Diaspora

The orphan's stream of consciousness surged through the new connections, momentarily unstable with feedback: I think that Yatima thinks that I think that Yatima thinks…

Then the symbol network identified the last redundancies, cut a few internal links, and the infinite regress collapsed into a simple, stable resonance:

I am thinking

I am thinking that I know what I'm thinking.

Yatima said, "I know what I'm thinking."

Inoshiro replied airily, "What makes you think any one cares?"

For the five-thousand-and-twenty-third time, the conceptory checked the architecture of the orphan', mind against the polis's definition of self-awareness.

Every criterion was now satisfied.

The conceptory reached into the part of itself which ran the womb, and halted it, halting the orphan. It modified the machinery of the womb slightly, allowing it to run independently, allowing it to he reprogrammed from within. Then it constructed a signature for the new citizen—two unique megadigit numbers, one private, one public—and embedded them in the orphan's cypherclerk, a small structure which had lain dormant, waiting for these keys. It sent a copy of the public signature out into the polis, to be catalogued, to he counted.

Finally, the conceptory passed the virtual machine which had once been the womb into the hands of the polis operating system, surrendering all power over its contents. Cutting it loose, like a cradle set adrift in a stream. It was now the new citizen's exoself: its shell, its non-sentient carapace. The citizen was free to reprogram it at will, but the polis would permit no other software to touch it. The cradle was unsinkable, except from within.

Inoshiro said, "Stop it! Who are you pretending to be now?"

Yatima didn't need to part the navigators; ve knew vis icon hadn't changed appearance, but was now sending out a gestalt tag. It was the kind ve'd noticed the citizens broadcasting the first time ve'd visited the flying-pig scape.

Blanca sent Yatima a different kind of tag; it contained a random number encoded via the public half of Yatima's signature. Before Yatima could even wonder about the meaning of the tag, vis cypherclerk responded to the challenge automatically: decoding Blanca's message, re-encrypting it via Blanca's own public signature, and echoing it back as a third kind of tag. Claim of identity. Challenge. Response.

Blanca said, "Welcome to Konishi, Citizen Yatima." Ve turned to Inoshiro, who repeated Blanca's challenge then muttered sullenly, "Welcome, Yatima." Gabriel said, "And Welcome to the Coalition of Polises."

Yatima gazed at the three of them, bemused, oblivious to the ceremonial words, trying to understand what had changed inside verself. Ve saw vis friends, and the stars, and the crowd, and sensed vis own icon… but even as these ordinary thoughts and perceptions flowed on unimpeded, a new kind of question seemed to spin through the black space behind them all. Who is thinking this? Who is seeing these stars, and these citizens? Who is wondering about these thoughts, and these sights?

And the reply came back, not just in words, but in the answering hum of the one symbol among the thousands that reached out to claim all the rest. Not to mirror every thought, but to bind them. To hold them together, like skin.

Who is thinking this?

I am.

2

TRUTH MINING

Konishi polis, Earth

23 387 281 042 016 CST

18 May 2975, 10:10:39.170 UT

"What is it you're having trouble with?"

Radiya's icon was a fleshless skeleton made of twigs and branches, the skull carved from a knotted stump. Vis homescape was a forest of oak; they always met in the same clearing. Yatima wasn't sure if Radiya spent much time here, or whether ve immersed verself completely in abstract mathematical spaces whenever ve was working, but the forest's complex, arbitrary messiness made a curiously harmonious backdrop for the spartan objects they conjured up to explore.

"Spatial curvature. I still don't understand where it comes from." Yatima created a translucent blob, floating between ver and Radiya at chest height, with half a dozen black triangles embedded in it. "If you start out with a manifold, shouldn't you he able to impose any geometry you like on it?" A manifold was a space with nothing but dimension and topology; no angles, no distances, no parallel lines. As ve spoke, the blob stretched and bent, and the sides of the triangles swayed and undulated. "I thought curvature existed on a whole new level, a new set of rules you could write any way you liked. So you could choose zero curvature everywhere, if that' what you wanted." Ve straightened all the triangles into rigid, planar figures. "Now I'm not so sure. There are some simple two-dimensional manifolds, like a sphere, where I can't see how to flatten the geometry. But I can't prove that it's impossible, either."

Radiya said, "What about a torus? Can you give a torus Euclidean geometry?"