Diaspora

People began shouting excitedly, their words immune to the fictitious vacuum but degraded with distance by the scape, scrambled into a pulsating roar. The orphan turned away from the asteroid, and saw the nearest citizens waving and gesticulating.

The fourth citizen's symbol, plugged directly into the orphan's mind, had already concluded that the fourth citizen was tracing out the asteroid's path in order to change what the other citizens thought. So the orphan's model of the fourth citizen had acquired the property of having beliefs about what other citizens believed… and the symbols for Inoshiro, Blanca, Gabriel, and the crowd itself, snatched at this i

As the orphan plunged into the spherical arena, it could hear people laughing and cheering. Everyone was watching the fourth citizen, though the orphan was finally begi

The orphan kept checking the scape addresses of the reference points it had been following, and it found a microscopic change in the asteroid's direction. The flash of light—and this tiny shift in course were what everyone had been waiting to see? The fourth citizen had been wrong about what they knew, what they thought, what they wanted… and now they knew that? The implications rebounded between the symbols, models of minds mirroring models of minds, as the network hunted for sense and stability.

Before the asteroid could coincide with the fourth citizen's icon, the orphan jumped back to its friends.

Inoshiro was furious. "What did you do that for? You ruined everything! You baby!"

Blanca asked gently, "What did you see, Yatima?"

"The rock jumped a little. But I wanted people to think… it wouldn't."

"Idiot! You're always showing off!"

Gabriel said, "Yatima? Why does Inoshiro think you flew with the asteroid?"

The orphan hesitated. "I don't know what Inoshiro thinks."

The symbols for the four citizens shifted into a configuration they'd tried a thousand times before: the fourth citizen, Yatima, set apart from the rest, singled out as unique—this time, as the only one whose thoughts the orphan could know with certainty. And as the symbol network hunted for better ways to express this knowledge, circuitous co

There was no difference between the model of Yatima's beliefs about the other citizens, buried inside the symbol for Yatima… and the models of the other citizens themselves, inside their respective symbols. The network finally recognized this, and began to discard the u

And the model of Yatima's beliefs about Yatima's mind became the whole model of Yatima's mind: not a tiny duplicate, or a crude summary, just a tight bundle of co

The orphan's stream of consciousness surged through the new co

Then the symbol network identified the last redundancies, cut a few internal links, and the infinite regress collapsed into a simple, stable resonance:

I am thinking

I am thinking that I know what I'm thinking.

Yatima said, "I know what I'm thinking."

Inoshiro replied airily, "What makes you think any one cares?"

For the five-thousand-and-twenty-third time, the conceptory checked the architecture of the orphan', mind against the polis's definition of self-awareness.

Every criterion was now satisfied.

The conceptory reached into the part of itself which ran the womb, and halted it, halting the orphan. It modified the machinery of the womb slightly, allowing it to run independently, allowing it to he reprogrammed from within. Then it constructed a signature for the new citizen—two unique megadigit numbers, one private, one public—and embedded them in the orphan's cypherclerk, a small structure which had lain dormant, waiting for these keys. It sent a copy of the public signature out into the polis, to be catalogued, to he counted.

Finally, the conceptory passed the virtual machine which had once been the womb into the hands of the polis operating system, surrendering all power over its contents. Cutting it loose, like a cradle set adrift in a stream. It was now the new citizen's exoself: its shell, its non-sentient carapace. The citizen was free to reprogram it at will, but the polis would permit no other software to touch it. The cradle was unsinkable, except from within.

Inoshiro said, "Stop it! Who are you pretending to be now?"

Yatima didn't need to part the navigators; ve knew vis icon hadn't changed appearance, but was now sending out a gestalt tag. It was the kind ve'd noticed the citizens broadcasting the first time ve'd visited the flying-pig scape.

Blanca sent Yatima a different kind of tag; it contained a random number encoded via the public half of Yatima's signature. Before Yatima could even wonder about the meaning of the tag, vis cypherclerk responded to the challenge automatically: decoding Blanca's message, re-encrypting it via Blanca's own public signature, and echoing it back as a third kind of tag. Claim of identity. Challenge. Response.

Blanca said, "Welcome to Konishi, Citizen Yatima." Ve turned to Inoshiro, who repeated Blanca's challenge then muttered sullenly, "Welcome, Yatima." Gabriel said, "And Welcome to the Coalition of Polises."

Yatima gazed at the three of them, bemused, oblivious to the ceremonial words, trying to understand what had changed inside verself. Ve saw vis friends, and the stars, and the crowd, and sensed vis own icon… but even as these ordinary thoughts and perceptions flowed on unimpeded, a new kind of question seemed to spin through the black space behind them all. Who is thinking this? Who is seeing these stars, and these citizens? Who is wondering about these thoughts, and these sights?

And the reply came back, not just in words, but in the answering hum of the one symbol among the thousands that reached out to claim all the rest. Not to mirror every thought, but to bind them. To hold them together, like skin.

Who is thinking this?

I am.