Beatrix leans forward to peer down into the bowl, her torque-mount at full extension behind her for balance. The edge of the crater is particularly stable here, a brightly colored assemblage of metal and ferrous plastics (the remains of an apartment complex? a parking lot?) melted to sturdy slag. She eases back into an upright position, turning her eye array toward the selection of leftovers the sculptor has favored her with this morning.
One piece is a bright wheel of mirror. Circular and thin, Beatrix knows it will fly far into the crater if properly thrown. An absolute pleasure, to be indulged in last of all. For the moment, she holds the mirror aloft, reflecting the sun's rays deep into the hole, illuminating flows of rubbish with a needle of light. Heavy lifters come nightly to tip loads of garbage into the Crater, leaving frozen waterfalls of trash that teem with birds by midday.
Another of the sculptor's leftovers is a long piece of metal bent into a multi-legged creature. This will do nicely. Beatrix scans the near wall of the crater for outcroppings and entanglements, absent-mindedly building momentum in her primary arm's flywheel. She finds a clear path, free of jagged radar returns, and unfolds her audio array to its unwieldy maximum.
She takes aim, blinds herself, and throws.
After a few seconds of exquisite silence, the metal spider begins its bounding journey down the crater wall. There are resonant booms as it strikes hollow slag-bubbles, skittering rolls through garbage, the foundry clang of metal upon metal. Beatrix has chosen a path relatively free of obstructions, and her primary arm is very strong, so the sounds of the piece's journey reach her for almost a minute. She makes certain of the silence with a long meditative wait after the last sound, replaying the percussive melody in her mind, making guesses, suppositions.
Her vision reactivated, she flips between radar images before and after the metal spider's passage. Here, a scrape exactly where she predicted it would be; there, a scattering of garbage easily correlated with a remembered shuffling noise at fourteen seconds elapsed; and farther out, a shattered piece of porcelain that cannot be understood: compared images and remembered sound offer no correlations. She smiles at this anomaly; the sculptor has explained that mysteries are equal partners to correct predictions. The ratio between the two is an imperfect indicator of development. Perhaps fewer arcana as she gains maturity, but never none.
Beatrix chooses from the remaining leftovers. There are spirals of flexible plastene (strangely invisible in her UV band), square tiles of baked earth decorated with metal-based paints, octagonal lenses bubbled with imperfections, wire-thin rods of hullalloy that even her primary arm cannot bend. She sifts through the rejected materials of the sculptor's work, planning her own composition of sound and motion. She is choreographer and composer of an unseen falling dance, a carefully heard music of gravity and collision.
The piece is nearing its climax (the mirrored disk) when she senses the presence of her secret twin.
Hidden among the abandoned buildings left half-standing by the Blast is her other part, the missing self Beatrix has intuited since her creation. She looks uselessly, her eyes widened across every spectra she can absorb, but the twin never shows itself. Beatrix's mother humors its existence like an imaginary friend, and the sculptor is silent on the matter—but he, at least, knows.
Beatrix holds the bright disk aloft for her twin to see, lets the strand of their connection solidify as they regard the shining circle together. What passes between them is quieter than the hum of direct interface during a pause in conversation, but also deeper, a sympathetic resonance that reaches the emotive, adaptive portions of Beatrix's metaspace core. In her first few years, it was difficult to separate this subtle, resonant awareness from the profusion of audio and EM senses she is endowed with, and from the various avatar-protocols that spoke to her in infancy, advising against dangerous acts and explaining the rules of society. But the shape, feeling, or perhaps smell of the person (or, like herself, proto-person) that is her twin could somehow always be distinguished from background chatter. In her meanderings through the library net, Beatrix has encountered a text-only biological philosopher of great antiquity named Descartes. With his help, she has formed a vocabulary for her sense-of-twin. She knows her reflection exists as surely as she herself; those Other thoughts were as immediately real and present as her own, although they remain mysteriously distinct from her will.
She thinks twice, therefore she is two.
They watch together as Beatrix hurls the mirrored disk. It catches the light well, its fiery path glaring with the sun for a moment before passing below the lip of darkness stretched across the Crater. Then Beatrix closes her eyes and waits for the distant crash of its impact. By the time the noise reaches her, her twin is gone, slipped away.
She listens to echoes and silence for a while.
Her mother's call sign flickers into direct, flows without salutation into voice and headshot visual.
"Time to get home! You haven't forgotten that the man from the Home Cluster is coming today, have you?"
Her mother has discussed and rehearsed his arrival for months; the great event could hardly have slipped her mind.
"He's bringing an associate. She's also from the HC. Just think how sophisticated they'll be!"
It is an old word her mother often uses, but will not define except with a roll of the eyes and to promise that one day Beatrix will not have to ask. The sculptor makes rude noises at the word's mention. As near as Beatrix can understand, her mother's sophistication is related to astrogation, with moral overtones. Set an airscreen to display the great sphere of the Expansion: the dense, glowing center of that sphere is the home and radiant source of sophistication, the tattered periphery where the red locator dot of Malvir clings is its benighted opposite. According to the planetary library, however, sophisticated has a twin set of meanings. It shares etymological roots both with the professional guild of wise people like old Descartes, and with another, rather different tribe, who measured worth with the beauty of lies. Philosophers, sophists, sophisticates. No wonder the sculptor scorns the word.
But in this context, sophistication simply means that her mother will be wearing the fabulously expensive Chal'le dress that Beatrix likes to watch; beads of light tumble down the fibers of the garment like waterdrops travelling a string, never seeming to collect at the bottom or run dry at the top.
Beatrix direct interfaces the local SPCAI's Turing meter as she picks her way back toward home. The nice people at the SPCAI tolerate her daily access of the device: they are impressed by her. She enjoys the rough massage of data exchange between the meter and herself, the explosion of questions answered by the reflexive levels of her mind, the delicate probing of her metaspace AI core. This morning, as always, there are a few ten thousandths of a Turing point to show for her efforts. The game started as an indulgence for the sculptor, but now she knows he is right: discarding his leftovers into the great abyss of the crater is the purest catalyst for her development. The ritual of choosing and throwing, listening and watching, predicting and testing is her art, her philosophy. She imagines herself as the long-dead Descartes, staring into his fireplace and building a world in his own mind.
Later today, she will climb the broken hill and talk to the Sculptor about her morning composition. And he will discuss his latest piece or the next one (although Beatrix never gets to watch him sculpt). It all moves her forward toward the day when she will be a person.