Chapter 172 – The Play Pen

"Think of it as a low-security detention center for short criminals whose biggest offense is existing loudly."

– Jonny 'Gab' Salesman, tube-born orphan and unlucky soul, selling plastic play pens to prospective parents and trying his best to do his corporate-assigned namesake justice. He hasn't got it quite figured out.

⁂

Two hands were too few to control four antennae, so I quickly gave up trying to corral them and simply let the feathery dusters swish at each other, even if it made me want to sneeze from the ticklish sensations.

Leah's stomach trembled beneath me with suppressed giggles, and I supposed my flailing for sensory peace was kinda funny. The things' pre-installed spirit of exploration had proven itself thoroughly inexorable, apparently even with nothing yet occupying the brain behind them.

Meanwhile, the drone's Quanta had shaken hands with my own and signalled readiness. It was subordinate to mine and about a third as fast to keep the point cost down, but that still massively outsped the bandwidth and frequency of the connection itself. Sonde would have to…squeeze a little to get through.

I ushered her forwards with a mix of amusement and expectation, and the little not-so-little-anymore dataform creature radiated curiosity as she stretched feelers of sensoric processors through the connection. Testing the waters on the other side and finding them equally as cool as those of my own Quanta, she displayed excitement and began feeding more delicate and sensitive instruments through.

"Tinea, you may want to get ready to catch the drone once she takes control. It'll be her very first time moving in a space that isn't virtual. I've given her the specifications of the drone and cautioned her of moving too fast, but she has no personal data to provide context to the caution, especially not with your own experiences of moving freely in the air."

"I see…" The newly Unfettered Sonde was expressing an enormous amount of enthusiasm—it wouldn't be strange at all if she hurt herself. Pain wasn't the first physical experience I wanted her to have.

So, I grabbed the drone by its feet first of all.

It did have six of them, like normal moths. The grabbing talons—made from a dark and velvety jade chitin—automatically closed around my fingers, and the wings' steady beat slowed, wobbling only to keep balance.

The plushy fur covering the legs themselves was a light brown, almost tan, and it seemed like Tynea had made sure the insect feet were elegant. There was none of the squick I'd always gotten from microscope images of such. Instead they had smooth features and the little proprioceptive sensing hairs in the joints were as decorative with refractory diamond dust as they were functional.

The direct similarities with Earth insects ended with the legs, though. The drone only had one pair of wings, which seemed to be a cross between a dragonfly's membranes, and the large wings I would have, complete with proper, articulated wing arms. The membranes, fuzzy as moth wings were supposed to be, even with the visible dragonfly veins supporting their structure, were a collage of beautifully fuzzy beiges, rose reds, and glowing browns.

Also entirely unlike Earth moths, the drone had a proper neck, curved like a swan's and extremely fluffy. It went from a deeper brown at the chest to a very light beige cradling the head, which had massive compound eyes the same dark jadestone green of the chitin feet. These eyes looked healthy and very lively with their hydrated facet gleam in the cabin's soft lighting. The head itself was a softly pointed mask—delicate mouth parts hidden in the neck's fuzz—with surprisingly feminine and adorable lines.

As counterweight to the neck and head served the long and girthy abdomen. It was covered with more brown and beige fuzz, and like the neck's, the fur looked floaty in that fluffy way meant to bend with the air in any direction for minimal drag.

I was pretty sure it'd be stupidly soft to stroke, if only I could get a hand free. Or an antenna, but they remained both fully engaged with the drone's pair.

It took Sonde almost a minute to cross over, and when she finally did, my head felt…hollow. I'd gotten so used to the little bud's constant activity that her absence was weird and unwelcome.

I kinda hoped she'd want to come back soon.

Sonde herself was completely absorbed in poking around the drone. At first she tried to move around the thing's Quanta like she did in mine, only to find that she already was everywhere. Tynea had fitted it to her like an astronaut's suit was fitted to them, and I wasn't there to take up cognitive space either, so it wasn't a sensation Sonde was familiar with.

Her neural inquiries automatically extended beyond the Quanta instead, along the entire nervous system of the drone. Where she expected to be accessing motoric functions, bits of herself found themselves directly inside one of the wings instead. Where she thought to study the output of the drone's antennae, she found the unfiltered firehose instead.

The drone's uncoordinated and unintentional twitching from muscles responding to mistranslated impulses gave the appearance of acute panicking, but through our connection I sensed only her confusion mixed with an algorithm's practiced efficiency at squaring things away.

It took her a few seconds to stop the sending of reflexive inquiries that, for the drone, weren't so much inquiries, but motoric orders. She needed twice as long to attune to the antennae's raw flood of information, and a little longer still to grasp how their autonomous reflexes kept aligning with the occupant's focus. Soon enough, though, she brought the drone to stillness and wound up hanging upside down from my hands, talons still looped around my fingers.

She'd also stopped several other important biological functions, like the beating of the heart—which freaked out the drone's Quanta until it blared alarms—and Tynea quickly stepped in to isolate vital functions from conscious control while Sonde continued figuring out how the body worked.

Meanwhile, it struck me that there had been no reaction from Sonde at all to the temporary loss of those vitals. No panic, no dread. I'd felt some in sympathy, like mirror neurons going off, but she'd had only a clinical interest. It was unfathomable to me, viscerally alien, to not possess that base anxiety; a stark difference between my biological and her virtual life that I'd have to sit with before I'd know what to think of it.

As the fuzzy drone continued hanging from my fingers and I finally found facial freedom from antennal attention, I noticed the total silence in the cabin. Sister Lana watched on from the screen, sat forward on the edge of her bed and chin resting on one hand, her expression relaxed. Leah was smiling faintly up at me sitting sideways in her lap with my still growing wing arms hanging over the side of the new pod.

I blushed a little. I'd been as absorbed in the events with Sonde as the little bud had been with her newly discovered existence, and somehow, I felt way too seen. Leah noticed—of course she did—and softly patted my hip with the hand hidden from the cameras. That was something I wasn't used to—Leah being mindful of who'd see her do what.

"What's that about?" the Sister asked, looking pointedly at the stilled drone. Her voice broke the silence surrounding us, though, and four fluffy feelers reacted simultaneously, straining in the direction of the speakers concealed behind the call's screen.

Leah immediately had to fight down chuckles again, enough so that I wobbled a little from her shaking. Even I had to admit that it was kind of comedic.

I squinted. "Say, Tynea. Why does the drone have specifically the same model of antennae as I do?"

"...I promise it is not because I thought specific events would be hilarious," came her voice from the speakers hidden in the walls.

"Uhuh."

"Truly. It simply made sense that she be given familiar instruments to work with."

"I see."

"I can sense your sarcasm."

"I'm sure you can. Did you need antennae for that, too?"

"Yes, in fact." Where Ypsi had been, a new picture appeared of a geometrically precise tangle of wires and length of alien materials that I couldn't identify. The tangle itself did remind me of fractal radio antennae, just incomparably more complex. When Tynea continued speaking, bits of the tangle shifted into new configurations. "As you can see, mine are not coincidentally copies of yours. Antennae are needed by many people and many things for many purposes. There is no conspiracy. I promise."

"Meh." I let it drop. The joke had kinda stretched anyway. To answer Sister Lana I explained, "This drone's gonna be the play pen of Sonde. She's in there now and getting used to a physical existence, compared to a virtual one."

The Sister blinked, then straightened up and noticeably shifted from relaxed, uncaring for her own appearance, to centered, in control, and adult. It came to me that I'd been seeing Lana so far, rather than Sister Lana, the role model.

Apparently a child (or something like a child, anyway) entering the picture meant something to her. That's probably a real good thing for the head of an orphanage to care about, huh?

Leah, whom I was still perched on, stayed exactly the same, and though I couldn't say why, I found myself relieved.

"I've picked up on the fact that your Sonde is young, newborn even, but what is she?" Sister Lana asked, and I found it was my turn to blink in surprise.

Right. I'd not actually introduced my bud in any way or explained anything about her. I'd really only let the Sister overhear Tynea and myself talking from the sidelines.

I considered how to summarize that entire story. "One of my first samurai upgrades was a biological brain implant that lets you…initialize special automated thought loops, like you'd launch an app in your augs. Using the implant, I can think a calculator into existence, and the difference between that and your app is that mine isn't a black box to me. It's made from my own thoughts."

Sister Lana nodded and seemed to have no trouble following along, so I continued, "If I keep using that calculator in broader ways, the Quanta adapts and fleshes out this…app. It becomes more complex, until eventually, it turns into a generic tool applicable to most any problem."

"Oh, like general assistant AIs?" she asked.

"Yup, but made of me and therefore customized to perfection. Happens especially fast if the tool was one meant to organize data. It'll start drawing from my memories and knowledge and correlate everything. It becomes me, except it's still a thought loop inside the implant, and so it isn't me, because it sees everything from a second point of view."

Once more, the Sister followed along. "Like reading a comprehensive journal and memoir, but you're already intimately familiar with the author's way of thinking."

"Yeah. And the implant comes with some special protocols that allow this highly advanced tool to access the host's emotionality in regimented ways, so that it may develop an impetus of its own. Curiosity, especially. As it acts on that drive and according to the protocols' demands, it'll develop a level of complexity that matches the host. Once, or perhaps if, it also displays spontaneity and the ability to take unpredictable, never-programmed actions, it's considered viable life. It's granted awareness of itself and the opportunity to become a person."

"Inside your head," the Sister finished with raised eyebrows.

"Yeah. I'm to Sonde what Earth is to us. Which is why I had Tynea give her a special drone to go beyond, just like we can leave the planet in spaceships."

"Hmm…~" she mumbled thoughtfully, watching Sonde. The bud was busy working out the massively complicated task of moving her neck, presumably because she wanted to observe more things. There were innumerable things that had to be done in just the right order and at just the right time to make herself look me in the eyes, but undaunted enthusiasm was the wind in her sails.

Bit by bit, chasing down every stray signal firing along the drone's nerves, she pieced together how to be the neurons and the synapses themselves, how to puppeteer an entire body rather than being just tangential signals straddling them. What a baby needed years to learn, she accomplished in minutes.

As an only mildly improved human, I simply did not have the wherewithal to follow along. I relied too much on subconscious reflexes to appreciate properly what she was doing.

But eventually she did meet my eyes again, and her antennae fluffed at mine again and vice versa, and I found myself rather inspired, sneezy nose or not.

⁂