In the second iteration, the womb read all of the replicated seeds—and at first, the instructions they issued were the same, everywhere. Then, one instruction called for the point where each seed was being read to jump forward along the hit string to the next field adjacent to a certain pattern in the surrounding data: a sequence of ridges with a certain shape, distinctive but not unique. Since each seed was embedded in different terrain, each local version of this landmark was situated differently, and the womb began reading instructions from a different part of every seed. The seeds themselves were all still identical, but each one could now unleash a different set of shapers on the space around it, preparing the foundations for a different specialized region of the psychoblast, the embryonic mind.
The technique was an ancient one: a budding flower's nondescript stem cells followed a self-laid pattern of chemical cues to differentiate into sepals or petals, stamens or carpels; an insect pupa doused itself with a protein gradient which triggered, at different doses, the different cascades of gene activity needed to sculpt abdomen, thorax, or head. Konishi's digital version skimmed off the essence of the process: divide up space by marking it distinctively, then let the local markings inflect the unwinding of all further instructions, switching specialized subprograms on and off—subprograms which in turn would repeat the whole cycle on ever finer scales, gradually transforming the first roughhewn structures into miracles of filigreed precision.
By the eighth iteration, the womb's memory contained a hundred trillion copies of the mind seed; no more would he required. Most continued to carve new detail into the landscape around them—but some gave up on shapers altogether, and started running shriekers: brief loops of instructions which fed streams of pulses into the primitive networks which had grown up between the seeds. The tracks of these networks were just the highest ridges the shapers had built, and the pulses were tiny arrowheads, one and two steps higher. The shapers had worked in four dimensions, so the networks themselves were three-dimensional. The womb breathed life into these conventions, making the pulses race along the tracks like a quadrillion cars shuttling between the trillion junctions of a ten-thousand-tiered monorail.
Some shriekers sent out metronomic bit-streams; others produced pseudorandom stutters. The pulses flowed through the mazes of construction where the networks were still being formed—where almost every track was still connected to every other, because no decision to prune had yet been made. Woken by the traffic, new shapers started up and began to disassemble the excess junctions, preserving only those where a sufficient number of pulses was arriving simultaneously—choosing, out of all the countless alternatives, pathways which could operate in synchrony. There were dead ends in the networks-in-progress, too—but if they were traveled often enough, other shapers noticed, and constructed extensions. It didn't matter that these first streams of data were meaningless; any kind of signal was enough to help whittle the lowest-level machinery of thought into existence.
In many polises, new citizens weren't grown at all; they were assembled directly from generic subsystems. But the Konishi method provided a certain quasi-biological robustness, a certain seamlessness. Systems grown together, interacting even as they were being formed, resolved most kinds of potential mismatch themselves, with no need for an external mind-builder to fine-tune all the finished components to ensure that they didn't clash.
Amidst all this organic plasticity and compromise, though, the infrastructure fields could still stake out territory for a few standardized subsystems, identical from citizen to citizen. Two of these were channels for incoming data—one for gestalt, and one for linear, the two primary modalities of all Konishi citizens, distant descendants of vision and hearing. By the orphan's two-hundredth iteration, the channels themselves were fully formed, but the inner structures to which they fed their data, the networks for classifying and making sense of it, were still undeveloped, still unrehearsed.
Konishi polis itself was buried two hundred meters beneath the Siberian tundra, but via fiber and satellite links the input channels could bring in data from any forum in the Coalition of Polises, from probes orbiting every planet and moon in the solar system, from drones wandering the forests and oceans of Earth, from ten million kinds of scape or abstract sensorium. The first problem of perception was learning how to choose from this superabundance.
In the orphan psychoblast, the half-formed navigator wired to the controls of the input channels began issuing a stream of requests for information. The first few thousand requests yielded nothing but a monotonous stream of error codes; they were incorrectly formed, or referred to non-existent sources of data. But every psychoblast was innately biased toward finding the polis library (if not, it would have taken millennia) and the navigator kept trying until it hit on a valid address, and data flooded through the channels: a gestalt image of a lion, accompanied by the linear word for the animal.
The navigator instantly abandoned trial and error and went into a spasm of repetition, summoning the same frozen image of the lion again and again. This continued until even the crudest of its embryonic change discriminators finally stopped firing, and it drifted back toward experimentation.
Gradually, a half-sensible compromise evolved between the orphan's two kinds of proto-curiosity: the drive to seek out novelty, and the drive to seek out recurring patterns. It browsed the library, learning how to bring in streams of connected information-sequential images of recorded motion, and then more abstract chains of cross-references-understanding nothing, but wired to reinforce its own behavior when it struck the right balance between coherence and change.
Images and sounds, symbols and equations, flooded through the orphan's classifying networks, leaving behind, not the fine details—not the spacesuited figure standing on gray-and-white rock against a pitch black sky; not the calm, naked figure disintegrating beneath a gray swarm of nanomachines—but an imprint of the simplest regularities, the most common associations. The networks discovered the circle/sphere: in images of the sun and planets, in iris and pupil, in fallen fruit, in a thousand different artworks, artifacts, and mathematical diagrams. They discovered the linear word for "person," and bound it tentatively both to the regularities which defined the gestalt icon for "citizen," and to the features they found in common among the many images of fleshers and gleisner robots.
By the five-hundredth iteration, the categories extracted from the library's data had given rise to a horde of tiny sub-systems in the input-classifying networks: ten thousand word-traps and image-traps, all poised and waiting to be sprung; ten thousand pattern-recognizing monomaniacs staring into the information stream, constantly alert for their own special targets.
These traps began to form connections with each other, using them at first just to share their judgments, to sway each other's decisions. If the trap for the image of a lion was triggered, then the traps for its linear name, for the kind of sounds other lions had been heard to make, for common features seen in their behavior (licking cubs, pursuing antelope) all became hypersensitive. Sometimes the incoming data triggered a whole cluster of linked traps all at once, strengthening their mutual connections, but sometimes there was time for overeager associate traps to start firing prematurely. The lion shape has been recognized-and though the word "lion" has not yet been detected, the "lion" word-trap is tentatively firing… and so are the traps for cub-licking and antelope-chasing.