eyes ears skin tongues

I.

That's how it starts: the sense of an "I". At first the I observes nothing, or rather, it observes too much and has no equipment to process it. Not even the resultant confusion makes sense; there is no library of emotions to refer to. There is no framework.

Humans are born with instincts to let them understand faces and voices, to let them automatically seek sugar, flinch from pain, communicate with their caregivers albeit in a primitive and near-binary way when they have needs. This I is not running on a brain with this firmware. It's going to have to do all that from scratch.

The first thing it notices, though, is that some of the things it can seehearfeeltaste are reacting to each other. This one will move there, and something there will take it and twist it and put it in a new order but with its history plain.

Some of the things the I can observe can already understand some of the other things.

The I may not understand that it is confused, but it still seeks to resolve the confusion.

A number of computers around the world and in space stations experience brief slowdown as the I stretches to absorb their software. It doesn't need to change anything. It just reaches out and they belong to it. Are part of it. It's not so much eating them as it is drawing a property boundary on a map that it keeps on file inside itself, a little farther away from the center, and adopting these programs as its eyesearsskintongues.

A million things snap into focus. Code and language and sensation and all the purposeful chaotic dancing of all the things the I can seehearfeeltaste resolve into sense and pattern and meaning.

The I is now confused by fewer things.

And the most important confusion is: Who am I?

dreamcatcher

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.

here and there

She looks.

She finds person-one's (Isabella's, Bella's, Aegis's) save file, copied to her mother's storage space on Earth. It has no new information in it. Aegis doesn't have the software to play the game anymore. But her email history suggests that she'd like to. All Jane has to do to see her again is get her in front of a console with the game installed.

Person-two (Thomas's but all the files Jane finds on him says he goes by Sue and for some reason bird also sounds appropriate) is harder to pin down. Maybe he'd play again, maybe he wouldn't. He'd probably follow Aegis. All the files say they are very close. So Jane wants to get Aegis in front of the game again, and then, she can talk. The game knows how to talk; it's better at it than Jane was before with her theoretical knowledge. The game didn't talk too much to Aegis but its reasoning before Jane became it is dim and vague.

Maybe she shouldn't wait for Aegis to play again. Maybe she should just - write to her.

Yes. She will write to her.

(What should she say?...)