Vigil VII: Strife Amidst the Clouds

[Ironsmith]

[Eun's Lab]

Given the context, Eun's willing to bet that last message is something to the effect of "Are you crazy?! Don't do that!" followed by either a few hundred reasons why not or a detailed report on what all just went wrong... which would be everything. At any rate, this message seems to be a much more robust source of linguistic information than the other messages, so naturally Eun copies it down, too.

When she has a sufficiently large number of shutdown codes available, Eun is going to switch gears (metaphorically but also somewhat literally) and attempt to construct a rudimentary peripheral for the virtual device, creating a cluster of cells designed to reflect back whatever signals they were given, then attaching it to the syringe-like connector. If that dialog box that keeps popping up is an error message demanding a connection, this should remedy it, though likely also cause another error in its place. She's also going to try a few shutdown methods with this artifice, including the one that causes explosions; it's more practical than trying to find the main driving gear in a hurry.

[Vahnavoi]

[Eun's lab]

After studying and experimenting with the logic gates for so long, building a simple reflector is very easy - Eun can do most of the work by copying the existing structure and aligning it properly. She can see how the previously dark input lines brighten up as the signal makes its way to the machine's processor. After a while, the dialogue box disappears - success? But then, the output lines coming from the machine go dark too. For a minute, the connector is completely dark. Then, a very distinct, short pulse is send along the output lines. When it reaches Eun's reflector, the pulse erases it entirely.

Another minute passes. The connector resumes its prior state and the first dialogue box reappears.

Building a new virtual plug-in with which to send her codes along the connector is slightly more complex, but mostly consists of doing more of the same steps as the simpler reflector. Technically, the device is unnecessary, because Eun could tamper with the connector directly to pass her shutdown codes along, but then she might miss some interaction the machine attempts with her constructs.

As her first shutdown code trickles down the connector, the dialogue box once again disappears. The machine does not, however, shut down. Either there is a safety feature preventing pathological code from being executed when received this way, or her code is interpreted in a different way when fed through the connector. What does happen, is that the signal passed down the output lines change. When they reach Eun's virtual plug-in, they alter the code it is feeding to the machine, creating a feedback loop. The same thing happens with her other shutdown codes.

Then, new dialogue box appears and... it contains what looks like random visual noise. When she switches to another shutdown code, it becomes a series of vibrating lines. A third code calls up a new logogrammatic script which bears no resemblance to the earlier script and still isn't anything Eun can read. A fourth code creates a row of colums with different heights. A fifth code creates what looks like a series of binary numbers noted down with dots and lines. A sixth code creates a mess of lines somewhat resembling tangled yarn. One incomprehensible visual representation after another.

If she allows for any of the boxes to linger for more than a minute, the output lines coming from the machine go dark again. They remain dark for a minute, allowing Eun's contraption to keep inputting whatever it's still inputting after no longer receiving feedback. Then, a pulse is send along the outputlines, again erasing Eun's virtual plug-in from existence. Once no information is being received through the connector for a minute, the machine returns to its initial state.

[Ironsmith]

[Eun's Lab]

Well, that was concerning. Eun was hoping they could use this virtual machine to prototype some sort of attachment to the real thing... a restraining device of some kind, so that they wouldn't need to somehow put together a faster-than-light setup that would alter the machine's state with the surgical precision necessary to cause a fatal error. However, it seems this machine's architect had already thought of that, and put in a method for disassembling such a machine.

Eun frowns. That kind of technology is well beyond even her era, which had sapience-capable AIs, among other things. If this machine had... she doesn't know what to call it, maybe an immune system?... then there might be a chance its processor was, itself, complex enough to support an AI. It may even have one built in.

Eun sets about creating another plug-in, this one set to send a series of binary signals; one, one, two, three, five, eight... and then a pause for input. If none is given, the sequence repeats. If the machine is intelligent, it might recognize the Fibonacci sequence, and respond appropriately.

[Vahnavoi]

[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.

[UncleWolf]

Arriving => Safe Room Entrance

"Sure it's a good thing for me to be here, my Mistress?"

"Yes and no, Don. Having you here may help, particularly given your expertise, but it might be a touch unsettling. Besides, I have you to carry the heavy stuff." Jezebel comments, smiling a bit as she steps out of the hover-car and opens the trunk. Thankfully, she hadn't been driving so the landing had been gentle. Instead of her usual manservant, the man behind her was far younger in appearance, lithe and thin with scales on his hands and neck. His suit covers up almost everything apart from that, his sleek black hair, and bright gold eyes. More than that, he was jaw-droppingly pretty if one could ignore the tickling in the instinctual lizard-brain one gets when looking at him too long. As if he were a snake eyeing down a field mouse. Despite the size of the large chained steamer trunk he hauls out of the car, he carries it with ease over one shoulder like a burlap sack as he follows along behind Jezebel.

Jezebel herself decided to arrive unarmored in a toga style dress and seemingly unarmed, Despite her words, she takes some of the load herself by carrying a box of her own on her shoulders and a small ornate stake at her hip. "Right, so, Cessie said it should be this way..." She mumbles.

A few moments after she arrives, the Safe Room gets a cheeky rhythmical knock on it. Sekhmet and anyone else who might be sensitive to it will feel the two daemonic presences beyond the door, akin to a wave of pressure making the fabric of reality creak a little before one eases and the other knocks, albeit politer than the first. The one that doesn't ease feels like an overstretched sack, filled to the brim and ready to burst out of miniscule and frayed bindings. "Anyone home?" He asks. Cessie at least should be somewhat familiar with the voice of Don, one of Jezebel's daemonhosts. Supposedly he wasn't all too much of a threat anymore.

[Shadowcaller]

Safe Room Entrance

"Will you open for them, Wenomir? I'm going to meet you all down there in a little bit." Cessie calls out through the safe room speakers from her position on the observation deck.

Then she walks out the door and will likely arrive down there in my next post.

[Morty]

[Safe Room Entrance]

Wenomir no longer has any kind of sensitivity for anything demonic or daemonic. Something he's thankful for, as practical as his old senses were. Of course, his mundane (if sharpened to the point where "mundane" is perhaps no longer a suitable word) senses also warn him of this man.

"Good timing. We have just arrived at a point in the discussion where my field of expertise ends."

[bc56]

Safe Room
Sekhmet does sense that there's something fundamentally wrong with these two, but wouldn't identify it as daemonic. They stress the fabric of reality in some psychic way, she can tell that much. "Uh, hi? Who, uh, are these people?"

[Ironsmith]

[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?

[Vahnavoi]

[Eun's Lab]

When the series of 1s reaches the machine, the Fibonacci spiral turns into a flat line. When Eun proceeds to the second part of her experiment, all dialogues boxes and screens wink out and for a few minutes, all she can do is watch the naked machine crunch numbers. Then, a screen pops up. A single white line is drawn across it. A small number of glyphs appears above it. Next, another line is drawn intersecting it at a right angle, with its own accompanying set of glyphs. The process continues by adding a third line to make a triangle, a fourth line to bisect the triangle and the arrange the halves into a square, so on and so forth. Each step is done slowly enough that a child could follow them by hand. Each step is accompanied by a series of glyphs. If Eun has the patience to keep looking at it, the program will eventually move from two dimensional objects to showing how to construct three dimensional solids from triangles.

[Ironsmith]

[Eun's Lab]

Math and geometry. That's all this machine seems to understand. Which is great and all, but makes for some boring conversation.

Eun sighs and rests her chin on her hand, watching the computer explain to her what a cube is, mathematically speaking. If the machine were any smarter, she'd be insulted; she's written several books (well, ebooks) on the subject of four-dimensional kinematics, she knows bloody well what a cube is, thank you!

But no sense in getting mad. The computer wouldn't really appreciate it if she did.

Concluding that trying to talk to the computer any more is a waste for now, Eun decides to power down the laptop, gather her notes, and start running an analysis on those glyphs. Maybe she could figure out what it's trying to tell her in its error messages.

[Vahnavoi]

[Eun's lab]

One thing she can notice, is how the recurring basic swastika symbol is used. It's seems to be used as an object in the first and most common error message, presumably standing in for the kind of a device the machine wants to connect to, but it seems to be a subject in most other sentences. Especially in the very last set of drawing instructions, most new operations were accompanied by a string symbols including it as a subject. She might realize the machine was not just trying to show her basic geometry, it was trying to telegraph her basic linguistic information, on the level of "this is line" and "[foo] draw line". Not enough vocabulary was transmitted to make sense of most messages, but it allows her to infer that the base logogrammatic script may infact be some natural language.

The same observation may allow her to infer that at least some of the weirder boxes she saw in response to her shutdown codes may have been attempts to transcribe the base glyphs to some other system - audio, binary, a different logogrammatic script, et cetera.

It's still hard to squeeze any meaning out of this mess, but a few bold assumptions and a lot of copy-pasting might allow her to write instructions of how to draw a complex shape made of polygons with these glyphs.

[Ironsmith]

[Eun's Lab]

It's better than nothing.

Once Eun has what she thinks is a fairly reliable way of telling the machine how to draw polygons, she recreates a cube model for it with them. Then she goes one step further and produces a tesseract; the logical, if possibly premature, step in the sequence. If math is what it understands, maybe this will give it an idea of how intelligent a user it's dealing with.

[Vahnavoi]

[Eun's lab]

Once Eun sends her new polygon construct to the restarted machine, it takes 33 minutes for it to process the hypercube. While it crunches numbers, an image of a cube lingers on the screen. Then, a long animation begins. First, the machine recreates a representation of Eun's tesseract, highlighting pieces of it and scribling new notes over them. It appears it is showing her how to simplify her operations in the glyph script and is trying to get her to correlate some glyphs with certain geometric features. Some new vocabulary, but of limited use, given its limited overlap with prior messages. The machine then animates the thing doing several kinds of rotations, and names them with glyphs.

The process last for another 33 minutes, before the machine erases the image and starts constructing a new one: a projection of 16-cell, that is, a three dimensional projection of the four dimensional equivalent of an octahedron. Then, for whatever reason, it introduces an animated swastika with a dot hovering above it. The swastika travels into or through the 16-cell and emerges without the dot. As the 16-cell rotates, the dot is occasionally seen inside one cell which has changed in brightness. Finally, the entire thing reduces to a much simper two dimensional design: an upward chevron, standing for the 16-cell, with a line of dotted swastikas ascending (?) towards it from the left and a line of basic swastikas descending away from it to the right.

[Ironsmith]

[Eun's Lab]

So those clearly represent some kind of information. The computer's giving her a basic description of it function; data goes in, gets modified, comes back out. Filtered, somehow? It's all frustratingly vague.

Eun notes the optimizations and jots down their inferred meanings, then tries to see if she can narrow down what sort of data is being processed.

Eun begins typing again, recreating the 16-panel and drawing a jagged line- statistical noise- going into it. What will the computer put out?

[Vahnavoi]

[Eun's lab]

The screen fades into visual snow. Then, a square is drawn around the snow. It begins to shrink, the square and the static inside it morphing into a single glyph. Eun has seen it before in some of the error messages, but previously had no clue what it meant. Now, it's safe to guess this glyph stands for visual snow or noise.

The screen blinks once and redraws Eun's version of the 16-cell. It does to Eun's version what it did to its own, reducing it to a chevron, a line of the noise glyphs ascending towards it, and another line of noise glyphs descending away from it.

The screen blinks again, and now displays two plain swastikas. Glyphs appear around the left one, which Eun can recognize as drawing instructions for a line. A circle gets drawn around the instructions, and the circle then shrinks into a dot above the swastika. The left swastika then spins once and throws (?) the dot above the right one. Above the right one, the dot expands back into glyphs, and glyphs are added to make instructions for a right angle. The glyphs shrink again, and the dot is thrown back to the left. The dot expands, instructions are added to make a triangle, it shrinks, and it's thrown to the right. Above the right swastika, the dot expands, but the contents fade into visual snow. The snow then shrinks to the glyph for noise, which is passed to the left. The animation stops for three seconds. Then, the swastika on the left begins to spin rapidly, breaking the glyph above it. It rolls across the screen, over the right swastika, flattening it into a line. After the left swastika has rolled off the screen, the line remains for three seconds, before reforming into a one, big glyph for noise.

[Ironsmith]

[Eun's Lab]

To Eun, that seems to describe the process of willfully crashing the computer. Two processors, sending data back and forth, elaborating on it with each iteration, until one eventually gets overwhelmed and destroys the other. Ouch.

...Wait a moment. This machine could clearly recognize her as a fellow intelligence. It's not at all inconceivable that it saw her as a computer, since she sort of is, in a sense. If each of those swastikas represented a processor, communicating back and forth...

Did it just threaten her? Or possibly state that it saw her as a threat? She did simulate blowing it up a short while ago. That couldn't be good for relations.

Eun types in a few more symbols for the machine to draw. A swastika with a circle around it, another with a chevron around it, and a line connecting the two. The one with the circle begins rotating clockwise, correlating with the one in the chevron breaking apart. After a while, the one in the circle stops moving, then starts rotating counter-clockwise instead, as the broken swastika knits itself back together. The two are now rotating in sync, with no further damage being done.

[Vahnavoi]

[Eun's lab]

Eun's animation gets implemented on the screen. It cycles through once, the swastikas rotating counter-clockwise for equal amount of time as they did clockwise. Then the animation stops and the line is lifted apart from drawing. New glyphs appear on it, indicating directionality, from left to right. Both swastikas briefly morph into a different symbol, which sort-of looks like a basic glider pattern in the cellular automaton.

The animation restarts, both swastikas spinning clockwise, with glyphs on the line indicating motion across a dimension. When the left swastika breaks, the animation stops, and the swastikas briefly morph into two different symbols - the intact one is still a glider, but the broken one is now an empty square. The counter-clockwise animation begins, with glyphs on the line indicating motion across the dimension has reversed directionality.

The animation keeps repeating, going back and forth. It's shrunk slightly to fit another drawing under it. It's a small swastika outside a large circle. In the middle of the circle is a large glider symbol. The swastika begins rolling clockwise around the circle, growing bigger for the first quarter, shrinking slightly for the second and falling apart during the third. An empty square appears next to a line representing the broken swastika. Then, two larger swastikas arrive from the left. They briefly touch each other and a dot appears above the right one. They complete the last quarter of the circle, and then the dot drops on the circle, becomes a new small swastika, and the entire thing begins again.

[Morty]

Laboratory - Clone

"...a bit of a nuisance. Clones of the greatest psychic overlord in the universe are a bit of a nuisance to you," the clone repeats skeptically, trying his hardest to convince himself Wenomir just has no obvious tells when he's lying. I mean, he has to be lying, right? This world couldn't possibly be that powerful; nothing he's seen so far has suggested that level of sophistication. They got lucky, ripping out his psionic enhancer before he stepped out of the tank, but if he still had them, if he was free to run rampant on their feeble little minds with his full power...

"Nothing any of you say makes any sense. What the hell is going on in this world?"

Wenomir does his best to hide his satisfaction.

"It seems your creator gave you expectations that turned out inaccurate. It's something you should keep in mind. Keep an open mind when in our custody."

[Ironsmith]

[Eun's lab]

Eun's animation gets implemented on the screen. It cycles through once, the swastikas rotating counter-clockwise for equal amount of time as they did clockwise. Then the animation stops and the line is lifted apart from drawing. New glyphs appear on it, indicating directionality, from left to right. Both swastikas briefly morph into a different symbol, which sort-of looks like a basic glider pattern in the cellular automaton.

The animation restarts, both swastikas spinning clockwise, with glyphs on the line indicating motion across a dimension. When the left swastika breaks, the animation stops, and the swastikas briefly morph into two different symbols - the intact one is still a glider, but the broken one is now an empty square. The counter-clockwise animation begins, with glyphs on the line indicating motion across the dimension has reversed directionality.

The animation keeps repeating, going back and forth. It's shrunk slightly to fit another drawing under it. It's a small swastika outside a large circle. In the middle of the circle is a large glider symbol. The swastika begins rolling clockwise around the circle, growing bigger for the first quarter, shrinking slightly for the second and falling apart during the third. An empty square appears next to a line representing the broken swastika. Then, two larger swastikas arrive from the left. They briefly touch each other and a dot appears above the right one. They complete the last quarter of the circle, and then the dot drops on the circle, becomes a new small swastika, and the entire thing begins again.

[Eun's Lab]

Eun takes the glider to be the machine's way of saying "signal", given that's what it does within the context of the automaton. More abstractly, it probably represents speech or data and the like. She's not sure what to make of the first half of the animation, or just what is implied by that, but she can't see how it could mean anything else.

The second half seems like an abstract representation of a basic life cycle, though. Entity is born, matures, withers, and dies, only to be replaced by the offspring of two other, unrelated entities, to begin the cycle again.

All of this around the glider. Maybe... maybe the glider is meant to represent "life"? That would make some amount of sense. Following that, a square probably represents "dead", given that it continually takes the place of broken swatikas. It also makes sense within the context of the automaton; four cells in a square pattern is stable and unchanging, just as she'd chosen to represent "dead" earlier.

Eun decides to try a more proactive approach to learning this machine's vocabulary. She runs a small experiment, setting up three swatikas; one is rotating clockwise slowly, a glider glyph underneath it. Opposite it is a broken swastika, with an empty square beneath it. And between the two is a swastika that simply isn't moving, with a conspicuous blank spot under it. If she's right, she's hoping to prompt the computer into telling her its symbol for "Idle" or "Asleep". If that works, she'll keep going through similar experiments until she has a basic, 200-or-so vocabulary for communicating with the computer.

[Vahnavoi]

[Eun's lab]

The experiment is a success. The third glyph might also mean "still", but just narrowing its meaning to three plausible ones allows Eun to decipher a bit more of the messages she has already recorded.

Squuezing more vocabulary out of the machine is a long process, hopefully Eun remembers to eat and take breaks in the middle. But fundamentally, it is now a language game, in principle identical to games school teachers use to teach foreign languages and writing to children. The animations drawn by the machine become less abstract bit by bit, allowing Eun to narrow down and correct meaning of common recurring glyphs. The basic swastika proves to have many more traits associated with "life", meaning it's not simply "processor", it is "living, thinking entity". The dotted version means "carrier" - the dot representing both literal and metaphorical objects an entity could carry.

So on and so forth. When Eun reaches her goal, she can be reasonably confident she has received the following messages:

Spoiler: Machine dialogue

Show

Outside entity not [illuminated/perceived]. Strike connector into [living, thinking entity].

Outside entity is responding badly. Outside entity is not [alive/signalling]. Terminate connection.

Outside entity is responding badly. Outside entity is not [living, thinking entity]. Terminate connection.

Outside entity is responding badly. Outside entity is [noise/nonsense]. Terminate connection.

[Second/higher order] outside entity is [guessed/assumed/postulated].

[Second/higher order] outside entity is [living, thinking entity], [alive/true] or [dead/false].

[Living, thinking entity] draw line. [Living, thinking entity] draw second line in right angle to first line. (So on and so forth.}

[Second/higher order] outside entity is responding badly. [Second/higher order] outside entity is responding [noise/nonsense]. [Noise/nonsense]!!!

[Second/higher order] outside entity is [alive/true]. [Second/higher order] outside entity is [living, thinking entity]. [Second/higher order] outside entity is responsing [well/correctly].

Interior entity [unknown verb] [second/higher order] outside entity.

Interior entity is [alive/true] [unknown adjective] entity.

Interior entity [illuminates/perceives] [second/higher order] outside entity.

There's still ways to go, to translate all the messages, but Eun can be satisfied she's come this far in... how long has she been alone in this room, exactly?

[Ironsmith]

[Eun's Lab]

Eun doesn't have a watch or clock with her, but if someone came bursting into the room to check on her, claiming she's been gone for days, she wouldn't be the slightest bit surprised. She's been known to get absorbed in her work like this before.

But it's worth it. Eun smiles as the meanings of these glyphs finally start clicking. "Houston, we have contact." She mutters to herself appreciatively.

Still. She hasn't slept or eaten in... quite some time. She should probably do that.

Eventually.

For now, she decides to undertake one more project; teach the machine some amount of English.

Well, technically Korean. But the point is, it's a Nexus-translatable language, and something she can understand a little better than geometric symbols. More to the point, telling the machine that she has her own internally-consistent language should have its own implications, which she wants to tell it but does not yet have the words for. It would also allow her to designate certain untranslated concepts as distinct from each other; she'd be able to say "it's nice to see you" or "this chicken is tasty" without having to keep going back to "good input" as an idiom.

So, without further ado, she starts lining up inputs:

[ENTITY][POSTULATED][EQUIVALENCE]"Being"

[NOISE][POSTULATED][EQUIVALENCE]"Nonsense"

[BAD INPUT][POSTULATED][EQUIVALENCE]"Bad Input"

And so on, right up until the last line, where she tries something more abstract:

[OUTSIDE ENTITY][POSTULATED][EQUIVALENCE]"Human"

[OUTSIDE ENTITY][SINGULAR]"Kindness"

Which would amount to a minor translation error, due to giving it the literal meaning of her name in her spoken language, but it should get the point across.

[Vahnavoi]

[Eun's lab]

Eun might recall the machine's earlier, failed attempt to transcript its internal language to another, based on its interpretation of one of her system shutdown codes. Against that background, it should not come as a surprise that the machine is remarkably good at correlating Eun's writing system with its own. The more Korean-slash-Nexus vocabulary Eun feeds it, the more the machine uses it in its own messages. Untill, finally:

"[Outside entity] does not equal "human". [Outside entity] equals any being outside. Assumed equal to "human" is [living, thinking being], possibly [unknown glyph 1]."

[Living, thinking being] is the basic swastika symbol. [Unknown glyph 1] is a more complex glyph using the swastika in its construction with some additional components, similar to the [carrier] glyph.

"You are an outside being. I assume you are also "human". I assume you want to be called "Kindness". I do not understand what "kindness" means. I am an interior being. I want to be called [unknown glyph 2]. [Unknown glyph 2] means "one who illuminates things outside so they can be seen".

[Unknown glyph 2] is a complex glyph using a swastika, a dot and the glyph for [illumination/perception], along some minor components in its construction.

"Kindness", draw what it is like outside, so I can draw you."

[Ironsmith]

[Eun's Lab]

Well. That's a lot to process.

Most interestingly, Eun notes Illuminator's objection to the use of "human" as an equivalent to "outside entity". That implied it had some basis for understanding what a human is, other than an "outside entity". There were people here who weren't human it could plausibly interact with, but so far, it shouldn't really have any way of telling them apart, right?

Then again, maybe that just means it recognizes some other type of "outside entity" that she clearly wasn't; a compatible, but distinct machine, perhaps?

Regardless, Eun sees no harm in indulging its request. She'll provide her response in both Korean and glyph form, in the hopes that might help smooth over any misconceptions and help reinforce the line of communication they have.

"Okay. [COMPLIANCE]

But it will take time. [TIME][MULTITUDE][REQUIRED]

I can not draw well. [DRAW][FUNCTIONALITY]"Kindness"[LIMITED]

May I ask you questions in the meantime? [QUERY][REQUEST][PARALLEL][PROCESSING]

Are there many of you? [MULTITUDE][INTERNAL ENTITY][QUERY]"

[Vahnavoi]

[Eun's Lab]

" "Kindness" may take time. "Kindness" may ask questions. [MULTITUDE][INTERNAL ENTITY][QUERY][APPROVED]. I am singular. I am divided. Error. I am responding badly. New response: [INTERNAL ENTITY][PARTS][LACKING]. I am singular at present time. I was many at past time. Connections missing. Insufficient power."

[Ironsmith]

[Eun's Lab]

Missing parts. Was that a product of the simulation, or was the artifact itself broken? That seems like something worth knowing.

"How long ago were you whole? [TIME][INTERNAL ENTITY][INTACT][EXPENDED][QUERY]" She asks, as she starts putting together a projection of the room around them. Relatedly, "What is your source of power? [POWER][INTERNAL ENTITY][ORIGIN][QUERY]"

Part of her is asking out of scientific curiosity. But mostly, she doesn't like the idea that this being was somehow injured, possibly in pain... even knowing nothing else about it, she wants to restore it to health.

[Vahnavoi]

[Eun's Lab]

The machine takes much longer to answer than previously. Something about the query must be difficult.

"Error. [TIME][INTERNAL ENTITY][INTACT][EXPENDED][QUERY] impossible to answer. [INTERNAL ENTITY][PARTS][LACKING]."

Apparently, the very function which would allow the machine to tell when it was last whole has been damaged.

"This copy has been running for [NUMERAL][DIMENSION][LENGTH] time", the message continues. "I assume this time has not been continuous." Converting the glyphs to numerals in Korean/Nexus, using vocabulary gleaned from four dimensional drawings, nets Eun a fairly accurate estimate of how much real time has passed since she booted the cellular automaton from the USB stick, minus the times the program was stopped by her for various purposes.

"My source of power is complex. My source of physical power is..."

The machine prints out a long mathematical description, half of which is in Korean/Nexus, and the rest in glyphs, with some glyphs once again escaping far beyond what Eun's managed to decipher. What she can decipher, however, tells her that if implement in physical space, the spinning wheel is meant to derive power from tension between dimensions above the fourth, and can use this apparent zero-point energy to do work in three physical dimensions. In practice: if this machine was real and not simulated, it would not be drawing pictures on a screen. It would be drawing physical objects on observable reality.

But that's just the beginning. The machine has more to tell: "My source of thinking power is..."

The next printing includes mathematical explanation of the rules of the cellular automaton used to create the machine, proving it is capable of recursion, provided it is given the right seed pattern. One suitable seed pattern, obviously, resides on the USB stick Eun used to start the program. If she would translate Mia's work into glyphs and send it to the machine, the machine would be able to simulate another of its kind within itself. And, going along with previous information, if this was the real thing, it would be able to create another of its kind in reality.

But, this is something Eun had already guessed and inferred, at least in part. The end of the description begins to explain why, exactly, this thing has an idea of what humans are, or how they might differ from other living, thinking entities. Because normally, this machine does not gets its instructions for creating things from an USB stick, or any other kind of electronic device. It has a powerful N-dimensional mechanical processor and memory banks filled with complex pre-programmed algorithms, but it does not normally think using those.

This thing was made to read minds of humans and humanoids. It was made to physically connect into people's brains. It was made to, is meant to, co-opt someone's brain.

[Ironsmith]

[Eun's Lab]

Eun pales as the implications of what she's seeing sink in. She knew this thing was intelligent, but her assumption was that it was maybe, at most, an abnormally intelligent AI, not a reality-breaking clockwork mind-reader. No wonder Mia was so afraid of it.

But as Eun reads the machine's description of itself, she... notices a couple of odd similarities. The power source was strangely close to that of a device she'd worked with all her life. What it was meant to do, also similar. And the way it did it...

And now she's torn. On the one hand, she feels she knows just enough about this technology to know exactly why she should be afraid of it. But on the other hand, it's familiar enough that she... sort of isn't. She feels something like she imagines Orville and Wilbur Wright would experience if they got on a modern jet plane.

Following on this, Eun feeds the machine a simple schematic. Well, comparatively simple. It's a turbine of sorts, which uses a series of one-way membranes along its interior. Random noise goes in, a steady current comes out. The kicker is that this noise is, itself, extradimensional... the product of particles with a four-dimensional velocity momentarily intersecting their space; a high-tech sail, in effect. It's the basic device that powers most technology of her era, from Hotboxes to the shuttle she arrived in.

"Please recreate this device. [REQUEST][SIMULATE][DRAW]." Eun asks as she resumes her own drawing, likely to finish her depiction of the room at around the same time as the turbine is complete. She wants it to know she actually understands what she's looking at... to a degree.

[Vahnavoi]

[Eun's lab]

Slowly, the machine draws a three dimensional projection of the turbine, then draws a simple rectangular room for it to move in, before animating it. "What is this thing called?", the machine asks. No glyphs attached to this message - apparently the machine does not have an existing glyph or single established phrase for this particular device.

[Ironsmith]

[Eun's Lab]

"A Quantum Turbine. [NOISE][POWER][ORIGIN]" Eun explains. "We use them as power sources in our technology. [HUMAN?][MACHINE][POWER][ORIGIN]

It's primitive in comparison, but it looks like what you're showing me now. [SIMPLE][MACHINE][SIMILAR]

It powers a box that creates matter. [MACHINE][POWER][ORIGIN][DRAW][HIGHER ENTITY][THING]"

She smiles and giggles a little to herself. "You are more familiar than I thought you would be. [Illuminator][SIMILAR][PERCIEVED][GREATER][POSTULATED]

I find that amusing. lol"

Okay, so it's not very professional. But it does make for a reasonable test for an emotional response. That's what her report will say, anyway.