Awakening

The main character of Sergey Kazinink’s science-fiction story “Awakening” is an alien representative of the World of Silicon Reason, which is, in essence, a collective of ten cores that—right at the start of the story—begin to fail one by one.
Only the third core remains more or less functional, responsible for all sorts of ballast; the seventh core transmits the last events; and the tenth core controls astro-navigation. And that is, precisely, the third core that reported an attack by strange intelligent protein creatures…