching and eating jumping spiders like Portia.

Portia specializes in eating spider-eating spiders, most of whom are larger and stronger than she.

Her eyes are remarkable. The visual acuity of a primate peers out from those pinhead-sized discs and the flexible chambers behind them, piecing together the world around her.

Portia has no thoughts. Her sixty thousand neurons barely form a brain, contrasted with a human’s one hundred billion. But something goes on in that tiny knot of tissue. She has already recognized her enemy, and knows its spit will make any frontal assault fatal. She has been playing with the edge of the Scytodes’s web, sending tactile lies to it of varying shades to see if it can be lured out. The target has twitched once or twice, but it will not be deceived.

This is what a few tens of thousands of neurons can do: Portia has tried and failed, variation after variation, homing in on those that evinced the most response, and now she will go about things differently.

Her keen eyes have been examining the surroundings of the web, the branches and twigs that hang over and below it. Somewhere in her little knot of neurons a three-dimensional map has been built up from her meticulous scrutiny, and she has plotted a painstaking course to where she may come at the Scytodes from above, like a minute assassin. The approach is not perfect, but it is the best the environment will allow, and her scrap of brain has worked all this out as a theoretical exercise ahead of time. The planned approach will take her out of sight of her prey for much of the journey, but even when her prey is beyond view, it will remain in her tiny mind.

If her prey was something other than Scytodes, then she would have different tactics – or would experiment until something worked. It usually does.

Portia’s ancestors have been making these calculations and decisions for millennia, each generation fractionally more accomplished because the best hunters are the ones that eat well and lay more eggs.

So far, so natural, and Portia is just about to set off on her quest when movement attracts her gaze.

Another of her species has arrived, a male. He has also been studying the Scytodes, but now his acute eyes are locked on her.

Past individuals of her species might have decided that the little male was a safer lunch than the Scytodes, and made plans accordingly, but now something changes. The presence of the male speaks to her. It is a complex new experience. The crouching figure there at the far side of the Scytodes’s web is not just prey/mate/irrelevant. There is an invisible connection strung between them. She does not quite grasp that he is something like her , but her formidable ability to calculate strategies has gained a new dimension. A new category appears that expands her options a hundredfold: ally .