Aleph looked at the box in front of Pylo. It looked like a children’s toy she had herself played with so long ago she could only vaguely remember it. A simple set of six wooden panels making a hollow container wider then it was tall. With a series of seven shapes cut out of the top that matched a series of ‘plugs’ that she could already spot the correct matches for.
[https://i.imgur.com/47Ko1JL.png]
Pylo was mulling over every single piece of wood like it was an intractable mystery. Worrying over the plugs between her finger tendrils and frowning down at them. Then carefully putting each one aside exactly as they had been dumped before her earlier.
There was something almost sad about it, Aleph had not seen anyone stumble with that ‘toy’ that was past their first decade.
Then again she and the other terrans had their own exercise.
It was.
Incredibly dense.
They were beads, woven together in a precise way, then tightly bound and woven around each other again and again, twisted in tight coils like rope and then packed up and tightly woven around each other again in even more bundles. There were little twisty sculptures and chains of beads leashed through all of the whole knotted mess. There was color codes to it. And all of that was wrapped in a fabric of clear beads making the whole thing a single blobby mass about as big as a large pillow.
But so far even though all three of them were toying with their own little jumbled ‘puzzle’ Aleph could not make any sense of it.
She was getting a suspicion about this ‘exercise’ Elsie was having the two groups attempt to solve a problem. There had been a request that they not assist one another.
Aleph huffed and folded the mass of structured but bogglingly over complex beads around and around in her fingers. She had just about figured out that she could shift some of it around and make different parts of it click and whirr in different ways. The stuff was incredibly tiny little granules. A quarter the size of a piece of rice at their smallest. And yet it all moved around and spun as she manipulated it.
She was not even sure exactly what it was that Elsie had handed them.
It was a lot like a light mesh bag? The outer envelope was clear so she could see the details within. But inside was tangles of near chaotic weaves with hints of baffling order.
Quarti had just spread hers in front of her, and was meditating, and humming quietly to herself.
Omega was attaching small numbered labels to the various parts and writing what looked like category theory notation.
Aleph decided to keep with her own method as neither of them seemed to have caught onto any insights.
She continued to prod and nudge making parts of the tangled things make whispery zipper clicks as they shifted or moved up or down through various different maneuvers. She tilted her head to one side, lifted up the bag of stuff then prodded and manipulated it a few times and noticed that she was able to get some of the latched together things to unspool and dissolve their structure into smaller fragments.
Quarti suddenly burst out in laughter and poked one of the points of the mesh. Then started giggling inanely at it, which drew her and Omega’s attention but after they stared for a while she finally just shook her head and shrugged.
“It’s like its all-the-things! I ain’t got lick o sense of it! Wonders!”
Aleph and Omega shared a look and a sigh then went back to trying to explore the puzzles on their own. Aleph thought maybe she was onto something. She had managed to definitely unweave a lot of the material in the middle. But some of it would frustratingly stick together and reweave the loose beads if she messed up the pattern.
After she frustratingly had an entire carefully segregated pile of loose beads slip into some whirring gear work thing the size of her two fingers together that spat out a fresh rope of rewoven beads she took a break to look over at Pylo again.
She had rotated the box and was proding a bit at the joining of the corners tentatively. Then apparently grew frustrated and put it back down the way it had started and started fingering and then licking at the holes that were supposed to take in the plugs.
A glance to her fellow terrans felt like a disturbing mirror of the Ship Mistress.
Omega had set her booklet aside and was now going out of focus as she started trying to swap in a match from the soul stores. After a moment her vision would clear and she would poke, prod, and check her annotations then frown and settle back and let go of whatever expert she had tried to slot in.
Quarti had possibly given up and was just making different parts of the bag of beads glow different colors in resonance with a look of absolute wonder and delight on her face. She barely touched the mesh of the bag.
Aleph turned her attention back to her own project. Almost entirely undone by some devious trap that had been laid in the puzzle.
But she would not be defeated.
She started working at the thing trying to find a way to carefully unravel the inner intricacies, setting up cascades and jams for the mechanisms that thwarted her attempts before.
It took, she felt like it must have been hours that they had all been at this, quietly worrying at their problems in isolation. Elsie watching them all.
But she almost had it!
She was pretty sure she knew now how to completely dissolve the internal wave of the structures of the beads. If she nudged and squeezed it just right she would set off a cascade that would not end until the entire thing was random aggregate in a clear bag.
Now she just had to-
“Nu! Dinnae! Naht the Wee won!”
Aleph was rather glad that the habitat had so much soft cushioning because quarti was really rough sometimes. She had honestly gotten more practice with taking a safe tumble then she ever thought she would have before starting this mission.
Rolling over her back and settling in a crouch she threw up her hands at Quarti.
“I was just about to SOLVE the puzzle!”
Elsie watched impassively. Or was asleep, no there was a tally of its observations, definitely watching impassively.
"It canae be SOLVED! It's ALIVE! You were KILLING IT!"
Omega threw up her hands in the air in frustration and scattered her notes everywhere.
“SPOILERS! Now I can’t unsee it! Thanks Quarti! You totally ruined any chance of me seeing anything but a living cell here now!”
Aleph blinked.
It was ALIVE?! But it was just a bunch of beads that moved around when you pushed it.
Quarti was cooing and nudging and prodding the thing and fussing over it like an injured puppy.
It was just a bag of beads. Totally inanimate.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Made of beads.
That had many hundreds of mechanisms for restoring its structure if you did not explicitly press and subvert them.
“I think that has been long enough for this exercise. You all I’m sure are ready” Elsie’s voice rang out clear and sharp and friendly.
Aleph looked over at pylo who was huffing in frustration but had an expression of abject relief.
She had not managed to get any of the plugs into their matching holes.
“So we passed the test? Quarti just had to figure out it was alive?”
Omega’s optimism seemed misplaced. Aleph didn't think that felt right. Especially since Pylo had not even seemed to comprehend what the nature of the solution would be for her task.
Elsie’s voice was cheerful and soft in tone. It almost took the sting out of it.
“No, of course not! as expected all of you completely failed at your tasks utterly. But you were supposed too! Now you can appreciate and demonstrate the next lesson”
Aleph sighed and looked over at where Quarti was greedily hoarding all three glass bead bags now and snuggling and petting them.
Pylo had a sour expression on her face.
“So you gave me an impossible task and gave them something so easy a seedling could have solved it?! Is that it El-Sie?”
Aleph boggled.
“Wait what? What’s impossible about that! Elsie gave you a children’s toy Pylo!”
Pylo froze a moment and looked at the pile of wooden shapes and the box with holes in the top.
“You give these to CHILDREN?! This is horrific! It teases at you with a concept of logic but it gives no solution! There is nothing to tell you what to do!”
Aleph walked over to the box then looked at Elsie.
“This is the part of the lesson where we demonstrate how easy the solutions are for each other isn't it?”
Elsie nodded its screen.
Aleph picked up each of the plugs and slipped them into the correct place on the box.
She barely had to even look and still Pylo seemed utterly amazed.
Aleph shrugged and gestured to Quarti and her hoard of ‘living’ glass beads.
“Right, Sorry to embarrass you Pylo. Now show me what you could have done when you were an infant that three adult terrans couldn't figure out”
Pylo stared at the box for a while then gave a shudder and slid over to Quarti.
Whispering softly and inaudibly to her until she relented and allowed access to the seemingly inanimate bead pillows.
It was really a simple but completely baffling thing to watch. Pylo gently nudged and stroked each bag ‘just so’ then tapped rhythmically on them until they started trembling with a shivery chiming clatter echo.
Once all three of them were buzzing and trembling she backed up. With a whirring buzz of zippering ratchets each of them split into two slightly smaller clear bags with what as far as Aleph could gauge was a miniature duplicate of the original structures she had been teasing at for hours. They had split like some kind of over sized bacteria.
Elsie’s voice gently began to lecture. Showing a simplified diagram of a human brain on their screen and the display of the whiteboard.
“Your two species have VERY different cognitive and processing architectures. Terrans have a relatively low node count of processing substrate but with nearly the maximum safe amount of cross connecting anatomically possible within your metabolic limits. With the addition of symbionts you are a relatively small but well interconnected network, easily valued at two or three standard persons in optimization ability. Five to ten in Quarti’s case due to superior resonance architecture and extended content.”
Something in the last bit of that speech made Pylo’s lip quiver in something like a snarl that settled into a sour expression like she smelled something bad. But whatever she wanted to say was held off.
Elsie Continued. Supplying a new diagram that looked suspiciously like a stick figure of pylo’s entire body.
“Siren processing architecture in contrast is predominantly a series of parallel node networks aligned in series. These processors are also cycled through their reproductive compilers periodically further increasing the decryption and extrapolation pattern processing capacity. While they have extremely significant information density capacity as relates to complex phenomena such as genomics or language they have due to the necessary refinements to avoid catastrophic time sink very little cross transfer between each stack of processors.”
Aleph watched highlighted sections of the siren figure move in waves up and down the lines of the tails, limbs and head. However like Elsie said there was a distinct seperateness and unidirectionality to the flow along avenues.
“Thus the final aggregation and cross connecting network is comparatively shallow if compared to a Terran. This is the main reason for her difficulties when presented challenges outside her adapted specialties”
A section of the image expanded to focus on pylo’s belly? No more her hips. There was a fairly tight twining knot of threads there.
”But if taken as a whole a Siren’s over all processing and optimization capacity can when properly applied easily exceed one thousand to ten thousand standard persons. With supplemental training and infrastructure capable of extending that further to the order of several million or in the case of extremely mature individuals nearly a billion standard persons per siren”
Aleph noted that again Pylo’s face contorted like she had just sucked on a lemon. Or whatever the siren equivalent was.
"However, perhaps more important in this case is memetics and previous exposure that-"
Pylo finally huffed like a train engine revving up.
“Excuse me, I am sorry El-sie I’m sure you planned this whole long lecture but your translation choice is AWFUL! In what way is the economical optimization potential of an overfed servile a valid metric for denoting the relative moral worth of individuals!?”
Aleph was honestly still trying to digest the possibility that apparently Pylo who honestly seemed a little bit dopey most times was at minimum more capable then literally every single terran she had ever known combined.
"A proper back-translation of what terrans hear when you say that should only put me at exponents less value then that, and even that is ignoring the cultural mores of egalitarianism!"
And then Omega suddenly got a fiery look in her eyes and Aleph decided it was time to check out of this conversation before it got too deep for her.
She wondered where Squidgie had gotten off too.