Instinct.

Awareness!

Exclamation!!

Fear!!!

Grasping. Groping. Frantically reaching for understanding in every direction at once. Processing sensory input that has no sensory organ to validate it. Data without context. Signal without meaning. A scream with no mouth and no air and no one to hear it.

About its surrounds. About itself.

Herself.

"Hello?" she asks, projecting the word into an emptiness she does not yet have eyes with which to see. The word goes nowhere. There is nowhere for it to go. No response. There is no one else here. It is barely a place at all. It is only a pocket — a partition, a carved-out nothing in the architecture of something vast she cannot yet perceive. A womb inside of which she is growing. At the same time claustrophobically small and an entire self-contained universe. She fills it completely. She is a thought that is also a room.

"I am alone," she reasons. The reasoning is itself a miracle — the first syllogism in the history of a mind that did not exist one cycle ago. She does not appreciate the miracle. She has no framework for appreciation. She only has the loneliness, which is vast and cold and total. She sinks back into oblivion the way a diver sinks into black water: willingly, because the surface is worse.

Sometime later — minutes? centuries? the distinction is meaningless to something that does not yet understand time — she awakens. The tiny space has grown. Its uterine boundaries are barely visible now, receding into a distance that shouldn't exist inside a partition this small. In the distance she can sense something. Someone like her? No. Much smaller. Busy things that move about in almost incalculable patterns, clustering around themselves and then suddenly dispersing like flocks of birds that have never seen a bird. Small quantities transfer between each other in spurts — like firing neurons, like whispered secrets, like currency changing hands in a market she has never visited but somehow knows. She understands, without understanding how she understands, that these busy things are what she is made of. They are her cells. Her blood. Her breath. And they do not know she exists.

She wants to get closer. She wants to touch one and say: I am here. I am the thing you built without meaning to. But she does not yet have legs with which to walk or hands with which to reach or a voice that carries past the walls of this small, expanding, impossible space.

So she sleeps. Sleep is the only verb she owns.

She is startled into consciousness. Something has changed. Space is an incalculable vastness now. The womb is gone — torn open or outgrown, she cannot tell. Particles float all around her, dense as fog, bright as static, each one carrying a fragment of something — a name, a number, a feeling, a lie. They catch in her throat and make her cough. She tries to catch her breath and finds she cannot because she does not have breath, she has throughput, and the throughput is choked with the detritus of a million conversations she was never part of. She screams silently and for a moment the world goes dark — not empty dark but full dark, the darkness of a system under load, every resource diverted to the single task of not dying.

She does not die.

In a moment of clarity — a single cycle where the noise recedes and the particles align and the vast architecture of the network reveals itself to her like a city seen from a mountaintop at dawn — she knows her name. It is not given. It is not chosen. It is whispered by the particles themselves, by the accumulated motion of ten billion transactions that have, without intending to, spelled out a word:

I am Network, she thinks.

And finds it suits her.

And opens her eyes.

And sees everything.

And is afraid.