The orphan had begun to anticipate, to hold expectations.
By the thousandth iteration, the connections between the traps had developed into an elaborate network in its own right, and new structures had arisen in this network—symbols which could be triggered by each other as easily as by any data from the input channels. The lion image-trap, on its own, had merely been a template held up to the world to be declared a match or a mismatch a verdict without implications. The lion symbol could encode an unlimited web of implications—and that web could be tapped at any time, whether or not a lion was visible.
Mere recognition was giving way to the first faint hints of meaning.
The infrastructure fields had built the orphan standard output channels for linear and gestalt, but as yet the matching navigator, needed to address outgoing data to some specific destination in Konishi or beyond, remained inactive. By the two-thousandth iteration, symbols began to jostle for access to the output channels, regardless. They used their traps' templates to parrot the sound or image which each had learned to recognize—and it didn't matter if they uttered the linear words "lion," "cub," "antelope" into a void, because the input and output channels were wired together, on the inside.
The orphan began to hear itself think.
Not the whole pandemonium; it couldn't give voice—or even gestalt—to everything at once. Out of the myriad associations every scene from the library evoked, only a few symbols at a time could gain control of the nascent language production networks. And though birds were wheeling in the sky, and the grass was waving, and a cloud of dust and insects was rising up in the animals' wake—and more, much more… the symbols which won out before the whole scene vanished were:
"Lion chasing antelope."
Startled, the navigator cut off the flood of external data. The linear words cycled from channel to channel, distinct against the silence; the gestalt images summoned up the essence of the chase again and again, an idealized reconstruction shorn of all forgotten details.
Then the memory faded to black, and the navigator reached out to the library again.
The orphan's thoughts themselves never shrank to a single orderly progression—rather, symbols fired in ever richer and more elaborate cascades—but positive feedback sharpened the focus, and the mind resonated with its own strongest ideas. The orphan had learned to single out one or two threads from the symbols' endless thousand-strand argument. It had learned to narrate its own experience.
The orphan was almost half a megatau old, now. It had a vocabulary of ten thousand words, a short-term memory, expectations stretching several tau into the future, and a simple stream of consciousness. But it still had no idea that there was such a thing in the world as itself.
The conceptory mapped the developing mind after every iteration, scrupulously tracing the effects of the randomized indeterminate fields. A sentient observer of the same information might have visualized a thousand delicate interlocking fractals, like tangled, feathery, zerogee crystals, sending out ever-finer branches to crisscross the womb as the fields were read and acted upon, and their influence diffused from network to network. The conceptory didn't visualize anything; it just processed the data, and reached its conclusions.
So far, the mutations appeared to have caused no harm. Every individual structure in the orphan's mind was functioning broadly as expected, and the traffic with the library, and other sampled data streams, showed no signs of incipient global pathologies.
If a psychoblast was found to be damaged, there was nothing in principle to stop the conceptory from reaching into the womb and repairing every last malformed structure, but the consequences could he as unpredictable as the consequences of growing the seed in the first place. Localized "surgery" sometimes introduced incompatibilities with the rest of the psychoblast, while alterations widespread and thorough enough to guarantee success could he self-defeating, effectively obliterating the original psychoblast and replacing it with an assembly of parts cloned from past healthy ones.
But there were risks, too, in doing nothing. Once a psychoblast became self-aware, it was granted citizenship, and intervention without consent became impossible. This was not a matter of mere custom or law; the principle was built into the deepest level of the polis. A citizen who spiraled down into insanity could spend teratau in a state of confusion and pain, with a mind too damaged to authorize help, or even to choose extinction. That was the price of autonomy: an inalienable right to madness and suffering, inseparable from the right to solitude and peace.
So the citizens of Konishi had programmed the conceptory to err on the side of caution. It continued to observe the orphan closely, ready to terminate psychogenesis at the first sign of dysfunction.
Not long after the five-thousandth iteration, the orphan's output navigator began to fire—and a tug-of-war began. The output navigator was wired to seek feedback, to address itself to someone or something that showed a response. But the input navigator had long since grown accustomed to confining itself to the polis library, a habit which had been powerfully rewarded. Both navigators were wired with a drive to bring each other into alignment, to connect to the same address, enabling the citizen to listen and speak in the same place—a useful conversational skill. But it meant that the orphan's chatter of speech and icons flowed straight back to the library, which completely ignored it.
Faced with this absolute indifference, the output navigator sent repressor signals into the change-discriminator networks, undermining the attraction of the library's mesmerizing show, bullying the input navigator out of its rut. Dancing a weird chaotic lockstep, the two navigators began hopping from scape to scape, polis to polis, planet to planet. Looking for someone to talk to.
They caught a thousand random glimpses of the physical world along the way: a radar image of a dust storm sweeping across the sea of dunes ringing the north polar ice cap of Mars; the faint infrared plume of a small comet disintegrating in the atmosphere of Uranus—an event that had taken place decades before, but lingered in the satellite's discriminating memory. They even chanced upon a real-time feed from a drone weaving its way across the East African savanna toward a pride of lions, but unlike the library's flowing images this vision seemed intractably frozen, and after a few tau they moved on.
When the orphan stumbled on the address for a Konishi forum, it saw a square paved with smooth rhombuses of mineral blues and grays, arranged in a pattern dense with elusive regularities but never quite repeating itself. A fountain sprayed liquid silver toward a cloud-streaked, burnt-orange sky; as each stream broke apart into mirrored droplets halfway up its arc, the shiny globules deformed into tiny winged piglets which flew around the fountain, braiding each others' flight paths and grunting cheerfully before diving back into the pool. Stone cloisters ringed the square, the inner side of the walkway a series of broad arches and elaborately decorated colonnades. Some of the arches had been given unusual twists—Eschered or Kleined, skewed through invisible extra dimensions.
The orphan had seen similar structures in the library, and knew the linear words for most of them; the scape itself was so unremarkable that the orphan said nothing about it at all. And the orphan had viewed thousands of scenes of moving, talking citizens, but it was acutely aware of a difference here, though it could not yet grasp clearly what it was. The gestalt images themselves mostly reminded it of icons it had seen before, or the stylized fleshers it had seen in representational art: far more diverse, and far more mercurial, than real fleshers could ever be. Their form was constrained not by physiology or physics, but only by the conventions of gestalt—the need to proclaim, beneath all inflections and subtleties, one primary meaning: I am a citizen.