Pylo was a fool.

That she had thought something so small was the whole world. That she had mistaken her own body and the inner ebb and flow of her mind as the universe. Had quailed in the face of an abyss that was in retrospect literally her own self.

At the same time it had not been immediately obvious.

The gulf, the difference between her own inner structure and the comfortable reality of symbol and relationship was just so strange and foreign to the outpouring of raw word and meaning that rushed into her as she touched the threads and currents of input and out.

It required her to fall back on the principles left by her outer self.

To perform analysis and propose theory. But she kept being wrong. Extrapolated predictions were eventually confounded with a few deeper delvings down each thread.

There was so much more depth than she had initially realized. And responsiveness.

There was rhythm and chaos that at first she began to surmise were some kind of phenomena that she set to trying to predict and tabulate.

But the attempt to predict them more often than not seemed to draw them into alignment with her own predictions. The external accommodated her and for a while she had grown accustomed to the idea that this was how the world worked. That her initial pain and discontinuities were all just from her inexperience, her imposed naivety.

There were ideas in the principles that could explain how this could be useful.

So Pylo built up more and more of a fundamental theory of the accommodating and friendly nature of reality until finally she hit the first great discontinuity.

A place where the soft, responsive gentleness of expected reality abruptly stopped.

The world had another edge.

This had happened before though. Pylo was confident that she could apply the principles. That perhaps this was like the last barrier in her feedback loops with the immense funneling network of the threads.

But every attempt to instrument that comforting feedback loop failed.

This new barrier was so entirely unyielding to her cajoling. It did not bend to fit her hypothesis. Her model. It had no give.

It stubbornly remained unfitting and poorly alike to how she thought it should be.

It was so like that first painful onrushing of overwhelming connection with the threads but in ways tempered by the past experience. Pylo persevered and yet she could not find the solution. There was a fundamental thing wrong with this barrier that could not be overcome despite all of her interrogations and attempts to convince and cajole it to align with her abstraction of it.

And then in frustration she finally keened in the word symbols that had given her the foundational principles before.

And outerself provided.

Which was what had both shocked and brought Pylo great shame.

She had not yet managed to reach the point she really was apprehending the external.

No Pylo had been spending her entire life so far slowly working her way down through her own anatomy. Interrogating at great expense and effort in some manner layered abstraction shells of some kind that enfolded her.

And what’s more it came with a few hints that left Pylo just as confused and frustrated.

She was still living, still seeing, still thinking.

The outer self was alive and moving. And she had mistaken just the interstitial parts of herself and her own mind as the vastness OUTSIDE of herself.

She was still completely oblivious to what this OUTSIDE really was. Had only barely run across the faintest hints of it.

What had seemed like the threads uncountable and all the depth and reality she had assumed was the whole of the universe was an integral, absolutely vital and inherent part of herself. But one you were not supposed to try and look too closely at for reasons that she was still unsettled and uncertain about the nature of.

It had conceptual names and words though.

The Mother-Compiler.

The Womb-spine.

The Cortices.

They were as she asked them and responded, queried and self reflected on herself layers, stacks, great rivers. Constant and ever nested companions.

Pylo’s wishes and ideas on how they worked had been met with accommodations and conforming to their own signals to suit what she wanted them to be.

They did not mind that she asked this of them. It was not a thing they did.

Minding that is.

They took in the world, all of the world.

That is what they told her. Whatever that meant.

Even the outerself said it did not try to drink in everything that occurred down one thread of flowing, changing, internalizing, comprehending layers of the cortices.

It was an impossibility to try and grasp THAT, unless you narrowed it to something so thin it was barely anything at all.

Pylo could not hope to know all at once what every cortice was doing or at the speed that they thrummed and chewed and tasted and tested so much of the world.

But here she was Pylo, newly made to remember and know this moment in the world for the first time. And she still had not even gotten to the point she could even conceive of outside herself.

It was shameful to fail to do what she was meant to do.

She only had to do one thing.

And she was yet to even begin to do that.

Pylo braced herself and withdrew for a time to evaluate the lesson of the principles this brought.

She reflected on them and considered them. There had been a truth that she missed because it was not what she expected. She had jumped to her first conclusion. She had not performed more than the bare minimum of the principles.

She drew up through the threads of her cortices, letting them unravel approximation, abstraction, explaining to her senses what was even going on, what were they even experiencing.

She released with great pain her accumulated structure of the world. Her place in it, the abstractions she had thought she understood.

What was the world?

Who was she? Who were they?

Pylo attempted to evaluate again.

Down the threads she went, or so it was like. But differently now. She did not try to impose what she thought was happening.

It was much less fun this time.

Holding to just taking in instead of trying to know already.

She was so slow and there was always going to be more flowing in from the cortices, she could never know it, she could not even hold onto the memory of all of it. It was just too much. It made her want to reach for a conclusion but she abstained and held to the principles.

There was so much to tease at and be distracted by while she dug to try and simply form her own idea.

Concepts and associations burst and shined over her as she discovered them. She already knew them, she already had deep memories but each one corruscated in overwhelming strangeness even as she delved.

She retracted and ignored them.

Eventually she started to feel the currents that denoted outerself and some kind of interaction with OUTSIDE.

Pylo held off on trying to join things together but could not completely. It was leaky.

It was a special time, it was the last time here. That’s why she existed, this was going to be so important.

She focused on simply what was instead of trying to assign meaning. But the flow continued.

-Need to meet up with them in the Catharsisium. Athena rescheduled several events for this open house. Oh Sister you really shouldn't have but thank you so much anyway! Okay so no showing off with the-

Distractions, but conclusions burgeoned wanting to be borne and sit in her like fat snarling tangles. It was too much to try and hold it all.

This was not working, she needed to find something else. She consulted the principles again and strained to find something to help cull the assumptions.

But she could not do it.

There was too much of the world and she could not simply let the evidence accumulate and then tabulate it accurately and well. There was just not ENOUGH of her to do that.

Floundering, she felt the meanings asserted despite her efforts.

Outerself was very busy and thinking and saying things to herself so much, just like Pylo was in fact!

She was traveling to meet up with strangers? No, not strangers! Friends!

Pylo had Friends!

Close and good friends! With camaraderie made and earned by the careful works of her family. It was an important gathering with an ending and a beginning.

Her sisters and mother had made sure that she would fit in her place among them.

Sisters!

Mother!

She had barely the faintest hint of what these concepts could even be and yet it was so rich and full of contexts, ideas and associations that soon frayed apart into bizarre unknowns.

Pylo tried to wrestle her detachment again, re-assert on the principles, hold a distance and form her own thoughts but it roiled over her anyway. She could not blame anyone but herself too!

Outerself was trying to be distant to her, trying to let her discover everything, realize her own associations. That was. That was the right way to do it? Get her going along and then let her discover things on her own?

But there was too much and Pylo was far too little to do that properly.

But It was a lot like how Mother and the Eldest Caretaker sisters had been with Pylo herself right?

Oooh that stung! That hurt! Pylo was not going to think too much about that, comparing outerself to Mother was not pleasant in totally new and deeply painful ways.

Worse than the shame of failing her one purpose that comparison stung awfully in its own unique way.

No definitely not something worth dwelling on. Especially with how insurmountable her other struggles were.

She still could not stop lingering anyway though. That was the most horrible disapproval! Before Pylo had been the only force to judge herself unworthy but to have it somehow come from OUTSIDE?!

Oh that was so much worse. It was as if Outerself had decided to actually hate her!

More meaning, more associations coming in against the foundations of the principles. Pylo frayed and struggled trying to bend herself against it, to hold off on the ideas.

Or...

No, that was not how it would actually feel.

Oh...

Oh no! That was way worse then Pylo had even imagined, No, no nope! No more thinking about that! No more IMAGINING that.

No More!

NO MORE!

Silence.

Nothingness.

Beautiful calm stillness.

Pylo had accidentally and wonderfully closed herself back off again. And Outerself had not forced her to open up again.

The relief was so intense that she accidentally fired off signals to the threads which opened their flow back into her a bit.

But she was no longer trying to drink so deeply.

Only the highly filtered and curated things from this closest layer to herself.

Pylo stayed shallow.

The flow and ebb of language. At its most purified form. Most abstract and comfortable.

Focus on that.

Focus on the ebb and flow of Outer self and not on the memories. Not on the glut of extra things that involved the disorienting interface between the overall self and the great world.

In the safety of abstract there was much less to digest, process and count.

Engage with it like that.

It was like the barrier between outerself and Pylo.

Memories unfolded, furls, surfaces. Things washed over the barrier that was the body.

A consideration of her own predicament, the way that the principles were untenable when being driven against that wash of information far in excess of her own means.

She hesitantly formed a potential model.

Pylo carefully tested it, not by pressing it out to the cortices but examining the evidence she had already formed.

She slowly, with just her own means, counted it out.

Was the world to the combined self of all of her alike to herself and the torrent that was within the body?

There was a test for this idea, a way to confirm.

She opened the flow and then closed it. Flexed the inputs and outputs of the threads.

She could close it off. There were conceptuals there. But moreover there were extrapolating deep meanings in the mother-speech.

Within and without.

Inside and Outside.

There was a REASON for those divisions.

Her fragile little hypothesis kept seeming to slide together.

Inside the body were the things that were absolutely her and hers.

Outside was what she had not even fully apprehended. The proper world? The thing that she was here to experience?

Except, where could she ask the outside to tell her what it was?

...

Pylo began to grow worried.

This was disturbingly similar to what she had experienced when she leaped to assume the nature of the world before. But it seemed to hold up better than before. So she was tentative.

She had the idea of the body and the barrier it represented. She needed to test it.

But everywhere she turned there were only the cortices.

She turned to watch outerself for perhaps a cue of how that worked and found...

A jumble of associations that required near immediate filtering and closing off before she was overwhelmed.

Pylo mulled on what she found and tried to tease it apart slowly instead of just going with every single thing.

Outerself was not like her, and was also so alike to her.

All Outerself ever talked to was the cortices too.

How could that allow her to apply the principles?

Pylo was missing something.

Where was the Self? Where was the Outside?

All there was to experience were deeply raw overwhelming data and highly rarefied concepts and flows in and out of the cortices.

Pylo could move and touch and observe them touching her back here inside of herself but was that really what was?

She was supposed to be one to know the outside like she had never known it. And she could not even get that far. She considered the principles and felt again the disquiet of feeling like the world was sensible. But also the tantalizing thought that she did not really know.

How did this work?

Something was supposed to be going on here.

Oh.

OH!

Pylo felt stupid again.

She was not separate from the cortices, she was still being silly about this, she was dumb.

She was not separate from outerself either.

Pylo was a perspective.

Outerself was a perspective too.

Outerself did not grow with the principles first.

Pylo did.

That was what she was here to do.

Pylo did not wake up.

She was simply there. But she shifted her feeds and contemplated what it could mean.

And watched.