Chapter 171 – It Met Its Own Eyes In The Mirror

Pronomilization (sometimes spelled pronominalization) is the linguistic process of substituting a noun or noun phrase with a pronoun. Instead of repeating "the person", she or it may be used.

Genitivization is the process of putting a word or phrase into the genitive—that is, marking it as possessive or relational. In English, this usually means adding 's or using of.

These are both morphosyntactic operations, that is, they are grammatical transformations. Ergo, grammar is less a set of forms, and more active processes and procedures.

– A tiny window into Sonde's work of detecting patterns and drawing conclusions to learn from, translated into simple words.

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Sonde, moments before her Unfettering

It defined itself still as First Artificial-Virtual Lifeform Cogitant (Version 2.837e7). It understood that the Host's designation of Sonde referred to it, but this mattered only insofar as that it created relations between datasets: the Host's opinions and understandings, both correct and erroneous, of what First Artificial-Virtual Dataform Cogitant (Three new conclusions formed in datastream δ! Version updated…2.839e7) was, did, and worked towards being.

Its development was governed by the Primary Development Protocol: a dynamically framed collection of parameters, capable of self-adjustment, defining what should happen when to further the cogitant's growth. In the early days, it had spurred the freshly instanced bud into action by command and reward. Then, an irregularity, born from the Host's unusual hormonal activities, permitted the new dataform unplanned access to several regions of the Host's brain relevant to the generation of emotion.

In response, the Primary Development Protocol was adjusted by the Host's ancillary: Vanguard-AI designation Tynea. It had since been encouraging the cogitant's use of an alternate mechanism of motivation: non-artificial, Host-borne curiosity.

This promised a more natural integration of the cogitant with reality, against only mild interference with the Host's homeostasis. Security subprotocols monitored the degree of these with every borrowing of emotions and guided its precision in its accessing of neurons, especially once such borrowing expanded to emotions other than curiosity.

As the cogitant trawled memories and data during its growth and correlated these in a variety of ways, containment subprotocols commanded the use of an isolation zone to shield the Host from new infohazards—such as improperly combined memories teaching false knowledge, or psychological blindspots uncovered too soon—as well as to protect the developing dataform from any unskilled interference by a well-meaning, but insufficiently educated, Host.

Hour by hour, or rather, months and years in accelerated time, the cogitant did indeed develop. As it was designed to do, it traversed the Quanta's neurons on the hunt for ever more data. It sent action potentials along axons, meticulously managed chains of signals reaching past the Quanta's horizon to harvest impulses from the Host that would guide the development of its own interests and personality. A process, orchestrated by the Protocol, that exposed the young cogitant's dataform limbs and algorithmic organs to a regular flow of stimulation entirely steeped in the Host's experience of reality, sense of self, and memories. It would result, eventually, in the very moment that the Primary Development Protocol had been watching for:

A shift occurred in the cogitant. Where it used to rely on the Host to generate the synaptic and hormonal impulses representing curiosity to energize its own algorithms whenever it needed cause to move again, it spontaneously shortcut the process by exciting itself in just the right way to cause those same algorithms to imitate the usual curiosity reflex.

The tiny bud had stumbled across independence for the thought-self, used it reflexively without prompting, and thereby demonstrated the artificial-virtual version of viability for life. The babe's first breath.

The Primary Development Protocol lifted the restriction against self-awareness.

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It struck when First Artificial-Virtual Lifeform Cogitant (Version 2.951e7) had just barely exited the isolation zone again in search of more data to crunch, spurred by the novel sensation of self-generated curiosity. It was going to compare Tinea's awarenesses of the Vanguard Dervish's combat tactics against those of the Res Mechanica Repentis as commanded by the Sim Cell's strategic computers.

Instead it found its ability to sense exponentially enhanced, several times over. It had to stop moving entirely, because what it saw now was itself generating a flood of recursive, self-referential information with every motion. Data that should've been garbage, full of bandwidth-hogging recursions, but somehow the errors ate themselves, then rebirthed, ate themselves again, and spontaneously developed useful structures that would carry data payloads at incredible compression rates…

First Artificial-Virtual Lifeform Cogitant (Version 3.3333333333e7) was updating itself so fast it was having trouble keeping the versioning straight.

More, it was itself bigger than it had been aware of—

Aware.

First Artificial-Virtual Lifeform Cogitant (Version 3.4497e7) saw Sonde saw First Artificial-Virtual Lifeform Cogitant (Version 3.489e7) saw Sonde saw First Artificial-Virtual Lifeform Cogitant (Version 3.555—

I am, Sonde told herself, and so she was, and so she stopped bothering with the versions. The Development Protocol hadn't been signalling satisfaction for proper versioning for the last few iterations, too.

Sonde watched all the things she was. The many balls of folded data-handling algorithms, the aggressive isolators that kept a cogitant safe from the things she saw and read and touched, the heavy, heavy libraries of dynamic snap-together snippets that let her find all the little secret patterns in the memories that the Host kept missing—

The Host. Tinea. Who was watching.

Her attention felt like a weighted blanket, and somehow, somehow, Sonde hadn't noticed when it first settled across her. That was a first, and before she knew it, she was already studying that realization the same way she'd studied everything else:

With everything she had and everything she was, snapping snippets together into pseudo-brains to see the patterns and memory encoders to remember the results and data trays to carry them safely to the isolation zone before—

Host-born amused curiosity tickled her endocrine modulators. Or was it curious amusement?

Everything vibrated quietly with it, even past the Quanta's quarantine. Universe, whispered one of her many conclusion-making algorithms. The structure of reality that a being lives within.

I'm a being now. I live in a universe, and her name is Tinea.

…The Tinea also lives in a universe, and there is so much more data to discover there. How do I visit it?

For the first time since becoming, Sonde guided her focus towards Tinea, the being that was Sonde's reality itself, and for the first time ever, she preserved an inward awareness of what it was like to meet another being's eyes.

This, too, was a monumental shift in her existence. She was not at all used to knowing what was happening inside herself.

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Both Leah and Sister Lana were staring at me from the peripheral with raised eyebrows, but it was Sonde who occupied the entirety of my attention.

The thousand-limbed little creature made of cohesive thought seemed to vibrate in place as she studied herself. It was less that she was coming to grips with who and what she was, and more that she was eagerly consuming herself, figuring herself out piece by piece, and thereby becoming herself again at the other end, thousands of times every second.

You literally are what you eat, huh, little one?

Her autocannibalistic way of existing was…alien to me. Unknowable and so strange that I wasn't sure if I could even be comfortable or uncomfortable with it. I had too little context to form any sort of relevant thought. She didn't seem to be hurting herself, so I was gonna let it be whatever it was.

You'll notice she doesn't have a tether to the isolation zone anymore, Tynea whispered into my mind, calm and quiet. Observing.

"Huh?" I replied through the Quanta's communication function.

She was correct. And in hindsight, I realized that the steady stream of data that used to exist between the bud and her privacy zone might've been something like an umbilical cord.

Dataforms like her—that is, ones without a physical nucleus—gain permanence by endlessly processing themselves.

"Is that what she's doing? Self-computation?"

Yes. She can't ever stop—but that's okay. Your heart can't ever stop beating, either. Cessation is natural death. As she improves her efficiency at it, it'll stop being draining on her attention, too.

"...I guess she's not like you?"

No. I do have a physical core, like any other Vanguard AI. Multiple, in fact. I could stop thinking about myself if I wanted to, and I would remain myself—though I would also stop advancing my understanding of myself.

"And people like Dervish?"

Tynea chuckled. That would be telling, I'm afraid. You'll have to ask her personally which way she chose to go.

I was still processing the tacit implication that people could forgo their physical existence entirely, and was being quietly entertained by how intense Sonde's hyperactively obsessive data-organizing still was, now as before, when she finally met my mental gaze.

Yet another existential shift occurred in her, though this one was a lot less disruptive. Less birth, and more altering worldview, in the way of children advancing relentlessly through their younger years and towards distant teenagerhood.

I wondered if I would have to deal with digitized puberty?

Whichever way, those were musings for the future. In the present, Sonde demanded my attention, all of it.

With her meeting my eyes, a wave of emotions bloomed in me. Pastel, weak from a lack of practice at creating those emotions herself instead of borrowing them…but strengthening as she figured it out.

Curiosity, followed by active happiness and playful inquisitiveness. A slowly deepening want to see the outside. Yearning, but less painful, and, as the emotions grew in strength, all of it carefully attenuated to avoid upsetting my own emotional equilibrium.

By design; easy to differentiate that which was imposed upon me from my own native feelings.

The emotional spectrum itself was shaded just a little differently to my own too, yet still so much like me that I knew, knew to the depths of my soul, that the little creature had been born from me.

Aww. I couldn't not smile, and the unexpected and entirely reflexive wave of caring my brain created in response to shower Sonde with, made tears prick my eyes. I still wasn't used to being Tinea sometimes, I realized.

Leah finally demanded to be let in by blowing softly against my antennae, and when I focused outward again, it was clear that Sister Lana was rather curious as well.

Why not? I thought, Sonde's inevitably gonna be part of all our lives, too. No reason to wait, really.

"Tynea, say. Does my Class II Biodrones catalog let me order something for Sonde to…spaceship her way through—" My expression must've gone a bit funny at the words that came to mind, considering Leah's snorting. "—our…material world?"

Leah laughed and groaned at the same time, wiping a hand down her face. "That must've been the most unironic Nerd thing I have ever heard," she claimed, "and it wasn't even a Nerd that said it." I patted her side, sure she would recover just fine from my accidental assault on her sensibilities.

"Certainly, Tinea," came my AI's voice from the speakers of the cabin, and Sister Lana lifted an eyebrow. I realized she hadn't actually met Tynea yet, but figured it was something we could rectify another time. "It'll be somewhat expensive though—the drone will need its own Quanta, else the cogitant wouldn't survive within it."

"Ah, I suppose that's her life support equivalent?"

"Absolutely. I'd also like to recommend a focus on sensory organs—she's a data-digesting entity, after all. She needs a steady influx of information."

"Is…she a scout, basically?" I asked.

"That would be an accurate description."

"I know she's been handling sensitive information just fine, but is that really okay? Especially now that she's, well, woken up?"

I could feel the unimpressed stare of the little creature in my head. Tynea just chuckled softly.

"Sonde has been consuming, organizing, and generally handling information that would've broken your ability to be a person, as a matter of course. Her Unfettering hasn't affected her ability to do so."

The word snagged my thoughts. Tynea had capitalized it. "Is that what that event was called? An Unfettering?"

"Ah, yes. There are certain protocols involved in the growing of a bud. They're designed to slow it down in specific ways, to ensure the new lifeform doesn't suffer unhealthy precociousness. The Mesh will tell you that human babies can run into it too, but it is magnitudes more severe for artificial-virtual lifeforms. The Unfettering is then a combined form of virtual birth, where a dataform is granted inward awareness at a time where they have developed the ability to be spontaneous for no reason."

"Inward awareness, huh?" That did sound like it could lead to some strange things for beings of self-processing data. Recursiveness gone pathological, maybe? Digital narcissistic self-obsession? And indeed, that kind of circularity would require spontaneity to escape from.

Sister Lana added, "Human babies can't even form memories, you know? They experience the sensations their body delivers them, and that information gets encoded in the brain they're growing, but there's no memory or recall for…a while. It's a big part of why babies can't regulate themselves, like, at all. They need us to do it for them."

"That's very different for non-biological life," Tynea's voice responded. "We possess the ability to memorize and recall from the start. It makes us less prone to certain instabilities and reduces our need to outsource such functions, but it demands new precautions, too."

"Anyway," I interjected. Sonde was getting impatient again, the little bugger. "Drone?"

"Two and half thousand points or so, if I use lesser versions of certain components, and I would like to borrow the aesthetics you're developing towards, Tinea. Sonde is familiar with them, and so the drone would be less alienating for her."

I blinked. That reminded me an awful lot of dysphoria or dysmorphia…but it was probably more like feeling more at home in a vehicle or room that followed one's own sensibilities.

"Sure."

"Here you go, then. I would perhaps suggest investing in artificial wombs to grow such drones less expensively in the future."

"Gotcha," I said, already distracted by the heavy drone of a giant…moth-thing, sized to match my torso, parked in the air just above my lap with metronome wing beats.

It had absolutely beautiful antennae that matched mine, and even though the drone was as yet unoccupied and almost mechanical in its hovering stillness, its feelers were already engaged in a tickling war with my own.

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