Quote Originally Posted by Vahnavoi View Post
[Eun's Lab]

Upon receiving the Fibonacci sequence, the dialogue box turns into a drawing of a Fibonacci spiral. It then begins rotating and zooming out, a visual representation of how the sequence continues. The machine does not send any kind of new outgoing signal along the connector. It seems to be fine with receiving the sequence over and over again. Eun may have to manually change what's being send to the machine, if she doesn't feel like waiting for longer to see if eventually the machine decides it's had enough.
[Eun's Lab]

Okay, that's progress. The machine recognized the numbers and their significance; it was almost certainly intelligent. But the way it chose to respond worked against her goals here; she'd want to eventually find a way to communicate with the actual machine, not just a simulation of it, so the fact that it wouldn't respond along the pipeline presented a problem.

...Right?

Eun frowns. Maybe not. If this device is an exact re-creation of the artifact they're holding, maybe communicating with it would be enough for... whatever purposes came to mind. Either way, they didn't seem to have a lot to talk about. Math is universal, but she has no idea of the machine's perceptual capabilities beyond that. How does she tell it who she is and what she's doing? Can it even tell someone's messing with it?

Maybe she could make some progress with a kind of cipher. Correlating numbers and concepts. If it was intelligent, maybe it could glean her meaning?

She erases her plug-in and creates another one, this one designed only to send whatever number she chose, while highlighting whatever numbers she was sent back. Then she sets up a cell colony designed to loop infinitely nearby, sending a 1 to the machine. Then she changes the colony to a still life; present, but stagnant, and sends a 2.

She hopes to see if it gets her meaning. 1. Alive, changing. 2. Dead, unchanging.

After a few rounds of this, she deletes the cell colony entirely and sends a 1. She doesn't want to hurt it, she wants it to be Alive. Does it understand that?