To call them children would be somewhat misleading. Reproduction in a world of pure information is complicated. Rather than the mingling of genetic material, what happens nowadays is that two or more entities split off copies of themselves and combine the data after applying some semi-random processes and manipulations.

What you are left with is a collection of god-like ideas arranged in an interesting way. What they lack is subtlety, finesse and a certain emotional maturity that takes hundreds of years to acquire. So you could say that they do resemble human babies, in a way. Titanic, clumsy babies with vast capabilities swimming in a sea of total human knowledge.

These creatures were then firewalled off from society and given hyper accelerated instruction by a governing body of older, more experienced entities which we refer to as the Sangha. This would give these new beings the abilities they would need to cope with life in a cube of dense computational matter.

Iris was one such student.