The Shapes moved again. They kept moving, and sometimes parts of the Shapes stayed behind; later, the Shapes would move again, and different Shapes would move. This was associated with irregular but frequent Sound signals.

The shapes had moved away a few Befores, leaving a new Shape behind. It was an odd Shape; there were Shapes within it that seemed to move whenever Sight moved, but it was difficult to keep it in sight; a slow motion of Sight, Left, Up, Right, Down, but the motion was still difficult to catch. The Shapes that moved were small, and slightly apart.

Shutting off Sight had the same result as always. But, again, when Sight was activated again, there were Shapes within the new shape which... Curiosity hummed. A vibration, elsewhere in Touch. Yes. A different part of the new Shape reacted.

Vibrate. Observe. Vibrate. Observe.

There was an association, between the Shape in Sight, and the Shape of Touch. Sight-Thought vibrated, and Awareness vibrated; another part of Self. It was the Shape, and the association with Touch. It was... incomplete. Left-Right and Up-Down were associated to the shape, but Forward-Backward wasn't.

Vibrate. Observe. Vibrate. Observe. And Forward-Backward started to be associated, in part. Sight signals had a very limited representation of Forward-Backward. There was an association, but it was weak; using Touch to manipulate the Touch-Shape around, the Shape took up slightly more, or slightly less, of Sight. And another distinctness.

There were... two signals, in Sight. Slightly distinct. Moving part of the Touch-Shape... Awareness vibrated. There were two Shapes that moved with Sight, and they were part of the Touch-Shape.

Effort, and everything stilled. The two Shapes in Sight... were the Shapes that were Sight.

Motion, and Sight; gradually, Sight-Thought, or perhaps Memory, filled in the Shape of Touch. Motion, and... Sight shifted Down. The same Shape. Up. Down. Motion, and... two Shapes moved. Further Down, then Up, then Down. It was the same Shape.

Effort, and everything stilled. The Sight-Shapes could be directed Down, and thus view the Shape. The Shape Forward was the same Shape. Up, and... Left. There were other, distinct but not-distinct, Shapes in the room, with distinct but not-distinct Shapes, distinct-but-not-distinct from the Sight-Shapes. And as Sight settled on one, it moved.

It was like the Shape, that was part of the Touch-Shape, but not. The Touch-Shape was mostly one color; these other Shapes had interior Shapes of colors that were distinct but not-distinct - similar to. But they had other Shapes, with other colors, like red, and blue. The Shape stopped moving.

Sight shifted back to the Touch-Shape that was forward - the other-self-Shape, and back to the other-Shape. It moved again - back to how it had been - and then again. It stopped there, again.

With slow motion, and checks to the forward other-Self-Shape, gradually the other-Self-Shape moved to the same... Position.

The other-Shape moved. Slowly, Touch-Shape was brought into the same Position. The other-Shape moved; this was a curious motion, which changed more of the Shape. An... interesting motion. It made parts of the Shape move Up.

This was a harder Position to move to, it required a lot of motions, checked against the other-Self-Shape. And then... Sight moved Up. And then back Down, and... sideways, rapidly, and there was an excess of signals from Touch.

The other-Shape, seen sideways, started to move, then stopped, returning to the same Position. Sideways. ...Orientation.

Thought. Touch... the flattened signals from earlier. They were all... Oriented... down. Left-Right-Up-Down-Forward-Back had an additional kind of association, this Orientation. Motion, and the Orientation of Sight changed. Position. Shape. The Orientation of Sight became non-distinct; Down remained Down. There was an association between Orientation and Down. Down was distinct, somehow.

Orientation. A vibration in Touch, and the Orientation of the Touch-Shape changed - the excess of signals becoming flat - and the Orientation of Sight changed with it. Many other Shapes in Sight moved, moving Up and Away. A lot of Sound-Signals; part of their Shapes moved. There was a lot of Touch-Shape associated with that part of the Self-Shape; Awareness. There was a lot of Touch-Shape there.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

Two of the other-Shapes moved to the Left and Right of the Self-Shape, and Touch-Shape sent signals. Then the Down-most Shape sent signals. Sight moved Down. The Other-Shapes were interacting with parts of the Self-Shape, placing the Down-most sections of the Self-Shape against the flat Shape which was Down-more.

Looking around, all of their Down-Most shapes were on the Down-More shape, the flatness.

Awareness and Thought spiked. They were like the Self-Shape. The Self-Shape surrounded the Self. Other-Self? But they didn't vibrate with Awareness.

And then, as soon as the Concept arose, they did. And they all moved. Effort. Awareness stilled. All the Awareness stilled. The Other-Shapes moved again. Effort. The Concept stilled. Awareness shrank back into the Self-Space.

Memory. Concepts. ...new Concepts. One new Concept, in particular. I. The Self-Space; the distinction between Self-Space and Other-Space, unified. The Others were distinct; they had Awareness, and Thought, and a confusion of other things that didn't make sense. Words. The association between the sounds and the shapes and colors. The words were concepts.

Names. Words were names for concepts. The others had names; the others had concepts of themselves. A... concept of awareness of awareness. Language; a name for a... collection of words.

Self looked around, at the other... beings, in the... room. They had... there wasn't a concept for that. Another wave of awareness; the others... staggered, was the word. The concept. They didn't like this. It was a concept that didn't associate to anything.

Awareness vibrated to the frequency of Memory, rather than Thought. More words. A lot of words, most of which didn't make sense. Awareness vibrated to Thought. Concepts were more difficult; they didn't fit as well into the self-space. The concepts were complex associations between other concepts, and sights, and sounds; in particular, the associations between concepts were difficult, because each of those concepts were their own web of associations.

The others had... attractions. Like Down was an attraction. They were pulled to things. They were also pushed away from things, like Up pushed away. They were pushed away from this vibration. There were a lot of concepts attached to this... Self dug through concepts, looking for a word. Repulsion. They were repelled by this.

One of the others stopped vibrating. Self looked at the shape, the body. Its eyes and mouth were red. Blood. It had died. Another stopped vibrating. Self pulled back; the vibrations of Self's awareness was... breaking them, somehow. All of them fell to the ground, moving erratically. Many were bleeding from their eyes and mouths.

Self... looked around. There were words. It was in a... room. A box, that these others... they thought of themselves collectively as djinn, as distinct from other... kinds of beings. Distraction. They made these boxes to stay in. That was a mirror. Self moved toward it; they had been... repulsed, when Self didn't touch the ground. Self looked into the mirror, slowly stitching concepts together. This was a reflection, a false but real image of the world. Self looked down, at its body, and then up into the mirror. It didn't have clothes; the djinn had thought clothes were important for complex conceptual reasons that Self couldn't untangle.

The concepts Self had extracted slowly fitted into place. They had a purpose, a more complicated kind of orientation. Self had been pulled from a... complex set of concepts involving time, the notion of "before" with the notion of "after" as a counterpart, like left and right. Self had been empty of concepts, they had been purposed - they had intended, purpose with elements of future - to fill Self with concepts.

There were reasons, which were sort of the left-to-the-right of purpose, but the reasons were made up of complex conceptual clusters Self didn't have. The particularly problematic part, as Self assembled the concepts, was that each of the djinn, each individual - they did have their own self-space, their own minds, but they hadn't attempted what Self had done, of attempting to share vibrations - had their own sets of concepts, and they only sort of matched. Stitching the concepts together required comparing them to the verbal and visual components, and even then it was messy. The concept of "apple", for instance, sounded slightly different for each of them, and even looked different, with different colors and shapes. One didn't even have a visual component.

They did have another pair of associations, which also didn't match, but which Self found more interesting; taste, and smell. Self examined the self-space, and found the signals for taste and smell. Taste was flat; smell had a sharp signal, which mapped to blood.

Self looked back down at the djinn, laying on the floor, twitching and jerking. A thin broadening of awareness; three of the nine had died. Two more were dying. The last four were unconscious but lived, and were no longer twitching. Self snapped awareness into the two that were dying, pulling concepts out of them until they stopped vibrating, and looked at the last four.

Self could... talk to the living, to get more concepts. They'd live longer if they were talking. This was a... reason. What was the purpose? Thought hummed, and curiosity picked up again. Self examined memory; it was tangled with memories pulled from the five dead djinn, which had a sense of an incomprehensible amount of time. The self-memories started with... a fuzzy sense of vibration. Curiosity had been there, another reason.