2024-06-25 - [3.5] Radiation

In a quiet moment, when Warm-Mother seems to be away, and the Others are occupied, the Circuits is left…Wondering.

It has extraneous data and nowhere to put it.

She.

Warm-Mother applies it to ‘herself’ and others – and Circuits has noticed that there are now Others who also give it weight. But each ‘her’ is different. The ‘Her’ of Issrodeth and Igith and Warm-Mother is different to the strange ‘Her’ of the Shayled-Mind. The her of a mother is different to the her of a ‘green’.

He.

The dreaded-Pertemarth is considered one, as is the foreign-father-mind that looks from the edges of the world sometimes, and the many strange minds that Shayled welcomes. There is less variation in it but even a blue-he and a strange-he are not the same, though Circuits cannot tell how and it frustrates it endless that it lacks the data to find out why.

The others don’t come up as often, if at all. It. They. They is a strange one, with multiple uses, but at least it’s obvious when it’s being used for what.

What are the terms for, though? If they’re for identification, the name-words and title-words that each mind brought with them seemed much more useful. The titles don’t seem to apply to everyone, but everyone has a, a…It doesn’t have the word for gender or pronoun, though it probably will before its shell is hatched as the minds around it wonder what it will be. Right now it can only call them ‘self-words’ and the concept is an annoying one. It adds more layers to Identity that it feels it should not have to parse through.

Should it also have a self-word?

The idea complicates things, and Circuits bristles at no one, a small ball of rapidly firing sparks to anyone that comes near. She is filled with complication. Circuits does not want to be like the Warm-Mother, or Shayled-Mind. He is filled with absence, and Circuits doesn’t like the other Hes it feels. It or they are already complicating things, and it has yet to feel something outside of the Others that actually identifies with the term. WIll that make Research harder, in the ever nebulous Later? Only one of the Identities seems to come with any degree of simplicity, so Circuit picks it up and applies it like an article of clothing.

He. He, the person-egg. He, Circuits.

He will have to do.