Cloudborn

Silt is born into the cloudbanks of a gas giant, one of forty-three field-organisms in a birth-flock that gives it everything: warmth, navigation, direction, charge. The flock organizes the atmosphere around it, filters the dangerous from the safe, and provides the accumulated knowledge of generations encoded in skeins of metal lattice that tell a young field what the world is and how to move through it. Silt has never needed to find its own direction. It has never fed alone, navigated alon...