Children of Memory

Generations after Heorest Holt’s disappearance, a girl named Liff is born into a dying world. Landfall is collapsing due to ecological failure and technological decay. To cope, the colonists have created myths, blaming their decline on a fictional rival colony of Seccers and the vengeful spirits of the Watchers, the sleepers abandoned on the Enkidu.

Liff grows up on a remote farm after her parents die in an accident, leaving her with a harsh and abusive uncle. As society crumbles, harvests fail, and masked gangs raid the remaining farms, Liff flees. She joins a group of scavenging children who ironically call themselves the Seccers. One by one, her companions are killed or starve, until Liff is the last living human on Imir. She wanders the desolate ruins of Landfall, searching for food, until she too dies. The narration reveals that an unknown entity observes and endlessly repeats this entire history, from Holt’s arrival to Liff’s final moments.

Miranda awakens in a new body aboard the ship Skipper, feeling unnerved that the experience of being a copy feels no different from being the original. She is a duplicate recovered from an alien simulation engine on Imir, where her previous organic self may still persist as a colony of Nodan life, but is effectively gone as the Miranda-entity. Her rescue was driven by the version of Miranda who had remained aboard the Skipper: initially even Kern and the crew viewed the simulation-Miranda as mere data rather than a person requiring rescue, and it was the ship-bound Miranda who insisted on treating her as an imprisoned sister and demanded they try to recover her. The two versions were then reintegrated through a complex process of exposing Miranda-on-ship to the simulation-Miranda’s identity via successive mediated virtual experiences, leaving a single Miranda who holds both sets of memories.

In a quarantine chamber, she is joined by a splinter-instance of the AI Avrana Kern, who was also recovered from the simulation. Kern informs her that centuries have passed, during which more ships have arrived to study the alien engine. Miranda’s crewmates—including Fabian, Portia, and Paul—visit her but seem to be hiding something, deflecting her questions about the colony she so vividly remembers. Haunted by memories of the simulated people, especially the girl Liff, Miranda confides in the splinter-Kern. Kern, who is also being denied information by her main AI self, agrees something is wrong and proposes they escape quarantine and return to Imir to discover the truth. Miranda accepts without hesitation.

The narrative briefly returns to the girl Liff inside the alien simulation. Without the disruptive presence of Miranda, her story unfolds in its original, tragic loop. She is born into the final days of the failing colony, lives a short and desperate life as its last survivor, and dies. This cycle repeats endlessly, with the only other constant being the presence of a mysterious entity symbolized as a circling wolf.

The splinter-instance of Avrana Kern speaks with her copies of the uplifted Corvids, Gothi and Gethli, who have been placed in new cloned bodies after being extracted from the simulation. When Kern questions them about their consciousness, the birds respond with philosophical evasions. They argue that they are not truly sentient, viewing themselves as merely complex, non-conscious analytical systems. They extend this logic to all biological life, including humans and Kern herself, proposing that what is called sentience is an illusion created by sufficiently complex information processing.

The Corvids then suggest that the Imir simulation itself may have achieved a form of aggregate consciousness, an emergent intelligence born from the complexity of its interacting parts. Kern synthesizes this into a reading of the simulation’s chaotic reactions to Miranda’s presence as “a thing never intended for awareness trying to confront itself” (446), suggesting that this resembles an existential crisis. Later, the recovered Corvids meet their original counterparts without conflict, as their philosophy prevents any anxiety over their duplicated nature. Kern concludes that, despite their claims, the Corvids must be treated as sentient beings.

The splinter-Kern, now inhabiting a spare body identical to Miranda’s, frees them from quarantine. She has engineered their chamber to detach from the Skipper and function as a small shuttle. After Miranda confirms to the main ship AI that she needs to see Imir’s surface for herself, the greater Kern allows them to depart—having decided, when the splinter-Kern took steps to leave, that it was best to let matters take their course so Miranda could see for herself. As they descend, they detect faint radio transmissions from Landfall but realize they are fakes generated by the simulation engine.

They land at Landfall’s coordinates to find nothing but pristine, untouched wilderness. There is no town, no farms, and no archaeological evidence that a colony ever existed. The main Kern AI reveals that they withheld this because Miranda’s reintegration was still stabilizing and she was so fixated on the life she remembered there. The only trace of human activity is the buried, ancient wreckage of a single crashed vessel—the Urshanabi. Kern confirms that the Landfall colony was never founded; Heorest Holt and his entire crew died when their shuttle broke apart during its first and only descent.

This short chapter clarifies the implications of the previous revelation: The girl Liff never existed. Her life, her ancestry, and her entire world were fabrications, constructed from what could have been had the shuttle landed properly. The narrative states that as Holt’s shuttle crashed, “invisible hands were spread to catch them” (457)—the alien engine intervening in some way—though exactly what it preserved and how remains unstated.

On the empty plains of Imir, Miranda realizes the alien engine did not record history but created it. It copied the starting state of the crashed Urshanabi crew—Holt, the shuttle, the ark, all their preparation—at such fidelity that, from inside the simulation, there was no moment of transition, and then ran a speculative simulation of what would have happened had they landed safely, following their story from its hopeful beginning to its inevitable, tragic end with Liff, then repeating the loop.

Miranda insists they have a moral duty to help the people of Landfall, but the main Kern AI dismisses them because, she claims, they are not real. Miranda argues that their simulated consciousness makes them real people, a point the splinter-Kern, herself a copy, concedes. Miranda proposes that the engine kept throwing her and Liff together as though it wanted the colony to live, though Kern-major dismisses this as speculation.

She proposes a plan to the assembled fleet: They will rescue Liff by transferring her consciousness from the simulation into a physical body. Liff can then act as an ambassador for her people and help decide their future. There is a colossal amount of pushback from almost everyone, centered on ethical and definitional questions about who or what can be saved, before Miranda wins them over. Later, the woman whose identity Miranda originally absorbed visits her copy, telling her, “you did better than me” and that she was “the me I’d have wanted to be” (470).

Gothi and Gethli reflect on their analysis of the Imir simulation. They find it functionally indistinguishable from reality and agree with Miranda’s reading that the simulation was actively trying to use her to alter its fixed, tragic narrative. They prepare to reinsert Miranda into the simulation, this time with special privileges to ensure she maintains her identity. They conclude that the engine is a priceless “time capsule” (473) capable of preserving entire worlds of information that would otherwise be lost to entropy.

The narrative returns to the simulation, where Liff is living out her final, lonely days in the ruins of Landfall. As she stands in the deserted central square, two women appear: Miranda and Kern, the latter inhabiting Miranda’s borrowed body, described as “a tall, pale creature whose imperious demeanor fairly screams Witch” (475). Starving and desperate, Liff at first assumes they are figures from the colony’s myths but soon drops her defensive posture and begs them for food. Miranda kneels, offers her help, and introduces herself. As Liff takes Miranda’s outstretched hand, she is filled with a sudden, deep hope that this time, her fate might be different.

Much later, Miranda prepares to leave Imir, which has become a major research outpost. She is joined on a new ship by her crewmates and a new companion: Liff, who now lives in a physical body and has spent years adjusting to the real world.

Before they depart, Miranda and Liff enter the simulation one last time. They travel to an era when Landfall was thriving. Liff stands at the edge of the forest, intending to contact the emergent consciousness of the simulation itself, an entity she knew as the Wolf. Kern’s voice describes it as “some self, belonging to the actual simulation…like something trying to fight its way out of an eggshell” (480) arising from the aggregate complexity of all those modelled minds. As Liff holds out her hand, a vast presence stirs in the darkness of the woods. They are about to introduce this isolated, artificial mind to the existence of a wider universe, a risky but necessary step Miranda equates to humanity’s first contact with her own species.