The Immortality Option

Titan, Saturn's largest moon, was airless, frozen, and lifeless...but only by some definitions. Organic life had never arisen on Titan's barren surface, but a kind of intelligence - housed in processor chips and wiring, alloys, and metallic plating - had long ago made Titan its home. For long before humans had even dreamed of travel between planets, Titan had given rise to the Taloids, a race of self-aware robots - robots whose development had, in its own software-based way, paralleled humanity's own. But the Taloids, unlike humans, had never reached an Age of Enlightenment. They knew nothing of their origins, nor did they really care; they worshipped a mysterious god called the Lifemaker, lived in competing city-states, and grew houses and tools. Outside the cities, some tended robotic herds, while others farmed the land, growing crops of body parts and silicon, or scavenged the chaotic mechanical forests for nourishing scrap metals.
Humans arrived on Titan to face the greatest mystery of the twenty-first century: What were the robotic beings called Taloids? Where had they come from? Human scientists suspected that the Taloids were an accident - the product of an artificial intelligence gone wrong. But, if so, where was the ancient, immeasurably advanced civilization that must have wielded such superior computing technology eons ago, when the Taloids had first begun their renegade evolution? The robots' creators had disappeared without leaving a trace - except for the Taloids themselves. And the Taloids, by now, were not at all what they had started out to be. Earth's finest scientists were stumped.
Then came an unexpected development: scientists on Titan discovered strange blocks of code in the moon's ancient computer banks. Neither the programs that made up Titan's biosphere nor Taloid digital "DNA," the code had been undisturbed for millennia. But now, with human help, it was beginning to activate itself at last...