#Avrana

[goldpilot22]

some new guys

[souldagger]

a copy of a copy of a copy

[excessive-moisture]

One of my favorite tropes is when a character gets so caught up in a project that it ends up killing people

[astronomalyy]

terraformers and their worlds...

[matrose]

Dr. Avrana Kern, loosely inspired by Mucha. i made an ant brush on procreate just for her:)

[parttimecosmichorror]

It's always Avrana Kern this, Avrana Kern that, but what about my girl/sentient alien microbe Miranda? Who has no real sense of identity and is terrified that one day she'll lose control and start consuming and subsuming everyone around her? What about the Miranda copy that survived a hundred lifetimes in Landfall, trying to save a city and people that never existed, and who was then rescued and brought face-to-face with the version of her that never knew Liff? What about the Nodan entity that remembers its entire past but has to live out a myriad of different presents? What about the dissonance of realizing that you might not be the same entity after all, until you're reunited with the rest of yourself? What about the original Human Miranda, who gave her self over to an alien microbe, believing that it was for the better good? What about Miranda?

[approximateknowledge]

i love how the children of time trilogy spends 2 books talking about "Imperial C" as one of the main languages the terraforming-era humans used and it's never further elaborated upon, and then you get to the third book and it's revealed in a very oblique way that Imperial C is, in fact, English

because Avrana Kern decided to make a gog damn *pun* about there being no "i" in "ants" but there is one in "spiders" (and it's explicitly pointed out the joke only makes sense in "Imperial C") (which is also very funny considering she's an upload running on a computing substrate of quasi-uplifted ants, she's quite litterally the "i" in the ants)

[who-do-i-know-this-man-s3]

⚠️Vote for whomever YOU DO NOT KNOW⚠️‼️

[crowreys-wormstache]

The Avrana Kern of Theseus

[the-cosmic-creature]

AHHH just finished Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky and holy shit???? its gotta be up there with Project Hail Mary in my favorite first contact books list because… wow. the insane world building, the speculative evolution, the brain-uploading, the religion of fucking SPIDERS… i am obsessed

[lossis]

Terraformers

The quality is terrible, but here ya go, there isn't enough art for this book series

The constellations in the backround are a spider, a crow and an octapus

Here's the sketch

[not-a-mawmouth]

Hm. Something about how Avrana Kern partially despises humanity for its history of genocide, hates them for being so prone to ideological stupidity, and yet not only is she actively advocating for the genocide of humanity (despite those humans being victims of the same awful event that caused her to believe humanity wasn’t worth saving) pretty much the only reason the humans are willing to resort to genocide is because her “humans are bastards” ideology meant she kept trying to kill them. And refused to grant them asylum when they asked for it. And told the spiders time and time again that the humans were an ancient enemy that would inevitably destroy them.

So, naturally, the humans stopped trusting anything to do with her. Including the entire sapient species they had no idea existed as a result of her experiment.

[souldagger]

listening to the Children of Time audiobook rn and oh my GOD. just got to the eliza/kern double message part and it is INSANEEE in audio form the narrator makes kern's parts sound so fucking desperate and intense literally sitting at work with my hand over my mouth

[morally-grey-girlbosses]

Propaganda under the cut.

Lappland Saluzzo:

What if Goro Majima was an Italian wolf girl, and also a lesbian? Lappland is a disgraced mafia assassin who hates the famiglia for how they've ruined her country and hurt countless people for the sake of the egos of a few old men. She thinks organized crime is inescapable, though, so her rebellion is to pick fights with other mafioso to justify killing them brutally as possible. She believes turning herself into a violent wild card the leadership is afraid of will stop them from treating her as a person they think they can control. The only person she truly respects is her old rival/childhood friend who DID manage to escape the mafia, whichs fuels Lappland's extremely homoerotic obsession with her that includes at least two duels to the death. At one point her rival is arrested on suspicion of murder, so Lappland visits her in jail to chat and hand-feeds her chocolate through the bars of her cell (it's intentionally her least favourite flavour). The next day she crashes a semitruck into the courthouse in the middle of a hearing to take credit for a car bomb assassination the she didn't do to keep her rival from being falsely convicted. Lappland is the toxic girl shonen rival that tumblr keeps saying they want.

Avrana Kern:

First of all, read Children of Time its great. Avrana Kern was the one of the greatest scientists of old Earth, she spearheaded a project to terraform other planets a principal part of which would be sending down a "barrel of monkeys" armed with a virus to encourage their evolution towards sapience to do a lot of the legwork so the planet would eventually be ready for human colonisation, so great morally grey girlbossing there we can all agree creating new forms of slavery, to her credit she does actually care more about her monkeys than she does other humans but still #Girlboss am I right? Anyway she was caustic, she was blunt nobody liked her but she got the job done what a girlboss. Until an anti technology cult managed to spread a computer virus that destroyed all technology just as the project was beginning the final stages, destroying her barrel of monkeys before if could reach the planet below, Kern was the sole survivor managing to jettison herself from the main station and get into a stasis pod.

Over milennia her body even in stasis began to degenerate until she was more or less fused to the pod, more AI than human. Also spiders get the evolutionary virus and began to develop sapience and a society. The last survivors of humanity arrive on their last ditch colony ship the Gilgamesh and Kern awakens from her slumber, she refuses to acknowledge the humans aboard as human and say the planet below belongs to her monkeys (as we have covered there were no monkeys below, only spiders) and she'll destroy them with her advanced pre collapse of humanity tech if they try to land, they're forced to leave #Girlboss am i right? Eventually the spiders get high enough on the technology ladder to get in touch with her and she basically sets up as their god but she doesn't understand they're spiders, not monkeys so there's a big disconnect there, there's some religious wars done its not a great time in spider society its mostly her fault we gotta say but #Girlboss am I right? Eventually the message gets across that they're spiders not monkeys and she has a bit of a breakdown gets downgraded from god but still very influential in spider culture.

Anyway eventually the spiders develop spaceflight, the spider astronaut chapter is the best its so good, and bring her down to the planet, she now runs on an Ant based operating system and doubles as an AI for the starships created by the spiders. Trust me it all checks out please read Children of Time. This is only stuff from the first book she does more morally grey girlbossing in Children of Ruin and Children of Memory but I won't go into those, have some air of mystery going forwards.

[astronomalyy]

shout out to women in STEM who have their consciousnesses involuntarily fused with AI and develop a subsequent sense of misanthropic rage, as well as an initially hostile connection with a highly intelligent non-human species that progresses into begrudging respect, who eventually come to embrace their computerisation for the sake of further advancing scientific progress <3

[matrose]

so basically she was a genius scienist and pretty misanthropic but then she got bombed while trying to play god and started rotting in her cryosleepchamber and eventually just the AI copy of her remained and she WAS a god just not omnipotent so she didnt know she was a god of spiders but eventually they solved that miscommunication and she actually apologized to them and then she uploaded herself onto ants and now shes a spaceship and has actually started to care about people even if she does so in a very bad mood while being very annoyed