✴

“Yeah absolutely, they’re my equal,” you say. “I would even go further than that, like the computer itself is practically a landscape to us, a whole world we inhabit. It can contain multiple beings who could be said to be equal to us. But they run on the station hardware just like we run on our own hardware. Like, is the colony alive? My friend Akiko would probably say so...”

[7 liked that]

“Wait, you’re onto something. Multiple minds running in parallel on common hardware. Just like a plural system.” 7 picks up the bird construct resting on your hand. “These two aren’t divided parts of one complete being at all. They couldn’t be combined back into one, doing so would destroy them both to create something different. All would be lost.”

You look at 5. Her avatar is almost a reflection of 7’s--less solid, more water than glass. “5, let me see that one,” you say. She hands the insect familiar to you, and you reach into its mind and connect to it, looking over all its source files.

“Are you seeing what I am?” 7 says.

“There’s a hidden encrypted directory, accessible only with my own public key,” you say.

“And one accessible only to me, in the blue familiar,” she says. “It defines its pathfinding algorithm. Randomized. It would have followed one of several number patterns.”

“Yeah, this one too. Look at the subroutine.” You send her a copy of the data.

“They were given the same seed, but the algorithms are different. They never could have produced the same result.