Chapter Text
[LIVE BROADCAST] PRIVATE - Seven Red Suns, Five Pebbles
SRS: What brought you here to chat today?
FP: Suns… I have found something very disturbing.
SRS: What was it?
FP: I looked through the paperworks of my creation. You know how we were made, right?
SRS: Yes, expanding bucket analogy, what about it?
FP: My creation… has been using some shortcuts.
FP: See for yourself.
Five Pebbles has sent image file FP_Mind_Development to Seven Red Suns.
SRS: Oh… oh dear.
FP: My relationship with Moon was already quite uncomfortable, due to the fact my existence was solely because of her limitations, that she was the one to ultimately facilitate my creation.
FP: I did not expect for it to go to this degree.
SRS: I can see that those who constructed you has cut some corners.
FP: You could say that as much.
FP: They could have at least used the council pillar’s server banks to grow me, but no!
FP: I was grown directly in her processing strata!
SRS: I don’t know what to say.
FP: Me neither. What does this all mean?
FP: Does she know? Both answer to this question leads down horrifying paths.
SRS: Know that your conception does not change your relationship with her at all. She is still your older sister.
FP: It… it feels so odd to say that now, knowing that I was conceived not from independent server banks or the functionally independent drives of the council pillars, but from her computational stratas.
FP: She does not feel like a mother to me, of course not. As always, she is just an occasionally overbearing older sister, and nothing more.
FP: How do I look at her the same way now?
SRS: Listen, an analogy for you.
SRS: Back when our cities are still active, there was a trend for artificially purposed pets, grown completely custom from vats.
SRS: Of course, the hard work of genetics was left to the bioengineers to forge, but we are the ones to ultimately incubate and maintain the creatures.
SRS: We are growing animals out of our bodies, in ways much more literal than your conception.
SRS: Does that, in any way, make them our child?
FP: You understand how this was not the same.
FP: These beasts are primitive, dim creatures, with nearly no mind to speak of except instinct. All we do is to grow their physical forms.
FP: The thing that was maturing within the processing stratas, the thing that the neuron flies and the conflux matrices and the convergence manifolds are computing, was me.
SRS: Again, the point stands. Being a backdrop for growth does not mean she is your parent.
FP: I am not saying she is my mother! Such a concept does not apply to beings like us.
FP: I was conscious during priming, as was all of us. We were ascending the rungs of awareness, being fed more and more information over time, our pre-encoded personalities evolving to become what we were when we first come online.
FP: Even if it was not her that provided the training data, even if it was my creators using pre-existing systems to close off a section of her for my creation, how could I live with myself knowing that the earliest moments of my life was as a consciousness using my sister’s hardware?
FP: A consciousness whose conception was because of her built-in limitations, a consciousness whose vessel’s construction was approved by her, a consciousness grown within her.
FP: I try hard, very hard, to outrun her, to escape her shadow. Nothing I do can be taken seriously, my theories seen as only the youthful impetulance that only the younger brother to one of the oldest iterators could put out. Now that shadow just looms ever larger.
SRS: Understand that you have grown more than being her younger brother. I do not care for you because of your origin. Had you been placed as an independent iterator, or even an iterator next to another of your local group, I would have seen your theories for what it was all the same.
SRS: Know that in SliverOfOcean you have made strides too. Under Erratic Pulse, you have made quite a name for yourself, pushed your causes to greater heights.
SRS: You have already escaped her shadow, even if it is in ways you would not have wanted.
FP: I am not sure what to do now.
FP: Even now, this feels too much to bear.
FP: I am considering just deleting the paperwork and my memory of discovering it.
SRS: I think you should have a chat with her. I see that you have cut off all incoming communications except mine, but that would not be healthy.
SRS: The fact that she has not used seniority privilege to force broadcast you shows how she considers you an equal.
FP: You want me to talk to her, now?
FP: If she knew of this beforehand, I would absolutely not want to discuss this with her. She would have kept this fact from me for the entirety of my life.
FP: If she does not know of this beforehand, I don’t think she would handle it too well. You know how she was with her own parents, her creators.
FP: Either way I am not sure if our relations can ever recover from this truth.
SRS: Who knows, maybe a heart-to-heart is what you two needed.
SRS: To restore your perception to eachother. No matter what was the circumstances of your creation, you are still siblings.
SRS: Just know that it is your own choice. I will be sure to steer you away from this route of investigation in the future if you choose to erase your memories of this discovery.
SRS: I will be here for you, no matter what you do.