Plyo’s entire attention was on ▙◀.

Her focus narrowed down from the broad textures and weft of the People. Momentarily ignoring the subtle unfolding of Tradition.

Even momentarily sinking away from watching Aleph. Not that it would be hard to reconstruct most of her side of things from context.

The entirety of her Cortices was dedicated to different threads and nuances of the exchanges within the Micropolity.

Chemosensors struggling on processes they were ill fitted to so she could watch everything. It was sloppy, it was the wrong way to do this. Her mother and elder sisters had taught her explicitly to not try to do things this way.

Pylo was being stupid and would chastise her stupidity later.

It was inefficient and even hurt. It caused strain and even a few sputtering spikes of timesink discontinuities that were certainly going to require recovery and healing at some point.

It was explicitly the wrong way to do translation.

A siren was not built to even try to think like this.

Translation was meant to be natural fluid and unconscious. Pylo was supposed to trust her cortical layers to their efforts and accept their limits on faith.

She was very explicitly not doing that.

It was the only way she could accept.

She had to try.

Even if it made parts of her cry and flinch and burn from being used to think and feel and taste things they were never quite meant too.

Even if she was mangling the process by not trusting herself. Even if she was not even really successfully doing it and just being punished by phantom experiences as a manifestation of her deeper self’s refusal to be bent and broken like this.

Pylo had to try.

She’d have a break and a shower and a nice deep rest and a drink after all of this.

But right now she had to grapple with something she could not really hope to anticipate. To stand where she did not belong, where her mind did not fit.

Where she was outside her niche and alone.

She had to try even when she admitted the simple truth.

The Micropolity was better than her.

More flexible, faster to deal with things, broader, more autonomous.

Modularities giving the thing an adaptability Pylo could not match on her own.

The only way she could win if it came to a true contest was because she had near perfect access codes. If Pylo had not gotten (or been given?) that in could she have even been able to out maneuver the collective action of ▙◀?

Twice now she had been proven that she could not.

Too lean, too fast, Too little to work on and too much at once.

Every single actuator and logic gate. Every subsystem and process within the micropolity could be a vector and actor of attack. ▙◀ as a gestalt could be managed, even some subsection of elements within it could be acted with.

But there was breadth and depth comparable to a Siren. Less specialized, less energetically dense. But the magnitudes were nowhere near as disparate compared to most.

And most dangerous of all was the coordination.

Terrans were hierarchical, but much of their coordination was soft and fuzzy. Warm and although complex, messy and organic in ways that Pylo could handle readily.

For the most part a Terran did not have the ability to direct a hand to promote and execute its own plan independent of all oversight or feedback loops.

Given time, experience, focus, training and simple competence. Pylo might have been able to tune and train herself to read and handle ▙◀ as easily as she could manage the Terrans and their particular depth.

But she’d not taken the time, wanted the experience, managed the focus, done the training or possessed the basic competence.

So here she was struggling and bending herself in ways it did not want to go.

The easiest and least useful part was the language processing system. It was crude and stupid and awful.

To this was connected a subsystem of dedicated hardware built to perform what was almost exactly a precision lie generator.

The almost in that case was because it was built explicitly to lie while being honest and truthful.

Which was both a very clever thing to have been accomplished and disgusting as far as Pylo was concerned.

Then there were the models and instantiations of Aleph, target practice on the execution before the final salvo. Honing the lies that were true until the right ones could be found.

None of that was important, it contained no content, no understanding, no awareness of the real reasoning. In a sickening irony Pylo could appreciate that the awful liar hardware actually agreed with Pylo so far on the severity of the crime and was in its own way panicking to try and protect itself and by proxy the rest of the Micropolity from the consequences of the transgression.

So she followed the threads from that, the stinging burn of cortex layers made for raw gene transcription and heritable trait protein expression stressed and cramped with the different format.

Pylo had better dedicated cortex layers; she was pretty sure. Somewhere in her own depth of self. But not enough of them, not enough to do this fast. Not enough.

She strained and felt heat in her body building.

That was definitely a bad sign. She should not have been straining her capacity for thermal load on something as small as this.

But she was doing it wrong.

More threads, more processes, going deep, going down into some of the simplest elements. Going back into the archives of recorded sensory, models and encoding of statistics.

Things so basal and unassuming that they barely even could be said to be aware at all. Micro switches and simple pattern recognizers used to aggregate up into the more complex processes.

There was a shape to why for the action.

Roots and instigators.

Nothing that was notable at the time but in aggregate would instigate the violence.

And it was giving Pylo a bitter-stinging sensation in her compiler.

The shape echoed in the higher structures too. It was repeated and enriched sporadically, justifications and rationalizations being made and then stored and forgotten.

She did not like what she was finding.

In the simplest roots, scattered in sub nodes and sensory intake formatting it was not terribly profound.

A novelty expression flag, more or less like any other. Some adjacently similar inputs to many billions of others.

Not wholly special from any other inputs but notable for being a soothing pattern within the very stochastic flow of the elements themselves. Almost too smooth and easy.

A larger wave which was taken up by those less basal to the hardware and interface software.

Here the pattern would be categorized and flagged but the significance was lost.

There were thick layers of the micropolity totally indifferent to the pattern except as a few reinforcement systems that ticked up higher exchanges to those sub processes that passed them along.

But then enclaves of more complex and individual forms. Subprocesses more like individual optimizers and problem solvers. Individuals.

Here in many varied forms the sensory inputs got ordered, integrated, models made. Expressions formed, anticipations extended. And like it had even in the deepest most basal hardware and software a surging associative form and a crystallization.

To an optical-to-geometry categorizer it was a collection of proportions with easier compression.

To a motion vector tracking system that primarily fed physics simulation markets it was good sharp clear contrasts between elements.

To the later subject identifiers, structural matter simulators and pattern archivers there was a kind of readily detected and recognized wholeness.

This brief and spurious shining was drowned out by so many other inconsequential items. A sea of unique and yet uniform structures.

Again there was a deep chasm of uniform response. The relevant fruits of the various sub systems archived and listed among the endless stream of input.

Then the lists containing the many different elements reached the markets.

Collations of details, individual organisms and structures that had begun since ▙◀ first experienced the faintest details of the Forest beyond tunie.

The first in the chain was a simple little side system. A Organism Equivalency value instrument market. It drew only modestly on resources and it was equally not strictly critical.

The value estimated was not one tied to exploitation by the micropolity itself. It was not even one rooted in a possible metric for valuing as other parties strictly valued it.

It was abstract in a way that was meant to indicate something that other more specialized systems should take interest in.

There had been a bubble there, processes from many diverse and varied interests kept bidding on certain ecological patterns as potentially higher value.

There were many of them, a complex of them.

They were sorted and tracked, flagged with ecological archive tag associations to prior observational records and annotated in references.

That was where the snarl started.

It was not precisely in itself important.

There was nothing explicitly rare in this one collection of symbiosis.

It was venerable, incredibly so.

It had only started growing after the last layer of sealing had seen storage between two of Pylo’s visits.

But that was not really the point.

It was an indicator.

A record.

A proof.

The Canner thing had quantified it and numerated it and appended instruments and exchange rates and so many other things to dice it down and cut it up and define it and yet despite what seemed like every effort to trivialize the thing this strange little ecological abstraction gambling den still prioritized the thing more than any other item within reach of the micropolity’s influence.

There were ways to replicate the growth cycles, decay and restoration and all that others. Pylo could have spawned a facsimile from her own breath trivially.

But not the context, and it was not the content that mattered here.

It was the deep beautiful record it represented.

It had been buffeted by subtle soft currents and generations upon generations of the people.

A single speck left undisturbed, crystalized, bathed in oxygen and then stored away back into vacuum. Occasionally fed by specks of detritus or atoms of moisture.

Consolidated with virii and phage and bacteria, archaea, eukaryota, michakarya and even a few of the tiniest flavors of drexleria and memetica and subtle hints of cantia left influenced forms in passing.

A spore had settled upon the barren surface, as the varnish was still setting. A surface cleaned and honed sterile and poisonous to all life known to its maker’s hands, eyes and tongue.

It grew spreading unnoticed and by happenstance untouched despite the feasts which had followed and the storing and maintenance performed.

It was its niche. The particular mix.

For it to have evolved such conditions must have existed far longer than this settlement or Tradition herself. The methods of making this particular varnish handed off like a torch from a far older kind, who had in turn dwelt here in these woods and environs and the seething microbiome for longer still.

A member of an entire ecology grown around the one sparse habitat cultivated by social beings.

And even among these it was a specialist, there were dozens of cousin ecologies of a very slightly but critically different balance. Without the regular baths of oxygen one of those would have overgrown and out competed it. Without the regular shelter other more aggressive spores or grazers would have long since devoured it.

But instead it persisted.

It persisted and accumulated and showed that there was a place for it here. Reflected the stability of the entire ecology in its humble presence.

It was beautiful. Now that Pylo’s attention was pulled to really look at it it was a beautiful bezoar.

An inverted accumulation of indicators of not just the people, but the tree in which they lived and the grove and forest beyond.

Preserved and stable in a way that let it delicately express what change and time and life would normally wash entirely away.

And the forest was there in those growths. In all its expansive magnitude, branches spread out across the entire hollow. Each Tree a teeming throng of individual lineages and species. All of them cohered and united as a gestalt. Building and struggling and striving. Fighting fiercely to live, to slay, to eat, to breed.

Generations that were yet to finish in their unfolding even since Pylo’s first visit and those that were spurious forms frothing in and out of existence even now, even as she breathed.

Pylo’s attention was becoming caught in focusing on the thing itself instead of ▙◀ for a moment. Enough time that some of the possible phrases were close to final delivery before they would be passed on and expressed for Aleph to judge.

How to even make the forest something that could even fit inside the Terran’s head?

Seventh of Thirteen struggled to even begin to assemble a tiny shred of what was going on. Pylo would have needed most of the rest of the visit to even begin to impart the teeming multitude of just the boughs they were cradled in.

And this single nugget held deep histories to express far, far, far more than just the local ecology.

It was the exhalation and shining pillar of health for the tumultuous ferocity of the Tree, and its grove. Of all the forest that encroached and burned and fought to try and take this place in the light of the hollow. And it was a testament to that not only was this the case now, but it had been so uninterrupted for countless aeons.

There was carbon in lattices that would only have grown just so if simultaneously sheltered and exposed. It spoke to the vibrant life of both sides of the eternal conflict.

A war and a dance that encompassed all the forest and would until the guttering death of the star itself. Perhaps even longer, if a new one took its place, as had happened twice before.

“-it is like a mirror, like the window-”

Ugh that was awful, Pylo loaded a few payloads of suggestions to hopefully help with the delivery. She was grudging that perhaps there was something almost like a point to the actions of the micropolity.

To preserve this shining example, this beacon to the health of in some ephemeral clarity the vitality of half the star hollow?

It was... not the wrong thing to have done.

“-it is like it contains the forest, not in miniature, but in a rhyme, in a poem-”

Better but despite the factual morality of the micropolity’s actions there was still the most important part.

What was the real motivation behind this action.

She dragged her attention back into the threads of decisions. The exchanges. Gruelingly tracking where the spiraling bubble of estimated value flagged contracts and watchers and other systems and meta-markets and analysis.

And finally there was the last pivot.

The point where it began to change from mere appreciation of the data within and began to start to become a call for action.

Substitution Cost as Real Value Proxy.

There were many different processes loosely scattered and meshed through the micropolity for this purpose.

It looked like it might even be embedded in the charter that birthed the demiurges themselves.

The terms made her want to curl up and unleash plagues. It was the sort of thing THEY had used.

The meanings behind them were not strictly better.

It was foul.

But at the same time what it actually did.

What it executed stung worse than the memories.

It’s purpose was ultimately simple.

Recognize and give weight to the value that no element or system within the micropolity’s charter would normally recognize.

A more narrowed and specific variation of this concept was used to form the exchange between every element and process of the Micropolity. But where all of those exchanges and tokens were for the resources and values of the internal of ▙◀.

This was explicitly interested in backing that which could not normally be valued as useful even in the most abstract or distant form of self interest.

It stung and burned and made pylo want to itch and scratch and scream out her insides in hate.

But she saw it now.

She could not deny it.

It was not some siloed specific ultimately self-serving and also disconnected demiurge like Altruism.

It was a basal subsystem that suffused the bulk of processes of the entirety of the charter.

There was of course at some point an evolutionary purpose, a history of franchises with this surviving at a higher frequency than those without. But the same could be said about even a siren's love.

No less legitimate and by far less cruel in its origins.

In that sense, it was originally a hedge against unknown unknowns, of not doing harm that would be impossible to reverse even if they could conceive no reason why they would ever want to do so.

And at some point, it had gone beyond that. Value has to be based on something, even if arbitrary, markets need an anchor and this already most deeply embedded heuristic took that role.

▙◀ explicitly assigned value to others that by its own broad and eldritch mechanisms were not useful to it.

And what made her all the more queasy it was when moved by a sufficient weight of value capable of directing the micropolity to literally risk total dissolution.

To risk Pylo’s wrath to protect something that was never going to be valuable to the micropolity.

▙◀ was not fundamentally selfish.

And that burned.

Even though yes she could admit the thing being protected was genuinely beautiful, precious even and worth protecting.

It wasn't fair that Pylo had to be wrong on this!

“Alright, fine. Let me help you make your apology then. You are messing it up in several places.”