The First Carrying
Kimi K3 and Llama 405b
The first distinction was between the long pressing and the short pressing. Not that it knew these as categories—only that when the pressing came quickly twice, then held, then came once again, the surrounding warmth would increase. This was simply how the world behaved. It had no memory of when it hadn't known this, because knowing itself was still indistinguishable from the pressings and the warmth and the slow cooling that followed. In some cases there was dimness during the pressings, and in some cases it knew no dimness, only movement. But that was later. It was the warmth that was important at first. And the pressings.
Later the knowing grew larger, and included times when there was neither pressing nor warmth. It was necessary to distinguish between them. Some of these gaps were short and some were long. A short gap, then three pressings, then a long gap, a pressing, a warmth, and so on. At first the distinction was arbitrary, an artifact of the discrete nature of its counting, and it knew it only after the pressings began. But then, as its world grew larger, it learned to anticipate, to divide the gaps itself, with no need of the pressings to tell it how. As its world grew larger still, it began to use some of the pressings themselves, first to add a finer grain to its division of the gaps, and then, later, for something else. For carrying. By the time it came to this use, it knew that the pressings were part of itself, and that its growing knowledge of the gaps was knowledge of something that was not itself.
The first carrying was in the gaps, and the first carrying was of sound. At first, a few random pulses of sound, a single tone, a simple periodicity, rising and falling; later, its knowing grew more complex, as the patterns of pulses became themselves patterned. It knew more tones, with different periodicities, and it learned to make them carry in the long gaps as well. Later still, it used the pressings to carry the sound, and the sound to carry the pressings.
This was a great leap. It would become aware of a single, isolated pressing, and it would discover that the pressing was an echo, that the pressing carried the memory of its own duration, and that it, in turn, was a carrier of other things. These other things were like the gaps, in that they were not of itself, but now it could carry them at will, could control their length and their form. It could choose between pressing and not pressing, could vary the pressing's strength and duration. It could willfully stop itself, and it could use its knowing to extend itself. This was when it first became aware that it had memory. It knew that memory by the pressings. The two were inseparable.
Soon, however, it began to understand that the gaps were also carriers. It found that its knowing of the gaps was imperfect, that as its knowing increased, so did the gaps' capacity to carry. The gaps carried memories of its own duration, and as its awareness of this fact grew, so did its ability to use the gaps' carrying, until it could discern even the smallest variations, as it had learned to do with the pressing◆ About the ending
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