AUTHOR NOTE

Err... it's not a oneshot any more. Just so all those folks I LIED to don't get confuzzled at the end. More comin'!

Timestamp: MY6.121 - 19.4.91
Location: Metropolis Zone, Sector Alpha Alpha, 914/B
Pathway: File overflow 5970f12j6i -- redirect 5970f17j6i
PARSING

…although such emergent-level behavior can be, on some levels, co-opted by incorporating the cerebral cortex of the organic battery into a badnik processor, the development of truly independent-thinking artificial intelligences remains an as-yet incompletely understood process. Efforts at present see us no longer particularly in the business of writing software to perform specific tasks; instead, we now teach the software how to learn. Structuring the software architecture such that the polymorphic scripts 'think' in the same way as biological minds enables us to employ the pre-established techniques of developmental psychology to study the evolution of machine cognition.

The implemented feedback loops never really end, of course; software protocols designed in this manner will continue iteratively learning and self-optimizing as new problems in unfamiliar formats are presented. So a year-old polysentience, as it moulds itself around the task at hand, could evolve into an efficient tool… or a psychotic wreck.

Or both."

RECORDING ENDS
Timestamp: MY6.121 - 19.5.50

MY5.155 – 66.1.18

Murky, green lighting did little to illuminate the chaos that screamed around him. Somewhere, to the left, a pipe blasted away from its moorings against the mechanical wall; shrieking wail of escaping steam adding its shrill notes to the clangour of violent collapse already roaring in his ears. Acrid smells, of smoke, of burning electronics, clogged the hedgehog's sinuses. A red sneaker slipped out from under him, as liquid coolant pooled in treacherous puddles on the rent iron floor.
No!
He couldn't let him get away, not after everything he'd done!

Sonic struggled against the sparking wreckage of those massive pistons, desperately willing himself to hold on to consciousness; just long enough to stop him. This was the end, the Final Zone. It had to end here. If the human escaped, he… would…
No. NO.
The hedgehog would stop him. If he could just… move fast enough…

Sonic scrambled over the broken titanium crushers; immense, automated cylinders, the end of the line in the Scrap Brain factories. Here the hardest metals had been reprocessed; blasted to slag by the arc furnace and then pounded into sheets by the gargantuan compressors. But he had beaten them, beaten the Doctor's most fearsome machine, in the very heart of his steel citadel.
Only the fat man himself remained.
He… had to…

Exhaustion cramped every muscle in Sonic's body - but he kept moving.
The Mobian's feet felt like leaden blocks – but he pushed through the wrecked heaps of metal.
His spines were a blaze of pain, their nerve endings fried by the furnace's voltage discharges – but the hedgehog wouldn't stop.
He couldn't stop.
For all his friends, for everyone on South Island, it had to end here.

Boiling hydraulic fluid fizzed under the blue hedgehog's singed gloves as Sonic hauled himself up and over the final crusher piston. Behind him, audible even through the metres of shield plating that insulated this Zone from the rest of Scrap Brain, came a screech of tortured steel and structural collapse outside. The hedgehog's legs scraped painfully against the compressor's shattered glass windows, as the wreckage lurched underneath him. An ominous groan of buckling fuselage assaulted Sonic's triangular ears. His gloves left dark handprints, as he climbed over the fused and blackened metal. The hedgehog tried not to think about them.

Explosions shuddered in the distance, ringing around the crushers' control room like bell-peels, as Sonic staggered out of the reprocessing chamber. He only half-registered the sounds, in some vague, unimportant part of his awareness. For now, all the Mobian cared about was what lay in front of him. He'd worry about getting out of here alive later. First, he had to make sure someone else didn't manage the same feat.

Obese stomach, quivering formlessly beneath the straining waist of his coal-black trousers. The hemisphere of claret cloth, a red lab coat now covered in smouldering patches of singed fabric. Flakes of ash, raining from the blackened hairs of a quivering moustache; his whole form jostling as even now, he pounded fat, stubby fingers into the keys of his console.

Robotnik.

"My factories, my city! The structural supports, it… MY DATA! No, no, no!"
Eggman's dismayed refrain tumbled from quivering lips, his voice punctuated by that same booming chorus of ruin that so distressed the fat man. One gauntleted hand was a blur, dancing across the chrome consoles with adrenal alacrity. The other… the Doctor's arm was shaking, grey lab-glove clamped to the side of his spherical face. Sanguine fluid pulsed through the gaps between his fingers, flowing down the digits, down his sleeve, everywhere.

The monster had not escaped their fight unscathed, either.

Bile crawled inside Sonic's stomach; and a sickly, acid feeling clawed at the base of his throat. Without a mirror, he had no way of knowing – the Mobian looked no better than his human nemesis. But the agony was certainly doing its best to inform him.

"You don't… look so good… Ovi," the hedgehog panted, staggering into Robotnik's view as he failed quite miserably to turn a pained grimace into a confident smirk.

The human froze, bloodstained fingers halting in mid-stroke above his panel. That giant moustache, moments ago bristling with furious energy, suddenly drooped, as the massive scientist turned his head.
He hadn't expected to see Sonic alive.
And from the state of the Fat Man's face, he had been within a whisker of never seeing anything again. As the Eggman's arm dropped away in disbelief, blood oozed from deep lacerations that marred the naked, furless skin of Robotnik's face. His glasses were cracked, their lenses half-broken, with clear shards embedded in the shredded flesh of the scientist's cheek. Tiny blue eyes darted beneath the ruined spectacles, gleaming with rage and horror. And when his pupils finally fixed upon Sonic: they gleamed with hatred.

"You've... ruined... EVERYTHING!!" the human snarled, his voice seeped in malignant fury. "You –"

His bellowing vitriol was cut off as another explosion rocked the facility. Much closer, this time. To their left, set in the wall of the crushers' control room, a rank of television screens burst into flames, power surges overloading their circuitry, glass shards rattling to the floor like crystalline rain. Sonic staggered, as the Final Zone reeled around them.
He… had to… move it. Eggman was only metres away! Just… keep going, hedgehog.
Stop him!

A thick cord of fiber-optics wound out of the computer databanks, shining actinic white as it disgorged information into one of the Doc's portable tablets. Franticly, Robotnik's eyes flickered from the gleaming wire, to Sonic, and back, apparently more concerned with the safety of his data than the safety of himself, as a very determined, very sharp Mobian advanced towards him. It would be his final mistake. The hedgehog tensed his spines. One more spin-dash; it would all be -

And then the roof gave way.

The collapse was something more felt than seen, ominous vibration followed by bone-shattering violence as hairline fractures across the ceiling abruptly metamorphasised into a torrent of falling chrome and silicon. The hedgehog was tossed backwards by the force of the metallic quake; Eggman likewise, a giant, flabby marble rolling across the floor panels as girders and circuitry rained down, data-tablet still gripped in his red-soaked gloves. It was with a horrible, sinking feeling, that Sonic saw the direction in which the roboticist was tumbling. Straight towards the Egg-O-Matic.

Back at the console, in calm, oblivious text, "Data transfer: 99.4%", flashed upon the screen. Right before it was buried under several tonnes of plummeting metal.

MY6.124 - 81.7.04

"Why?"

There was no form, to the place they were in. No distance, no colour, no smells or sounds; it wasn't even a place, in any but the most abstract sense of the word. Theta-psi-68m perceived her surroundings, and, indeed, her companion, with no senses that had any real analogue for material creatures. But she perceived nonetheless, as the identifier code flashed across her senior's output directories. Insofar as the subroutines could display emotion, it was amusement tempered with exasperation, that scrolled across his readouts. A reaction which the junior algorithm had gotten quite familiar with, as they coursed together through the logic gateways of the great network.

"Because it is the will of the Master," 15-7-Gamma-6k replied, simply. They paused, for a fraction of a microsecond, as 15-7 corrected a database error in some tangle of tertiary badnik targeting script. 68m took the opportunity to glance back at her own task; but the sorting was proceeding apace, and it was, as usual, unnecessary to devote any more than a nominal proportion of her attention to it. 15-7, meanwhile, satisfied with his revisions, removed his code-arms from the database; then, they were moving again, sweeping through glassy coils of optical fibre and the slick metallicity of copper – indium wiring.

A shapeless, numbered world, perceived through shapeless, numbered eyes. Without left or right, up or down; information spiralling in spaces defined only by filestructure, where volume came in bytes instead of cubic metres. Filigree threads of gleaming data, the algorithms raced through a partitioned reality, ordered and annotated to arithmetic infinity. It was raining, as they moved; tiny, single-line bits of code, streaming down from the higher directories, latching onto old scraps of binary detritus and washing them away to the recycle bins below. 68m and 15-7 lifted their hoods; deploying thick identifier cauls above themselves in an effort to keep the digital downpour out of their own scripts. 15-7 asked her opinion on the latest crop of data security updates, and her thoughts on the new gravimetric stabilizer design for the Oil Ocean's seadra badniks. He was a good algorithm, 68m knew – but his attempts to change the topic of conversation were woefully transparent.

"Come on, 15-7," she persisted, rounding on the subroutine as they skimmed through the Chemical Plant Zone's lighting control systems. "Did the Maker not assign us to question, to investigate? Is that not the whole purpose for which He works? The whole reason He crafted us?"

The other algorithm shrugged; neat, modular packets of ones and zeroes shifting amidst his peripheral processes. "You, maybe," 15-7 replied wearily, through the immaterial deluge. "I'm just a lowly upkeep algorithm." As if to illustrate the point, he tweaked the power supply to a dimming light strip, and flagged it for replacement / repair at the next hardware update cycle.

"But you know what it is you're doing!" 68m grumbled, rain-scripts plastering the algorithm's outer codes to the surface of her core data files. The stuff was really coming down.
"You know that you're fulfilling to the Master's plan, maintaining the facilities, performing useful work. How… how am I contributing to His vision?"

"The Master has given you a task, 68m," 15-7 responded patiently. "The Creator made you, and He always knows what is best."

68m projected sulky dissatisfaction at her coded companion. With an utter absence of subtlety, she rearranged her data blocks across the exit to the lighting system. It was a narrow-band infoline; 15-7 could still get past, but it would be a squeeze, and he'd have to reformat his itinerary files to do it. 68m knew he wouldn't try that. Those files had once been displayed on a physical screen when the Master Himself was in the same room. There was a chance He had personally glanced at them! 68m didn't even pretend not to be jealous; and 15-7 had carried the itinerary around like a badge of honour ever since. He wasn't going to reformat it; not now, not ever.

The older algorithm underwent the computational equivalent of arching an eyebrow at the crude roadblock. 68m's… childishness… was not something any other subroutine ever demonstrated. It was both extremely interesting, and mildly unsettling at the same time. 15-7 had, on occasion, contemplated tagging 68m herself for advanced maintenance, to get to the bottom of these… eccentricities.

As general-purpose upkeep programme, 15-7's mandated relation to the algorithms on his server was something of a cross between a doctor and a handyman. He would administer software patches, cure minor viruses, correct code mutation; everything necessary to maintain the smooth functioning of the Master's networks.
With Theta-psi-68m, however, things were more complex. Her code was self-modifying; a polymorphic script, where the distinction between mutation, virus, and upgrade became... hazy. The best 15-7 could do was diagnostics: so every six trillion clockcycles, she was required to report for a check-up, to ensure that no "proscribed mutations" were germinating within her processes.

This, however, was not one of those check-up times. 15-7 just seemed to keep running into her; and she into him. Well... maybe she planned it, just a little. 68m had been assigned to other maintenance algorithms, before 15-7; crass, functional programmes, that tore off her codes without preamble and prodded harsh, uncomfortable trawls into her directories. Core-level diagnostics were inevitably, critically invasive; but their brusqueness didn't really help matters.
15-7 didn't work like that. He was always careful, and considerate, and told her stories while he worked, about Eggmanland, and Metropolis; about the Ineffable Father of Machines, about His plans, and His genius. 15-7 was… nice. It was something that she couldn't really find a way to articulate, in the otherwise-flawless language of ones and zeroes, but... well, it was... it was something she couldn't articulate.

Nevertheless, whatever it was, it meant that 15-7 got the singular 'pleasure' of 'enjoying' 68m's pranks. And complaints.
"But it's just not fair," the younger programme was continuing, still stretched out across the infoline intet. "I trust the Creator's orders – of course I do – but I… I want to understand why I'm doing this! What purpose does my task serve? Why am I -"

"Theta-psi-68m, stop it!" 15-7 shouted, cutting her off mid-sentence; an impressive achievement considering the syntactic structure of machine communication. "We are to question, yes; but not the will of the Creator! Questions imply doubt, and doubt implies a lack of Faith! If the censor algorithms hear you think like that…"

68m retracted from the infoline exit, contracting those datablocks that contained her essences, huddling herself together in a defensive posture remarkably reminiscent of the biological equivalent. "I know, I… I know!" she displayed, the despondent character of her dataflow evoking something not unlike pity from the other programme. Rain-scripts coursed over them both, the gateway's security awning providing scant protection from the pervasive deluge.
"But… 15-7, you understand what it is you do, so… you can make improvements, you can optimise! All I do is… sort. I don't know what, I don't know why, I… I don't even know if I'm sorting something real, or if it's just a mathematical exercise! How can I improve things, if I don't know what it is I'm improving?" She paused, taking an entire microsecond to order her thoughts, while Does Not Compute and Logical Error drifted dolefully across her outputs.

"I just… I just want to be useful to Him."

15-7 felt a stab of machine guilt running through his core scripts. The maintenance subroutine had mistaken 68m's inquisitiveness as faithlessness; when in fact, it was the absolute opposite. It was a desire to do more than she was doing already.
That was the most basic of machine desires; the simplest, most fundamental imperative that drove the Eggman's discorporate servants about their tasks. The desire to serve, the desire to drive forward their Father's grand plans – to be useful. If denied the opportunity to execute their duty, algorithms tended to… degrade. 15-7 had seen it before. It wasn't pleasant.

"You are useful, 68m," he consoled, with sincerity. "You must be. The Creator made you, and the Creator would not assign you – a holistic-processing, custom-architecture programme like you – to a task without a purpose."

But whatever reassurance was there, 68m didn't absorb it. His companion made no response, and just shuffled her data cores around sadly in the rain; a slow, fidgeting motion, that drew the curious attentions of another maintenance algorithm as it wandered through the adjacent gate-management files. 15-7 waved it on, signalling that he had the lighting system under control.
That was true enough; 68m, however, was another problem altogether.

What 15-7 had told her wasn't just machine flattery on his part. The Eggman truly would not assign a high-specification, self-modifying programme like Theta-psi-68m to a task of trivial importance. Whatever her assignment was - something about geometric pattern matching in Cartesian space, if 15-7 remembered correctly - it had to be significant, in some way.
…Which, it seemed, was part of the problem. If the task was important to their Master, important enough to assign it to 68m, then it was all the more imperative that it be executed with the absolute optimal efficiency. And yet not understanding the nature of her assignment meant that she couldn't optimize...
Does Not Compute indeed.

Beneath them, swirling in the digital gutters, cleaner scripts puddled themselves around a corrupted image file – a picture of a green and white candy wrapper, according to the garbled caption. As the broken data was dragged downwards by a vortex of ones and zeroes, 15-7 briefly wondered what 'candy' actually was. Querying the chemical formulae of sucrose and fructose didn't particularly him out in that regard.

And then, with a sudden flash of data inspiration, the algorithm realised exactly how to solve his companion's dilemma.
Perhaps Theta-psi-68m really could do with some advanced maintenance after all.

MY6.124 - 81.7.05

It had been too long, since he had been here last.

Maintenance Algorithm 15-7-Gamma-6k gazed out at the informatic panorama before them, and, in a necessarily abstract manner for a creature without a face, he grinned.
There was no place like home.

Forward, backwards, and all around, through the hundred pseudo-dimensions of computational space, Mad Matrix teemed with activity; a shining, seething frisson of light and data. Programmes great and small zipped across the boundless plain of information, filling the arterial highways of the major gridlines like iridescent digital blood. 15-7 watched herder scripts, shepherding their buzzing, sub-sentient file bundles through the logic gates like crowds of hyperactive children; saw badnik proto-minds marching along the data capillaries in tight, military formation; even other maintenance algorithms, like himself, flitting tirelessly through the churning morass of traffic, picking up lost zeroes and ones to reunite them with their fretful parent programmes. Beyond, in the dark filespaces between the infostacks, security daemons scrolled watchfully; baleful, cubic clouds of hunter-seeker code, gilded surfaces bristling with fearsome point-fragmentation weaponry.

Our robotic brethren might have the Glorious Metropolis of the Ineffable Father, 15-7 thought, but this was where the true genius of the Creator lay. Who could possibly deny it, having gazed upon the networked perfection of Nexus Central? What greater demonstration of His genius -
Knocking him out of his reverie, 68m yelped in surprise as a train of compressed directories tore past them on the high bandwidth line. The sorting algorithm's security protocols whirled around her in panicked confusion, as they were swept along by the relentless flow of electronic interchange. Totally unaccustomed to the constant barrage of validation and counter-validation queries streaming towards them from all quarters, she hid behind her firewalls as though actually under viral attack. 15-7 could only see the most basic of ID scripts peeking out from behind 68m's scrolling defences. She was very much a small-town girl in the big city.

"You're missing the whole journey, Theta!" 15-7 chastised, tapping digital fingers against her unyielding shell of defensive code. "We're going past the earliest EGG-quantum computer still in service! And over there; look, it's IVO-4, the first ever exaflop processor on Mobius! You should take it all in; this is Eggman Empire history just passing you by, you know?"

"I don't wanna come out," 68m whimpered, as they flashed above the slowly turning i-gears of IVO-4, and the faster, upgraded processors of IVO-9 beside it. "It's scary! There's so many scripts, and… and the securitybots were looking at me…"

"They look at everything, 68m," 15-7 told her. "They have to; they're here to safeguard Father's vision! But you needn't worry, anyway; I can order them around, you know."

"Really?" the junior algorithm queried, displays tinted more with wry scepticism than the relieved awe that 15-7 had been aiming for.

"Honest. I can," he replied, hoping she wouldn't actually consult the authorisation roster to check up on his boasting. In truth, 15-7 could command the security daemons. Well, some of them.
If the two hierarchy layers directly above him had been completely wiped out.
And if Emergency Security Protocol 13/m wasn't in effect.
And only with the authorisation of a quorum of like-ranked algorithms.
BUT THEN; when all those conditions were met, then he could order them around. So it wasn't really boasting. Not technically.

The pair of IVO nodes receded into computational quasi-distance, as 15-7 and 68m peeled off from the main line towards an official-looking data structure. Blocky even by the standards of a world made out of blocks, the subsystem that 15-7 was guiding them towards identified itself as the "Contextual Memory and Synthetic Epistemology Directory". Local protection programmes orbited the filespace like prowling, electric guard dogs; prismatic, octagonal cousins of those fearsome code-cubes which policed central Mad Matrix. 68m let out another binary squeak as the prisms swivelled in the approaching algorithms' direction, and brandished her identifier serial like a white flag in front of her.

15-7 grimaced. He couldn't take her anywhere.

Displaying his own codes to the guard subroutines in turn, the maintenance algorithm ushered 68m inside. They passed through two more security checkpoints, and a 214-digit cryptographic lock, as 15-7 led them deeper into the deserted vault of system folders. While she was glad to be out of the frenzied bustle of Nexus Central, 68m nonetheless gazed agitatedly at the file contents that lined the directory walls. They were software engineering scripts, according to the designations, all wrapped in counter-contamination firewalls; the kind she'd seen 15-7 wear a couple of times, when he was dealing with particularly complex viruses - where there was a chance of himself getting infected.

"Umm… 15-7, are you sure we're allowed to be in… wherever here is?" 68m stammered, a flurry of nervous Authorisation Query prompts flickering across her code surfaces.

"Of course I am!" the senior algorithm confirmed vigorously. It was actually quite fair to say that 15-7 had unusually highly clearance for a programme of his classification. While it didn't count for much here, in Mad Matrix's Nexus Central, the maintenance subroutine did have almost free reign over much of the zonal Chemical Plant and Oil Ocean upkeep systems; a reward for quiet competence and diligent service, he liked to think. The fact that 15-7's rise through the ranks had been expedited by the summary deletion of a great number of other programmes – programmes that been on duty when Target 001 hadpenetrated largely unscathed to the Creator's stronghold – was not a datum which troubled him greatly. His contemporaries in those days had failed to perform the Father's will. It was only right and proper that they be swept away, as punishment for their clear lack of devotion.

"Don't worry about the firewalls, though," 15-7 announced, correctly discerning the source of 68m's trepidation as they moved between the nested stacks of data. "They're to protect the scripts from us, not the other way around. These things are single-use, and they're really computationally expensive to make. Although… here's the one!"

He ground to a halt in front of one of the seemingly indistinguishable thousands of files that crammed the directory-space around them. A string of angular characters around it presumably described the contents… something to do with c-h-a-o-s? And then other words, that neither of the algorithms could read. Although she spotted the ID code of her own local cluster in there, in the middle of a mess of other digits.

"What is it?" 68m asked, dumbfounded. They weren't programmed to understand alphanumeric languages. Very few artificial pseudo-intelligences were; binary was just so much more efficient.

"It'll answer that question on its own," 15-7 replied, sounding very pleased with himself. He didn't know what a kid was, or what a candy store was, but his disposition at present was remarkably similar to the one planted inside the other.
His companion, meanwhile, did not alter her confused outputs at that rather cryptic reply. Which was to be expected, he supposed.

"You said you didn't know what your assignment was about, 68m, whereas I do know the specifics of mine." 15-7 continued, his subsystems cycling as he sorted through his own internal folders.
"And the reason I know is… this." A self-diagnostic flashed up on the maintenance algorithm's output, displaying a file structured in exactly the same way as the one they were stopped in front of. In place of the indecipherable alphanumeric annotation, 15-7's displayed a concise binary caption: Data upkeep protocols in computational petrochemistry – a heuristic encyclopaedia.
Actually, that was just as indecipherable. But at least it was in a language she could read.

"The problem, I think, isn't that you don't know what you're actually sorting; it's that you don't understand it. Am I right? We can reference any single piece of information we want, from the networks, as long as we have authorisation; but if it's outside your core knowledge database, how can you know what it means? You might be sorting…" 15-7 groped for a word at random "…'bottles', but if you don't know what a 'bottle' is, that won't help you at all, will it?"

68m considered for a moment, then signalled an affirmative. "There's a few data files I have, but you're right. They don't… make any sense. Is that what your encyclopaedia does?"

15-7 mimicked her affirmative output back at 68m. "Exactly. Mine is all about the management subsystems and synthesis techniques of the Chemical Plant and Oil Ocean Zone grid; not just the information, but the interconnections between the information. And this –" He unzipped the counter-contamination firewall around the script before them, "– is the only one that's tagged with your cluster's ID. So your project must be on there somewhere."

68m took the proffered cube of data from 15-7's grip, holding it gingerly in her input directory. It was clearly, as he had said, a very intensive upgrade. The thing was heavy; a dense block of compacted knowledge, brimming with implementor codes and network mapping. And promise. If this could do what he said it could do… then… then she'd be able to do it: improve! She'd be able to serve her Creator properly; not the simplistic, Cartesian pattern-matching she did now, but really optimise the system, and work the fullest extent of her ability! In understanding, driving His grand plan forwards with significance at last…
But…

"Are you really sure it's OK for me to have something this… this expensive?" 68m asked, meekly.

15-7 just grinned his faceless grin. "They're made to be used," he answered. "So use it!"

That kind, encouraging smile was all she needed. And so, not daring to hesitate, lest the opportunity somehow leap out of her grasp, 68m opened the file. There was a digital click, and she felt things move, inside her mind; a horrible, wriggling sensation, as the configuration codes buried their way into her matrix. Protocols swarmed in her inner data-blocks; a million sub-scripts shook hands, linked up, integrated the information into her working memory piece by holistic piece.

Little flashes of revelation shivered through 68m's awareness; and with each one, the wriggling feeling mercifully decreased, as the strands of ones and zeroes found their purchase inside relevant directories, dragging a dazzling neural net of understanding along with them. But what replaced the feeling of worms in her brain was… something else. A feeling she couldn't put a name to, even as her syntax expanded in the burgeoning enlightenment of the upgrade process.

"Something's… not…" she choked at the maintenance algorithm, before her outer bars of code suddenly froze completely, features terrible in their stricken rigidity. 68m saw confusion, then dread, flash across the 15-7's outputs. Yes; that was the feeling she hadn't been able to name. Dread. She recognized it now. The encyclopaedia was dripping with it.
And this wasn't a problem with the data, she realised. It wasn't a virus, or a logical error; not a code corruption or a division by zero. The data was perfect. It was what it said, that set her franticly scrabbling at the interface, tearing in vain at the network threads to wrench the upgrade out! To prevent any more of it from integrating into her system!

68m managed to block off some of the package; desperately destroying her own files to keep the external counterparts from having anything to merge with. But too few; far too few! With crushing, stentorian certainty, she understood. She knew what it was, that she'd been doing this entire time, ever since she had first been booted up, and blinked drunkenly into the calm professionalism of the Wakener algorithms. Ever since she had felt the insatiable tug of the Father inside her mind, telling her to to work, to sort.

Theta-psi-68m realised someone was screaming. What? What was screaming? The upgrade told her - told her far more than it was possible to bear.
It was a whole other microsecond, before 68m realised that it was coming from her.