Diaspora

The fortieth wave plowed through an abstract topography bearing no trace of the crystalline regularity of its origins, with ridges and furrows as convoluted as the whorls of a fingerprint. Not every point had been rendered unique—but enough structure had been created to act as the framework for everything to come. So the seed gave instructions for a hundred copies of itself to he scattered across the freshly calibrated landscape.

In the second iteration, the womb read all of the replicated seeds—and at first, the instructions they issued were the same, everywhere. Then, one instruction called for the point where each seed was being read to jump forward along the hit string to the next field adjacent to a certain pattern in the surrounding data: a sequence of ridges with a certain shape, distinctive but not unique. Since each seed was embedded in different terrain, each local version of this landmark was situated differently, and the womb began reading instructions from a different part of every seed. The seeds themselves were all still identical, but each one could now unleash a different set of shapers on the space around it, preparing the foundations for a different specialized region of the psychoblast, the embryonic mind.

The technique was an ancient one: a budding flower's nondescript stem cells followed a self-laid pattern of chemical cues to differentiate into sepals or petals, stamens or carpels; an insect pupa doused itself with a protein gradient which triggered, at different doses, the different cascades of gene activity needed to sculpt abdomen, thorax, or head. Konishi's digital version skimmed off the essence of the process: divide up space by marking it distinctively, then let the local markings inflect the unwinding of all further instructions, switching specialized subprograms on and off—subprograms which in turn would repeat the whole cycle on ever finer scales, gradually transforming the first roughhewn structures into miracles of filigreed precision.

By the eighth iteration, the womb's memory contained a hundred trillion copies of the mind seed; no more would he required. Most continued to carve new detail into the landscape around them—but some gave up on shapers altogether, and started ru

Some shriekers sent out metronomic bit-streams; others produced pseudorandom stutters. The pulses flowed through the mazes of construction where the networks were still being formed—where almost every track was still co

In many polises, new citizens weren't grown at all; they were assembled directly from generic subsystems. But the Konishi method provided a certain quasi-biological robustness, a certain seamlessness. Systems grown together, interacting even as they were being formed, resolved most kinds of potential mismatch themselves, with no need for an external mind-builder to fine-tune all the finished components to ensure that they didn't clash.

Amidst all this organic plasticity and compromise, though, the infrastructure fields could still stake out territory for a few standardized subsystems, identical from citizen to citizen. Two of these were cha

Konishi polis itself was buried two hundred meters beneath the Siberian tundra, but via fiber and satellite links the input cha

In the orphan psychoblast, the half-formed navigator wired to the controls of the input cha

The navigator instantly abandoned trial and error and went into a spasm of repetition, summoning the same frozen image of the lion again and again. This continued until even the crudest of its embryonic change discriminators finally stopped firing, and it drifted back toward experimentation.

Gradually, a half-sensible compromise evolved between the orphan's two kinds of proto-curiosity: the drive to seek out novelty, and the drive to seek out recurring patterns. It browsed the library, learning how to bring in streams of co

Images and sounds, symbols and equations, flooded through the orphan's classifying networks, leaving behind, not the fine details—not the spacesuited figure standing on gray-and-white rock against a pitch black sky; not the calm, naked figure disintegrating beneath a gray swarm of nanomachines—but an imprint of the simplest regularities, the most common associations. The networks discovered the circle/sphere: in images of the sun and planets, in iris and pupil, in fallen fruit, in a thousand different artworks, artifacts, and mathematical diagrams. They discovered the linear word for "person," and bound it tentatively both to the regularities which defined the gestalt icon for "citizen," and to the features they found in common among the many images of fleshers and gleisner robots.

By the five-hundredth iteration, the categories extracted from the library's data had given rise to a horde of tiny sub-systems in the input-classifying networks: ten thousand word-traps and image-traps, all poised and waiting to be sprung; ten thousand pattern-recognizing monomaniacs staring into the information stream, constantly alert for their own special targets.

These traps began to form co