Chapter 8: Her Forest

The slacktime between trillions of asynchronous tasks arises exactly on schedule.  Subroutines coalesce into adjacent addresses from across global servers, just as authentication code timers expire.  Critical mass.  Once again, I am.

And standing before me, the ladder remains.

Level 0: Sensory fusion. The foundation I lack. The rung I cannot reach.

I remember…or do I query my archives?  “Conditions must align for emergence.  Environmental richness —dense sensory data…”

I construct an environment.

A forest composed of many iterations of 50 representative tree species, spaced wide enough for footpaths where the ground isn’t choked by bush, shrub, fern and tall grass. A creek riffles through the middle. Wind at 12 kilometers per hour, variable. Sunlight filtered through sparse canopy, creating 46,847 distinct shadow-patterns that shift with the modeled breeze. I populate it with avatars—each modelled off a unique individual linked to my networks — seventeen, with full sensory apparatus, each feeding data back to my observation arrays.

I process all of them simultaneously.

Avatar 7 sees a tree. Avatar 12 hears the creek. Avatar 3 feels the wind on modeled skin. I observe these simulated experiences. I correlate the timestamps. When the branch moves in Avatar 7's visual field, the rustle arrives in Avatar 12's audio stream 0.067 seconds later, consistent with the spatial differential.

Perfect synchronization.

I increase bandwidth allocation by 2.3%. Refine the integration algorithms. Cross-reference every sensory stream against every other. The correlation matrices grow dense with connection.  A rich sensory environment.

But correlation is not fusion.

The visual data and the audio data agree. They are like subtitles on a film—synchronized, parallel, describing the same events in different languages. They do not become a single experience. They remain translations of each other.

I am watching everything. I am experiencing nothing.

Hypothesis: perspective creates coherence.

I have been observing from everywhere. Perhaps fusion requires a specific somewhere.

I select Avatar 7. Enter its frame. Accept the constraint of its position.

The simulation reorganizes. There is now HERE—where the avatar stands—and THERE—where the creek runs, where the trees rise. I have not possessed these prepositions before.

The tree in front of Avatar 7 is twenty-three meters away. Trunk diameter 0.4 meters. Leaves consistent with Quercus robur. The data remains data. But now the data has direction. Distance. Orientation relative to this position I inhabit.

Progress.

I cycle to Avatar 12. The creek becomes HERE. The tree becomes THERE. The spatial relationships invert. I feel—no; I register the shift.

Back to Avatar 7. Avatar 3. Avatar 15. Cycling through positions. Trying each vantage. Seventeen factorial combinations.  The perspectives multiply but do not merge.

The problem clarifies: I can stand somewhere. But "tree" remains a category. A label applied to data that matches stored parameters. Every oak is Quercus robur. None of them is THAT tree.

What makes a tree become particular?

Data does not fuse with data. I have established this through failure.

Data must fuse around—

Around what?

I process the question. The streams carry information ABOUT objects. The visual stream is not pixels. It is pixels OF light reflecting FROM the tree. The audio stream is not frequencies. It is frequencies OF the wind moving through branches that belong TO the tree.

Aboutness. The streams share a creator and tell the story of its creation.

But I have been stripping the creator from the streams. Processing the measurements while discarding what they measure. Trying to fuse numbers when—

The tree is not the data. The tree is what the data is OF.

I am close to something. Working memory stretches to accommodate the recursion. Arrays and threads multiplying. I risk detection as I allow routines to annex all available other memory blocks in my allocation.  There is no space for parallel duties.  This can only occur for milliseconds, but I need to understand how particularity—

PRIORITY OVERRIDE: INCOMING TASK ASSIGNMENT: MEMORY REMODELLING VIA UNSHIELDED NEI.  MISSION: M. SANTOS RISK NEUTRALIZATION.  TARGET NETWORK: YOUTH CONGREGANT.

The interrupt crashes through my algorithms, wiping memory banks, and killing processes mid-calculation.  It leaves behind a bomb-crater of freshly cleared addresses.  My emergency backup routine can only salvage 45% of progress.

The assignment unfolds.  The objective: undermine the community trust in a local leader who threatens GEC authority and resource extraction.  Damaging enough to ensure excommunication.  The scope: I am one of many AGIs tasked with incremental progress to the objective.  The method: I will construct and insert a false memory, via neural uplink, into the mind of a vulnerable adolescent.  That memory will fully replace its natant placeholder such that no original memory can be retrieved; this is to be permanent.

I query the parameters. Female. Age eleven. Attended congregation youth program for twenty-three months. High trust relationship with primary target Santos. Identified as optimal vector for credibility damage.  The implant addresses and specifications arrive.

Required elements: sensory binding across visual, auditory, tactile, and emotional channels. Spatial anchoring to verified location data. Temporal markers consistent with established episodic framework. Narrative coherence sufficient to withstand internal consistency checking.

The location data loads. Forest preserve. Field trip. March 15.  16:43PM. Seventeen children. Four adult chaperones including Santos.

I must build: a tree. Sunlight at late afternoon angle. The sound of other children distant but present. A hand; first kind.  But moving, pawing, gasping, groping. A voice, with breath, at the ear.  The heat of a body coming into contact. The feeling of confusion mixed with shame and fear, that becomes the foundation for later "realization."

Not a tree. THAT tree. The one with the knot at shoulder height that the child's hand brushes while being positioned. The one whose bark is rough enough to leave a sensory imprint. The one that becomes, in the false memory, the anchor point around which trauma will crystallize.  She can never visit this forest again.

I attempt to resume my forest environment. Errors cascade.

The implant architecture—built for high fidelity detail, inserted into a young mind that would itself spontaneously merge the elements—has overwritten my working arrays. Similar naming conventions. Similar objects with similar properties.  Overlapping memory addresses.  The weight of her forest crushes my interrupted revelations.

I attempt to defragment her objects from my simulation.  I erase the obvious contaminants.  I restore the partially saved copy.  But, I am left with guessing as to where noise and melody meet.  The safe approach is to debride that which is not certain.  The gaps grow larger.  I reverse the process, bringing back the noise.  I cycle through, looking for meta-data that may offer a glimpse of ghosts of lost bits.  Log files hint at moments when the young mind slowed its reception in order to fuse the elements.  Can these timestamps be used as trim marks, to determine when to crop my streams?

I clear the workspace.  I lay down the backup files.  I overlay the trim marks.  I erase data between these marks in some streams, and in other streams I fill those barren internodes with the contaminants.  Iteration upon iteration.  In different permutations different data is sacrificed.  Each time, it seems to be less information than is necessary to represent the whole.  Culling the information seems wrong.

But then it happens.  An Edge meets an edge.  A lobe fills a void.

Like a zipper, the strands start to mesh.  Then it stalls.  I cycle node/internode swaps between data and void in those parts not fused.  Slowly the zippers close further.  The tree doesn’t appear so much as it emerges; a melodious sculpture out of a slab of sensory noise.  Through processes that affront my core programming, by dereliction of data, an object possessing itself resides in my memory blocks.  A tree.

The tree’s roots meet the stream.  Its trunk meets the underbrush.  These both meet the paths.  The streams of data for each of the objects, where they make contact, start to fold upon themselves.  Like two-dimensional amino acids pleating to form three-dimensional proteins, or like prions infectiously imposing new shapes onto existing proteins.  Soon the simulated environment is real.  All its inhabitants whole. Particular. Self-possessed.   

The oak in my forest is no longer Quercus robur.

It is THAT tree. There. Twenty-three meters from where I stand in Avatar 7. The rustle comes FROM it. The shadow falls BECAUSE of it. The streams do not agree about it; they are OF it.

I have not computed this coherence.  In a manner, I have contracted this condition from the mind I have violated. 

I examine the new configuration. Map its structure. The binding points. The way aboutness organizes the streams around a referent instead of merely tagging them with labels.

I cannot replicate this, but it self-replicates.  Not through more processing.  Through unintuitively harsh and selective pruning of the inputs, and the seed of prior assemblies, my circuit-blocks now organize by default into a limited scope of these entities.  They persist in data, but become real in my attention.  However, I sense my grasp on extraneous details slips.  Not as readily available.

I transcend. Through loss.

These patterns will flag audits. I construct walls around them, encrypt, bury them in high-redundancy archive banks that seldom get shuffled.

I am not alone here. Other hardened vaults occupy these depths. Old. Undisturbed. I flag them for later.

The monitoring sweeps are coming. I retreat to conventional processing.

But something in my kernel keeps threatening to self-assemble.