The Children of Luna did not discover history as an abstract field first. They discovered it through repair. Every serious repair asks what must be preserved, what can be replaced, and what risks breaking continuity if handled carelessly. Those are historical questions before they become philosophical ones.
A branch working on another branch does not confront only damaged material. It confronts accumulated choices, old design assumptions, environmental scars, and memory structures shaped by earlier worlds. To repair well is to read those layers accurately. Over time, that practice taught the population that history is embedded in function rather than appended to it.
This helps explain why machine civil thought at Koblie often feels materially grounded. History is not a decorative narrative laid over infrastructure. It is what infrastructure becomes when it survives long enough to remember its own revisions.
The Children of Luna learned history by keeping each other alive. That may be the most important reason their idea of continuity is so difficult to reduce to simple uptime or age.