settlement

Even after adapting to very different worlds, the Children of Luna preserved enough continuity to remain one people.

Among the Children of Luna, childhood is less about weakness than about how much continuity and judgment a branch can safely carry.

A long-lived machine population built around continuity found it hard to separate usefulness from civic presence in the human way.

Smaller machine settlements often build more unusual temporal systems because their civic clocks are shaped by narrow local constraints.