Children of Time, #2
Children of Ruin
by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Contents
PAST 3: FOR WE ARE MANY — CHAPTER 6.
Overview
Paul 97’s colony reveals how far Senkovi’s uplifted octopi have developed: they form unstable but persistent multi-generational societies, communicate through emotional art, and use distributed cognition through their arms and social contact. The colony independently detects and corrects flaws in the terraforming system, showing that Senkovi’s experiment has escaped his direct control while still advancing his goal of making Damascus habitable.
The chapter reframes the octopi not as simple subjects of uplift but as a growing civilization with its own alien forms of consensus, engineering, and reverence. Their view of Senkovi as benevolent but not divine underscores the widening gulf between human intentions and octopus thought.
Summary
Paul 97 lives among 139 other octopi in a colony formed around the terraforming machinery. The Rus-Califi nanovirus, applied cautiously by Disra Senkovi, has strengthened the social parts of the octopus brain: juveniles remain near adults, generations overlap, lifespans have lengthened, and the colony grudgingly functions despite conflict, dominance displays, and territoriality.
Paul 97 understands the world in a fluid, inhuman way. His Crown processes instinct, emotion, social arrangements, the Aegean, Senkovi, colony members, and machinery as felt relationships rather than measured abstractions. His Guise—skin, color, and shape—expresses these feelings with great precision, making communication a kind of emotional art rather than a tool for hard information.
Paul 97’s arms act as semi-independent sub-minds, carrying out desires through his Reach. Contact with other octopi, including fights and dominance struggles, also passes information and processing power between them. As a result, the colony can collectively solve problems without any one individual fully grasping the whole.
The octopi notice that geothermal vents are becoming misaligned and parts of the sea floor are cooling, long before Senkovi’s systems would flag the issue. Through conflict, dances, color displays, and unspoken consensus, the colony adjusts machinery and directs other machines according to Senkovi’s larger terraforming plan. Senkovi will later find their tampering, but the experiment is already beyond his control.
Other colonies communicate between facilities, some individuals travel to find better neighbors, and others manipulate the Aegean’s task queue to create new settlements out of crates and piping. The octopi continue exploring both physical and virtual connected spaces, but unlike the earlier disaster that shut down the Aegean, they now understand enough to avoid breaking vital systems. Paul 97 and some others regard Senkovi as a source of home, benevolence, and knowledge, not as a god, and find the idea of a nonintrusive individual stranger than human divinity.
Who Appears
- Paul 97Uplifted octopus whose colony demonstrates emotional communication, distributed cognition, and collective problem-solving.
- Disra SenkoviHuman uplifter whose experiment has produced capable octopus societies beyond his direct control.
- Paul 97’s colonyMulti-generational octopus community that adjusts terraforming systems through conflict, display, and consensus.
- The AegeanOrbital or system infrastructure whose task queues and machinery the octopi use and manipulate.