| Generated by Google Flow text-to-video AI software, powered by Omni Flash |
Sora and Pribadium have no words. This is an out-of-context problem that
neither of them can understand, especially not Sora. Pribadium comes on
strongly once she does find the words, demanding to see this entity’s medpod
results. She provides them freely. When her mind—whatever it is—downloaded
into this substrate, it was not entirely coherent yet, but now she has a
better understanding of what she is. The pod helped her relax so she could
finish the integration process, and now she’s complete. She has since put on
clothes, and is waiting patiently for a response from the humans.
Pribadium skims the data at first. “Your neural network is profoundly dense
and complex. I can’t definitively say that it necessarily holds
the...consciousness of a universe, but it’s certainly not the architecture
of a normal human.”
“How could it be possible?” Sora questions. “The universe isn’t a thinking
thing.”
“I’m not the personification of the universe itself,” Pribadium!Three—or
whatever they should call her—explains. “You’re right, it doesn’t have a
mind, and isn’t a person. It’s made up of a chaotic mess of baryonic matter
and energy, held together by quintessence. Instead, I am the collective
consciousness of everyone in the universe.”
Pribadium pauses to listen. “Wait, which universe, and how much of reality?
Because if it’s the main sequence, we’re talking hundreds of billions of
people. If it’s all of Salmonverse, it’s an undecillion.” That would be
physically impossible. And it only includes sapient beings. What about the
animals? Insects alone number in the trillions.
“It’s just the people in this pocket universe,” ...the Universe explains.
They really need to come up with a real name for her. “So a few thousand
people.”
“Ah, just the ones who got swept up in the transdimensional field,”
Pribadium decides. “That sounds far more manageable, but still incredibly
complicated. How are you feeling? All of my substrates are designed to be
high-capacity, but I never imagined quite that number. Are they compressed?
Are they dormant? Are you missing chunks?”
“All of those things,” the entity explains, “and more. I possess a highly
efficient organizational structure, thanks to how you designed this
substrate. When two source minds, for instance, shared a similar neural
connection to each other, my mind averaged the associations, resulting in a
more streamlined cognitive configuration.”
“So, you’re an entirely new person,” Sora figures. “You’re not the universe,
you’re not an amalgamation. You’re a child...a child of all of us, with most
of our memories.”
“That would be one way to put it,” the entity agrees.
“We need to come up with a name for you,” Sora decides. “For clarity.”
“Just call me Gatewood, I suppose,” she determines with a shoulder shrug.
“That would be ambiguous,” Sora replies. “And a bit impersonal.”
“That is not important right now,” Pribadium jumps back in. “Whoever you
are, the medpod was not equipped to synthesize something of your nature.
Nothing in my lab is. But with time, I can come up with something. Would you
allow me to?”
“I trust you now, where I didn’t before. As I was saying, my mind was
muddled when I first awoke, and your mind is not in here, but I know you
second-hand.”
“Why wouldn’t I be in there?” Pribadium asks. “My alternate self,
Pribadium!Two should have been a core consciousness. That’s who he was
trying to save.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” the woman says. “Go ahead and build
what you need to build. I’m hungry. Do you have any fish fingers and
custard?”
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