Children of Memory

The history from the Rourke archives reveals the fate of one of humanity’s many failed terraforming missions. The project was led by Commander Alex Tomasova, with Renee Pepper serving as ecologist and genetic engineer. After their ship, the Phoenix, arrived at Rourke with critical damage, the crew was stranded on the surface when the rogue virus from the dying Earth disabled all their advanced technology, as happened in Children of Time.

Having survived this attack, the colonists proceeded. They found that the planet had a breathable oxygen atmosphere but was suffused with chemical toxins and teratogens. Over fifty years, the crew slowly died off as they tried to build a livable community. Pepper’s attempts to establish a self-sustaining Earth-like ecosystem failed disastrously, producing only deformed animals and thriving ants. The one exception was a population of corvids—a species of crow bulked out with raven and magpie genetics. Initially a nuisance, the birds were driven into the harsh wilderness by the resentful humans.

Decades later, the Corvids returned, having undergone a radical evolution. The planet’s toxic chemistry induced two complementary types of brain damage. One type of Corvid became an obsessive pattern-recognizer, while the other became a monomaniacal problem-solver. The Corvids’ pre-existing instinct for lifelong pair-bonding fortuitously meant a recognizer and a solver would form a single, super-intelligent “compound individual” (196), making each complementary pair viable where either alone was a dead end. These new Corvids returned to the abandoned human settlement and, using their unique cognitive abilities, began repairing the failing infrastructure. In her final years, Renee Pepper, the last human survivor, was tended, fed, and spoken to by the Corvids, who had initiated communication with her. She studied them in turn until her death, after the Phoenix itself had already been destroyed, though she was never quite sure the degree to which the Corvids possessed actual intelligence and to what degree they mimicked or parroted the world around them. The Corvids preserved her records and, over centuries, mechanically completed her terraforming plans without truly understanding them.

Aboard the Skipper, Miranda observes the two Corvids, Gothi and Gethli, who have awakened from cryo-sleep. They explore the ship’s digital archives, copying and rearranging huge, eclectic blocks of data into new files. When questioned, they respond with literary quotations preserved in the Rourke data records—though the source literature itself is lost—which Kern dismisses as simple parroting rather than true sentience. The crew awakens Paul, an intelligent Octopus, but while the Corvids are fascinated by him, they show no sign of recognizing his personhood.

Miranda grows frustrated with her inability to communicate with the birds. After she temporarily locks them out of the ship’s systems, the birds stage a formal protest using these same literary quotations from the Rourke records. Their intelligence remains ambiguous, seeming complex but instinct-driven.

Meanwhile, initial scans of their destination, Imir, are disappointing, suggesting that they have found another failed terraforming project with only a primitive atmosphere and no signs of a developed ecosystem. Just as the crew concludes the mission is a bust, Kern announces she has detected signals coming from the planet.

On the planet Imir, a young colonist named Liff, the first of a new generation born on the planet itself, watches the settlement’s only shuttle, the Urshanabi, make a rough landing. The shuttle returns from the colony’s derelict mothership, the Enkidu, which remains in orbit. Aboard are Liff’s grandfather, Captain Heorest Holt, and twenty-three newly awakened colonists.

Heorest introduces the newcomers, who possess skills needed by the struggling colony of Landfall. Among them is Miranda Lain, recruited specifically because the colony now has children of its own who need teaching. When Liff and Miranda make eye contact, Liff feels a bizarre sense of dislocation, as if her world has momentarily shifted. 

Later, Heorest takes Liff and Dastin Gembel, the colony’s lead agriculturist, to see a new forest plantation. Gembel proudly explains his work creating a simple, controlled ecosystem on Imir, deliberately leaving behind the pests and diseases of Earth. There is an unspoken tension surrounding the trip to the Enkidu, hinting at a difficult choice the colony’s leaders made.

Miranda integrates into the Landfall colony and becomes a note-taker for its Council, giving her access to their private debates. She learns the settlement is on the brink of technological regression; its last industrial printer is failing and the Urshanabi is likely permanently grounded. The leadership is deeply divided. Heorest’s wife, Esi, argues for repairing the shuttle out of a sense of duty, but the engineer Olf, the farmer Gembel, and the security chief Halena Garm insist they must prioritize the colony’s immediate survival.

Heorest ends the argument by declaring his intention to lead an expedition into the wilderness, claiming a discovery there could save them. Later, Miranda overhears Heorest and Esi arguing. Through oblique dialogue, Miranda infers the colony’s dark secret: The founding members left other colonists in cryo-sleep aboard the orbiting Enkidu, and Esi lives in terror that these colonists will one day awaken and seek revenge. This guilt, Miranda understands, is the reason for the silences and evasions of everyone around her.

Miranda reports this to her own companions. She believes the colony is the perfect subject for long-term study, though she notes a caveat: The colonists’ fear of future strangers is the sort of conspiratorial thinking that could come back to haunt them. She also feels a troubling sense of disconnected memory, as if she is forgetting something critical about her own mission.

In midwinter, Captain Heorest Holt tells his granddaughter Liff a “story” (236) before he leaves on his expedition with Halena Garm. He explains that when the colonists first arrived, they heard a voice, an unknown entity he refers to as the Witch living in the hills. He believes this being holds the key to advanced technology that could save their society from its slow decline.

Heorest and Garm depart and never return. In the wake of her grandfather’s apparent death, Liff becomes withdrawn and sullen. One night, a tall, severe-looking woman accompanied by two large black birds appears at Liff’s door. Liff instinctively knows she is the Witch. The woman says she is looking for her friends and dismisses Liff’s demand to have her grandfather returned. Before leaving, the Witch gives Liff a vague, conditional directive: When the opportunity arises and she picks strangers out of the crowd, she should bring them to her.

The narrative switches to the internal dialogue of the Corvids, Gothi and Gethli, revealing that they are the Witch’s birds. They work for the Witch, a being who has passed through many transformations and stubbornly thinks of herself as human, to locate her missing companions among the colonists. The Corvids reflect on their failed attempt to manipulate Liff by acting like supernatural creatures from her storybook.

They visit Liff again, but she is no longer receptive to their fantasy. Having studied her textbooks, she now suspects they are biologically engineered animals from a rival, hostile colony. She demands the truth in exchange for her help, tired of the secrets kept by the adults around her.

Seeing a new problem to solve, the Corvids change their strategy. Believing Liff is a key variable in the “system” (251) of Imir, they decide to give her the truth she wants. In their own retrospective account, they report having whispered the secrets of their origins into her ear while she slept, hoping this data input will alter the situation in their favor.