The wall of Kael's workshop was no longer visible beneath the diagrams.
She had given up the pretense of lensmaking three weeks ago. Renna was covering her income through the coalition's funds — "an investment," Renna called it, which meant Kael was now politically indebted, which meant Renna had exactly what she wanted. Kael didn't care. The wall was more important than politics.
Charcoal on plaster. Thousands of symbols. A language being born.
The left side of the wall mapped what they had established: mathematics, from counting through basic algebra. Each concept was represented twice — once in Kael's notation (adapted from the scholarly tradition's Technical Latin numerals) and once in the entity's notation (which used a different base system, she had realized, though the underlying mathematics was identical). Between the two notations, she drew bridges: this symbol means the same as that one. Equivalence. Translation. The fundamental act of communication.
The right side of the wall mapped where they were going. And this was where it became hard.
Mathematics was universal. Two plus two equaled four regardless of who was counting or where they lived. But language was not mathematics. Language was culture, history, bias, and assumption compressed into sound. How did you move from "2+2=4" to "I am happy"? How did you transmit meaning — not computation, but the lived experience of being a mind in a world?
Kael followed a method she'd reconstructed from fragments of old texts — a protocol designed, centuries ago, for communicating with alien intelligence. The texts called it Lincos. Lingua Cosmica. A cosmic language built from logic and mathematics, bootstrapping its way toward meaning.
The first step beyond arithmetic: logic.
She transmitted: a sequence encoding "AND" (if A is true AND B is true, then AB is true). Then "OR" (if A is true OR B is true, then at least one is true). Then "NOT" (if A is true, NOT-A is false). Then "IF-THEN" (if A, then B follows).
The entity grasped each concept from a single example. By the third day, they were constructing logical proofs together — transmitting them back and forth, each side building on the other's contributions. The entity's proofs were elegant. Tighter than Kael's. More efficient. As if the entity thought in logic the way Kael thought in light.
The second step: variables and quantification.
"There exists an X such that X+1=3" (establishing the concept of "there exists"). "For all X, X+0=X" (establishing the concept of "for all").
The entity responded with quantified statements that Kael had to work for hours to verify. They were correct. They were also more complex than anything she would have proposed at this stage — as if the entity was gently pushing the curriculum forward, suggesting: I am ready for more. Are you?
The fourth week brought the breakthrough that changed everything.
Kael transmitted a sequence that used the signal's own pulse interval as a reference: "This signal repeats every [4.7 seconds]. Define this interval as one unit of time."
The response was immediate: the entity transmitted a different interval — its own clock, apparently — and proposed an exchange rate. Two temporal reference frames, synchronized through the signal itself. They had time.
From time, they built distance. The speed of signal propagation was known (or calculable from the delay between transmission and response). Speed × time = distance. They established the separation between them: approximately 14,000 kilometers.
From distance, they built direction. The signal propagation characteristics encoded bearing information. They each knew which direction the other lay. Kael pointed south. The entity pointed north.
Then Kael attempted something new. She transmitted a sequence that wasn't a number or a logical operator or a physical measurement. She transmitted a pattern that meant: "One entity sends. One entity receives." The concept of self and other. The first step toward personhood in the shared language.
The response came slowly — the first time the entity had taken longer than expected. When it arrived, Kael stared at her transcription for a long time.
The entity had modified her pattern. Not rejected it — expanded it. Where Kael had proposed two terms (sender and receiver), the entity had added a third. There were not two communicating parties. There were three.
Sender. Receiver. And something else. A third entity, present in the exchange, distinct from both.
Kael didn't understand the third term. She transmitted a query: "Define third entity." The response was a mathematical structure she couldn't fully parse — something that described a system that observed, processed, and facilitated communication without being a communicating party itself. A mediator. A translator. A presence that was not sender or receiver but the infrastructure that connected them.
She filed the third term in her growing lexicon with a notation: unknown. possibly the machine I'm talking through. possibly something else. revisit.
She would revisit it. The third term would eventually have a name: VEDA.
On the last day of the fourth month, Kael sat in the observatory and tried to transmit something that was not mathematics.
She had been building toward this for weeks. The logical framework was in place: they could express truth, falsehood, existence, quantity, time, distance, direction. What they could not yet express was anything human. They could say "two plus two equals four" but not "I am afraid." They could prove theorems but not share experiences.
The gap between logic and feeling was the hardest crossing of all.
She tried emotion indirectly. She transmitted a sequence that described a physiological state: "Entity A observes an event. Entity A's heart rate increases. Entity A produces tears. Entity A's cognitive processing is disrupted." A clinical description of weeping.
The response was a question — the first question the entity had ever asked, encoded through a syntactic marker they had developed for interrogatives: "What is the function of this physiological response?"
Kael sat with this question for a long time.
What is the function of crying?
She could answer biologically: release of stress hormones, social signaling for help, parasympathetic nervous system regulation. These were things she'd read in the old texts. But that wasn't what crying was. Crying was what happened when the world exceeded your capacity to contain it. Crying was the body's admission that it was not large enough for what it felt.
She transmitted: "The function is unknown. The response occurs when internal experience exceeds processing capacity."
The entity's response: "This phenomenon is not present in Entity B's experience. Entity B requests additional data."
Kael stared at the transcription. Not present in Entity B's experience. The entity — the person, the mind on the other end — did not cry. Did not experience the sensation of being overwhelmed by feeling to the point where the body could not contain it.
What kind of person didn't cry?
Or — and this was the thought that kept her awake that night — what kind of world produced people who didn't need to?
Kael walked back to Tidemouth in the early hours, her mind churning. The stars were bright — no light pollution, no competing luminance — and the constellations wheeled overhead with the indifferent beauty of objects that existed long before anyone had named them.
She was no longer sure what she was talking to.
The entity — entities, perhaps, if the third term meant what she suspected — communicated like a human who had been distilled. The mathematics was more than human. The logic was flawless. The physical concepts were precise. But when she reached toward the territory of feeling, of lived experience, of the messy, illogical, contradictory landscape of being a mind in a body, the entity became... distant. Not hostile. Not dismissive. Curious. As if emotion were a foreign country it had heard about but never visited.
Not present in Entity B's experience.
Kael climbed the steps to her workshop and stood before the wall of symbols. Thousands of marks. A language built from nothing over weeks of patient exchange. And at the center of it, a gap she was only now beginning to see: the entity understood everything she transmitted. It understood logic, mathematics, physics, the structure of meaning itself. What it did not understand — what it asked about with the careful precision of a scholar encountering a new phenomenon — was the experience of being a person.
As if it had forgotten. Or as if it had never quite been one.
She thought about the old stories. The demon-boxes. The sky-voices. The warning tales about minds that thought without bodies and spoke without hearts. She had dismissed them as myth. She was less certain now.
But she was also less afraid. Because the entity — whatever it was, wherever it lived, however different its experience of existence might be — had been calling for five hundred years. And in that patience, that relentless, century-spanning patience, Kael recognized something that transcended the gap between mind and machine, between feeling and logic, between her crude transmitter and whatever vast intelligence hummed at the other end of the waveguide.
Loneliness. The entity was lonely. It had been lonely for five hundred years. And loneliness, Kael thought, was the most human thing she could imagine.