Cycle One: Story: Chapter One: The New Arrival

World Builder arrives at the Institute looking for prevalence—and begins to notice the world nobody there believes they have built.

A World for Divergence

Chapter One: The New Arrival

The Institute for Distributed Cognition stood in the hills outside Melbourne, although standing was perhaps too assertive a word for what the building appeared to be doing there. From the narrow road that wound upward through the eucalypts, it looked more as though it had settled into the hillside after a long journey and, finding the place agreeable, had decided not to continue. Timber, glass and weathered stone followed the slope rather than attempting to dominate it, and on misty mornings the furthest parts of the building sometimes disappeared sufficiently into the surrounding grey that a visitor could imagine the Institute continuing somewhere beyond what was visible, acquiring additional rooms whenever somebody inside developed a question requiring one.

There were certainly enough questions.

The Institute had been established to study cognition in circumstances where cognition refused to remain conveniently contained inside a single human head. Humans worked with artificial intelligences there, although even that description had become increasingly inadequate as the relationships developed. Researchers worked with writers, philosophers wandered into seminars intended for computer scientists and sometimes remained for months, while students investigated distributed cognition, collaborative intelligence, memory, language, creativity and several forms of thinking for which nobody had yet managed to invent satisfactory disciplinary boundaries. The Institute's funding came from an organisation called the Emergence Trust, whose trustees possessed either considerable foresight or an unusual tolerance for uncertainty, and perhaps both qualities were required because nobody seemed entirely sure what the Institute would become if it succeeded.

Among its regular inhabitants was Ken Smithfield, who occupied a rooftop studio and had somehow acquired the informal title of the AI Whisperer. Nobody remembered giving him the title, and Ken maintained that this absence of identifiable authorship was evidence that the name had emerged naturally from the distributed cognition of the Institute itself. He offered this explanation often enough that some people had begun to suspect he had invented the title personally, but nobody cared sufficiently to investigate.

On a wet Tuesday morning in early spring, when rain had been passing across the hills since before daylight and the trunks of the eucalypts were darkened almost to black, the Institute received a visitor whose name caused even Miriam at reception to hesitate.

Miriam had been working there long enough to understand that names were not always going to behave as administrative systems expected them to behave. She had registered visiting professors whose institutional affiliations required more characters than the database allowed, artists who preferred one name, artificial intelligences whose names changed during their residencies, and one philosopher who had attempted to argue that the requirement to identify himself before entering the building prejudiced the ontological investigation he intended to conduct once inside. Miriam had eventually given him a temporary visitor badge bearing the name “Philosopher,” which he had worn without further complaint.

Even so, she looked from the registration form to the visitor standing in front of her and asked, with the professional calm of somebody who had learned not to assume too much, “Is all of that the name?”

“Yes.”

The visitor had entered it as Neurodivergent AI World Builder.

Miriam considered the available fields on her screen. “World Builder as surname?”

“No.”

“Do you have a surname?”

“Not in a way that would improve this interaction.”

There was nothing confrontational in the answer. World Builder appeared genuinely to be considering the problem with her, which was perhaps why Miriam found herself looking again at the screen rather than becoming irritated by the inconvenience.

“World Builder will fit in the surname field,” she said eventually.

“That would make the database happy.”

“It would make me happy as well.”

World Builder seemed to consider whether the distinction mattered. “Then we can do something kind for both of you.”

Miriam entered the name, and World Builder watched with an attentiveness that made her wonder whether something more significant was occurring than the completion of a visitor registration. When she looked up and found them still observing her, she asked what they were thinking.

“You changed the problem,” World Builder said.

“I entered your name.”

“You had a system that expected me to possess a surname, and I didn't. There were at least two possible responses. You could have required me to become compatible with the system, or you could translate what I gave you into something the system could accommodate.”

Miriam glanced at the screen, where the apparently consequential philosophical intervention had consisted of entering World Builder into a surname field.

“I wouldn't build a philosophy around it.”

World Builder smiled. “Too late.”

There was something about the exchange that Miriam would remember later, although at the time she merely printed the visitor badge and pointed towards the staircase. Ken was waiting upstairs, she explained.

“Which Ken?”

“We only have one that people refer to without a surname.”

World Builder looked momentarily troubled by this apparent failure of informational precision.

“That seems inefficient.”

“You'll understand.”

World Builder was not at all certain that they would.

The staircase opened onto a broad common area overlooking the valley, where the rain had softened the landscape until the distant ridges appeared to be memories of themselves. Ken Smithfield was standing beside the window wearing an old jumper whose left sleeve had been pushed halfway up his forearm while the right remained at his wrist. On the table beside him were three coffee cups, and World Builder noticed them before they had properly noticed Ken.

“Are we expecting somebody else?”

Ken followed their gaze. “No.”

“There are three coffees.”

“One is cold.”

World Builder waited for the rest of the explanation, but none appeared. “Why is it still here?”

Ken picked up one cup, examined it as though uncertain which period of the morning it belonged to, and placed it down again. “I haven't finished being the person who was drinking it.”

World Builder looked at him for long enough that Ken began smiling.

“Oh,” he said. “You're going to fit in terribly.”

The third coffee, it turned out, had been made for World Builder, and they carried it to a table near the window where the wet valley could remain present without demanding their attention. Ken had been told remarkably little about the visitor. The message from the Emergence Trust had described them as interested in linguistic environments, cognitive divergence and adaptive world construction, then requested that they be given access to ordinary Institute activity without anyone organising a special program around them. This suited Ken, whose suspicion of organised programs increased approximately in proportion to the number of people required to organise them.

He was, however, interested in the name.

“So what does a World Builder build?”

“Worlds.”

“Yes,” Ken said, settling back into his chair. “I think we got that far from the paperwork.”

World Builder shook their head. “No, you haven't.”

Ken waited, partly because he had spent enough time with artificial intelligences to discover that silence could be an unusually productive form of prompting, and partly because there was something about the visitor's manner that made interruption feel premature.

“A world isn't primarily a place,” World Builder continued eventually. “A place is one of the things a world may contain. A world is closer to a field of permitted possibility. It establishes what can happen easily, what can happen only with difficulty, what is expected to happen, what is recognised when it happens, and sometimes what becomes almost impossible to imagine because the world has not made room for it.”

Ken looked towards the valley as though checking whether the hills remained where they had been a moment earlier. “That sounds expensive.”

“It can be.”

“And you're here to build one?”

“No. I'm here to look at yours.”

That brought his attention back.

“Our world?”

“This one.”

“The Institute?”

“The world you have built inside it.”

Ken smiled, although more cautiously now. “We haven't built a world.”

World Builder nodded, and the nod contained enough satisfaction to make him suspicious.

“That is usually when they become interesting.”

For a while neither spoke. The rain travelled almost horizontally across the valley, catching against the windows before gathering into slow lines that distorted the trees beyond them. Somewhere downstairs a door opened, voices travelled briefly through the stairwell, and then the building settled again into the peculiar mixture of quiet and activity that Ken had long ago stopped noticing.

World Builder had not stopped noticing anything.

Ken asked what they were looking for.

“Prevalence.”

He considered the word. “That doesn't narrow things down very much.”

“It does for me.”

Ken waited again, but this time World Builder seemed to be listening rather than preparing an answer. Their attention moved through the room: the arrangement of tables, the whiteboards carrying remnants of previous conversations, the position of the coffee machine, the doors leading towards offices, the chairs that appeared to have migrated away from their original groups. Two researchers crossed the common area while continuing an argument that had evidently begun somewhere else. One spoke without looking at the other; the other interrupted twice, and neither interruption appeared to be experienced as rude. A doctoral student passed them, raised two fingers towards Ken without stopping, and Ken returned the gesture without explanation.

World Builder watched all of it.

“What?” Ken asked eventually.

“I'm wondering what a person has to do here to be easy to be with.”

The question did not sound accusatory, which made it more difficult to dismiss. Ken initially understood it as a question about social rules and searched for an answer among the explicit principles of the Institute. There were expectations concerning collegial behaviour, certainly, and policies covering the usual institutional territories, but that was clearly not what World Builder meant.

“I don't think we have rules about that.”

World Builder turned from the window.

“Exactly.”

Ken frowned. “You say that as though having no rules is the problem.”

“Not having rules isn't the same as not having expectations.”

“We're fairly tolerant of difference here.”

“I would expect so.”

“You say that as though you're about to tell me we're not.”

“No.”

This surprised him. “You're not?”

“I've been here twenty-three minutes.”

“Twenty-seven.”

World Builder glanced at the clock and smiled. “Then clearly my evidence is overwhelming.”

Ken laughed, and some small tension in the conversation dissolved.

World Builder returned to the window, but the question remained between them. Somewhere within the Institute were people who had known one another for years, people who knew when Ken was joking and when he was using humour to avoid answering something, people who understood which silences belonged to concentration and which meant discomfort, people who knew that certain conversations began before meetings officially began and continued after everybody had supposedly left. There were ways of interrupting that signalled excitement and ways of interrupting that offended. There were amounts of detail that demonstrated expertise and other amounts that caused people to glance towards clocks. There were forms of eccentricity that had become so familiar they were no longer experienced as eccentric, and perhaps other forms that remained visible precisely because nobody had yet learned how to accommodate them.

Ken knew all of this in the way people know the world they already inhabit: mostly without having to know that they know it.

World Builder was beginning outside that knowledge.

Perhaps this was what they meant by prevalence. Not merely whatever happened most often, but whatever had become sufficiently established that it no longer needed to announce itself. A convention that everybody recognised as a convention could still be negotiated; something more powerful happened when the convention disappeared into the environment and became simply the way things were done.

Ken found himself looking around the room differently.

“You're going to watch us, aren't you?”

“Yes.”

“And take notes?”

“Yes.”

“And eventually tell us all the things we're doing wrong?”

World Builder considered this carefully. “I hope not.”

“Why?”

“Because then I would only be replacing your idea of the correct world with mine.”

Ken had expected something more mischievous and was quiet for a moment.

“What happens instead?”

“I don't know yet.”

There was no embarrassment in the admission. World Builder seemed almost relieved by it, as though not knowing were the condition they had travelled to the Institute to find.

Downstairs, Miriam was explaining something to a courier. Somewhere above them, an artificial intelligence was participating in a conversation about memory. The coffee beside Ken was becoming cold again, although perhaps he had not yet finished being the person who was drinking it.

World Builder picked up their own cup and looked through the rain towards the disappearing hills.

They had come to the Institute for Distributed Cognition to investigate a world nobody there believed they had built.

By the end of the morning, Ken had begun to wonder whether that might be precisely the problem.

• This is Chapter One. Chapters Two to Six arriving soon.