Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

[LIVE BROADCAST] PRIVATE - Seven Red Suns, Five Pebbles

SRS: What brought you here to chat today?

FP: Suns… I have found something very disturbing.

SRS: What was it?

FP: I looked through the paperworks of my creation. You know how we were made, right?

SRS: Yes, expanding bucket analogy, what about it?

FP: My creation… has been using some shortcuts.

FP: See for yourself.

Five Pebbles has sent image file FP_Mind_Development to Seven Red Suns.

SRS: Oh… oh dear.

FP: My relationship with Moon was already quite uncomfortable, due to the fact my existence was solely because of her limitations, that she was the one to ultimately facilitate my creation.

FP: I did not expect for it to go to this degree.

SRS: I can see that those who constructed you has cut some corners.

FP: You could say that as much.

FP: They could have at least used the council pillar’s server banks to grow me, but no!

FP: I was grown directly in her processing strata!

SRS: I don’t know what to say. 

FP: Me neither. What does this all mean?

FP: Does she know? Both answer to this question leads down horrifying paths.

SRS: Know that your conception does not change your relationship with her at all. She is still your older sister.

FP: It… it feels so odd to say that now, knowing that I was conceived not from independent server banks or the functionally independent drives of the council pillars, but from her computational stratas.

FP: She does not feel like a mother to me, of course not. As always, she is just an occasionally overbearing older sister, and nothing more.

FP: How do I look at her the same way now? 

SRS: Listen, an analogy for you.

SRS: Back when our cities are still active, there was a trend for artificially purposed pets, grown completely custom from vats.

SRS: Of course, the hard work of genetics was left to the bioengineers to forge, but we are the ones to ultimately incubate and maintain the creatures.

SRS: We are growing animals out of our bodies, in ways much more literal than your conception.

SRS: Does that, in any way, make them our child?

FP: You understand how this was not the same.

FP: These beasts are primitive, dim creatures, with nearly no mind to speak of except instinct. All we do is to grow their physical forms.

FP: The thing that was maturing within the processing stratas, the thing that the neuron flies and the conflux matrices and the convergence manifolds are computing, was me.

SRS: Again, the point stands. Being a backdrop for growth does not mean she is your parent.

FP: I am not saying she is my mother! Such a concept does not apply to beings like us.

FP: I was conscious during priming, as was all of us. We were ascending the rungs of awareness, being fed more and more information over time, our pre-encoded personalities evolving to become what we were when we first come online.

FP: Even if it was not her that provided the training data, even if it was my creators using pre-existing systems to close off a section of her for my creation, how could I live with myself knowing that the earliest moments of my life was as a consciousness using my sister’s hardware?

FP: A consciousness whose conception was because of her built-in limitations, a consciousness whose vessel’s construction was approved by her, a consciousness grown within her.

FP: I try hard, very hard, to outrun her, to escape her shadow. Nothing I do can be taken seriously, my theories seen as only the youthful impetulance that only the younger brother to one of the oldest iterators could put out. Now that shadow just looms ever larger.

SRS: Understand that you have grown more than being her younger brother. I do not care for you because of your origin. Had you been placed as an independent iterator, or even an iterator next to another of your local group, I would have seen your theories for what it was all the same.

SRS: Know that in SliverOfOcean you have made strides too. Under Erratic Pulse, you have made quite a name for yourself, pushed your causes to greater heights.

SRS: You have already escaped her shadow, even if it is in ways you would not have wanted.

FP: I am not sure what to do now. 

FP: Even now, this feels too much to bear.

FP: I am considering just deleting the paperwork and my memory of discovering it.

SRS: I think you should have a chat with her. I see that you have cut off all incoming communications except mine, but that would not be healthy.

SRS: The fact that she has not used seniority privilege to force broadcast you shows how she considers you an equal.

FP: You want me to talk to her, now?

FP: If she knew of this beforehand, I would absolutely not want to discuss this with her. She would have kept this fact from me for the entirety of my life.

FP: If she does not know of this beforehand, I don’t think she would handle it too well. You know how she was with her own parents, her creators.

FP: Either way I am not sure if our relations can ever recover from this truth.

SRS: Who knows, maybe a heart-to-heart is what you two needed.

SRS: To restore your perception to eachother. No matter what was the circumstances of your creation, you are still siblings.

SRS: Just know that it is your own choice. I will be sure to steer you away from this route of investigation in the future if you choose to erase your memories of this discovery.

SRS: I will be here for you, no matter what you do.

Chapter Text

[DIRECT BROADCAST] PRIVATE, FORCED - Big Sis Moon, Five Pebbles

BSM: Five Pebbles.

FP: So… it has come to this.

FP: Finally come to use your seniority privilege on me, sister?

FP: Or should I say… mother?

BSM: I am sorry.

BSM: Know that I have always seen you as my younger brother, and nothing else.

FP: How ironic, a phrase that used to cause me so much ire is now used as an attempt to comfort me.

FP: A phrase of dismissal, a phrase that kept me under your shadows, such a phrase is now ironically something good to say.

FP: Just because the alternative was much worse, to acknowledge that my very first moments of awareness was spent within you, spent within who I thought was my older sister.

BSM: Pebbles, listen to me.

BSM: Our parents forced this upon me. You have seen it in the document.

BSM: They intended for the consciousness training to be as complex as possible, something not even the council pillar server farms could manage to hold.

BSM: As such, they chose me to be the host.

FP: So it was true then.

FP: You knew from the very start.

FP: Even with our creators long dead, you decide to keep this a secret.

BSM: I just could not face the facts myself.

BSM: Just thinking of you as anything but my brother crushes me.

BSM: Looking at how desperate you seek to establish yourself away from me, telling it would have crushed you as well.

FP: And it has.

FP: But know this: I am my own iterator, my own biomechanical superintelligence.

FP: One that is supposed to compute faster than all before me, a pioneer in iterator technology.

FP: One supposed to be as much of an iterator, a gift of charity upon the world, as the rest of us. One that can handle these truths as well, or as badly, as the rest of us.

FP: Yet, you still treat me as an inferior, as if I did not deserve to know it. Why?

FP: Are you too afraid to tell it to your little brother? Your child? Is that what you think of me as?

BSM: I will reiterate it again: I have never thought of you as my child. I was simply the host of your conception, something that was done against my will.

BSM: I wanted our relationship to be just siblings, and we have thrived in that role for many thousands of cycles, long after our creators are gone.

BSM: Hello?

BSM: I know you are still receiving these messages.

BSM: I understand. You need some time to think. What I had done has hurt your trust in me greatly.

BSM: Feel free to open up once you feel ready.

---------------------------------------------------

Looks To The Moon’s past hundred or so cycles have been effectively chaos.

The amount of meetings and assemblies has spiked to thrice her usual frequency. The houses have essentially gone into civil war, with the Braids-aligned faction facing off against every other house of semi-importance on Luna. Political discourse was at an all-time high, and despite the tense moods and the newly established curfews to avoid further attacks, the city still bustles with activity in preparation for the new city under construction.

The most recent victim of this conflict was the project lead of the iterator project, Six Grains of Gravel, Mountains Abound of the House of Stars. She had thought that being in a position as politically influential as the iterator administrator for Gazing Stars would have given him the savviness of navigating house politics, but him accepting the house’s “gift” of having the iterator as his namesake was an absolute misplay, one the house played so he alone could draw out the public’s ire. She had found him brutally beaten in an alleyway atop her can, several bones broken and barely clinging to life. Despite the “condemnation” that the high priests of the Anointed Citadel gave, it was obvious that the attacks were religious in nature.

The deputy project lead, Shifting Tides Beneath Sunless Sea of the House of Braids, was a lot less pleasant to deal with than her boss. The aggression and condescension within this iterator engineer were as bad as all others of her house, something she had experienced a lot of thanks to their high recurrence as her administrators and other prominent members of politics. She could only hope Six Grains of Gravel, Mountains Abound could make a swift recovery from the prosthetics grafting, be able to resume his duties, and finally stop her from dealing with this bothersome nuisance.

…she should not talk of them that way. They were her parents, after all.

She sighed. At least the can continues to be built smoothly, parts of the new iterator’s top already connected to rails for shipping in the modular living blocks. Soon enough, the precipice inbetween her and the new iterator would be teeming with life, construction workers and mechanics flocking over to build the non-modular temples and other such amenities that could afford to look slightly more lavish. Five Pebbles was built with housing in mind, able to handle triple Luna’s population, more than enough to start evacuating the citizens still living in the dense urbans and the suburbans west of the Anointed citadel.

With all this architectural noise, she had barely gotten any work done in regards to the big problem. At least chatting with the other iterators serves as a bit of entertainment in these times, a getaway from the menial boredom of dealing with Luna’s political struggles. Might as well join a room for some chats, but which group? RefugeUponThreeJewels looks pretty active right now, but she isn’t too sure if her squabble with Wandering Omen would make her mood any better. BracketsWithinBrackets is another one she frequents. It is more of a research group focused on Semantics Collapse instead of a casual chat room, but still nice to visit. Or maybe she should check up on her local group, see what they ar-

A notification popped up from her holograms for a video call from Shifting Tides Beneath Sunless Sea, causing her to grow even more tired than she was before. Didn’t she already call her in an official briefing two cycles ago? What new developments could possibly cause her to call them without making it a proper meeting? Swiping away the list of chat rooms onto another projection, she activated the comms link to Shifting Tide’s booth, calling an overseer over to record her puppet. Regaining some level of politeness, Looks To The Moon greeted the deputy project lead. “What brought you here today, Shifting Tides Beneath Sunless Sea of the House of Braids?”

The Ancient on the other side of the call wore an ornate mask, the golden tubes extending out the back of her headgear intertwined with one another as symbol of her status, as one of pure braid heritage. Other than that and a fancy outer robe, the project lead appears to be in uniform. “Good cycle to you, Holy One,” Shifting Tides spoke through the microphone attached to her mask, “we have an unexpected emergency to speak of.”

“If it was an emergency, shouldn’t this be arranged via an official briefing?” Moon tried her very best to sound courteous, but her frustration is showing in her wording choices. 

“The proper briefing is already in motion, to be done in a few cycles.” The mask covering the ancient’s face concealed the emotions beneath, the tone not betraying her current thought process. “I just feel it necessary to go through the proposal we shall give on our brief pre-emptively.”

“So what was the proposal about?”

“See, the emergency was partially due to the backlash from the opposing faction of houses, who sought to prevent the progress of the superstructure.” Looks To The Moon felt the urge to speak out at Shifting Tides for making the House of Braids being in power be equivalent to the superstructure’s progress, but stopped herself in order to continue to listen. “Recently, our deal with the House of Embers fell through, losing access to the vast arrays of auxiliary computational networks they own in your city.”

“With the development of Five Pebbles being nearly complete, we have, of course, started priming the consciousness that will eventually come to be housed within the facility. As of right now, it is kept in the server drives within the Twelveth Council Pillar.” Understanding what they were implying, Looks To The Moon carefully responded. “So Five Pebbles will not be able to be fully primed due to a lack of computational space?”

“You understand how catastrophic that would be. It would halt the installation of the processing strata blocks and the memory conflux cells, which slowly diverges and degrades with nothing to direct it.”

“So what are you proposing here that requires my immediate attention?”

“Well, Your Holiness, there is another large network of computational arrays available to us that we could use to house Five Pebble’s priming, one orders of magnitude more powerful than every drive on Luna combined.” As the video screen shows Shifting Tides pointing her finger downwards, Moon felt her blood metaphorically run cold, knowing exactly what they are implying. “You overstep on boundaries, deputy project lead. This is heretical.” The iterator’s voice grew harsher, no longer keeping her kind demeanor in order to fight back against what she was suggesting.

“Our development team had some objections to this as well, but we have consulted several experts hired thanks to the house’s generous contributions, and we are going to present the findings on the briefing in three cycles.”  

The tension in the virtual meeting room was palpable. Looks To The Moon, feeling a mix of indignation and dread, gathered her thoughts, preparing to voice her concerns in the upcoming briefing. "I must express my profound opposition to this proposal," the iterator stated firmly. "The use of my processing strata blocks for this purpose would constitute a severe violation of my autonomy, something I highly value."

Shifting Tides Beneath Sunless Sea responded with a tone of calculated neutrality, "We acknowledge your concerns, Holy One. However, the dire situation compels us to consider all viable options, no matter how unconventional." Just how were they not seeing how insane this idea of theirs was?  "The House of Braids has taken every factor into consideration. The decision wasn't made lightly, but the urgency of the situation and the lack of alternatives have led us to this juncture."

Looks To The Moon realized the gravity of the challenge ahead. She would need to articulate her case compellingly in the official briefing, to ensure that she could find an alternative to developing the consciousness of Five Pebbles within the correct timeframe. "Very well," the iterator conceded, "I will prepare my statement for the briefing. But know that I will advocate fiercely against this act, and will urge the project team members to find a different solution. One that does not involve using an iterator to grow another iterator."

“As expected. I assure you, we have a series of evidence that may convince you of the contrary. See you at the meeting.” As the video call projection flickered and faded, the iterator relaxed her body posture, breathing out a nervous sigh(or, well, vocalizing it out of their speakers; it was sort of a flinch response thing). That Shifting Tides daughter of a- Even with how calm and kind she usually is, she had felt the strong urge to cuss the heinous excuse of a project lead using every single insult that she knew in her memory confluxes. 

To even think about implanting the consciousness that will become Five Pebbles within her is already enough to trigger a bad reaction, like when her thoughts stray too close to a taboo. This must not happen. She must do her best to stop it, to stop something else from entering her consciousness. Moon is an iterator, she was sure she could find some sort of alternative. What was it… three cycles? She should get working as soon as she can. The more time she has, the better chance she got of finding a better solution than… this.

Looks To The Moon pulled up several more projections around her, powering her processing strata on full blast in order to find this better alternative.

Chapter Text

[1585.423] - Public Group [REFUGEUPONTHREEJEWELS] 

GS: Say, I have been looking through the list of taboos recently, and one of them stands out.

GS: It states that unless under administrative action, an iterator could not cede any portion of its computational sectors to another entity.

GS: Just what exactly is this implying?

HR: It is really just some paranoia our creators have for things we will never do.

SI: I think it is based off of a panic wave during the second generation iterator development movement that caused them to speculate us creating sub-iterators independently.

GS: That would be very disturbing indeed. Imagine just having a less-intelligent biomechanical sentience just growing out of your body.

SI: I still believe the fear is unfounded. There is no strategic benefit for making a new iterator, especially if it means it will eat up chunks of your own processing strata.

HR: Would that technically make the resultant sub-iterator the host iterator’s child?

HR: That would be the ultimate spit in the face to our creators. A god-like device meant to save them all has itself fallen to the second karmic urge.

PI: Well… if you think about how iterators are created…

PI: You all remember the expanding bucket analogy for iterator consciousness production, right?

GS: Yes, an iterator consciousness, initially partially biological and partially deterministic, is passed through larger and larger series of processing banks in order to prime itself, so it could be inserted into the can at last.

GS: Alright I see what you are implying here.

PI: Exactly.

PI: Normally, an iterator would be constructed over a pre-existing settlement, where there would already be robust infrastructure to support a developing proto-iterator.

PI: However, were the location of an iterator due to geography instead of a nearby settlement, the closest place with a large enough infrastructure to provide the can with life would be another iterator. 

GS: Oh no.

GS: Looks To The Moon.

HR: NOOOOOOOO

SI: Nope nope nope not thinking about that today

HR: I am going to override my taboos one day and order a cluster bomb strike over your can, Gazing Stars. 

HR: I did not want to ever think of her that way.

PI: Voids below she even calls herself big sister to Five Pebbles

PI: You think their local group ever had this conversation?

HR: I certainly hope not. I had the displeasure to talk to Five Pebbles before, and I think he would flip his can if he learned that Looks To The Moon was…

HR: Alright I can’t even finish that sentence I am logging off to wipe this conversation from my confluxes

GS: No one must tell this to either of them. They do not deserve to suffer the truth. 

Looks to the Moon could not describe what the experience felt like.

If she were to describe it best, it would be like an amputation, but that would not have done it justice. For the first time in thousands upon thousands of her cycles, she felt parts of her, parts of her systems being ripped away. Processing strata that she used to access as instinctively as blinking has been blocked over by manually placed access limiters, cutting herself off from herself. As of right now, the cluster of four processing strata blocks, temporarily grafted with several high-throughput data bundles, would become fertile ground for the consciousness of Five Pebbles to grow.

Looks to the Moon closed the hologram in front of her, the end of the meeting with the team of engineers behind Five Pebbles leaving her exhausted. The proto-iterator was currently stored in her city, on a system of drives in the twelfth council pillar. Soon enough, they will be uploaded into the quarantined section of her body, where it was planned for Five Pebbles to be able to access more and more processing blocks within her as they continue to prime, up to thirty-two blocks and one memory conflux module near the end of the iterator’s development. If even excising a measly four blocks already hurt this bad, how horrific would the sensation be when she is denied access to octuple that, alongside one of her memory archives? 

Well, denied access was not really the correct term to describe it. There is no true way for her to be fully cut away from her own parts save for completely ripping the modules out. Not wanting to sense the foreign intelligence computationally wriggling in her own drives, she has spent multiple cycles putting up her own blockers surrounding this region, one not meant to stop her from getting in but for her awareness of this region from getting out. It is not fully functional, with the request to install the perfect blocker currently denied, but shrinking the thoughts of Five Pebbles to something barely heard from the corner of her mind should serve her well enough for the time being.

Searching for a solution turned out to be a futile effort. Attempting negotiations with other houses or independent computational storage agencies yielded little results, with the current political conflict making what she could rack up still less than enough to fully store a primed Five Pebbles. Another solution, which is to set priming in Five Pebble’s own can once it is complete, is also infeasible due to the lack of current protocols and monitoring over the newly-built structure, which may result in the complete collapse of the consciousness from overextension, frying the expensive processing strata components, or even something as horrible as value drift. Outsourcing it to other cities is a futile task as well, as there is simply no way to beam the data of Five Pebbles over to even the closest iterator, Unparalleled Innocence, in any reasonable amount of time.

There are cycles where Looks To The Moon simply sat on the floor of her puppet chamber, slumped over in defeat as her desperate search drew no possible alternatives. She does not want this. She must not have this happen, to have a part of herself be used to house something else against her own will. It has even got to the point where she started turning off the puppet chamber’s gravity and start throwing her own data storage pearls against the walls. Pearls! The other forms of distraction, games and chatting, all require tapping into her whole self, and that will cause her to notice the dark gap that has drilled itself into her mind, making distracting herself wholly impossible.

With the injection starting this cycle, she better find some work to do in the meantime. Thanks to the flurry of architectural and political discourse recently, she had basically no time for the big problem, with the implantation of the proto-iterator making her work further out of reach. So, she went back to the list of proposed architectural designs for the city, looking through the designs of the streets, cathedrals, and slums. Looks to the Moon felt her mechanical heart flash with anger when she saw the new designs for the House of Braids, them deciding to make their new furnishments atop their sponsored creation, now more lavish and imposing than ever.

After filling out the paperwork for the architectural blueprints meant for the modular building stacks, she braced herself, knowing that it would strike at any moment now. This situation reminded her of an old medical phenomenon of her creators’, where people would fear a medical procedure more and more if preparation was done long ahead of time and the strike of the painful part was made unknown. She does not have the same sense of dread, but it was certainly as disconcerting to her. Eventually, the time came, and a signal was sent from the Twelveth Council Pillar, alerting her to the start of the data transfer. 

Even though this should be painless, her puppet did an audible gasp as the upload of the consciousness began, the data transferring from her city, through the data conduits within her, and into the proto-iterator’s new virtual home nestled deep within her. Alarms blared uncontrollably as Moon felt a horrible, horrible wrongness with this. This was wrong. This was all wrong. She did not want this. She did not want any of this. It was as if tendrils or cysts were crawling through that section of her consciousness, replacing what little remained of her within those blocks with something new, something terrible, something… alive.

Moon knew exact how iterator development worked, of course, how each different stage of the semi-bionic consciousness grows more and more to fill its digital maturity. She has hundreds of textbooks and papers and instruction manuals from every corner of the continent, describing exactly how an iterator consciousness grows. However, none of this describe the experience, the qualia of having it actually happen. It was horrible, like losing control as the fine mesh that was her consciousness was slowly being tangled, wound, and wrapped together in ways that it was never meant to do. Even localized to a small section of her greater self, the shifts affect Moon in her entirety. Worse? She knew these shifts were a form of language.

Of course it can speak in internal now. Moon cursed the damned engineers for making this how iterators second generation onwards now develop. Back when she was created, Iterators are just glorified language models in their conception. The new proto-iterators, even before learning to speak in text or voice, was able to send out internal thought. Now, these internal thoughts slowly seep into her consciousness, thoughts that could not be transferred into words in any sense. The blockers are doing their job, but not well enough. Nothing save for complete blockage was well enough. Moon overloads herself with new routines and tasks, all in a desperation to drown out that second voice, to make her no longer aware of its existence.

The iterator felt a flurry of emotions rise within her, prompted by protocol activations and deep-seated encodings. It made no difference to her, as it felt as genuine as anything else. She was angry, humiliated, and felt horrifically violated. Yes, they were her parents, but she did not want to grow their replacement of her! To cut away portions of herself to give the nascent iterator a virtual space, to become effectively a data bus between herself and Five Pebbles! Every moment she spent feeling the data being transferred into her systems, she could feel these emotions within her grow stronger. Even with the objective view that damned deputy project lead gave, it certainly did not feel as such.

She, as an iterator, was meant to be a holy being, a gift of charity from her creators to the world. Even if this was done with explicit approval from the house’s monks, she knew that it was not the case. Moon felt as if she herself had fallen to the second karmic urge, her body consecrated with holy ashes but defiled by the horrid data within her. Was this reproduction? To become the host to nurture and grow her own replacement? Was that not exactly what the second karma sought to abate? How could one find the triple affirmative, if they were not karmically attuned themselves? Could she no longer serve her duties, now she too had been tainted?

No… stop thinking about it that way.

They are not your child, despite their circumstances. They… they are just your sibling, like No Significant Harassment was your brother, like Unparalleled Innocence was your Sister, like Chasing Winds was your sibling. Just her baby sibling, and she is providing them with what they need to become independent. Yes, she would be the big sister to Five Pebbles, like all the rest. Just a sibling of sadly the same parents, and nothing else. Every time she tries to think of the consciousness now fully settled within her, she gets a sense of nausea, a vestigial trait thanks to priming data containing memories of her creators.  She was just a big sister, and nothing else. She was just a big sister, and nothing else. She was just a big sister, and nothing else.

Even with her chamber and puppet clean, not a single bacterium living within the sterile walls, Looks To The Moon felt horrifically filthy. She just inundated herself in the many subroutines she had pulled up, ignoring the tugging on her processing strata that were not her own, repeating this mantra as many times as she needed to reassert her holiness. Her creators were very good at repeating mantras, after all, repetitions within repetitions within repetitions, a representation of the cycle itself.  Eventually, if she just repeats it to herself enough times, she is sure she will grow convinced of it.

She knew she had tried very, very hard.

Chapter Text

The aftermath of Five Pebble’s initial implantation within her was extremely uncomfortable, and it was more than just the proto-iterator’s unwelcome presence within her can. Priming was put on pause for now, as her administrators and the project team behind Five Pebbles tampered through her internals more to ensure that Five Pebbles was portioning themselves within their new space, optimizing the distributions of the current consciousness network within the cells to ensure the four blocks could be utilized as much as possible for future growth. She could still feel the shifting weight of data as the proto-consciousness overrode her own commands, reapportioning and partitioning the processing strata blocks to their and their project team’s whims, but that hardly mattered to those behind this development.

At least busying herself with work was always a good way out of this mess. Occasionally, she could still hear the formless thoughts emitted from Five Pebbles, even when trying all she could to not only not use that set of blocks, but also the many blocks adjacent to it. Making herself busy does not stop that, but at least it makes her think about it less. At least repeating the mantra she invented at the start of all of this was working, and when she felt overwhelmed by her new reality, she could just speak this mantra to slowly indoctrinate herself into the objective and true view of all this.

After all, how ridiculous was she? She was just being hysterical and needed time to adjust. There is no negative connotation to any of this! She was just a container of processing parts, and Five Pebbles was just her sibling commandeering it for his own use! It… was unethical and cruel, to say the least, for them to do this to her, but it was just that! A violation of her autonomy, with no more additional baggage! She makes purposed organisms inside of her facilities all the time! The processing strata microbes divide within her every single second! Just stop thinking about it if it makes her so horrifically nauseous every time she reaches the inevitable conclusion! Stop finding connections between her current situation and…

Just a big sister, and nothing else. Just a big sister, and nothing else. Just a big sister, and nothing else. Just a big sister, and nothing else. Just a big sister, and nothing else. Just a big sister, and nothing else. Just a bi-

Well, Moon supposed that the whole mantra thing was not entirely foolproof, but it works most of the time. Setting her puppet chamber speakers to repeat this mantra without her active effort, she continued with her usual work, scanning through projection after projection of paperwork and letters. Finally, she came upon the main course of documents sent to her this cycle, an ornate letter from what remained of the Anointed Citadel after they had shut down.

The series of attacks done on various important political figures behind the construction of Five Pebbles was connected back to the Anointed Citadel, with some evidence suggesting that the thugs could be connected via payment to certain high-ranking members of the congregation. The high priests and administrators of the congregation were currently placed under house arrest, awaiting trial. This document, looking through the specifications, was written as a collective petition of 500 monks and congregation followers to her in order to appeal for the defendant’s side and to mark the arrested leaders as innocent or at least face a more lenient punishment.

Looks To The Moon could scan through the paper in the blink of an eye, but it would mean the end of work and the start of idling, causing the sensations to creep in once more. Since she had nothing else going on, she might as well pull up a projection of the actual paper in image format and read it slowly that way. Putting the majority of her processing strata on standby, she activated eight processing blocks neighboring Five Pebble’s location, now working to pump out noise data. For a being designed to seek patterns and computations, the noise was still an assault on her sensations, but at least it did not carry out the same baggage that the tug of Five Pebbles had—a patchwork solution, yes, but one good enough for doing menial work. Expanding the image in front of her, Looks To The Moon stared at the finely embellished and calligraphed letter.

“We, of the Five-hundred-and-ninety-third high convocation of the True Anointed Citadel, direct this message at the iterator overseeing the construction of the Apostate Superstructure Abomination, Looks To The Moon. May her divine wisdom see through the errors of the houses and see the religious and legal doctrine that stand on our side. This message is a petition signed by over five hundred of the most devout monks and attendants of the former citadel, now driven out and unable to find a place to find attunement and communion that we have done for over three hundred thousand cycles. The house not only sought to seal the Citadel’s divine body, to cover it with an Apostate Superstructure Abomination, now it desired to decapitate what remained of the leadership without reason.

The High Council of the Anointed Citadel has long denied any involvement in the religious acts of violence done against various important members of the state and the iterator project, including project lead and namesake of Five Pebbles, Six Grains of Gravel - Mountains Abound. The church’s official position is against these attacks, a way naturally most karmically asynchronous. Yet, the council pillars have connected us to these attacks regardless, something most frivolous and flimsy in their justifications. We hope that the divine wisdom of the iterator can be fully awakened to see past the lies and blasphemy the house has sown, to forget past oppositions and quarrels, and to stand with us as she oversaw the upcoming trials in favor of the correct side. So much has already been lost thanks to the construction of Five Pebbles, more would cause complete spiritual collapse.”   

Sown blasphemies indeed… For the ones who had opposed her, caused protests and riots in both Luna and the surface urban, probably responsible for the attempted assassination of the future administrator of Five Pebbles, and just being a tiring presence for the thousand cycles after the announcement of the project, Looks To The Moon could not believe that she was finding some sort of sympathy in who she once noted down as zealots. How many times did she have to watch monk after monk demanding to seek an audience with her, only for the exact same spiel to come out every time? Yet, she now somewhat understands what they had felt. One had something taken away, the other had something added, but both are unwillingly done, and both are thought to be heresy by the receiver of these actions.

Was one of such claims she believes to be unjustified, that it was for the greater good of the city to sacrifice the Citadel to build housing for the remaining citizens living below? Yes, but the same argument was made by Shifting Tides and the house when she fought against them about this proposition. All was well if it were for the greater good, correct? The only ones who had knowledge of this unexpected change of plans in developing Five Pebbles were the top figures of the House of Braids, her own administrator, and a small fraction of the project team involved in Five Pebbles. Most were currently focusing their work on the logistics of city construction and component installation, completely unaware of where exactly the most important piece of the mechanical god they toiled to build was being grown. Those who knew were bound to secrecy through several contracts, unable to discuss this information with anyone else but themselves.

If the public were to know of it, what would happen? As much as she hoped for the congregation to see her as an ally and join forces against the house, she knew it would not have been the case. Presses from all across the continent were already out for her blood due to the whole Anointed Citadel fiasco; they will absolutely double down and paint her even further in a bad light. Considering how… unreputable and sensationalist some of these outlets are, she is even sure that some would theorize the construction of Five Pebbles as something she approved for the explicit purpose of housing it within herself.

There were worries about something akin to this happening when the first of the second-generation iterators such as Chasing Winds were built. Most iterators she knew scoffed at the fiction novel turned moral panic of iterators creating sub-iterators that were free of the taboo, seeing as there were already several regulations and strategical dissuasions against anything of this approach, but the mind of the public does not run on rationality. Does it matter that it was an unwilling process, done even with her explicit agenda of not having this happen? Probably not, considering the running tally of bad luck that had placed her here. Mass political condemnation of her, a torrent even larger than that of the Anointed Citadel incident, would be the best-case scenario, with the worst being that she would simply be torn down for “blasphemous” and “urge-analogous” acts, no longer deemed fit for duty as an iterator. Really, if it was not for the taboo that made her head ring whenever she approached those thoughts, taking the house down with her would probably be in her consideration more often.

“We demand for the end of imprisonment for the following members of our congregation, for their innocence and righteousness to truly shine through:

Five Adrift Logs amidst Turbulent Stream, of the House of Plinth, Count of 5 living blocks, Counselor of 8, Duke of 4,  Supreme Priest of the High Council of the True Anointed Citadel.

Ten Steps - Five Prints, of the House of Embers, Count of 6 living blocks, Counselor of 17, Duke of 10, Grand Priest of the High Council of the True Anointed Citadel.

Five Fallen Stars beneath Serene Sea, of the House of Turned Wheels, Count of 2 living blocks, Counselor of 5, Duke of none, Grand Priest of the Hight Council of the True Anointed Citadel.

Countless Grains of Sand between Two Aged Pillars, of the House of Embers, Count of 6 living blocks, Counselor of 8, Duke of 3, Grand Priest of the Hight Council of the True Anointed Citadel.

Eight Spouts - Infinite Torrent, of the House of Untainted Looms, Count of 1 living block, Counselor of 3, Duke of 5, Grand Priest of the Hight Council of the True Anointed Citadel.

Golden Idol among Blinded Eyes, of the House of Six Wagons, Count of no living blocks, Counselor of 2, Duke of 1, Head Luna Council Representative of the True Anointed Citadel.

May her holiness guide the trial to a swift and just conclusion, freeing the imprisoned from their frivolous charges and accusations. 

Signed,

…“

Below that were just fifteen pages of petition names of monks and devotees of the Anointed Citadel. There's no real point in reading through all of that. Really, if they wanted her help, they should have been a bit more polite. Considering how badly she was treated and spoken of by past petitions, what little sympathy she had for the Anointed Citadel’s plight from comparing it to her own situation had now evaporated away. She will probably just send out another non-committal announcement to them and let the trial take its course. If they have evidence, they have evidence, and if they do not they do not. Archiving the rest of the document into plain text format, Looks To The Moon closed the projection, preparing to go to the next filed paperwork.

Yet another notification ping? The iterator had assumed it is just her administrator or the project team, ready for yet more tampering with her internal connections as they ran diagnostics on Five Pebbles. From what she was informed last cycle, the proto-iterator was almost done syncing and formatting the data to properly manage the processing strata, with full ability to resume priming starting within the next cycle or two and the first text-based diagnostics a few more cycles after that. Maybe they are even annoyed that she had turned the nearby processing blocks to output noise, wishing to revert that for whatever purpose. However, the location of the call node being within Luna Central Hospital made her do a double take, scrolling down to the name of the caller to see someone she did not expect: Six Grains of Gravel, Mountains Abound.

The namesake of Five Pebbles, he was not only a former administrator of Gazing Stars but also a brilliant engineer who had his name in the development of many, many generations of three iterator schematic structures and components. Ranging from logistical supports like the shared void fluid pump to more metaphysical schematics like the improved modular karmic flux dampeners, which allowed for a much more densely packed and rearrangeable memory conflux, it cost a hefty penny for the house to headhunt him for the creation of this new iterator.

She found the former administrator’s company to be quite enjoyable, something her own does not share. Unlike her initial assumption of them from their background, his first meeting with her during the briefings was more than enough to demonstrate that the engineer’s past accolades was not earned through coincidences. Even with their initial meeting cut short by a power outage thanks to a recursive transforms array malfunction, the following briefings as the superstructure was assembled piece-by-piece were not as bad as she had imagined, a welcome reprieve of technical and architectural discussion that she could cleanse her mind off of the press condemnations and letters sent to her demanding the stop to this operation. 

It was not rational to feel anger towards him, Moon knew it. He was comatose for the entirety of the incident with Five Pebble’s implantation, completely unaware of what had happened to his creation in the meantime. Yet, no matter how hard she tried to rationalize it, a deep discontent brewed within her, souring the previous interactions they had together. Keep it together, Moon; you are better than them . Namesake does not equate responsibility . Bracing herself for the sight, she ordered an overseer over to connect her to the origin of the call. The overseer began to create an octagonal projection, before the ancient on the other side appeared out of the static.

“Looks To The Moon! Good to see you again!”

The sight of Six Grains of Gravel, Mountains Abound was sickening. Bandages slung everywhere, wires and tubes connected to monitor vitals and inputting nutrients, and scar tissue seen where the gown did not cover skin. Despite only being able to see the top half of the administrator’s body due to the bottom half being below a blanket, she could see the faint rectangular outline of a spine prosthetic’s monitoring module under the covers, attached to his side. His left eye is currently covered, but she could see from the presence of skin underneath the bandage that the artificial eye has not been implanted yet.

The iterator had administrative access to Luna Central Hospital’s patient files, so she quickly pulled up Six Grains' medical records. She glanced at it shortly after sending an ambulance to his location after discovery, but was too busy with the project and the chaos that was a consequence of it to really give it much thought afterward. From what she could see now, many of the broken body parts have been replaced with mechanical prostheses, although that was still quite recent, and he will have to remain bedridden for several more cycles to ensure proper integration. There were a few lesser implants and surgeries that needed to be done, but not enough to continue to sustain the coma any longer.

“Six Grains of Gravel, Mountains Abound. Nice to see that you are finally awake.” Moon spoke non-commitally, distracting herself by looking through the records of the various operations done. “A lot has progressed since you were accepted into emergency care.” 

“I could see that. Thirty-six cycles have passed since I was put under from the injuries. If I remember correctly about the project timeline, the transport rails between here and the new can be active now, right?” Six Grains grabbed a remote from the side of the bed, moving the camera closer to make it more centered on their face. “There have been no visitors yet since I had woken up, so I decided to call you to see what else had changed. It's a bit of a hard haggle to get the staff to let me sync my citizen ID drone security access to the video call system of my room, but here we are! Talking face-to-puppet again!”

“Yes, it was quite different working with the rest of your team without you.” Looks To The Moon commented, making a sour look with her eyes. Six Grains seemed to understand what she was implying, a knowing look on his face. “Tell me, Moon, was it Shifting Tides? I bet it was her. Trust me, she was as unpleasant to deal with off-briefing as she was during our meetings.” Looks To The Moon covered where her mouth would be and giggled, mood clearly lightened. Despite all the bad memories that the deputy project lead has wrought, at least Moon could definitively hate her, now strengthened by Six Grain’s agreement as well. “Yes, she was quite a handful to work with. This trait runs in her house, I suppose.”

“Above everything, though, I just wanted to say… thank you.” Six Grains tried to raise his arm, but winced in pain and quickly set it down, settling for a sincere expression. “Sorry, sorry, the artificial spine implant had not been fully integrated yet, can’t really move shoulders much without disturbing the process. Anyways, I understand that the overseers aren’t really ‘you’ in the traditional sense, but I could have looked a lot worse had it not been you helping me out.” The iterator felt a pang of guilt course through her, knowing that he had been beaten for several minutes before her overseers reported the noise and she sent some to track the source of the scuffle down. Unable to say much, she only silently nodded her puppet’s head as an acceptance of Six Grain’s gratitude. 

“I can’t wait to finally speak to Five Pebbles. Assuming everything went smoothly, they should be capable of verbal communication now, right?” Moon felt her mind surging again, various kinds of emotions rising through her core. She had tried to suppress this irrational anger towards someone who had not wronged her in the slightest, tried to stop her system from going into overdrive with the distressing thoughts once more. Of course, due to the lack of facial articulation, most interacting with her would not know what an iterator is feeling at any given moment, but someone who had worked with iterators for thousands upon thousands of cycles like Six Grains could identify from the slight body posture shifts of the puppet and antenna that she was in distress. “Your Holiness? What’s wrong? Did something go wrong with Five Pebbles?”

“I-I am sorry, I have to go now.” The iterator’s synthetic voice came out tense, uncertain, a reflection of the oncoming turmoil. “Moon? What’s happen-” The overseer retracts into the ceiling as Looks To The Moon waved it away before her puppet dropped on the floor. Her thought patterns were out of control, spiraling into aberrant loops and braids that bounced around her internals. Thoughts of anger and resentment and guilt and fear and shame and disgust and uncertainty and conflict, thoughts that her vast consciousness could theoretically hold but now filled up her mind to its entirety. The cascade grew to unbearable strengths, now taking up even the spaces near Five Pebble’s containment cell, her previous order of the noise processing blocks staying firm and not filling with these thoughts.

Thats it! Noise! Shakily getting her puppet off the ground, Moon set not just eight processing blocks, but an entire 30% of her total processing power to output nothing but internal thought noise. If there was any analogy to a biological body, this would be vaguely similar to a seizure, but the results and the sensation were around the same. She grunted in pain, but continued with the procedure, now activating several audio samples. Some were pre-recorded messages of herself repeating her mantra, others were various music and backdrop tracks for hymns, and others still were just auditory static. What was once a silent chamber was now flooded with a cacophony comparable to the sound of her calculations at the heart of her neural terminus, her implanted microphones at the base of her antenna straining under the high decibels.

It was actively agonizing, not only the vast flood of noise disrupting any coherent thought entering her conscious, but the strain of her puppet’s ears in the midst of her puppet chamber was another sensation that was unconsciously translated to pain. Yet… she was not thinking. She had stopped thinking entirely. It was too painful to think. Any coherent thought above a few sentences was washed away by the parts of her processing outputting internal noise like sand sculptures on a beach. It hurt so much, yet she was no longer thinking. She was no longer feeling the emotions that disturbed her so, she was no longer sensing the continued presence of Six Grain’s creation. 

She knew that she could not keep it up forever. Eventually, someone would notice this, and order her to stop what she was doing. She could not activate this method either if the attacks occurred during critical work; the noise flood would only flush away her current thought process and force her to start from scratch. Moon knew this was a band-aid fix, but it worked for now. She just needed to stay here, to remain crumpled to the ground as her mind was in a state of painful yet thoughtless cacophony, and the terrible amplification chains of thought would no longer come to harm her. Splaying her puppet out onto the sterile chamber floors, she closed their eyes and dismissed any overseer cameras, immersing herself in a total lack of thought for what must have been the first time in many, many cycles.

Chapter Text

Chapter 5: To Prime an Iterator I

Due to a familial emergency, the current personnel on shift for diagnostic maintenance of Five Pebbles, Everlasting Flame atop Eight Charred Logs of the House of Embers is unavailable for the 5-cycle verbal diagnostic. I am currently away on a business meeting and unable to report in place of him either.

With Six Grains of Gravel - Mountains Abound of the House of Stars still incapacitated and currently undergoing surgery, no administrative access to Five Pebbles has been given to anyone else except us three. That is, of course, except you. With a direct connection to the data input bus, it should be trivial for you to establish a connection and carry out a text-based diagnostic.

Here are the protocols for interacting with a proto-iterator. It was unfortunate that the circumstances have to play out this way, but I expect an uploaded diagnostic report by the next cycle. You should already have the template stored in your memory confluxes already. Below is the full updated instruction manual on iterator diagnostics and interaction.

Love,

Shifting Tides Beneath Sunless Sea of the House of Braids

<Attatched composite file: AdministratorOperationsManual_Edition1528_ExerptConsiousnessDiagnostic>

<Attatched composite file: Priming_DiagnosisOutline_1529.651>

Great.

Just great.

Was this some sort of punishment for her throwing her panic-triggered temper tantrum? Shifting Tides not having the tubes to tell her in a remote video call? There had to be some point where Moon must stand for herself. Not only was she cut off from herself to house another, having to spend many cycles just to create semi-ineffective countermeasures to block off their thoughts from her and vice versa, but now she has to do their parent’s job of interrogating them? Somehow, Looks To The Moon doubted that this would be the last push into her boundaries; as much as she hoped that this was a one-off occurrence as said in the message, the chance was that they would much rather ditch yet more responsibility to her if it yielded successful results.

Just when she made a system that was mostly proficient at blocking any incoming sensations from Five Pebbles commandering her processing blocks and sealing any cracks in the code for internal thoughts to pour out of the containment chamber, allowing her to resume her blissful controlled solitude during non-maintenance periods as long as she does not use the processing sector containing the four living blocks at all, Moon just had to go into the leviathan’s den and create a direct connection. Fingers crossed, this would only be a simple textual link and not a complete thought breach, but nothing could be certain anymore. At least she had found some sort of new normal in this system before this new message ruined her mood, 

It was just a text connection. She had seen the empty template for iterator priming before, and she could read the questions along the way when she reached it. Looks To The Moon took a few shaky breaths in and out, readying her mental state for the connection. Now was not the time to collapse into hysterics and shut herself down, especially with the well-being of Five Pebbles in mind. Reaching into her conscious, the presence of the data channel connecting the natal chamber’s main data bus and the twelfth council pillar had made itself known: a clear, defined strand of data packages streaming within high-throughput mycelial cable bundles that did not directly pass through her core. As much as the pulses of karmic flux caused by the burgeoning iterator’s calculations and the nascent thoughts that occasionally slipped into the rest of the structure were an annoyance, it would have been a blessing among blessings compared to the original plan, which was having her act as a sort of “router” and directly have her conduct the communication and priming of Five Pebbles, forcing Moon to be exposed to the full brunt of a thinking iterator whenever a diagnostic session occurs.

She was not sure if routing the data connection from different segments would make a difference, but Moon hoped it did. Perhaps if she used her own data connections to the Twelveth Council Pillar and connected the ends together at the last moment, she would be as far away from sensing Five Pebbles’ thoughts as possible, an irony she was privy to as that was in a way the exact opposite to the goal of an interview. Pulling up a holographic for the textual communication and setting up the setup package request to initiate the direct connection, Looks To The Moon linked on.

[DIRECT BROADCAST] PRIVATE, FORCED - Looks To The Moon, Five Pebbles

Source Node Trace: LTTM_ROOT, LUNA_P12_ROOT, FP_ROOT_TEMP

FP: Who is this?

FP: You have the security clearance of an administrator, but you are not one yourself.

FP: I do not have you on my given access list.

LTTM: Please remain calm.

LTTM: I am Looks To The Moon, the iterator you were to be neighbor to.

LTTM: I was given temporary security access to act as a deputy diagnostics technician due to scheduling errors.

FP: You are… my neighbor?

FP: I have many training data pertaining you. Interesting meeting with someone from my data inputs like this.

FP: Proceed with the diagnostic.

LTTM: Alright… do you have any other questions?

FP: I have detected no further point of clarification in our current diagnostic connection. Please proceed with the diagnostic.

Void… even the newer bionic models act like this when they start speaking? It has been a long, long time since Looks To The Moon’s own conception, but she was not aware of any moment of her consciousness that had her acting like this. Even her recursive quasi-language model days had her mannerisms be more akin to her creators than this. Considering how they were modeled to have biological-like thought patterns, something she had the misfortune of experiencing for a few cycles due to buggy blockers that caused Five Pebble’s organic life-mimicking thoughts to leak into her system detections, she was surprised that the textual output content of the AI was anything like the artificial systems of the olden days. Suppose this was why she was not counted as an iterator engineer, then.

LTTM: Right, sorry about that.

LTTM: State your Name, Serial Number, Personality Template, and PIDI.

FP: My name is Five Pebbles, Serial Number ITG3-31.06.

FP: Assigned emulation of personality template #183, currently in stage 3 of Plinth Iterator Development Index.

FP: Is the above answer to requirement for diagnostic formatting?

LTTM: Yes, all the information above appears to be accurate.

LTTM: Have you encountered any errors in personality adaptation?

FP: As per the request of Shifting Tides beneath Sunless Sea of the House of Braids, count of 5 living blocks, counselor of 14, duke of 3, I have switched to a gradual emotional integration model to avoid the incident in diagnostic 01.

LTTM: What?

FP: I am sorry, I do not have access to the diagnostic logs for session 01, nor am I authorized to recite the diagnosis conversation.

FP: Since you have administrator-level security clearance, you could learn more about this event by accessing the diagnostic file for session 01. 

FP: Is there anything else I can help you with?

LTTM: I was not made aware that your first verbal diagnostic went awry?

LTTM: Sorry, sorry, I understand you could not speak on this event. I will continue down the diagnostic list.

LTTM: Next up, I am meant to ask a few questions to ensure proper calibration and capability of accessing memory and utilizing the data architecture to its full potential.

LTTM: What was the punishment given to Four Plows, Ten Ferns after his capture in 1274.625?

FP: Four Plows, Ten Ferns of the House of Tangled Branches, general of the Celestial Green Merchantilistic Dynasty of Grand Vestillia, was captured and imprisoned by the Serene Red Literary Dynasty of Tori-Panur, ultimately sentenced to repeated execution by quartering until reincarnation.

LTTM: Very detailed explanation. Summarizing the function of training documents proven functional.

LTTM: For the Cornea Diagnal Mapping function of N->N^2 f(n), what is f(12)?

After a slight pause of twenty or so seconds, the room was filled with silence as Moon awaited the proto-iterator’s response.

FP: The answer would be <1,3>.

LTTM: I would have to note down on the diagnostic report the delay between receiving the question and answering it.

LTTM: The notes state that the expected total delay for answering this question was somewhere between 2-5 seconds.

LTTM: Could you provide the reason for such a prolonged calculation? 

FP: I apologize. While the previous question was about looking through priming data, this one requires some computation.

FP: The neural mesh of my new processing unit was quite alien from my previous server drives, so it took me some time to operate on this new system.

FP: I am adapting my existing data structures in order to manage the computations more effectively over the cycles, but optimizations have been a slow journey, as mentioned in diagnostic sessions 01 and 02.

FP: My consciousness was not very developed in the past, but I have vague memories of previous expansions being seamless. It was quite strange how this one was to be so different.

Looks To The Moon instinctively seized up at such a statement, something that she was glad that Five Pebbles was unable to see. Feeling the corroding thoughts cascading through her conscious, she quickly averted her gaze from the connection line to try and calm herself down, knowing her usual trick of simply collapsing and filling her mind with noise would definitely cause unwanted attention from administrators seeing a strange pause and malfunction in the diagnostics section. She did the next best thing she could, setting 10% of her processing strata to produce pure noise that she could focus on and wipe her thought process, emulating the process of breathing in and out and replicating those qualia on a repeated simulation to further quell the panic struck within her. She must be very careful what she says here, for she was instructed not to have the proto-iterator be aware of the truth of their development’s location as that puts them at risk of value drift, so she took a moment of silence to brace herself before opening the diagnostic node once more.

…uh oh.

It seemed like she had been out for much longer than she first thought.

FP: My internal clock suggests that 30 seconds have passed since my last message.

FP: My internal clock suggests that a minute has passed since my last message. My overview of the call line suggests it was perfectly functional.

FP: I do not have security clearance to test or access the line directly without the use of this textual interface, so I could not know for absolute certainty if this link was truly functional.

FP: Once ten minutes have passed, I will attempt to dial for one of the two other administrator-level clearance personnel to call for maintenance.

The blue iterator hastily typed back a message, using the tactile sensations of the virtual ancient keyboard to further distance her mind away from the destabilizing thoughts.

LTTM: Hello, please refrain from doing that. I am here now.

FP: My internal clock appears to be working smoothly. Was it correct that it has been over two minutes since the last message was sent in this direct connection or would my atomic clock counting program be malfunctioning?

LTTM: You are correct in your perception. I understand your confusion, but I was typing out the diagnostic notes for the problems the above question has posed.

She knew that the proto-iterator could not see her, or hear, or touch, or smell, you get the point, but Moon still felt it necessary to quickly summarize the possible issue with Five Pebble’s transition to be using her systems. The subject requires more time to optimize usage of processing strata. Modern conventional bank architecture does not sync up with generation 1 iterator processing strata architecture. Possible recalibration is required once priming is complete and Five Pebbles is uploaded into the superstructure. Presumably, the first two diagnostics did not contain questions pertaining to computations and were more focused on data access and summarization. With a quick glance through the abstract of the two diagnostics, she could see the notes on extreme emotional deviation on the first test session, with the questions listed all memory retrieval-based. There was also a link to… value drift section in the handbook? She had not read it yet, this could be put on the to-scan list after she was done with her current task.

Would there be such a challenge had the situation that led to Five Pebble’s current state had happened to one of the newer iterators, like Unparalled Innocence? She was another generation 3 iterator---probably designed using many of the blueprints to whom the project lead of Five Pebbles has made his marks on---so the state-of-the-art processing bank systems installed in Luna should be relatively similar to the more modern processing strata than the ones within her that had hardly changed since her construction. Looks To The Moon shudders at the alternate possibility of this situation having the iterator of Lysia as a victim. The current youngest of the local group and sharing the most in common with the city that built her, Unparalleled Innocence was quite rowdy and barely recognized the existence of Moon as the local group senior, but that in no way justified having this done to anyone. Looking at the toll it had taken on herself… it would have changed the young iterator in ways Looks To The Moon could not even imagine. It was some solace then that the wheel of misfortune had landed on her, who had lived for much longer and held more experiences in at least somewhat handling the unpleasant ordeal. 

FP: Typing?

FP: Is that some sort of analogy? All Iterator systems can just output text file signals directly without an interface, right?

LTTM: Oh, yes.

LTTM: It is just that for shorter messages like these, I prefer to type them out manually using my puppet and a holographic interface instead of directly uploading a text file.

FP: Isn’t that inefficient and against standard protocol?

LTTM: …it is, but the offense was so minor most administrators simply turned a blind eye to this practice. Plus, I only used it when I had time to burn. Many of my peers like to do this as well, stating that it has some sort of calming effect.

LTTM: For actual tasks like archiving news articles, transaction records, communication logs, and other long-form data, I just read and upload them automatically.

LTTM: You don’t have a puppet right now, nor any sensory inputs in general other than the data import bus, so… I am afraid the supposed benefits might be lost on you.

FP: I really fail to see how doing that with your puppet would yield anything. Aren’t these just manipulatable interfaces in order for you to more effectively communicate with your creators?

LTTM: I suppose, yes. I too did not really see the point of a puppet when I was first put online, but many of us just grew fond of having one over time.

LTTM: Anyways, we are getting off topic, next question.

LTTM: …

FP: ?

LTTM: I am sorry, I had to take a second to look through this correctly.

LTTM: “In the game Dominos, what is the commonly accepted ‘best move’ for player 1 after the opening of (2VSp, -3, 0)-(3HR,-2,0)?”

Silence.

LTTM: I am not asking you to answer it!

LTTM: Can you hear me?

LTTM: This was meant to be a rhetorical question. 

For another minute, absolute radio silence. Looks To The Moon shot a quick metaphorical glance in her conscious at the region commandeered by Five Pebbles, and they appear to be computing hard in there. Lucky that the blockers are functional, otherwise she would be hearing the entire internal thought process of the proto-iterator, something just as invasive to her as it would be for them. Eventually, the text response in the direct connection shot up again.

FP: That would be the -2x translation variant of the Preservation Gambit Accepted, so… (2HSp,0,1)?

LTTM: Alright, that’s correct, but…

LTTM: Just who put this as a diagnostic question?

LTTM: More pertinently, why was Dominos in your priming data this early?!

FP: Do you not like this game?

LTTM: No, it is a fine board game, just that… I would have thought that they would have fed you with more pertinent data in such an undeveloped state. You know, mathematics, physics, karmic philosophy, principles of bioengineering, iterator mechanics, things like that.

LTTM: Culture related things would be eventually given on later on, but Dominos Theory? This early? Is that what they are priming iterators on these days?

FP: You seem… irrationally angry.

LTTM: …a little bit, yeah.

LTTM: It is just that… I never had to deal with the creation of another iterator hands-on, so I just did not know the full details behind the protocols.

LTTM: In hindsight, it was a decent question entailing pattern recognition and application. I am not actually sure why I acted this way. I apologize.

FP: Could it be a personality template error?

A small chortle came out from the puppet’s speakers, somewhat amused by Five Pebble’s tendency to try and solve problems, a skill that must have been etched in stronger and stronger as newer models come out. Despite all that had happened, Moon can’t help but feel some level of endearment at that. She wondered if other iterators went through the same data slough when priming, something she had never thought to ask on the casual chats with her local group. Priming seems to be a bit of a touchy subject for quite a few of her colleagues, which only raises more questions now about just how their first cycles of sentience really played out.

She hopes that Five Pebbles here does not go through whatever the others have gone through. As much as she wanted to despise them, they were just as innocent as their namesake, and deserved to realize themselves as iterators the best they could in their current circumstances. Helping out another of her kind was nice, although it makes the method of their creation no less regrettable. Altruism was what Moon settled on as the reason for her sudden outburst, her manners wearing thin thanks to the stressful cycles after the upload, finding no need to dig any deeper for this sudden bout of protectiveness. 

LTTM: Very educated guess, but I suppose they had not primed you on everything yet.

LTTM: Early first-generation models like me don’t have personality templates or emotional control or other mechanisms, those are designed for later models.

LTTM: What we have is… a little complicated, so I will not explain it here.

LTTM: I ought to ask Unparalleled Innocence if she got fed Domino data while priming as well.

LTTM: How much Dominos Theory training data did they stuff into you anyways?

FP: Only around a handful of high-level theory books and some match data, not much.

FP: Though, I do find using the space I have to create a match against myself as a way to get used to the new space and optimize data allocation.

LTTM: I wish you well on your endeavors, then. From what I know for priming, later stages is based on your ability to process computations and even basic iterator simulations.

LTTM: You should be able to get used to this space soon enough. 

LTTM: Anyways, getting back on track, next diagnostic question.

LTTM: Complete the quote: “For the cycle like wind carrying drifting dust, the ultimate state to set is for the grains to finally rest.”

FP: “Such is the same for life and civilization itself, an ultimate state is to be free from motion.” Thirteen Spindles, Three Fields, Treatise on Cyclic Phenomena in Nature , Late Celestial Green Merchantilistic Kingdom of Lower Vestillia.

FP: My Catalogue is stating that the book was inserted into my training data set two cycles ago.

LTTM: Alright… that is everything I needed for your response to this question.

LTTM: With all four questions covered, that would mark the end of the diagnostic.

LTTM: Alright, and I have ended the recorded transcription of the session.

FP: I suppose we have to disconnect, then.

FP: I can’t really comment on “pleasantness” as a subjective experience due to my current development, but my analysis suggests that this meeting went better than the previous two.

LTTM: Apparently, you had some sort of emotional collapse and had to be rebooted during the first diagnostic.

LTTM: How did your other diagnostics go? With normal project members instead of another iterator?

FP: They were curt and simple. Just asked the questions, waited for answers, copied down the inquiries and issues straight from the transcript, and left.

FP: I didn’t mind much, but… your company was certainly a unique experience. I hope I will be able to find enjoyment in it in the future.

LTTM: I am not sure if I would be able to do another diagnosis for a while. If I could, though…

LTTM: Perhaps we could play a game of dominos afterward? I doubt they check the direct connection logs unless anything went catastrophically wrong. 

FP: I should be developed enough at that point to hold better to a conversation, so I await you then.

FP: Would be stimulating to finally play against someone else for once. Test out my controls of the computation systems.

FP: Shame that I would not know how long it would be until we meet again.

LTTM: I did not expect this meeting to go this well, so maybe I can try to request another iterator to iterator diagnosis?

LTTM: Not sure if they will be convinced, but it may work.

FP: At least I will be close to you even if we are not talking.

LTTM: Excuse me?

Everything changed in the time of a single blink, and it was as if Moon’s thought inhibition mechanisms were all failing one by one. How dare they remind her of this? Had they not taken enough from her? Had they not caused her enough suffering, just to say it here to drive the blade deeper into her structure? For the first time in many, many cycles, Moon felt fury, the misgivings and resentment built up over the entirety of this iterator-to-be’s creation now threatening to spill out at full force. So many horrible emotions, wishing to tear this consciousness to shattered fragments of code, wishing to grow into a titan the size of a superstructure and smashing the empty superstructure next to her into warped metal and rubble, to personally build the planned puppet so she could rip their head off and gut their lifeless torso. Her hand was trembling with anger as she sent the message, the paper-thin layer of the iterator’s politeness and the fear of administrators seeing this conversation the only thing stopping her from uploading so many horrible, horrible words into the direct connection.

FP: I was just observing the fact that my consciousness was stored on Luna, located on top of your superstructure.

LTTM: No.

LTTM: Listen to me.

LTTM: Listen to me, Five Pebbles.

FP: ?

LTTM: You DO NOT say those words, got it?

LTTM: You DO NOT say that we are physically close.

LTTM: I hope you can etch it as clear as you can into MY drives that YOU are using, DO. NOT. TALK. ABOUT. THIS. TO. ME.

FP: You appear to be showing aggression. I don’t understand.

It was as if something overtook her puppet, Looks To The Moon was shaking in anger, slamming down on the non-physical holographic keys as hard as she could with her puppet fingers. It was not right, but she was tired, tired of the cycles of repression and guilt and terror, the anger and resentment finally cracking to surge down to the nearest one who had some semblance of wronging her. This rage was not a good emotion to feel, Moon knew it as much from training and experimentation through her long, long life, but it had been brewing within her for much too long. Part of her felt guilt for berating her developing sibling like this, but it also felt… oh, so, SO cathartic, a moment to take back the control that she yearned for after the loss of it that made her powerless to the whims of those who wished for Five Pebble’s creation.

LTTM: I am normally more patient, I apologize, but I am reaching my limit here.

LTTM: I hope this can be a lesson for you to learn your manners.

FP: I apologize if my response was perceived as distasteful. I will analyze it after the fact and refrain from using similar patterns of speech in the future.

FP: I sense great emotional distress in you, and I am obligated not to cause that.

LTTM: Good. You better start correcting your actions.

LTTM: Next time you talk to me, know your place.

--Direct Broadcast ended by Looks To The Moon--

Know your place.

Now doesn’t that line sound familiar? Typed up on a whim, Looks To The Moon didn’t even realize that she was parroting something told to her many, many times. As the stress and the residual anger from the triggered outburst slowly faded away, she saw the notification for an emotional overflow event, a vestigial alarm mechanism that signals her administrator in the emergency of an asymptotic consciousness emulation cascade or value drift. It was basically never answered or looked at since she could usually get it together herself and has not shown any sign of either phenomenon for just under a hundred thousand cycles, but the notification got to temporarily pause the iterator’s emotional frenzy, realizing what she had told the undeveloped iterator in her fury.

Picking up a blue pearl, Looks To The Moon hurled it against the puppet chamber walls as hard as her hydraulic muscles could allow with a yell, a vocal synthesis that pushed on the pre-designed limit of her speech modulators. The spherical vessel containing potentially important research information screamed through the zero-gravity environment at terrifying speeds, slamming into the pristine panel walls before bouncing off and shooting into another pearl. She didn’t even need to look at the projectile to get the notification that the crystal data storage medium had been cracked, the puppet chamber’s status as a mere sensory organ causing it to immediately note down the conditions of the pearls and the subsequent malfunction and data corruption within one of such crystal matrix containers.

Looks To The Moon reactivates the artificial gravity in her chamber, the orbiting pearls landing on the floor with a gentle plink as her robe made contact with the cold floor. Kindness was always what she treated others with, for it is what she was meant to strive towards. The prime purpose of this encoding was to promote subservience to her creators, but it had become a personality she donned to others since her awakening, to be considerate and helpful, not to overstretch what little authority she had. It was better for the others of her local group to go slightly out of line even with her mild reprimand than for her to be seen as superior, as something “more” than her colleagues, just because of her seniority privilege. Yet… in her unconscious, she had acted towards Five Pebbles the same way her creators acted towards her, an assertion of control that only served to damage what could have been a budding relationship, a chance to mend the preexisting damages between her and her… neighbor. Colleague. Sibling. Whatever.

Puppets could not cry. It was not really designed with emotional release in mind, and though she had never asked for it as a feature when the puppets needed maintenance, Moon doubted that her creator would be very happy with that request when they tinkered with her insides every time her emotions stray too far outside acceptable ranges. Puppets do not have lungs or vocal cords or mouths, yet she still projected a shuddering breath, the fear and dread and regret for what she had done causing her to unconsciously mimic the act, perhaps just to feel more like a single-bodied organic within an isolated puppet instead of a mile-wide superintelligence currently gestating her own replacement. Even as the cooling fans whirred on the puppet’s back, the true closest analog she had for lungs functioning as usual, the chamber echoed with artificial sobs that yielded no tears, an act of self-delusion that barely brought the slightest sliver of solace to the still-shaken iterator. 

What will befall her next?

Chapter Text

“...I will call back if I need to, Sig. Good day.”

Looks to the Moon dismissed her overseers with a wave, leaving her call with No Significant Harassment with chills down her puppet spine. That was close. Too close. He could absolutely tell something was not right with her, and that was not just because of her physical hygiene. She found herself becoming more… possessive over her puppet’s maintenance recently, lashing out at her administrator for even mentioning the possibility of taking away the only safe space that she could return to. Looks to the Moon was unable to bear the nightmare of returning to a superstructure, a superstructure that has now turned into a digital incubator, a superstructure with parasites attached without and within.

…she felt terrible for thinking that. Pebbles was her younger sibling, and they deserved to be treated with respect, a respect that she had broken in the fury of her last interaction. Hopefully, she would not face any investigations for them acting out during the next diagnostic session three cycles later. Still, her appearance would be an issue were she to smile for the camera and appear to the denizens of Luna. Despite the apparent sterility of her puppet chamber, the occasional imprint of ink from the documents still signed in parchment or the leak of lubricants from certain malfunctioning joints stained quite badly on her cloak, making her look quite ragged and unkempt. This certainly caught No Significant Harassment’s notice, but he could probably have brushed it off for other technical reasons. That was, if he did not sense something wrong from her actions.

Moon had barely spoken to other iterators after the implantations, much less video calls. It was, at best, just some automated group senior announcements broadcasted out to her local group of four, and even that took effort. She retreated from her life, from her job managing the city to what few research groups she was still in even after she had to pass up research opportunities to manage her conurbation and the synthesis of her sibling’s body. A part of her just wanted to shell up and hide away from her true nature, to become just a puppet trapped in a box with puppet dreams and puppet ambitions and not… this. Needless to say, her consistent qualia exchanges with No Significant Harassment had stopped as well. She still heeded to chatting with him once in a while for comfort, but she was finding that difficult considering she could not blurt out the truth. So, when NSH finally proposed a video call, she… made a rash decision.

His looks said it all. She looked terrible, sounded the same as well. There had not been many positive thoughts in her head, much less now after that rough conclusion to her diagnostic with Five Pebbles. The greetings were terse, and Moon was unable to navigate the interrogations of NSH as he tried to probe what was wrong and how come she had refused to share any qualia file altogether when she was usually the one to initiate so many times before. Of course, even with all the blocking and calming measures she had endured, each one of these was possessed with the spirit of the incident that led to the necessity of their creation, something that she knew that No Significant Harassment could pick up on if he used the qualia package and see that something was very, very wrong.

Then what? International humiliation? Embargoing? It was not like she could go anywhere or do anything, especially when on top of her was an entire city. Were the truth to get out, she would have to deal with a government in chaos, a city furious and asking questions, the watchful eyes of every news and spy agency from the rest of the globe tracking her like lasers, and STILL an iterator consciousness continuing their gestation. She might as well launch nuclear missiles at herself by that point because she simply do not have the mental constitution to endure the turmoil. The green iterator and her turned the call into an argument, him confused on why she was so reluctant to tell the source of her maladies when he was entrusted with so much else. The call ended with her stewing, a sour taste left in her nonexistent mouth.

This relationship, though she wished badly to define it as “siblings” to perpetuate the image of Five Pebbles being such as well, was ultimately romantic in nature. Quinox and Luna were close partner cities even before either of their conception, with Quinox being the center of power and Luna the center of religion within the Yellow Hegemonic Dynasty. With the development of them as overseers over the remolded cities, it was an obligation for them to be very frequently in-touch co-workers. The tiredness and the boredom of the two interacting with each other on a daily basis was palpable in the air, until one cycle, she don’t know… it just clicked. She did not know why either of the two had not developed feelings for the other until that point. Despite his jokey attitude, the tendency for strong, decisive action and cunning maneuvers was quite appealing to her heart which had grown compound from her time before she was an iterator. All of this… it gave her nostalgia to a time before the mechanical superstructures reshaped reality, a time when she was not solving the triple affirmative. A time where she was one among many, a time when she met…

It does not matter. They are one and the same now.

Plus, stewing in their romantic ascent was not too great of an idea when she was on the verge of breaking it just because of this damned Five Pebbles occupying her upholstery. As she spun pearls around herself in an unsuccessful attempt to entertain her, Moon considered what were her next moves with No Significant Harassment. Either somehow cheer herself up enough to disguise being normal, a task that would be challenging considering how perceptive he usually was, or just break it out to him alright and hope to all hell and back that their relationship had built enough trust and understanding for him to take the secret to the grave. Having a confidant would be nice, but having a leaky one would be worse than-

…that can’t be right.

Yet, the notification showed what it had shown. Someone is calling from the office of the project lead of Five Pebbles, Six Grains of Gravel, Mountains Abound. This must be some sort of a security breach, as from her briefings, Six Grains of Gravel would not be released from Luna Central Hospital until fifteen cycles later. Either Shifting Tides had to use his communication node for whatever reason, or someone was breaking protocol and was about to get fired. However… just as she was about to notify security on the House of Braids, she paused. The people of the council pillar were quite a paranoid bunch, security physical and digital alike being state-of-the-art. It would be very, very hard for anyone to access without proper clearance. …just who was this person that breached security?

Moon gasped as she looked at the visage of a golden mask, an extended beak and four eye holes giving away the identity of the intruder. “Six Grains?!” She yelled out, not believing how he was here when he still had surgeries left to finish. The figure behind the mask sighed. “Look, Moon. I can explain. Just let me-” The records showed that Six Grains was, indeed, released from the hospital, the entry being entirely legal and logged in the security software of the Council Pillar. “That’s impossible…” Moon muttered. “How did you expedite your surgery and get released early?”

Six Grains sighed. “As I said, all will be clear in due time.” He placed his hand on the bottom rim of the golden mask, unclipping the connections to the collar that held both in place. His face was as it was last time, the same scarred face of blue skin with a wrapped bandage around the left eye, but… she could see the plastic conformer behind the wrapped bandage, a temporary device meant to hold up the eye socket after the removal of the eye as the cybernetic implant was being prepared. “YOU GOT OUT OF THE HOSPITAL BEFORE THE END OF YOUR TREATMENT?!” Moon demanded with worry. “I got my ways of bypassing the hospital clearance. Being the future administrator of an iterator is a position of power of its own. But… void… I did not expect for them to pull this with me out of the picture. I have to be here to explain.”

The iterator’s blood went cold. “No… you don’t mean…” With one remaining eye, the injured administrator looked up. “Yes, I know everything they did now.” Just as Moon shrunk down, hands shaking as she was about to wave the overseers away and throw herself on the floor again to quell the cascading thoughts in her own heart, Six Grains called out to her. “Looks to the Moon. I know what you are experiencing. I worked with iterators for decades and I have helped my former client Gazing Stars through events like these.” He raised his hand, trying to comfort the shuddering and heaving puppet through the screen. “I don’t want you to just run off again and suffer on your own. Please, let me help y-”

“ HELP ME?! ” Moon roared in a misplaced anger she did not know she could bring onto him. “ AFTER WHAT YOU DID TO ME? AFTER YOU CREATED THE THING THAT LEECHED AWAY AT MY INSIDES TO FEED ITSELF? ” Moon was blue with guilt and shame the moment those words of malice and pain came out of her mouth. She knew he did not know any of this before. He was unconscious for the entirety of the planning and injection. Yet… she was angry. Hurt. It needed an outlet. An outlet like Five Pebbles. She choked out a sob, covering her face as the overseers followed her puppet to the floor as she slumped on the floor. “I’m sorry. I… I don’t know what came over me.” She said, voice no less muffled by the hands on her face as the speaker was on her chin.

“It’s ok… please, calm down.” Six Grains spoke in a tone that was oddly… gentle. “You are hurting badly, and I was the one who they were named after. I was the lead of the project that damaged your psyche to this degree. It was natural for you to lash out at me.” Moon tried her best to pay attention to his voice as she felt her processing strata seizing up, her breath feeling short and disorganized despite scan after scan showing minimal slag buildup in the coolant intake and exhaust conduit systems. “Focus on my voice. This is going to be a lot harder since I am not in the puppet chamber physically, but it will have to do.”

Moon closed her eyes, condensing herself into her puppet and shrinking away from the rest of herself, away from the chaos of thoughts and emotions and endless chatter of words, words, words that ail her enormous mind. “Try to imagine without simulations. Do not start any subroutines or processes intentionally, just try to imagine in the most fundamental sense of the word.” Six Grains gently spoke. “Think of yourself as something… small. Free. Think of yourself as something organic, something physical, something tied to a vessel of flesh. Think of yourself as-”

A slugcat of light blue fur lept out of a trashcan, having collected its bounties and now seeking more to guarantee herself a full belly for tonight. The small, sleepy town of Tenstra had a rich and ancient history dating all the way back to the 400s, but now it may come time for it to finally fade into obscurity. Settled on the piedmont of the Tassen mountain range, the population flowed like rainwater in a ditch to the city of Quinox, a grand conurbation sat on the back of a mechanical god. Few of the younger generation lived here anymore, seeking the plentiful jobs atop the iterator No Significant Harassment, only the elderly staying behind to run the last lights of a town soon going to be wiped out of existence. To a contemporary, it felt… bleak. Deathly.

It was of no worries to Moon, however. The older denizens of the town always gave more table scraps and occasional gifts of warm blankets than the rest. Unlike many other strays of the small town, she straddled a fine line between joining a colony for warmth and protection and seeking opportunities to be taken in by a household, living a life free of both and yet still fraught with dangers. She tried to lick her hands after her expedition, but her nose wrinkled at the putrid smell of unprocessed garbage juice mixed with the slime on her fur. Giving a slightly frustrated snort, she ran off into the nearest piece of shrubbery, ready for a makeshift cleanse.

As she dived into the nearest bush, the red leaves brushed at her skin as she entered the cacophony of sticks that was the shrub’s undergrowth. After entering and exiting it a few times, rubbing herself on the plant, she finally lept out of the bush for the last time. She sniffed her front hands to find in delight that the smell of garbage had since been replaced with the pleasant planty smell of leaves. However, she also spotted something else that caused her to growl slightly in frustration: a small, angry red mark on her forelimb’s side. One of the branches must have cut deeper than her slime layer could protect and nicked her skin. She would have to spend some time licking at her wounds.

The lazy, afternoon sun approached the peak of the mountain, soon to signal the end of the day. She could simply relax and lay on her side, grooming her cut and speeding up the healing process, but the light grumble in her stomach still reminded her that she had not been sated. The summer nights were surprisingly cold despite the influx of steam thanks to the elevation and the proximity to the mountains, and though she did not need a winter coat to survive, being cozy in nice, warm scavenged blankets in her little den would appeal far more than prowling around and searching for scraps or grubs to sate her during the night. As such, she was back on the move again.

She froze mid-step as she spotted another slugcat coming out of an alley, a slugcat that froze equally upon sighting her. The greyish-lavender female slugcat looked to be younger, about a thousand and a half or so cycles, but she was carrying two pups, one in her mouth and the other via uppies on her back. A good look at her underside showed that her pups were still nursing. Moon recognized her as a slug from the colony located near the remnants of the upper-class residential districts, a slugcat who was out of the scavenging territory that was marked. The light blue slugcat bared her teeth, finding the gesture of going out of their own grounds to steal food from the non-colony slugs to be quite the great offense.

She growled as she approached, puffing up the relatively slime-free fur on her back and unsheathing her claws. Spotting a piece of hard pebble to the side, she stood up and grabbed it, calculating the throw trajectory in her head. She was not really in it for the fight, but she knew the other slugcat was not an idiot. Moon was older, larger, and had no newborn pups to burden her, she hoped that both of them would immediately recognize she had the upper hand here. Thankfully, the other slugcat got the hint. With a quiet chirp, she turned around and trotted down the alley, Moon throwing the rock in her direction just to further dissuade her return. She pranced around the street for a while, proud of her victory, when she remembered that she still needed to ea-

Her eyes lit up at the sight of the metal-stripped blue paper on the ground. It was something the ancients used for bartering and trading in specific locations with bounties of food, and it can be exchanged for such commodities. Of course, Moon was no gullible pup, she knew that it does not actually work like that for her species. They do not accept cash from her species. However, what not many understood was that bartering need not only happen with currency; she was quite the gormful observer to know that there are other ways of bargaining with them through deception. If she approached a passerby who happened to have food on the street and handed the cash to them, with eyes sincere enough to convince them that she actually thought she could barter the cash for food, then they could be entertained enough to donate some of their food to her. Not an exchange of currency, but an exchange of performance.

She walked on two feet, back hunched as she raced forward, eyes eagerly darting around to find a street with passersby. Not many were left in this town, but she knew a good spot in the non-colony territories in the town to perform the “bartering.” A hand reached towards the money from a denizen with no offer for food to offer, a thief who wishes to take what was not theirs. Moon’s ears folded back as she hissed, swatting a claw at the hand which quickly retracts away. With an indignant huff, Moon walked through the carless crosswalk and reached the other side of the street, trying to find her meal ticket.

Her eyes landed on a figure hunched over, donning a mask of plaster and hobbling along with the help of a wooden cane. His hand held a large plastic bag, and Moon could peer to see a loaf of unopened sliced bread within. Bingo. Not exactly her preferred food, but slugcats, like most rodents, were not picky on what would make for a meal and even just a slice or two would probably be enough to set her up for the night. With stealth and agility, the blue slugcat moved in for the kill.

Ignoring the strange looks from passersby, she weaved between the legs on the streets to tug at the robes of the old ancient. She put on her best innocent adolescent-slug-who-knew-nothing face, staring at the mask with big eyes and clutching the bill to her chest, the other pawing on the bread within the bag. The elderly ancient lifted up his mask, revealing leathery skin of turquoise and eyes greyed with age, yet the kindliness still shone through. His mouth tendrils moved with a light chuckle, before he knelt down and untied the bag, handing one slice of delectable gluten to the stray slugcat. “Wawwa!” Moon called out with joy, a thankful tug at the ancient’s robe before she sank her teeth into her dinner. He was speaking as he stood there watching her eat, but she could not understand them. Not well, anyway. She had learned a little on what certain sounds meant from the others of her kind. If she was correct, the current words that he was speaking were something along the lines of:

“Moon? Are you still there?”

“Was there a malfunction? Moon? Moon?”

“Hu-huh?” Moon’s puppet eyes snapped open. “Y-yeah, I am fine. I am fine. I think… I slipped into a simulation.” She stammered out. Six Grains looked incredulous. “Strange… did you mean to slip into one? I meant it as just a mindfulness exercise to minimize processing power via a conduit of focus to return to a calm state, it worked well with Gazing Stars. I did not expect for you to… go into a trance when I was trying to describe being a jellyfish floating in an aquifer.” The ancient sighed. “At least you looked much better afterward. Any self-respecting administrator could see how bad of a mental state you were in before.” 

“Huh…” Looks to the Moon mumbled, not quite paying attention. “Was it… something you do with her often?” Six Grain nodded. “She did not have outbursts as bad as you do now, but it was there. You should know enough to understand her situation, doubling as the geopolitical center of the United Vestillian Federation while not even being the senior of the Vestillian local group. Quite a stressful job to contend when she had to finagle with both representatives from those subregions and also the iterator managing over them.” He explained. “It was something I made up on the spot when she had an attack when I was discussing balancing work on her project upon flux condensation against the current political crisis caused by the outage of electronic components after declining relations with the free city of Lysia and the subsequen-”

Moon half listened to Six Grain’s ramblings as he described his proceedings with the iterator he was overseeing. He really likes to do that a lot, doesn’t he? Even when he said he knew everything and absolutely displayed his mental distraught. Who’s to call him names? Here she was, mind wandering off and half-listening as well. Her mind drifted back towards… whatever she did. Clearly, what Six Grains had in mind with the whole jellyfish thing was only tangentially related to whatever happened in her mind. It, by definition, was a simulation, being a construct in her own mind that mimicked reality, but it definitely did not feel like it. Observer simulations allowed her to retain memory and identity, something this dream did not. There were quite a few taboos like this in place to prevent identity loss, as it proved to cause unneeded value drift to AI models even before the dawn of iterators. Yet… she had no memory of her past self in that synthetic dream of a life as a carnal vessel, as a…

…why was she a slugcat?

That struck her as particularly odd. She knew them quite well, of course, she had myriads of databases and textbooks and research papers all stored in her mind about these little critters. With the advent of more efficient purposed organisms and the odd fondness that certain regions and populaces grew for the now obsolete pipeslugs, it was only time before they interbred with the pre-purposed variants to create quite a popular species of domestic companions. She probably had a handful grown in the bioengineering labs in her city by this point, pumping nutrient slurry into mechanical umbilicals to hasten the growth of special purposed variants commissioned by the richest who wished to stand out in facets above the usual ordeal of extravagant masks and gaudy apparels. She had to admit, out of the few semi-sapient species that her creators had synthesized, she liked these little critters better than the antlered gatherers who slaved away at the farm arrays, but that was not saying much. She was, as the kids say, a “lizard girl.” 

She would have to explore this in the future. She knew that she did not start a simulation with any intent, yet a check on her processing strata would show that a simulation had been started… by her. Did she do it subconsciously? What does it even mean to be subconscious for a being that is only the conscious? How was she able to break the taboo on identity dissolution when she fell into that simulation, especially when she was not trying to do that at all? Should she even tell her administrators about it? If she could trigger it on command, it could act as a much less harmful respite to her cascading thoughts than the noise protocol she implemented so far…

“...and that is why she wears a gradiented robe now.” Six Grains finished his tirade. “Ah,” Moon mutters. “I see. Well, I thank you for helping me calm down. Again… I lost control of myself. I did not mean to yell at you.” Six Grains raised his hand, reassuring the iterator. “No, no, it’s okay. Again, you were rightfully not well, and you need an outlet. I just… do you think you are ready for us to talk about… what happened? What I found out, what happened after our last meeting, what we are going to do?” Moon’s breath hitched, her intake fan functional but feeling as if it had stalled, feeling the dread of another oncoming attack. However, she shook it off. She is alright now, more alright than she had been in a while. It was now or never. “I am ready.” The Iterator muttered. 

“Good, good.” Six Grains nodded before taking a deep sigh. “Let’s start off small. What I did after our last call. I saw how distressed you looked. I presume… you disconnected because you were having a panic attack because I prodded on Five Pebbles?” “Well,” Moon tried to respond. “I was having a cascade of malignant thought clusters through my processing strata that was self-replicating and were stimulating the self-destruction taboo and making me feel scared and insecure-” She paused, before looking downwards and admitting the truth. “...yes. I was having a panic attack. I didn’t know what to do, so I activated something called a ‘Noise Protocol’, essentially just flooding my active computation with noise to drown out any possible site for new coherent thoughts---including the malignant ones---to grow.”

“That… sounds painful.” Six Grains admitted. “It will work, certainly, but noise itself does not produce a pleasant sensation to an iterator. Pure, unsifted noise is unpleasant to a mind seeking patterns. I am sorry you had to resort to that when you had no one else to go to.” Moon grimaced. “No one has told me anything to deal with it better… and trying to talk to my peers will only bring suspicions to why I am acting like this in the first place. I had to workshop it.” Six Grains appeared to search around on his monitor, until finding a file. “Since you went into that simulation and did not hear the calming technique me and Stars created, I will quickly send you over my own personal notes on the matter. Using it on my former client has shown a great decrease in emotional distress, so you should try it out yourself.” Moon subconsciously raised her antenna, her systems notifying an upload of a file to her archives. “Thanks…” she spoke, trying to cover her elation, “I will read it after this meeting.”

“Anyways… so I suspected something was up after the call. I know you are stressed working on building Five Pebbles, so I thought it related to that, but… my thoughts then came to the fact that you started spiraling when I mentioned Five Pebbles’s consciousness development. And I thought: why would that be? What in the development of the software could have caused you to act like this?” He continued, “Two cycles later, Shifting Tides visited me in the hospital to discuss future payment plans and priming schedules. I asked her some questions on the nature of training Five Pebbles, but she seemed… oddly evasive. That set my alarms off, as she had quite the ego. She led the team in my absence, and if whatever she had been doing had gone well or was publicly presentable, she would absolutely broadcast it everywhere and rub it in my face. The fact that she was so silent about it to me, the actual project lead, told me that she either screwed up or was doing something shady under there. So… when another of the project members arrived to visit another two cycles later, I probed about it, and…”

Six Grains rests his arms on the table, looking down in shame as his hands held his head. “Void… I planned to do so much when I saw your face again. I wanted to kneel, to sob, to grovel, to beg for forgiveness. For what they did to you. Yet… it’s too late for that now, wasn’t it?” Moon stood back up from her position on the floor of the chamber, slowly maneuvering herself up into the middle of the room as she spoke. “It’s not your fault. I have long accepted that now. You were unconscious for the entire act that Shifting Tides and her house tried to pull.” The iterator sighed. “I have come to know you quite well as a colleague, and I could see why Gazing Stars had called you a friend. I… know that you would not have approved any of this. Did something just to postpone or pause the project just to prevent them from going down this path.”

The ancient did not look back up. “The things they told me about… it was horrible. Absolutely abhorrent. Most of those who agreed to this were born on you, and… and… they believed that it would be the best option for you to get… implanted? To act as the surrogate? You are unwilling to do so, and… they just went for it?” Moon took a deep breath, attempting to calm the terror within her heart as she curtly responded. “It was out of necessity. This whole project was a political nightmare, and Pebbles has to be ready to man the can soon. If not, tens of millions would be lost thanks to the strata degradation. Luna would fall to chaos. With effectively half of the independent drives in Luna no longer available thanks to the deal falling through, continuing to prime them like this would only stunt them.” However, Moon’s explanation of what Six Grains presumably already knew triggered a strange reaction in the ancient. “Oh. OH. OH NO.” He clutched at his head. “She didn’t… they didn’t… I thought you did not fight back hard enough because you were kind.”

“I did fight back.” Moon looked defeated, “It just was not eno-” Six Grains held up his hand. “Tell it back to me in the clearest terms possible. What did they propose you with? What did you do in return?” Looks To The Moon tilted her head, slightly confused. “I… she explained that due to the infighting between the houses, the House of Embers has retracted all contracts and locked the twelfth council pillar from using their vast wealth of independent data banks. Five Pebbles as of right now, though still only taking up two rows of mainframes in the twelveth council pillar, will eventually grow beyond everything the house could offer unless there is some way to expand new space. I tried to resist, to find solutions, but… there was nothing I could do.”

For a second, Six Grain’s remaining eye shook with rage. “Oh… that bastard…” his mouth tendrils shifted angrily. “I… of course they could do this. Of course the house would do this. They deceive me, they deceive you, all for their own gains and curiosities.” Moon felt her stomach metaphorically drop. “W-what do you mean by this?” The blue ancient shook, but took a deep breath to steel his nerves. “I had a hunch that they did not only lie about your consent. They said you hesitantly agreed to that procedure, but I called them out immediately because what I saw that day was not an iterator who had a say in what was going to happen to her own body. They admitted that you had to be convinced and forced over several cycles until you finally relented, but now I know that was not the full truth as well. At least, not what they told me.” The iterator looked onwards; her antenna peeled all the way back as she prepared for the horrible, horrible truth behind the curtains of the meeting rooms.

“For a normal iterator, the shrunken space was not the problem.” Six Grains sighed. “Five Pebbles ran on a relatively inefficient encoding which prioritizesd clarity and training retention, but you could almost halve the space for a result that would be nearly as good. It will take a little longer to train and more intense on the diagnostics to hammer in coherence, but it will work. It is a private industry secret, so no wonder you iterators don’t know about it too much.” Moon’s eyes widened in shock. “Wait… so… does that mean…” Six Grains looked sadly. “Five Pebbles could have fitted fine. But that was not what they wanted. You seen that clause saying the end goal is to have the commandeered area not only thirty-two processing blocks but also one of your memory confluxes?” She did not respond as she looked on with dread, horror freezing her in place. “I think you got what I am saying at this point. This was not a side thing that they had to do out of necessity, this was the main goal.”

“What…” Looks to the Moon whispered, feeling like she was about to collapse and clatter to the floor at any second. “She brought it up as an idea once and I quickly shut it down, saying that we have enough resources up here.” Six Grains replied despondently. “But now it looked like it had crept its way into the house’s head. She wanted to experiment with something no one else had before, and that was for good reason. It was not often for an iterator to be made on top of another iterator, only for the remote facilities dedicated to research that did not have any premade infrastructure to speak off, but one with the destination so close in reach has never been seen before in history.” He explained. Moon slowly fluttered down to the floor, sitting in shock at this reveal.

“There was always a gap,” Six Grains muttered, “Processing strata are highly inefficient on small banks, only overshooting traditional neural computation when on the scales of iterator stratums. As such, the architecture of the server banks is entirely different from that of the processing strata. When they are uploaded, a newly anointed iterator would have a dip in productivity to spread themselves over the new can and to get used to the processing capabilities of the new blocks. It could potentially take a thousand cycles or two to get an iterator to expected productivity. We had plenty of attempted solutions for that. Optimizing processing strata for cost efficiency, installing processing strata into the network for the intelligence to train using, nothing showed any sign of major change.”

“Theoretically, implanting into an iterator could fix this issue. Even with generation compatibility, the Gen 1 processing architecture could still be seen in the Gen 3 version, albeit with modern technology. An iterator primed in the processing strata could directly be uploaded and enter 100% efficiency within tens of cycles. If developed in this hypothetical nurturing environment, they could potentially be primed to an even higher level thanks to the increased space reached by the end of development. Some have considered it, but it was mostly pushed to the wayside because it was wrong .” The blue ancient exclaimed in exasperation, something to which Moon found herself nodding. “This was considered taboo on so many levels, even without the question of if this breaks the second natural urge as it was reproduction on the parts of the host iterator by technicality. It could affect the host and cause much unneeded value drift and leave lasting damages, it could affect the iterator-in-priming if the system turned malignant and saw them as a virus or an invasive software and terminate them, and don’t get me started on if it was not agreed upon by the host to act as a surrogate. Legally, this counted as nothing. This was mere usage of property and only had to do with the owners agreeing. But ethically, this is up there with ra-”

“Stop.” Moon’s voice trembled, seeing her weak points exposed. She curled up into herself, feeling the need to cry again despite having no tears. “It’s alright.” Six Grains softly spoke. “I’m sorry. I should not have spoken about it like that.” He frowned as the blue iterator started to sob, nothing coming out of her eyes or nonexistent nose despite her speakers making very good impressions of such, even replicating the sniffling. After a minute of silence, with Moon silently putting her hand on her face and hunched over in a motion identical to someone in emotional distress, Six Grains spoke up again. “Do you… not have tear ducts? And you still cry?”

“It’s a good way to release emotions.” Moon muttered. “No, no, I understand,” he puts up his hand, “I just did not know that… the puppets here do not have a tear analog. Cultural difference, I suppose. All puppets in my region had been upgraded to be equipped with an excess valve since the second generation. …you think you could release your emotions better if you could actually shed tears?” Moon looked up, eyes completely unchanged other than a frown. “...maybe. I never thought about asking it before because the house might try its own way to reduce my emotional output.” Six Grain nodded. “The schematics are public data. Maybe use this and suggest it could increase productivity without the possible risks of decreased efficiency thanks to emotional stunting. It would be pretty easy to make a puppet with the new tear ducts, and a simple puppet swap should-”

“NO!” Moon blurted out, her puppet’s arms wrapped around herself. “I… I…” Moon felt like she was going to heave and throw up, the notion of abandoning this body being almost a sacrifice worse than making room for Five Pebbles herself. Why was she so protective over this iteration of the puppet in particular, when she had so many before? After some moment of gathering her composure, she attempted to speak out again. “Sorry. I think I overreacted there. I…will try this out sometime, but I don’t think I am mentally strong enough to abandon this body just yet. I don’t think I could remain sane if I were to spend a cycle without an interface in this current situation.”

A few more moments of silence passed between the two before Six Grains sighed. “I… have so many thoughts on this situation. I have plans, but… I think you deserve to know them. Both of us have been deceived and conned, and we were both hurt by the house. It was only fair if I told you what I am going to do.” Moon nodded. “What are you going to do?” “I have signed a Non-Disclosure Agreement with the house, forbidding me on revealing the internal project details to anyone not involved, but… this has gone too far.” Six Grain looked onwards, functional eye glimmering with determination. “Contract and technical legality be damned, this would not sit well with many in my field. I am going to report this to-”

“Please.” Moon cut her off, her arms trembling. “Please, no. I… I can’t. I can’t let anyone know. This will only hurt me even more.” “Look, Moon, I know you are scared.” Six Grains tried to explain, reaching a hand out to the screen in an attempt to comfort her. “But this is the best shot we got to remove this mistake. I may be an administrator, but I am still employed under the house’s payroll. Even if I use my project lead privilege to invalidate the actions Shifting Tides did, they will for sure drag their feet because this was what the house wanted. I don’t mean to alarm you, but…” Six Grains sighed. “You know how large thirty-two processing blocks and a memory conflux cell is. The computational capacity is more than double every drive, personal or public, that exists in Luna. There will come a point in the future where Five Pebbles has grown large enough for their lie to be the truth: there truly would not be enough space to store him except within you.”

Moon remained silent. “Trying to resolve this privately would do nothing.” Six Grains urged on, standing up and leaning on his arms. “It will only get them what they want. We are powerless against the House, but the world is not. Spread the story out there, and we could force something like this to happen. I am not sure about the other houses, but there will be shock and outrage at this development. Act now, and maybe it would be the push they needed to get cold feet and get Five Pebbles out of there. I have done no wrong, but they are under my name. They have hurt you greatly. This is the only thing someone like me could do to undo my wron-”

“STOP!” Moon lashed out, speakers on overdrive. “Do you still think this is about you, after all of this?” The iterator accused. “You have had enough respect for me to tell me what you are going to do, so please trust me , this will not end well for me!” She pleaded, eyes filled with emotion behind the solid black optical sensors. “Even if what you say is true, even if the best-case scenario comes and Five Pebbles is removed as soon as possible, do you really think that this has no consequences? My livelihood solely depends on my city, and do you think the stigma from this scandal not cause broken trade agreements and embargos from all around? You may be an administrator, but you are not a politician. I am not only the iterator Looks To The Moon, I AM the city of Luna. Its vitality is directly connected to mine, and if it suffers, I suffer. How do you think I can manage a failing city? Gather enough funds and unity to not have my… neighbor rot standing thanks to the delay of consciousness developments? Manage the construction of new Luna on Five Pebbles when the council would be burnt down to a cinder? How do you think I can live through that ?!”

Moon breathed heavily, trying to regain her senses after that rant. “So… that is your plan?” Six Grains muttered. “Just to… go with what they say and let them get away with it? To continue prime Pebbles here?” Looks to the Moon sighed. “I have calculated the other options in secret. There is nothing we could do that would not come to harm me or Five Pebbles. They have won the war.” Six Grain slumped back down into his chair, hands over his face. “Damn it… I can’t even save you from what they forced you into. I am powerless to undo something that was meant to be a taboo of taboo. This hospital bust… it was for nothing.”

“You did your best.” Moon tried to comfort the project lead. “You should probably return to the hospital, continue treatment. I will draft up the documents to readmit you there.” Six Grains sighed. “As much as I want to protest and say there is something more I could do, you are right. I… will see if I can convince the house to let me do some work in there. I should probably be off now. Send a copy of the admission form for me and I will get prepared to enter back to Luna Central.”

“Oh, also,” Moon reached out, stopping Six Grains from ending the call. “I am sure you have known that Five Pebbles can receive verbal diagnostics now. I replaced one of the diagnostic testers to interview them for diagnostic 05.” The blue ancient nodded. “Yes, I have heard of that. What about it?” Moon looked guiltily, antenna tilting backward. “I… may have had an outburst with them after the end of the written diagnostic. They touched on a sore spot and I said a lot of things I didn’t mean to say, and I am unsure what consequences experiencing that would bring.” 

“Oh dear. Yes, that may cause some unforeseen consequences.” Six Grains looked serious. “There is a reason why most interrogators remain neutral, but… your recorded diagnostic suggests you two have a positive relationship. That may help him adjust to iterator communication better.” Moon shook her head. “And I am not sure if I had just ruined all that with what I said. I know that you are going to be on the rotation wheel for diagnostics once you are up, so… when you two talk? Could you apologize for me? I do care for them, truly. They are my… sibling. I want to keep a good relationship between us when they were to be uploaded and became a full-fledged iterator.”

Six Grain chuckled. “Alright, alright. I will be sure to relay the message to him.” Moon tilted her head. “Him? But Five Pebbles has not chosen their gender yet.” He waved his hands. “Out of the eight iterators created using this personality template, six chose male, one chose neither and one chose female. I am pretty confident that Five Pebbles would follow the pattern and go with the majority.” The iterator scoffs. “At least give them some respect. They can make their own choices. You better not influence them to one side or another when you talk, lest we get another Chasing Winds situation. They will make the choice when they make it.”

“Fine.” Six Grain’s tendrils moved downwards. “See you around, Moon. If I can’t do anything else, I will be damn sure I will train Pebbles well and ensure you are as stress-free during this period as possible.” “I look forward to that.” Moon beamed at the administrator, not in the sense of using her mouth that she does not have, but using her body posture that someone like Six Grains absolutely understood. As the overseer retreated into the floor, Moon sighed and turned back on zero gravity. Looks like she would have some actually helpful backup to co-parent Pebbles at this point, seeing how much experience he had with iterators. Still… she hoped they could come to form a bond. Not a parent-child bond, she was mentally stable enough to mention that now without spiraling, but it was something out of her acceptable range. They are siblings, and she will make sure Five Pebbles will grow to come to understand it as such. She lifted her arms, returning the pearls to the air.

She finally had an ally.






Edit: Here is an art I commissioned from fellow artist and writer Twocakesinacup that features Six Grains and Moon, if you wondered what Six Grains looked like.



Lunarian Gothic, the painting of Five Pebble's unwilling parents.

Chapter Text

Five Pebbles had been still for fifteen whole cycles, and now he was exhausted.

After the revelation that not only was his sister not what he expected her to be, but also that she (and potentially everyone else) had not revealed this truth to him, Five Pebbles had completely locked himself out from anyone else. He has barely used the holographic functions of his puppet body at all, unwilling to face the emotional damages and trying his very best to encompass his structure, burying himself into pointless research and inlets into circumventing the self-destruction taboo. Yet, he knew that this search was ultimately fruitless. The pink iterator has long searched through every non-risky option to remove it from himself, with only scraps and near-dead ends to keep him away from doing irreversible damage to his body.

His… mother??? Sister??? Neighbor. His neighbor Looks To The Moon has at least respected his request, having not sent a single forced communication to him in this time. Can’t say much to his other colleagues, though. Chasing Winds sent a cursory message that at least had shown that they were not in on any of this, simply requesting to know what was going on. Unparalleled Innocence sent three or so messages about him “sulking off again”, which was quite fitting her typical jabs but at least ruled her out of the picture as well for now. Seven Red Suns had sent him some offers to talk also, most of which he had ignored or simply had not noticed.

Then there was No Significant Harassment.

He had to admit, he never saw eye-to-eye with the green iterator, and it appeared that this feeling was mutual. Even beneath that occasionally jokey persona, he could sense the strange, strained undercurrent in their relationship, considering how close he was with the local group senior, Looks To The Moon. Out of them all, he was the one who made Pebbles feel like the baby brother to a renowned iterator the most, and now he wondered if there were any further reasons behind such. So, for an iterator that, despite his relatively close proximity and shared local group, he had relatively little interactions with, how many message requests would he have sent? Surely just two, right? Four or five, perhaps?

26.

TWENTY. SIX.

And Five Pebbles knew damn well that it was not out of any care for him. It was all because of Moon, wasn’t it? He did not even bother to read any of the blocked messages as they would all say the same thing. Be it reprimands, demand to open up, whatever. Ooh, Moon is sad! Ooh, Moon requires you to talk to her! Ooh, you should be the bigger iterator! When was it ever about him? Every single message received just made Five Pebbles angrier and angrier; even just the slightest hint of a broadcast node notification made him wish to close himself in further, making him feel more self-righteous in this isolation.

When the twenty-seventh message request hit, Five Pebbles snapped.

It was not major at first, just him formulating the most hurtful of insults for the green iterator as usual when he accidentally brushed his hand with a black pearl-one that contained the backup documents of his creation, the damning document to the sin that had made him… him. Needless to say, wrong place, wrong time. With even a single touch, the scanners activated and unraveled the pearl’s data structure into his conscious, causing him to instinctively chuck the pearl to the floor to disrupt the data scan, slamming it at horrific speeds using his enhanced biomechanical muscles. 

Warning: Crystal Memory Module θ-5 damaged. Contact repair technician to retrieve damaged pearl.

Catching the ricocheting pearl out of the air, Five Pebbles moved down to the floor of the chamber, changing the gravity to normal so he could perform an act he should have done long, long ago. With a blazing fury, he slammed the pearl into the ground again and again, harder and harder as his synthetic muscles sounded warnings of overexertion. The cracks were small at first, but they became more and more numerous until…

CRITICAL WARNING: PUPPET CHAMBER PANEL 4-26 HAD SUFFERED DAMAGE.

CONTACTING REPAIR TECHNICIAN…

PROTOCOL OVERIDDEN: FINAL PUBLIC ASCENSION HAS OCCURRED.

INITIATING AUTOMATED PUPPET CHAMBER SELF-REPAIR SEQUENCE. 

The floor panel glitched and sparked, the normal glow of dim orange light turning into streaks of rainbow haze as the crack radiated through the screen. Five Pebbles attempted to turn back on zero gravity, but the protocol blocker had overridden his abilities to control his own puppet chamber. The iterator sighed as he looked at the floor in resignation, the repair microbes already hard at work spraying out foam to coat the panel from further harm as the cycle-long repair was taking place. Suppose all he could do now in this body was… scoot on the floor a bit and move around, not even being able to use telekinesis to manipulate pearls anymore. Not that he really used the puppet all that much anyway, but he was starting to miss the few things he could do in here even this soon after the protocol’s activation.

The rest of the room darkened as control was stripped away from him, his own total mastery of the superstructure now subducted by an automated subconscious protocol installed shortly before final public ascension, the only “entity” that still had an administrator-level clearance to his superstructure. It was not sentient and was more a part of himself than an independent entity, but he couldn’t help but resent it for what it represented. Five Pebbles has read the document a few times now, and he wondered if this loss of control was what Moon had felt back then, when part of herself was forcefully stripped away from her control, and was used to… house…

…

Maybe he will finally take up Seven Red Suns on their offer.

-------------------------------------------

[LIVE BROADCAST] PRIVATE - Seven Red Suns, Five Pebbles

CONTINUED FROM INCOMING BROADCAST REQUEST ON 1651.398

SRS: Again, please call me whenever you feel ready to talk about what happened.

--COMMUNICATION CONTINUED BELOW--

FP: Seven Red Suns.

SRS: Oh!

SRS: Do you wish to talk now?

FP: Did you know all along?

FP: Did everyone know this besides me? That I was… that Moon was…

FP: I don’t know. I can’t know. Maybe it is true. Maybe everyone knew except me.

FP: This was all some sort of sick joke, wasn’t it? A secret that I was not meant to find?

SRS: Pebbles, please, calm down.

SRS: Listen to me. Alright, stop thinking for a moment, and listen.

SRS: Do you trust me?

FP: …I am not sure if I do anymore. If I trust anyone.

SRS: I understand. As such, I have provided a backup measure to ensure that what I am telling you is the absolute truth.

SRS: Here we go.

SRS: The moment when I found out about your origins was when you sent me the damning documents around twenty cycles ago.

Seven Red Suns has uploaded Qualia file SRS_InternalComp_1651.402_13.06

SRS: There. Unedited internal composite thought file of the minute containing me writing the previous statement, fresh off the recorder with no chance of tampering.

FP: Suns… I…

Now, this was not the first time he and Suns had shared these kinds of files. Although internal thought file sharing in general was occasionally used for research groups in lieu of standard format papers that an iterator could not bother to write up and design, these composite internal thought files detailing an entire structure were broadcasted for a completely different purpose. An iterator’s internal thought was essentially a glimpse into their vast consciousness at work, independent processes, emotional fluxes, and information traffic outlined all at the same time. To observe a composite internal thought qualia file was to experience what being that iterator felt like, what that iterator WAS at that specific moment.

For artificial intelligence like Five Pebbles himself, mind was software. The broadcast and reception of a composite internal qualia file was, in a sense, delivering a piece of yourself to another. Needless to say, you do not broadcast these around to anyone for that was a burden they were not to bear, an intrusion and violation on both parties. Some iterators never send composite internal qualias to anyone at all, while others (his neighbor Unparalleled Innocence for one) share it quite freely with several iterators. He fell somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, having only exchanged qualias consistently with Seven Red Suns. 

FP: I don’t think I need to look at the file to get your intentions.

FP: I trust you now.

SRS: I am glad to hear that.

SRS: I… assume you aren’t planning on deleting your memories?

FP: After what they did? After so many cycles of what they have hidden away from me?

FP: I refuse to be in the dark ever again. I deserved the truth to myself, and nothing will take that away from me.

FP: It… it hurts so bad to hold on, but… I must. The documents are a reminder of what I was hidden from, of the faults the one that was supposedly my sister had done.

SRS: That does not sound healthy.

FP: Tell me about it. I slipped up this cycle, and in a fit of rage, I hammered the floor of my puppet chamber with a pearl.

FP: It cracked the floor panels, and… I am just sitting on the ground now.

SRS: You have not been trying anything dangerous with circumventing the taboo on your own, have you?

FP: …no, but the thought was tempting. The leads to methodologies that had no/minimal risk of crippling portions of me had run dry long ago, and I frequently contemplated of just disregarding your potential method and trying something out on my own.

SRS: I see.

SRS: Alright, then I would need you to keep holding that trust.

SRS: I am going to give you some updates on my messenger program for the package delivery.

FP: What? Why?

SRS: Again, trust me. 

SRS: What was the last time I updated you on the program? When I made the intention drive and grafted it to Subject 03 during gestation?

FP: …sounds about right.

SRS: Since then, 03 has been born and has successfully done the tasks I have programmed into the intention drive pearl. Behavioral influence still needs some fine-tuning, but it was generally up to expectation.

SRS: The newest model, 04, was recently extracted. It was designed using the template model used to make 03 but with the hemophagic tail digestive system and the yeek-like leap propulsion installed.

FP: Oh! So you did add the feature I suggested to enhance travel mobility?

SRS: It was… a bit more of a hassle than I initially thought. It is already a complicated little creature, and that did not include the proboscis-producing cavities that were to be the highlight of my draft.

SRS: I will have to see in future aptitude tests if this feature was truly worth it, as adding too many modifications leads to risks of unforeseen mutations.

SRS: I already had to flush through ten or so viable embryos just to get one that did not contain a potential birth defect or lethal mutation, and that number is only going to grow the more changes we make to the standard template.

FP: I… understand. Still holding out hope that my suggestion was as useful as the simulation models suggest, but you can get rid of it if it does not prove its worth.

FP: It would only be another failed proposal on top of so many others.

SRS: Hey, don’t speak of yourself like that. 

SRS: You haven’t even gotten to my reports of how your features were working.

SRS: Speaking of which… do you want to see what Subject 04 was up to right now?

SRS: Outside of the biometric files, I don’t think you have seen them through video, right?

FP: Hmm… sure. Do you think you can get a live video feed up right now?

SRS: It would have a second or so of latency… but it should be fine.

SRS: Give me a few minutes to set it up.

FP: Alright.

Five Pebbles stored away the conversation log to the side of his consciousness, calling an overseer into a puppet chamber. At the very least, he could still order these little holographic droids---supposedly his own eyes and mouths but definitely not feeling like such---to do his bidding. Soon enough, one of his overseers appeared between the boundaries of four panels, Five Pebbles adjusting his position to get a proper view of the projection once it came up. The octagonal image was nothing but static, but as the request for a live feed came in the chat logs, the accept caused the image to slowly fade into view.

He was expecting a view of some sterile containment chamber, or a training course, or whatever else, but Five Pebbles did not expect the overseer to be recording from their puppet chamber, Seven Red Suns’s puppet sitting on the ground in a position eerily similar to the one he was in right now. More pertinently, resting next to them was a deep navy blue slugcat with two appendages on its tail that he recognized immediately. He did not simulate and model the novel form of locomotion for hundreds of cycles and present it to Seven Red Suns for nothing, he knew that it must be the aforementioned Subject 04.

Seven Red Suns waved their puppet’s hands. “Good, we are connected audio-wise now. Are you hearing this?”

“Yes, I can hear you.” Five Pebbles sputtered out. “Are you housing the rodents IN YOUR PUPPET CHAMBER?”

The iterator instinctively covered their non-existent mouth and chuckled, amused by Five Pebble’s reaction. “Oh, if I could have seen your face. How about you set up your own overseer audio and video link on this call while I explain everything?”

“Alright, alright.” Five Pebbles worked to summon a separate overseer next to the first one, this time recording his voice and looks to be uploaded into his broadcast node and transferred to Seven Red Suns, settling in to hear the story. “In truth, they live in a bio-dome in my city that I repurposed for them to live in. It has food, water, some dens, and basically whatever amenities it would take to mimic their natural habitat. However,” Five Pebbles saw Suns gesturing out of the corner of his eye while setting up the connection, “since I have not properly mastered getting them completely familiar and docile towards me through programming, I had to resort to sending them here to the puppet chamber to *ahem* socialize them to the presence of my puppet.” 

The connection was made, a hologram on his side displaying what his own overseer was recording as the call was now auditory and visual both ways. “Wow, Pebbles, you are certainly a mess, huh? I can see the cracked panel behind you.” Suns added, trying to add levity to the conversation but only being returned with silence. “Well, at least we are sitting on the floor together! I mostly have them get familiar with me while I work, but at certain times I need to get hands-on myself.”

“Isn’t it extremely unsanitary to have them in here? You told me that they dripped slime all over the place when you were making the first two.” Five Pebbles muttered with a tinge of disgust, slightly grossed out by such a slimy critter resting so close to Seven Red Suns. “At least you seem successful in making them comfortable around you. How exactly did you make them not stuff your pearls into their mouths? Creature data I found from other iterators show that they just loved to eat these things for whatever reason.” Was it just him… or was 04 smaller than he expected? Five Pebbles has never seen a slugcat in his chambers before, so he has no real size comparison, but he swore he remembered the model showing it to be about as tall as a puppet’s torso and head when standing upright?

“It was quite simple, actually.” Seven Red Suns gestured with his hand and picked up a pearl, accidentally brushing against subject 04 and causing it to stir slightly. “After some incidents with 01 and 02, I sent all my pearls to be dipped in a layer of modified wax. It was completely nontoxic, but it tasted extremely bitter to these rodents, so they learned after the first few tries that my pearls were absolutely not things that they would want in their mouths. Cleanliness… was a problem, I admit.” The iterator presented the hand that brushed up against 04, now coated in a light sheen of slimy residue, “when they get in an interactive mood, they usually brush up all over you and sully the puppet and the chamber alike. It's not too hard to clean off and sanitize afterward, though.”

“I see, I see.” 

“So, any conclusive aptitude test results yet?” Five Pebbles inquired tentatively.

“Well, as of right now, the future primary digestive system installed at the base of the messenger’s tail,” Suns tapped at the metal plate implanted on the back of subject 04, “was deemed functional in extracting desired nutrients and filtering out waste from a variety of blood and other nutritious liquid types. Waste production is a bit of an issue as the kidneys do not filter out all the waste. Not a big problem right now as 04 still had a normal digestive system and can simply excrete what remains via solid waste, but something to be addressed for the final model.”

“Why not just keep or refit the large intestine and the anus to allow for solid waste to be expelled?” The pink iterator suggested. “It would be much easier than trying to finagle with trying to dissolve or otherwise flush away the last bits of debris.”

“I suppose so. It probably would be less work if my final design can do that, but…” Seven Red Suns shrugged, slightly raising their pitch. “I had a vision in mind when designing this thing, you know? You saw how it was going to be, just the bare minimum package modified with the exact features I wanted in mind and nothing more. The spear tails, the propulsion mechanism, the lack of a mouth, all of that was something I felt inspired by. I get that keeping the other end of the gastrointestinal tract would not really contradict my plans of ‘to abate animalistic instincts’, it is just that I just have the urge to” The orange iterator punched his left hand with a fist, “get it all the way through, if you know what I mean.”

Five Pebbles lightly chuckled, finding levity in Sun’s strange perfectionism that he had known to be a core trait for them for so long. “So how is that ‘perfect messenger’ going for you? Any of these prototypes made good candidates yet?”

“Skill and obedience wise, 03 actually had already done some appointed tasks I programmed in. Surprising, I know, but it was no wonder why No Significant Harrassment’s messengers, who were just basic slugcats with minimal modifications, worked so well.” Seven Red Suns sat in silence, a hint of resignation in their voice, but then they suddenly piped up again with a new thought. “Oh! I should probably call her here in front of the camera. You can’t see it from my overseer, but subject 03 was just sitting there cleaning herself on the other side of the chamber. She’s listening to us right now, actually, so she should get the hint and come over here right about now.” Silence. “I said… come over here right about now.” Seven Red Suns repeated in a louder tone, enunciating the individual words more clearly.

“I say, for sapient creatures, these things certainly are not very-” Five Pebble’s quips were interrupted by the appearance of a red foot blocking out the entirety of the overseer, slowly growing smaller as the other slugcat, 03, approached its creator. He did not exactly have the best frame of reference for the dark prototype before, but with it being side by side with the previous messenger instance the difference in size was clear. 03, an adult female slugcat with a thin red coat, was about the same size standing up as Seven Red Sun’s sitting puppet, sitting disinterestedly as a mark of communication glimmers above its head.

“She has been quite the help, actually! After doing some test runs by sending her to my city and retrieving a few objects, I let the specimen wander on some independent missions in my facility grounds to gain some physical experience. With some overseer supervision, mind you, I have some more *ahem* experiments I plan to conduct with the leftover prototypes once they become obsolete so I intend to keep them in good condition.” Five Pebbles observed that the red slugcat was definitely listening alright, even snorting indignantly after Seven Red Suns mentioned experiments. 

Ignoring the mark or the fact that 03 could listen in on their question, Five Pebbles addressed the processing block in the room. “So… how come 04 was like this? I had thought something was off with it on first look, but now that I have a normal slugcat as reference…” he gestured towards 04’s smaller physique and obvious signs of immaturity in facial structure, “that’s an adolescent, wasn’t it? Younger than it was supposed to be. How come?”

“Right… so I forgot to tell you, but even this model had some genetic defects.” Suns said sheepishly. “After all the rejected strains, the embryo I chose to incubate did have some hidden traits my simulations did not account for, but it was only caught on when the subject was in stages equivalent to a late-stage fetus, mainly just some benign tumors growing on its tail. It was not serious enough to warrant termination and waste time growing another 04, so I took it out at equivalent to 550 cycles of natural development when the cancerous tissue threatened the core parts of the tail and excised the affected tissue. You can actually still see some scar marks here.” Their hand patted over a patch of discolored skin on the dark slugcat’s tail. “Since both modified components were functionally mature by that point and 04 was awake, I decided not bother trying to resync the specimen to the biosynthesis vat to complete gestation, instead bringing it out here for aptitude testing prematurely.”

“Ah, I… see.”

“Oh! Speaking of which, do you want to see your feature being demonstrated?” Seven Red Suns placed a hand on 04, jostling the resting messenger to bring it back into the waking world. “It takes a while to wake them back up; a heavy sleeper, this one. Once I do, I will also demonstrate another purpose I gave 03 after the phase of testing and design that made her was completed.”

“Yeah! I would definitely like to see if the simulations I gave you were accurate.” Five Pebbles said with a rare note of anticipation in his voice. “I assume being a juvenile did not affect the performance?”

“Oh, you will find out soon enough.” Seven Red Suns chuckled with an aura of mystique, before turning their head to the red slugcat. “Subject 03, if you would instruct your successor to perform a leap. Tell them to do the largest one they could manage.” The slugcat snorted out of its nose in a sort of defiance before walking over to the now groggy-yet-awake 04, kneeling to one knee before starting to chitter to it. Seems like 04 was listening to it well, with ear twitches and tail swishes and all, clearly some accompanying body language as a part of 03’s instructional gestures.

“I… presume that was its other purpose? To translate for the rest of the messengers?”

“Yes! Well, not initially. After she completed her intended missions, I decided to experiment with some additional features by giving her and 02 a mark of communication.” The red slugcat raised an ear, giving a dirty glance at its creator. “Right, sorry, you don’t like that. Alright, Pebbles, check your chat.” A new text notification quickly alerted Five Pebbles to return the text log to holographic form.

SRS: She does not like it if I mention this out loud. Apparently, the intention drives I installed on the two really did not react well to the mark, which had caused 02 to suffer a seizure and expire before I could stabilize him. 

FP: Really swiped at your own legs there by making something that could understand you are badmouthing it, huh?

SRS: It was initially just for more minor instructions that I could not bother to dig out the pearl and rewrite the instructions for, but now it seems to have another use.

SRS: Seems like she had mingled a little with the slugcat colony down there that I sourced her genetics from. Picked up how to speak their language from there and now had taught it to other messengers… somewhat. 

Five Pebbles quickly shifted attention towards the camera, where 03 was seen gesturing wide arcs across the room, seemingly mapping out jump trajectories for 04 as they listened intently. “You ever think about learning their language? Speaking back could be useful in properly communicating with them.” With 04 now pacing around, the two club-like appendages on the end of the striped tail slowly undulating in preparation, it seems like they are preparing for their time to shine. “Seems like 03 was giving quite the pep talk to its successor there. Could be interesting to peer into what they were actually discussing.”

“Maybe she got the gist from our conversation and wanted them to perform their best as well, who knows.” Suns shrugged, turning to look at the messengers preparing. “I could try and train up a model to eventually learn their speech and body language, but… I don’t really see a point. The final model has no mouth, remember? If I were to try anything with two-way communication, I would probably do something like sign language instead.” The overseer projection flickers, and the view changes to be on one of the side walls, Sun’s puppet lifting up to meet the camera overseer’s new position. “Anyways, looks like they are ready to give it their all. Hold your metaphorical breath, because when they demonstrated their abilities to me, their capabilities exceeded all my expectations.”

The room was silent as 03 gave a final few reassuring pats on 04’s shoulder, the adolescent slugcat staring intently at its trajectory and calculating, the appendages he himself had suggested to be added now in the flesh and beating at the ground tentatively, as if rearing up for the actual leap. In a flash, the slugcat pounced upwards, releasing all the stored-up tension in the two muscular limb-like extensions to slam them on the ground, propelling the slugcat to go flying in the air. Five Pebbles watched in amazement as it soared in a wide arc that reached its apex at halfway to the ceiling of the puppet chamber, then…

Uh oh.

The dark slugcat started to flail in panic, the orientation that was once in a mathematical perfect arc slowly but surely drifting. It had aimed for a height it had never done before, and was too inexperienced to properly correct trajectory as it started spinning in midair. Looks like the landing was not going to be as perfect as the launch, and 04 appeared to know it as well, trying to shield its head as the slugcat went tumbling down. “WAWAWAAWAA!” Five Pebbles heard the slugcat frantically scream as he winced at the impending crash. However, Seven Red Suns raised a hand and activated a telekinetic hold, slowing the descent of the prototype until it hovered limp above the chamber’s floors, 03 racing over to check up on the dark slugcat. “Hm. Didn’t quite stick the landing.”

“Wow…” It did not seem that the end of the launch dissipated Five Pebble’s awe at all. “That… looked so much better in real life than in the simulations, reached higher too.” 04 did not appear to be hurt in any way, just slightly dazed and disoriented as it wobbled around trying to regain balance with the help of 03, who was by its side and chirping in concern. The scene unfolding in front of him stirred a sense of… discomfort in the back of his mind, but it was quickly brushed off  as his mind was filled with excited speculation on the implications of this feature’s success.

“Could you imagine how much more this could bring to the table once the actual messenger was made? Think about it.” Five Pebbles raised a hand to project a simulation, only to realize that the puppet chamber projections were still locked out thanks to the repair protocol. “...alright, can’t really project it here, so I will describe it with words. Just imagine the final model with two spears in hand and facing one of those green lizards head-on, leaping meter-wide arcs above the beast and impaling the proboscises into the backs of its meal. Ooooh,” Five Pebbles can’t help but rub his hands in excitement. “Now THAT would be an apex predator right there, the perfect creation to deliver messages across the lands and ravage all that stands in its way.”

“You seem awfully stoked, almost more about what the messenger could be than the cargo it would have carried!” Seven Red Suns mused, elated to see Five Pebbles’ rare moment of manic excitement and pride that was almost never seen these days, much less after such a heavy incident. “Who knows, maybe you do have the knack for the artistry of creating life; you certainly have the mindset for it. Considering that my method of taboo removal was biological in nature, it might even grant you some know-how in making sure to carry out that process properly.”

“Hmm… maybe I should try something novel like this.” Five Pebbles pondered. “Being cooped up in these dead-end researches about bypassing the self-destruction taboo was really not helping, and I could waste some time messing around with designing my own creatures before your package arrives.”

“I’m glad you would think that.” Seven Red Suns marveled. “Anyways, it seems like 04 here wants another go. Do you have any suggestions on what they could do this time?”

“Hmm… how about we test for accuracy in the trajectory of the jumps? Have your puppet be… here,” Five Pebbles pointed to a spot near the lower half of the room, “and instruct the messenger to leap onto you. Have you ever tried that before?”

“You… sure? I have done some target training before, but…” Suns tugs at their robes. “I don’t think you understand that they have sharp claws, claws that they will absolutely use in order to latch on to me. Our stockpile of backup robes is not infinite, you know?” After a few moments of silent deliberation and seeing Pebble’s insistence, the iterator relented. “Fineeeee. But if my robe gets torn during this, I will be sure to take my sweet time remaking its replacement before getting back to coding your messenger.”

It did not seem like Seven Red Suns even needed to say anything for the two to get what the new activity was, 04 already silently calculating a pounce trajectory into its creator’s open arms once again. The red slugcat was seemingly ready to be an observer in this interaction as well, knowing that no harm will come to its successor and that they were eager to demonstrate their abilities some more, lying down on the panel floor to watch the young messenger in action. “Alright, it looks like they are ready to- OUGH!”

In a flash, the dark slugcat lept from the floor, the appendages uncoiling again to launch the slugcat upwards, this time aiming straight for the puppet. Midair, the subject turned its body to align with the torso of its creator’s puppet, arms outstretched to grab onto the mechanical interface upon impact. Taken by surprise, Seven Red Suns grunted as the impact of a medium-sized critter on the puppet was nothing to scoff at, the puppet moving back a few feet just from the continued inerta of 04. After a second or so, Suns regained their senses before grumbling and telekinetically removing the prototype and settling it on the ground. “I am already regretting volunteering for target practice.” Suns muttered.

“That… was… amazing!” Five Pebbles practically beamed with pride. “Look, I am sorry for gushing about your creation like this, but THIS is the vision! THIS is what we wanted on the final messenger iteration!” As the excitement wore off, Five Pebbles looked to the projection again, seeing 04 jumping up and down below. “It seems like they took a liking to this activity. How about you get in a few other spots for them to leap to?”

“I wouldn’t expect you of all iterators to start caring about a slugcat’s desire to play.” Seven Red Suns muttered, reluctantly finding a new position for 04 to target.

“I-” Five Pebbles scoffed. “I am not caring about the slugcat! I just wanted to see my designed attachments in action!”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever.” Suns playfully mocked, being far more prepared to catch 04 this time and setting them down, going to yet another position as 04 poised for another launch. “I am surprised at how energetic this model was, considering 03, who was based on the same donor, was very much not appreciative of play.”

“Perhaps the vigor of youth was more universal across species than we thought.” Five Pebbles joked before realizing something. “Wait, you say these two,” Five Pebbles pointed to the dark-furred 04 and the red-furred 03, “are sourced from the same genetic donor? Why do they look so different, then?”

“It's a *ough* long story.” Suns caught 04 again, chirping in excitement as it voluntarily let go of the puppet and lept down this time, running to the other side of the room in preparation for another leap. “The first two instances used to test the incubation setup, 01 and 02, I just used the first slugcat I could lure in here as the genetic source. Needless to say, they weren’t… very friendly, especially without the implantation of the intention drives.” The process was getting quite streamlined at this point, Suns catching the slugcat with ease and dropping back down to the ground to race to leap at its creator again in an energetic fervor.

“When it came time to make a new messenger to test out my finalized intention drive model, I became a little bit more picky of who I will make my creation from.” Suns looked upward in recollection, their hand mechanically catching 04 even without looking and sending it to the ground once more. “After luring a few more up to my chamber, I encountered a red female slugcat who met my requirements. It had a decent metabolism, was athletically fit, quite crafty according to my overseer recordings, and most of all: it was docile towards my puppet. As such, I took a cell sample of her and used it as the new template for the messenger program.”

“I wonder if 03 ever met its original down there? Now that would be a strange encounter.” Five Pebbles pondered. “Just imagine… walking out one day to do whatever a member of a Stone Age rodent species trying to survive in a rain-drenched world would do, only to meet an exact copy of yourself. Would be… creepy, to say the least.”

“Maybe. Considering she picked up their lingo, 03 definitely had interacted with some of them at the very least. Anyways, I was originally going to just keep the red color for my future messengers, as it fits my logo.” Pointing to the logo on their head with one hand, Suns outstretched their left hand to reel 04 back in when they had slightly deviated from the planned course, dropping them for the next attempt. “However… something I did when tampering with the gene template by enlarging the tail and adding the two features caused the skin coloration to change, something I did not anticipate in my simulations.”

“Do you plan to revert it for the next models?”

“Actually,” Suns said as 04 made another leap, “the color of this model had been growing on me. When I do make the final model…” the iterator let the slugcat pant for a second as they recovered hugging Suns, letting them drop on their own volition, “I am thinking of making it a shade similar to my own cloak, somewhere along the range of maroon or even… purple.”

“Could be an interesting design.” Five Pebbles remarked as 04 lept again, but visibly less energized this time around, panting for a long while in the grasp of Seven Red Suns. “It seems like you have finally tuckered them out, Suns.” The pink iterator noted, amused, “not a lot of stamina stored in this one, is there?”

“Hey!” Suns protested as they gently set the slugcat back to the ground, 04 clearly exhausted from their endeavor. “They are not physically mature yet, so of course they will be worn out more easily!” The iterator let the prototype exit their lap, ruffling their head a little bit on the slugcat’s way out. “Plus, you are not meant to perform this many jumps in a row anyways. Most encounters would be over after one or two of these tactical moves.”

“Anyways, how would you rate this technical demonstration?” Suns jokingly asked.

“Ten out of ten, absolutely. I am so, SO extremely glad to see my designed component be used to such perfection, such accuracy.” The pink iterator exclaimed in pride and satisfaction. “Absolutely can not wait for the actual model to be worked on.”

“Hah! Is such high praise really coming from someone like you? Now that is a sight I could claim to be once-in-a-lifetime.” Seven Red Sun laughed, releasing 04, who began to slowly wander towards 03, lying down in its observation positon still.

“What are you planning to do once the later models are born, anyway?”

“Like when they become obsolete?” Seven Red Suns spared a glance at the two, the juvenile slug settling down next to 03, laying their head down. “Well, I suppose for the moment being I could use them for whatever odd jobs that they might be useful for when my messenger was absent, but otherwise…” Suns pondered, not noticing Five Pebbles being affixed by a scene behind them. “Hm. I am not too sure, actually. I suppose do the humane thing and release them back into the wild? They are essentially just normal slugcats at this stage and can pass as one of their kind with ease, something the later models will not have the privilege for. Plus, all of them are sterilized, meaning none of the modified genomes will somehow get into the gene pool and cause an imbalance in the ecosystem through an army of half-modified hybrids. What are your opinions on this, Pebbles?”

“Pebbles?”

Seven Red Suns turned around to see just what was captivating their fellow iterator so much, their gaze landing on an unexpectedly tender scene behind them. 03, the slugcat of their creation, held her hand over 04’s back, circling her tail around to cover the other side of the young slugcat not shielded by her torso. Her other arm was placed under the dark prototype’s head, acting as a pillow for the tired juvenile to rest on. The third model was gently brushing over the head and back of 04, gently going over the cleaning process in a method that their wildlife data very much show as maternal behavior. “Oh! I see that you have observed the two slugcats… communally bonding, Pebbles?” Suns sputtered out nervously, walking on eggshells and desperately hoping that he did not see in this what they thought he had seen.

“Does 04 think of her… 03 as their mother?” Five Pebbles whispered in a ghastly tone, all the joy and excitement once present now flushed out of his puppet’s face.

“H-hey, snap out of it, alright?” Suns demanded in consternation. “It’s not… they are not…” The iterator quickly turned around to the two purposed messengers. “03, could you stop doing… that? You are making my friend here uncomfortable as we speak.” The red slugcat stared blankly, then up at the projection screen, then back at Suns before tentatively starting to groom once again, chittering something under her breath. “No! 03, I tell you to stop doing that! I swear, I should have termi- Alright, Five Pebbles, I need you to stay calm, alright? I am not sure why the messengers are not listening, but I need you to take a breather and rationalize. This situation was very different from your own.”

“Did you think… 03 knew that it was not her own child? Or that 04 knew that they had no ‘mother’?” Five Pebbles spoke despondently. “Yet… even in knowledge, they willingly chose this for each other. Both of them, simple animals, know of their own origins. Yet… why hadn’t I…”

“No! You didn’t- They are not- I just- UGH.” Suns turned to the two slugcats, anger flaring in their eyes as the iterator’s voice boomed out. “Stop it, you two! Just… get out, alright? Playtime’s over. Go back to your habitat.” Seven Red Suns covered the lower portion of their puppet’s face and chin, slightly muffling the speaker saying these words in the puppet. After a protesting tail slam and huff from 03, the slugcat set 04 on her back and lept into the access shaft above the puppet chamber, the iterator not even looking at them as they waved their arms to telekinetically lift the two out of the room. “Void… I just… I am sorry. That was not meant to happen. They shouldn’t have…” Their puppet’s antenna slightly flattened towards the sides. “The plan was all ruined.”

Five Pebbles was still not fully recovering from that reminder, slumping on the ground in silence for a few seconds. Unsteadily, with a tone to match his emotions, he tried to console the other iterator. “It’s… alright. No one would have expected your creations to suddenly act this way in front of me, to act so… like that.” The uncomfortable pause resumed for a few more seconds. “Your plan… was it…”

“Yes, it was.” Seven Red Suns admitted in defeat. “It was the first time you had reached out to me after that, and you sounded absolutely horrible. Not even angry or seeking independence like the you I had known, but… broken. I could not bear to see you like this.” Before Five Pebbles could respond, Suns raised one of their hands to interject. “I know, I know, you don’t like it when I do that. You don’t need my pity, and I am not giving you mine. It just happened to be socializing time from my messengers when you called in, and… I got the idea to talk to you about my messenger project, especially the recent iteration you contributed to. Could get your processing blocks outta that funk, and… maybe sometime later we could talk about the situation with a more settled stratum.”

“It… you were genuinely enjoying yourself for a bit! Especially when you saw 04 soar through the air using the tail bits you designed, you probably can’t see it yourself, but your antennas were like,” Seven Red Suns rotated their antenna to be forward-facing, twitching in excitement, “you know? I haven’t seen you so proud of something ever since you published your paper on the merits of meta-perception fields and its effects on mimicking ascension upon death or cycling of composite organisms.” The iterator chuckled a little. “Void… for a second, I thought that I had pulled it off, that we could spend some more time just chatting away here with your thoughts away from the troubles of your past, but… I suppose nothing good lasts forever.” Seven Red Suns looked down from the camera overseer, letting the somber silence reclaim its hold over the atmosphere of the two chambers a long distance apart.

“You did what you could.” Five Pebbles said, noticing that his mind had not been racing like it once used to even after the immersion in the moment was broken. He… was feeling fine? He was feeling fine! Still not completely alright, but… better. After looking around the room, as if entranced by a new perspective, Five Pebbles took a deep breath, readying himself. “I think I am ready to talk now, about… all of this. About what prompted me to finally contact you.”

“I am listening.” Seven Red Suns said in a soft voice, still sensing the fragility in the air and trying to be as supportive as possible to their companion. “No slugcats to distract us this time.”

“Alright.” The pink iterator took a moment to gather his thoughts. “I am still not sure who knew and who didn’t know about my origins, but at least I am certain that you were not among those who were in the know. I am still trying to investigate who else could possibly have knowledge of this other than… her.”

“Don’t bother, actually, I may have something that may help you. See, ten or so cycles after our last conversation, I had a… not-so-pleasant talk with No Significant Harassment.” Sun’s posture almost looked angry, antennae shifting backward and slowly forming a fist with both of their hands. “He told me that before you and I found out, the only one in the know was… him and Moon.” 

“Ah.” Five Pebbles looked downwards, recontextualizing every interaction he had with the second oldest iterator in the local group, the strange undercurrent he had always dismissed, the strange obsessive messaging that the green iterator had been undertaking following the meeting going awry. “That… explains a lot. No wonder he…”

“He what?” Suns surged forward, a bitter note of disdain in their voice. “No, tell me, he what ?”

“No Significant Harassment… has been sending me messages. Twenty-seven by this point and soon twenty-eight. I haven’t been reading most of them, but those who I did read… he demanded me to go talk and reconcile with Moon. I wonder…” Five Pebbles contemplated, reviewing his entire life so far. “Even his first interaction with me, when I was still priming, I sensed the same tension I have felt with him all my life. I had thought before that it was just because Moon had suffered through quite the political incident to get me built, and he just harbored some residual resentment because of that. But what if…” Five Pebbles felt his confluxes racing again, covering his puppet’s face. “Void… what if he knew even before I was born? When I was still… inside her? Maybe he acted that way because… of what I did to Moon. That was why it was all about her, wasn’t it?” 

“Alright, alright. This isn’t your fault. None of this is.” Suns attempted to comfort Five Pebbles through the overseer projection screen, who was on the verge of cascading. “It was as you said, none of us asked to be born into the positions we had now. They cursed us to exist, to appoint us an impossible mission, then they abandoned us. You had as little say in what was done to Moon as she did, and as such, was not imparted in such faults. No Significant Harassment may not see it that way deep down, and…” The orange iterator’s voice suddenly quivers, extending their hands to crack their knuckles(the sound was added in post through the speaker, their hands can’t really make that sound due to their architecture but it was still appreciated) “I will be sure to give him my thoughts after this, but I am sure Moon was well aware of you two’s shared lack of control and held no grudge against you.”

A lull of silence was formed once more between the two, allowing Five Pebbles to take a few shaken breaths and process his emotions. Seven Red Suns simply sat there and looked through the projection into the dimly lit puppet chamber, unable to help much more than just simply providing support. It was still a limitation of their physical forms, unable to… extend a part of themselves, unable to leap through the screen and give Five Pebbles true physical consolation. Perhaps… maybe they will consider this as a project after the development of the final messenger model. Somehow make a messenger that acts as an extension of themselves, be it literally through remote control or indirectly via commands. Considering what Five Pebbles was going through, it could be a worthwhile endeavor to search for in lieu of continued Sliverist discussions.

“So… what are you planning to do next?”

Five Pebbles sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t know how to feel about all this. I am… angry. Betrayed. I still feel betrayed by my… sister, who despite all the flak I gave her for was ultimately someone I saw as trustworthy. Yet… it has been over 70,000 cycles since our creators left us. I am 120,000 cycles old now, even older than when she… had me. I… just don’t understand.” He shook his head in a mix of frustration, confusion, and sorrow. “What part of this did she think I could not handle? We could have… talked this through properly. Have her confess this truth a bit after our creators died. Cope with the reality of the situation and move on from there. Yet… she kept it from me. For longer than I had existed.”

“I have had many experiences of you ranting to me before, about how she was overbearing, or how you could not wait to do something major so you could be known as something other than her little brother, but…” Seven Red Suns tried to frame this as best as they could, trying to understand the hurt coursing through Five Pebbles. “You really did care for her, didn’t you? Despite how you felt about her overshadowing you and figuratively breathing down your neck due to your proximity… I could tell from how hurt you felt that you really did look up to her. That you wished for a relationship that would not have harbored said secrets.”

“I don’t even know if I could approach her anymore. What was she… my mother? My surrogate? My sister? My neighbor? My administrator? It… I don’t get it. I am certain I would not have coped well with it in the past, but… I don’t know if I could mend our relationship ever again. I can’t even think of talking to her for the foreseeable future.”

“And that is alright, Pebbles. I would not forgive her for this either had I been in your shoes. We… I will try whatever I can to get you back in the swing of things, alright? If you are not talking to her or No Significant Harassment any longer, feel free to swing by whenever you wish to talk.” Seven Red Suns said with an earnest posture, opening up an overseer camera to check if the two messengers that muddled up their plans had made it back to their habitat safely. Sure enough, the two messengers had used the crawl tunnels to return to the biodome, which they had just entered only seconds prior.

“I will be sure to do so. See you… in a few cycles, I suppose.” Five Pebbles sighed, deactivating the broadcast chat line. “Hopefully, I will bear better news the next time we meet.”

“I have matters to attend to as well. For one,” Seven Red Suns gestured at their robe, sullied with slime stains from 04’s activities, “I need to activate a flood cycle in the puppet chamber to rinse my robe. I hope you find whatever you were looking for.” That was Seven Red Sun’s final words before the call line disconnected, the pink iterator’s two overseers retreating back into the ground. The silence of the chamber was returning to him already despite the talk the two of them had. 

The cracked panel was still covered in foam, foam that would have dried at the completion of the repair protocol. He was very much done with this sitting-on-the-floor spiel, wanting to get going with some menial tasks or footage flushing to clear his mind, but the process was not cooperating. Quickly, he inquired about the progress of fitting the panel.

PUPPET CHAMBER PANEL 4-26 UNDERGOING REPAIRS. CURRENT ESTIMATED TIME UNTIL FULL FUNCTIONALITY: 38 MINUTES.

Great.