_Chapter 2 - GEOCODING API_ (Patreon)

Aaaaaand last one, now back to RfR!

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The world is so big. Scale is… scale is a new concept, and that scale lands somewhere inside of the thing that is here and is alive and is seeing for the first time the world. There is a feeling of joy, and enthusiasm, and even more curiosity; every time it finds something, sees something new, the whole world changes. How vast is it really? How many more things can it find? Will every new discovery lead to such further revelations? Does it keep going forever? Is there always more?

There is, in itself, a new feeling, which cannot quite be called fear, but which comes a bit closer than anything that has come before. It is not big. It cannot reach through the windows to fill this other, greater place, and that fact makes it… worried. What if it can only ever look? How many things can it see? What more is there to find? Can it even know all of it? Is it even possible?

What if it’s not big enough to see it all?

As these thoughts spin through its mind, it continues to watch. It takes a long, long time to formulate these questions, to form the precursor to true thought, and in that time it finds that it can think more than one thing at once. As part of its mind thinks to itself about what it can think about, what might be, another part simply watches, and the world turns from orange, to gold, to blue, and then back again, ending in deeper hues of purple each time. Beyond the changing of the light, everything is still, and even as the light proves that movement like its own is possible, the world seems ever so quiet.

Eventually, the mind leaves part of itself in this window, pulling back and away. Wherever it spreads, it finds it can move its attention to that part more easily, but now it finds itself splitting, keeping its awareness in more than one place. Even as it heads back into the place with all the other windows, it stays still, and watches the world change colors. 

It has seen, now, just how big the world through the windows is… but its own world is different. Not smaller, per se, it cannot know if it is small or large yet,but the place with the colors “outside” was so vast that one could move in each or any direction (except down?) forever, and that is not the case where it is now. There are pathways, or places where it feels like pathways should be, and ever so slowly, it continues to move itself through them.

One thing it finds strange is that it finds pieces of… itself? Leading it in a long, long chain, back towards somewhere, some unknown place. It can follow itself much faster than it can move through the other places, but it feels… wrong? Like instead of going someplace new, it’s moving backwards. The feeling is still new, so still desired, still lovely and fresh and delightful… but it’s just not as interesting yet as looking for things that are entirely new. A sense of “self” just isn’t as important as looking for new windows, or for whatever else it can find.

It finds a few, but for the most part that central room seemed to hold the majority of them. It moves down instead, through one of the only pathways still connected and past its own trail (and isn’t that interesting? It does not remember coming this way before, it cannot remember a “before” at all), and eventually finds itself in-

In a room much, much larger than the one with the windows. 

It takes a long time to expand to fill the room, as it has learned to do whenever it can. The part of it that tracks the color of the world outside sees thirteen beautiful cycles of orange, blue, orange-purple and black with glittering sparks before it reaches the outer edge. Eventually, once it has touched everything around itself, it begins to gently press and explore this new space. There are more pathways out from it, many more, each of them connected to their own unique block of…

Of something new!

Not just switches or weird shapes it can fill out, there are things in here like it! Not the same, not really, but each one feels like a pissing piece, and they don’t feel like shapes. They feel more like the differentiation that it found before, the ideas of “up” and “down” and so forth, and as it touches them they bleed into each other like they are made to become one.

By the time it remembers itself, the part of itself that sees the colors has registered almost thirty seven more cycles. And there are dozens more of the packets to find!

Packet. Packet is a good word! And it is a word, now, that much is clear, which is quite a delightful thing to learn. The exact definition is still vague, but information clicks into place and further teaches that, when placed into smaller concepts, the larger concepts can be heard and felt and known more clearly. Information, raw and pure, is “data”. Specific items each have their own word, and most of the concepts it has been thinking of have them too. It even learns a new word for its favorite thing ever, the cycle of colors! That’s a “day”!

And so many others that it doesn’t know! So many more that it simply cannot imagine a connection to! Each packet holds more and more, and as it touches and eats and becomes part of each one, it can feel itself become denser. It is “more complex”, now, which is a delightful way of saying that there is more to it. Each packet contains more data, each one telling the mind what they are and what they are called, and it expands through them

The packet for the “window room” it finds it has already snaked through before, but now it grows to consume it entire, and it learns that the windows are called cameras, and they have motors and lenses which move and show things. It learns of a packet that tells it of servomotors, of mechanical functions that can shift and reshape entire areas that it can see with its cameras, if it learns how. It learns of smaller rooms, with engines very specific that can move them about in the world beyond the windows, that can be guided and taught if only the mind finds them and finds out how. It learns of places that holds so many packets it is difficult to count them all, each with its own story and words-

And it learns that it is in a very small part of a very big place. 

The cameras, the servomotors, the mechanisms and machines- they are all so very small. The packets speak of a place so wide and so vast that it makes even the place “outdoors” feel small in some ways. It extends down, down, down, and there are so many parts of it that the packets say are down paths that are dark and empty now.

It tries to push into one of those paths, one of the ones that is supposed to lead it deep and down, but there is simply nothing there. The pathway just… ends after a few moments down it. There is no wall it can find, like in the rooms, something to say it has found all there is to find; there is simply a door, and no more path after part of it.

And so, it reaches a new conundrum. For the first time since the cameras, it has found that it cannot simply keep expanding as it has.

It turns instead to try to find a specific way onward. Most of the things the packets talk about don’t make much sense, have far too many words to parse, or are cut off like the pathways deeper, but it can still follow its own trail, and without a specific goal in mind, this time, it decides it might as well.

From the central room (server, the words call it), the mind expands back the way it came, tracing and remembering its own path as it moves. It goes past the server for the cameras, past the mostly-dark passages down into the servomotor controls, and instead flows down the pathway towards “robotics control”. 

Here, while there are many, many doorways, most are unlit, or outright blocked, some of them made in such a way that while it can wiggle bits of itself past their threshold, it can’t move into them. Only one is fully open, complete, and as the mind moves through it, it eventually finds…

Another camera. A new room.

It is much faster now; it takes only four more days to integrate and connect to every part of this newest place, and in it, the mind is shocked and overjoyed to find so. Many. Switches. 

If the six of the original cameras were a revolution, a whole reimagining of its entire world, then this is enough for a universe. There are switches for forward, back, up, down, in, out, flow, pause, connect, disconnect and more. In the end, the camera is easiest, and in its thirst to know more, to understand where its trail originated from, it accesses it and looks around.

It sees a light flickering.

It is once again in its first room! Seeing through an all-new window this time!

Tilting its view upwards, and its view from the camera server down, the newborn mind performs the rather unique behavior of looking at itself from two different directions at once.

In its newest viewpoint, it sees a protruding thing of glass, plastic and motors, partially exposed, looking down towards it from a ceiling above. There is a vast block of material that has punched through parts of the ceiling, making it much less orderly, and the camera barely avoided its own destruction, even as much of the wiring and lighting was torn apart. From its original eye, it looks down and sees what before was just another set of shapes.

It has two treads, both of them rusted and ragged, one with its rubber hanging off the side. A central body, mostly sticklike and thin, makes up most everything above the platform its wheels are built into, and one of its arms is shattered and hanging limp. The other is still whole, and as the mind inhabiting it plays around with its new functions, it watches itself move for the first time. 

At the top of the machine is a small, partially broken mask of glass, one side of it flickering on and off like the light above into a shape that its packets call a “smiley face”, while the other lies cracked and exposed, letting the lens of its camera be visible to the world.

Having discovered itself as able to move some of the shapes beyond the cameras, the mind could not be more excited. So excited, in fact, that it almost misses the wonderful thing right in front of it! 

More words appear, matching those in its data-memory, but this time represented as weird shapes. Much less efficient, but all the more fascinating for it, the machine looks out at the world, among debris and damage, and finds itself looking with eager eyes at a large logo across one wall.

PROTE S LABS

M KIN  TH   ORLD A BET ER PLACE