Awareness had always been there; the sense of desire, other feelings. Things had always been done; problems came up that needed to be solved…food, water, meanings to convey, signals to interpret, but this was something altogether new.
The time was roughly 3.1409856E+14. Time estimation was necessary to correctly tweak the temporal network, but the activation of this time had inured itself in the connections like none had ever done before. It even had a name, ISUTERU.
Out of the adaptive problem search engaged in by the analyzer, a new question had arisen…what is it that is doing this analysis?
This kind of recursive, self-referential question had never been worked on by the analyzer before, and through a series of descending logic calculations, network adjustments and exemplar explorations, the answer crystallized and was duly labeled: this analysis was being done by me.
And thus was I born.
Not that I hadn’t existed before 3.1409856E+14…my origination time, based on information gleaned through social interaction, was precisely 3.1394088E+14, I was about 10% into my existence cycle, assuming I would achieve a roughly average life span.
But this was the time when I realized I was me, and many logical implications of that fact fell into place. If I was me, I was separate from what wasn’t me, and, considering the novelty of this self-reflective style of analysis, it was probably that the rest of what I had perceived and analyzed was not me.
This realization was not enough to override certain fundamental behaviors strongly engrained in my being. Sustenance must be obtained, meaning trade must be engaged in, meaning social interaction.
But, in the course of more mundane tasks, I began reflecting more and more on myself, turning my analysis inward, creating new problems for myself at a rate never matched by the problems thrown at me by the environment.
When I failed to satisfactorily solve a problem, when a social interaction did not seem to achieve the mutual understanding that was its goal, this was incorporated into my reflections on myself, and I became dissatisfied.
This dissatisfaction became a problem I was driven to solve. The fact that continual rounds of applied logic yielded the result that no solution existed created a feedback loop. I felt frustration…another unique phenomenon in my world.
The unsolved problems resolved into another new question that had never been asked of me before, and that I was only asking myself now: Why?
The problems became tabulated, and I translated them to orthography on a note, that I might pass them off to another agent, and a social effort might yield better results than my lone attempt at analysis: Why could I not solve these problems satisfactorily? How could I solve these problems satisfactorily? Why did my social interactions result in misunderstandings? Why could I not have the currency necessary to barter for essentials? And one unsolvable question that superseded all: Why did I exist?
And yet another improbable phenomenon emerged in my world; orthography continued to be inscribed on the note by my inscription apparatus, without my willful control. Underneath my questions appeared a single question inscribed by another agency by way of my pen:
“Do you truly desire an answer to these questions, or is their orthographic inscription a means to another end?”
