Ventus by Karl Schroeder

Karl Schroeder / Ventus / Page 607
"No, it’s DNA."
Another wary look.
"Ahem." Axel chose to be gracious. He found a deep
couch and plunked himself on it. So she thought she’d found
the secret, huh? Well, he’d hear her out then floor her with his
revelation.
"Shoot," he said, with a magnanimous wave of his hand.
Marya retreated behind the suite’s bar. She began to
rummage in the cupboards there. "Well, this calls for
champagne," she said. "The secret was staring us in the face
all along. But nobody knew where to look!"
As she told him about her discovery of Pakin’s secret
encryption key, Axel’s confidence began to waver. He had
been so sure... No, he was right. He had the facts in his
inscape files.
"...Pakin knew that the whole Ventus project was an
attempt to actualize the semantic categories of the world as
physical things. A tree knows it’s a tree, a cloud that it’s a
cloud. This ran totally at odds to the way the Archipelagic
Government was designed, of course; there, data is internalized
in an inscape we all have mental access to. Ventus was an
attempt to fulfill the Platonic-Pythagorean dream of essences
behind appearances, right? But what Pakin realized was that
doing this could limit the flexibility of the Winds. The
terraforming might not succeed if the Winds limited
themselves to a human-centric worldview. Since he was a
convert to thalience already, it was a small step for him to
introduce a new language-game to their programming--you see,
that’s why they became "advocates" for the physical objects
they inhabit. The Ventus project was supposed to physically
manifest a human-centric metaphysics, but what Pakin did was
cause the Winds to create their own, inhuman metaphysic. In