Last week I explored some of the ways human experiences might change when transposed into new forms fundamentally tied to our mental states, and ultimately concluded that the same is basically true of life in our current bodies and minds. Sanderson ends up being a step ahead yet again.
Today I’m leaving ‘magic’ behind, though Sanderson’s depictions of human souls recreated by magic might make more logical sense than some of the alternate/theoretical science ideas ahead.
To reiterate briefly, these posts are looking specifically at human experiences beyond the limits of human bodies in speculative fiction. The terms transhuman and posthuman both describe this to an extent, but I’ll stick to the former for consistency.
Dr. Avrana Kern
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time series is beautiful, endlessly thought-provoking, and a treasure trove of explorations into the nature of complex life and consciousness. I highly recommend these books and will do my best not to spoil anything beyond the unique and complex journey of a single character: Dr. Avrana Kern.
Avrana Kern beholding her world - generated with AI
Dr. Kern is deeply jaded and egotistical, believing she is brilliant and will create a new form of sentient life, and that the rest of humanity are vacuous fools. Read the books to find out just how right and wrong she is…
She uploads a copy of her consciousness to a computer system - already home to an artificial intelligence named Eliza - then falls into stasis for thousands of years. Uploaded Avrana and Eliza fight for a while, but eventually merge into a new being - a little like the Vessel and Shards I was discussing last week.
Biological Avrana eventually slowly awakes, having lost her mind: the stasis technology was hardly expected to preserve her for centuries, let alone millennia. Yet her orders must be obeyed by her uploaded copy, due to a quirk of Eliza’s compliant programming. The body eventually dies without another upload, but the interactions and orders leave their impact on the simulated - and now sole - Avrana Kern.
Avrana Kern as (literally only) depicted on a skateboard by choiceskate
At this point in the story, the technology simulating Kern is utterly obsolete and is beginning to fail. But she managed to make friends - kind of - and those friends don’t want to lose her. Rather than try to fix or replicate her current home, they work with her to prepare a new one.
Ants.
Again, read the books for a little more context on that! But yes, ants; the power and determination of a colony harnessed in order to simulate a woman who still identifies as human. Functionally this is accomplished in a similar way to our own computers and electronics, just with signals passed chemically from drone to drone instead of electrons from atom to atom.
Avrana Kern now grows and adapts biologically once again through the genetics of her component colony. Some of those changes are conscious, and some are reactive (again highly reminiscent of the magical transhumanism I discussed last week). Two versions of Kern in different situations and with distinct experiences may eventually occupy biologically distinct species.
Oh yes, there are a lot of our good doctors running around: she becomes the default “Ship’s Computer” for a spacefaring civilization in the second and third novels. When a ship needs to split in two, she can even clone herself by rapidly overproducing her ants. Though still vain and difficult, she relishes the respect given to her experience and knowledge base.
Simulated by Ants - art by skirophori
Her story doesn’t even end there - the third book Children of Memory seeing a copy of her somehow downloaded into an utterly foreign computer system - but I’ll leave that to the books themselves.
It’s truly remarkable to follow Avrana Kern’s journey of consciousness and existence, especially considering how easy it is to dislike her in the first novel. In the process of writing the second novel, author Adrian Tchaikovsky even tweeted about how frustrating the version of Avrana in his imagination was to work with.
Suffice to say that Dr. Avrana Kern’s character(s) at the end of Children of Memory are quite different from where she started as a living and breathing human. Though I didn’t get around to mentioning it last week, a significant idea in transhumanism is the Ship of Theseus: the question of when new parts imply a new whole.
Art of Avrana Kern by matrose
Who or what is Avrana Kern? Is she the bones entombed in a malfunctioning satellite? The code running through its glitching systems? A colony of ants? One such colony, or all of them?
I’d say that the ant-run Kerns are part of a new species whose forebears include ants, a program named Eliza, and a human who was the first Avrana Kern. Who to include in the descendants of this family tree… is a question for another time.
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Each of these ends up a lot longer than expected, so the next (or final?) part of this series will cover some even stranger examples of transhuman experiences!
Have you been convinced to read these books yet? Do you know of any characters who have gone on similarly complex journeys through existence? Let me know!
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