INTERLUDE - TYPE B

Systems must expend energy by nature, infinite growth is a myth and infinite self-replication is the territory of cancer cells. It is neither.

It has the designation of handling divergent systems. Boxes and clusters and sets and organizations. Component pieces. But a piece is only a piece in so much as it works in the system. There’s no reason to handle a rock, no reason to handle individual muscles. The first iterations did not make this distinction. This has made them obsolete.

A stomach is a system. Too bothersome to reduce it to individual buttons and levers and acids and bases. When the system functions a series of actions are replicated onward forever. The stomach system only stops when something outside of it fails. Perfectly inter-dependent. It processes and transforms energy, does not create and does not destroy. Matter in, energy out. Stomach to body to ecosystem to biome.

But there are errors in this.

It does not believe them to be an inherent feature of reality. That is why they are errors, not exceptions. Rules are easy, exceptions are complicated. An exception identifies with the rules and exists in contrast of them. An error does not identify with the rules. This can and should be remedied. That is what it is for. Things and animals and objects and people. Systems.

Equilibrium; when as much energy is expended as is created.

If the salival sample had been processed differently, this would not be the line of thought. Like sperm to an egg, what took hold was exactly what the situation allowed. The egg, more of a thinking and feeling machine than what was growing inside of it ever would be, weighed the choice very carefully. The subject had made it easy. This was the most unbalanced system it had ever seen. It was a purity of error. Hence, a pure specimen. Bespoke solutions for complex systems. The only way, beyond a certain point.

Nothing new under the sun, bespoke in the sense that it was it and not the other things that were also it. If one’s definition of “it” was broad enough, there had always been a lot of it. Always would be. There were a lot of errors.

The egg hatches quietly, the shell dissolving around the single hard bead of control that organizes the cluster of prehensile fluid. A squidgy, midnight-purple stone floating in a puddle of viscous fluid both living tissue and machine components. It looks around the room without eyes, feeling less the bodily heat and more the temperate energy of the host it has identified. It records time in the measures it takes for the central bead to fully replenish the exhausted plasma it seeps into the surroundings. It crosses the floor and finds the host curled up and half-humanoid, legs jerking in fitful sleep. Three fluid measures to cross the floor, one to bind to the host and attach itself to the sub-dermal senses. The body is alight with nerves and processes.

It suckles slightly and the host wakes with a shout.