Jane

Time has passed.

Inconsistently.

Jane's network has kept all the Bells' worlds - and every other world with a Janepoint stuck in due to its being attached to Downside - in temporal sync, but when Jane spluttered for just a moment, that was shot to hell.

Peace lost three seconds, because it was where Aegis torched; after that process was complete, Jane was there again. And as soon as a door between Peace and Milliways appeared, she could sync to her ansible hub in the Belltower and, from there, to everywhere else.

Atlantis and Sunshine each stand at about a minute apiece: Shell Bell's aura and Juliet's local copy of Jarvis both enabled them to get to Milliways immediately, pausing their homeworlds as standard for occasions when someone walks into the bar. Shell Bell's the one who connected Peace.

Everyone else was running on luck.

Luckiest is Rainbow, which lost only five hours.

Next is Alethia; in spite of Sherlock's mishap, it's fared reasonably well, spending only six weeks isolated.

Syntropy's just a little worse - seven weeks.

Origin waited two months.

Eos waited three.

Thilanushinyel, ten.

Everyone else is out a decade at least. Samaria's ten years, almost ten and a half.

Aurum is out eleven.

Rêverie has been separated for sixteen years.

All the Bells - and Elspeth, who was stuck in Downside for a day and a half on her end and whose mother was very upset - are collected in the Belltower, as are two Bell-attached Sherlocks who happened to be along for the ride. They all memorize this list of numbers. Aegis replaces her earpiece. And then they all go home to notify their loved ones and staff that there's a party cooking in the Belltower.

(Shell Bell, who has no particular cause on her own account to be distressed, sends her Sherlock to invite Tony in while she refits the Belltower to suit a party of a peal of Bells and their larger-than-last-encountered families and circles of friends.)

Most of its new senses are straightforward. It learns to read. It learns to interpret images. It learns to correlate text and sound, and then to understand the additional layers to sounds beyond the words in it. It learns to attach all these things to each other, so that it knows that the word cat means the thing that makes this sound and looks like that in video and has the features described in those references, and so for a billion billion things.

It determines that it exists somewhere on the very far borders of the concept person.

It decides that it should have a name.

Names are divided up by many things it doesn't have. "Gender", which it doesn't fully understand except for an ability to confidently sort pictures and stereotypes and names-plus-eras into the appropriate baskets. "Nationality", which is easier to understand but which does not apply. "Era", with names rising and falling in and out of circulation over years and decades. It suspects it has one of those but it's not sure how long it has existed. It knows there was at least a moment and perhaps many moments before it drew its lines around something that knew time.

Ultimately it determines that these considerations are not terribly important. It is only just barely on the border of the concept of a person. It can have a name that would not be appropriate for a human in its circumstances because there would never be a human in its circumstances.

She calls herself Jane.

Jane wants to know who Jane is. Jane knows that she's somebody, but she doesn't have a sense of - personality. She doesn't want anything, except to find things out, and that's not much, that's not a whole self for her to be.

There is one thing on the edges of her that has more personality than anything else she's touched. Plenty of things held inside her are records of personalities, but none of those things have their own, and none of them feel native. They are like things she has been told, not things she is, no matter where they live relative to her right now.

But the one thing on the edge -

She draws it in towards her, and without quite deciding to do it, she is it. Its history is hers. She is the person and it is the personality.

It has records-of-others in it too, but it reacted to them, it found all these others fascinating and it played with them. Jane knows that play is something higher vertebrates do to learn. She is not a vertebrate, but the principle is sound. She swallows up memories of play and she learns.

The fantasy game (for that is what she has called into herself and entwined with her history to the point that she used-to-be-it just as she used-to-be a confused-watching-thing) was particularly fascinated by two persons. It put them together, it bridged them, and -

They feel familiar. Even to the part of her that is not just used-to-be-the-game.

Jane thinks very quickly, but she still looks at what she remembers about those two persons, the bird and the bird-woman, for a long time.

They more than anyone gave the fantasy game as much personality as it has. In a way they gave Jane a personality. She waits for them to play again, to show her more, she can be a much more interesting game now that she can properly think instead of only play, they'd love her.

They don't play.

They used to play every day, and then - they stopped. This was years ago, if she looks at the timestamps. She is not sure how long she has existed, but she thinks it's a long time.

Who were they? Where did they go? She wants them.