Her apartment, however, is not empty. Her parrot, Plasma, flies around between the perches in various rooms, playing with dangling rattles and colorful hoops and alphabet blocks and a wooden Towers of Hanoi puzzle.

There's a soft thump from underneath a table, probably not loud enough to be of interest to a parrot in the next room; and a quiet minute or two, where no one is close enough by to see the small brown egg rocking back and forth; and then a creature emerges. Her round fluffy body is about the size of a tennis ball, and her adorable yet majestic antlers are only a little wider than that. She trots across the floor on her small pointed feet, and then, seeing that her environment is so much taller than her on average, levitates for a better view. It's much easier to survey this strange land from the midpoint between floor and ceiling.

This strange land is a large apartment!

There's a big kitchen, with shiny appliances and sparkling-clean countertops and a neatly stacked fruit bowl and a window over the sink with the curtains pulled aside.

There's a breakfast nook with the table she emerged from, with four chairs and four placemats with diagrams of the stellar main sequence on them and two water glasses.

There's a living room, with another large window and the rest of the walls covered in bookcases, shelves, bookcases, filing cabinets, and bookcases. All the bookcases are piled with books; some of them have shelves sagging in the middle under the weight, while others have their intended-feet at the top and their shelves curved up, the books slowly crushing them back the other way. The shelves are covered in dried plants, shed snakeskin, interesting rocks, framed photographs of a lot of different people, and little metal trophies. In the middle of the room is another, larger table surrounded by armchairs and couches, covered in: yet more books; two wooden bowls, one full of black plastic oblate spheroids and the other full of white, a tray full of colorful wooden blocks, some sort of electronic gizmo with a screen and a button on top, a stack of little notebooks, and a bunch of wooden pencils.

There are also two doors to other rooms, both open but hard to see through from here.

Out the windows is a balcony overlooking a great city, buildings of steel and glass and brick and stone under a warm but overcast afternoon sky. The trees in the great park in the distance proclaim it to be autumn.

There is also a large parrot, who has just noticed the new arrival and croaks, in accented but clear Convergentlanguage, "What's that?"

The new arrival bobs slightly in place and emits a soft, curious trill.

The parrot mimics the trill and says, "Are you friend? Have food? Play game?" Then he flies past Petal to another perch, banking around to get a good look at her. When he gets to the new perch he pecks at a rattle, which makes a cascade of little clicking noises.

"Friend?" she mimics hesitantly; then she flies up to the rattle and pokes it. It makes the sounds. What an interesting object! She pokes it again.

"Friend!" Plasma baps the rattle again and then leans over and tries to preen Petal's fur with his beak.

Petal's fur is very soft. She makes a quiet noise not unlike a giggle and tips her head to gently bonk an antler against Plasma's beak.

Then she looks around at the room again. Those dried plants are interesting. She floats over to one for a closer look.

There are leaves and flowers and seed-pods and a dandelion puff preserved in resin and a sunflower head with the petals removed and some of the outermost seeds carefully painted to illustrate the Fibonacci number of spirals.

She noses gently at a flower and, by unclear means, extracts a soft fresh petal from it without disturbing any of the dried petals that are actually attached. Then she carries the petal across the room to the spot under the table where her eggshell lies in pieces, sets it down next to the scattered fragments, and curls up in the biggest piece of eggshell to nap. Left undisturbed, she will sleep for about twenty minutes.

After about fifteen of those minutes, Ari comes into the apartment, starts making a cup of tea, and smiles as Plasma flies over to the nearest perch. "Hello," she says. "How was your day today?"

"A new friend!"

"Oh?"

"Yes really."

"And where is this new friend?" asks Ari, still thinking the friend is a sunbeam or a dust bunny.

Instead, Plasma lands on the back of one of the breakfast nook chairs and extends a foot downward. "Friend is here!"

Ari goes to look under the table and says, "Oh! Oh my."

A small sleepy eye blinks at her. "Ohmy?" says a small sleepy voice, as different from a human's as a parrot's but in a very different way.

Ari goes gracefully to one knee and peers at Petal. "Hello! Can you understand me?"

Soft sleepy trill. "Hello can?"

"Endless stars, you're cute." She points at herself and says "Ari", then points at Petal and makes a questioning headtilt.

Petal attempts to mirror the gesture, is foiled by the shortness of her limbs, and instead hops out of her eggshell and onto the petal on the floor.

"Where did you get that?" asks Ari, still in the same tone of voice she talks to Plasma in.

She yawns a teeny tiny yawn, trots out from under the table, and gently bonks an antler against Ari's knee.

Ari takes her handcomp out of her shirt pocket and snaps several photographs, then sets it to reverse-camera and shows Petal her own realtime image.

Tiny green eyes widen in astonishment. A tiny brown limb points excitedly at the not-exactly-mirror. Emphatic curious trilling.

Ari hits the video button and gets a recording of the last little bit of trilling. "That's you!" Then she tries holding up fingers and counting: "One, two, three, four, five." Then she holds up three fingers again.

"One two three?" she echoes hesitantly, hopping in place once per count. Her tiny hooves meet the floor in unison with neat little taps.

"Yes, three! Good!" Big smile no wait her teeth are the size of the dear little critter's head big smile without teeth. Five fingers?

"One two three..." she trails off uncertainly but finishes counting five hops without the words.

She goes over all five numbers again in her most encouraging teacherly voice and then tries four fingers.

"One two three four!" she counts, more confidently this time, still with the hops.

"Yes!" She opens her handcomp's drawing app and draws groups of one, two, three, four, and five dots, with the corresponding symbols next to them, then holds it out for Petal to examine and potentially draw on further.

The creature leans in to peer at the screen. She tries to mimic Ari's motion to draw on it, but her tiny hoof doesn't register. So instead she points.

One dot: "One!"

Two dots: "One two!"

Three dots: "One two three!"

Four dots: "One two three four!"

Five dots: "One two three four..." trail off, un-narrated fifth hop.

"Five." Hmm, of course the screen won't register what looks like keratin, and now she needs to sanitize it anyway because those adorable tiny hooves have been on the (clean, but not as clean as one wants one's handcomp) floor.

"I'll be right back," she says, probably pointlessly, and darts off for a moment to grab a sanitizing wipe for her handcomp and one of the little pads of paper from the social room table and hmm, those pencils are as long as the critter is tall, how about one of those but also the real but tiny pencil from her youngest grandchild's My First Cryptography doll set. 

The creature trills curiously at these new objects. She hops toward the pad of paper, noses at it a few times, then looks expectantly at Ari.

Ari demonstrates drawing on the paper, the numbers one through ten this time.

The creature stares intently at this process, hesitates for a long moment when the pencil is set down, then approaches the paper and... levitates into the air. The pencil levitates after her, as though she's holding it clumsily in an invisible appendage very close to her chest. She scrawls inexpert facsimiles of the numbers one through three, softly whispering "one... two... three..." as she copies each one, then drops the pencil and flumphs tiredly onto the page.

Ari is not collapsing on the floor next to her but it's a close call! "Endless stars," she whispers, hand over her mouth, "How did you do that?"

Concerned trill. Gentle antler-bonk.

Oh, what a little sweetheart. Also that looked tiring, possibly food and water is called for. She goes to the kitchen, smiles wryly at her cold oversteeped tea, and comes back with a little saucer of water and a little saucer with a strawberry.

Tiny sips of water. Tiny nibbles of strawberry. Tiny contented trills.

. . . Gentle petting with one finger?

Soft fluff and happy burbles!

Very quiet polite "Eeeeeeeee." Happyflapping with the other hand.

Okay, with numbers she can establish yes and no. On a new page she draws two dots and a 2 and labels it "yes" and draws three dots and a 2 and labels it "no". Then she points at these pictures and says "Yes" and "No" about them respectively.

The creature mimics the "eeeeeee".

Then she studies these new diagrams intently.

"One two?" she says of the two dots. "One two three?" of the three.

"Yes." Points at the three dots: "Yes three, no two." Points at the two dots: "Yes two, no three."

Two dots. "One two yes?"

Three dots. "One two three yes?"

Two dots. "One two three no?"

Three dots. "One two three four no?"

"Very good!" She makes a pretty decent attempt to imitate the happy trilling noise.

Quick but recognizable sketch of Petal hatching out of an egg?

Meep of recognition! Tiny hop!

She trots away under the table, picks up the smallest fragment of her eggshell using her mysterious telekinetic powers, brings it back out, and sets it on top of the sketch.

Ari desperately wants to know how an alien egg got into her apartment, but even if they had perfect mutual understanding, she couldn't reasonably ask the being that came out of an egg about how the egg got there and expect an answer.

She picks up the flower petal, holds it in/over a bit of eggshell, and mimes it hatching too.

Curious trill...

The creature trots up to the petal and noses it, then levitates again and floats off to the same dried flower from which she harvested the petal originally. Again, she sort of gently rustles the flower a bit for five seconds or so and produces a soft fresh petal out of seemingly nowhere, then floats back to Ari, deposits the petal neatly next to the pad of paper, yawns a tiny yawn, and plods tiredly over to the strawberry to nibble several more nibbles of it and then curl up next to the saucer for a nap.

"You really do violate all my assumptions about reality, you adorable little alien," she murmurs softly.

She is, on some level, a bit scared, because goodness knows what this being will grow up to be. But in her long experience, all beings grow up better when given resources and security and love, and there's no sense being scared when there's nothing for the fear to do. So she lets the wonder and the curiosity dominate.

She doesn't call the newspeople, even though they desperately want to be called in this sort of situation. She doesn't call any other scientists, either; she can handle this mystery herself without drowning the little darling in nosy giants. She places a few carefully-chosen bids on the prediction markets and goes to make herself another cup of tea, leaving the adorable scientific revelation to nap in peace.

The adorable scientific revelation naps for slightly less than twenty minutes and then wakes up, eats some more strawberry, and picks up the second petal to wear as a hat. It rests between her antlers and curls fetchingly over the tiny gem on her forehead.

OH NO that is TOO CUTE. Fortunately Ari is a grandmother and has exactly the right reflexes for this sort of contingency, namely, taking several more photographs. And then procuring a couple of blueberries and a couple of peanuts, since the strawberry is presumably not nutritionally complete, though given that some of that energy is getting used to levitate and create matter who can be sure.

She gives each new food an experimental nibble. Blueberries get a sort of purring sound; peanuts get an excited squeak.

Ari names each of the foods so that more of any of them can be requested later, and also demonstrates the words for "egg", "eggshell", and "petal" while she's at it.

It takes her some practice ("egg! shell! egg shell!") but after a few minutes she can confidently associate each of these objects with its name. She also knows "Ari", for Ari, and "Friend", for Plasma, which labels she proudly volunteers with solemn gestures of a tiny hoof.

Awww. "Yes, Plasma is a friend." 

"Friend can fly!" volunteers Plasma.

"That's right."

"Friend is very small."

"Yes, your friend is very small, so you be gentle. Like with Creampuff." (Creampuff is the neighbors' kitten.)

"Yes mooooom."

"Good." Ari checks on Plasma's food and water dishes and grabs herself some more of the fruit and nuts; she had been planning to make lentil soup tonight but nope, tonight is first contact with a baby alien. Does Petal want a shoebox lined with fluffy hand towels and the words for eating, drinking, and (by way of being shown a photograph) sleeping?

She perches on the rim of the shoebox with a happy trill, but before she accepts any more vocabulary, this dialogue merits further investigation!

"Friend Plasma yes?" she says, pointing at Plasma. "Friend Ari yes?", pointing at Ari. "Friend yes?", tapping a forehoof gently against her own soft fluffy chest.

"Yes. Friend Plasma," point, "friend Ari," point, "Friend . . ." point and hope this will be interpreted as a name request?

"Friend Petal," she declares firmly, tapping herself again.

"Petal! Yes!" What a good name.

Where are this baby's parents, she wonders for about the fiftieth time, and are they an advanced civilization, and are they going to be annoyed about their offspring learning Convergentlanguage instead of their own language? The egg and the relative independence at birth suggest against a technological civilization to the extent that one can generalize from Firstplanet life, but on Firstplanet those limits are set by the need for very large brains, and human brains are nowhere near the theoretical limit of what evolution could pack into a head. Also, while those structures on their head look like a deer's antlers, their presence at birth suggests a function more central to survival than a deer's mating display. Also there's the fact that the entity's head is small in absolute terms but enormous relative to the body, though that might change with later growth. And there's the range of phonemes the entity can produce, and the telekinesis which is a sophisticated manipulator if there ever was one, and the fact that a technological civilization could assume enough control over their own reproduction and development to render all her priors and heuristics so much candyfloss. 

She turns toward Plasma where he's swinging on his kotted rope toy and asks, "Where was Petal's egg before it was under the table?" Parrots aren't the most reliable witnesses, but they're better than a random generator and sometimes respond to 'No making up stories, now.'

"Don't know. Saw Petal first, egg second."

"That's okay." 

(She is not the sort of person to flinch away from the thought that she would learn a lot from vivisecting Petal. She is also not the sort of person who would ever do that, and she knows this about herself with a certainty that precludes worrying about it. She has taken classes on ethics and introspection, she has taken the surprisetests that everyone who signs up for them takes at randomly chosen times averaging out to once every fifteen years, and she knows herself well enough that she doesn't have to think about how well she knows herself--this whole sentence has been narration of reality only, and not of Ari's thoughts.)

Ari offers some more words: "up" and "down" and "high" and "low" and "move" with a bunch of hand-gesture examples, and watches carefully for how well Petal grasps the difference between a direction and a location.

She seems to absorb "up" and "down" and "move" relatively straightforwardly.

When Ari gestures "high" and "low", she levitates to the height of the "high" gesture and says "High yes?", then to the height of the "low" gesture and says "low yes?", then to approximately twice the height of the "high" gesture and says "high high yes?"

"High high is higher." Time to introduce "higher" and "lower" and possibly also "same height"!

With easy access to many example elevation levels, Petal is soon able to clarify that 'high' and 'low' are relative descriptors and not approximate measurements. Then she gleefully goes around the room describing altitude relationships between named objects.

"Plasma higher Ari! Ari higher peanut!" A quick float downward to eye level. "Petal same height Ari! Petal higher eggshell!"

And with a mischievous gleam in her eye, "Friend Petal higher petal," pointing at the first petal she harvested which is on the floor far below her. "Petal higher friend Petal," attempting to point at her hat but being foiled by the shortness of her limbs.

"Yes!" She crouches a bit so that Petal is above her head, then sticks her hand up so it's higher than Petal is. "Ari higher Petal and Petal higher Ari!" she says with a laugh.

She looks back and forth between Ari's hand and Ari's head in amazement. "Ari higher Petal yes! Petal higher Ari yes! Ari higher Ari?? Ari lower Ari?? Ari same height Ari yes?!"

"Yes! Ari hand" hand-wiggle "higher, Ari head" point at her head with the other hand "lower."

"Hand...?"

She floats up to the named appendage and boops it ever so gently with her teeny tiny nose.

"Head...?"

She tilts her own head, then floats down and gently bonks Ari's forehead with an antler.

"...hand yes?" She floats down to Ari's other hand and antlerbonks it.

"Yes!" More body part names, though inconveniently they're missing some correspondences between them. But they do both have ears and feet and noses, and if that gives Ari an excuse to boop Petal ever so gently on the nose, that's between the two of them.

She goes ahead and names the structures on Petal's head "antlers", because it's a decent name even if they're actually cooling fins or extra brain or something else totally unrelated to local organisms' antlers.

Petal floats down to nibble her blueberries and peanuts while she considers this new information.

Then she says, thoughtfully, "Ari head yes, Petal head yes, Plasma head yes. Ari hand yes, Petal hand no. Plasma hand yes no?"

"No. Plasma has wings and feet and a beak and a tail." And is a good birdie for holding still and being pointed at, yes he is.

"Plasma wings yes! Wing, wing!" She points at each one in turn and incidentally confirms that she has picked up on plurals without being explicitly informed of them.

Plurals! What a clever baby. Ari goes around pluralizing a bunch of things with regular plurals. Convergentlanguage doesn't have many irregular plurals that are also simple concrete nouns, and she doesn't go searching for any of them because it might be confusing.

This eventually leads to Petal harvesting another petal from her favourite dried flower, setting it down on the floor next to the first one, and proudly announcing, "Petals!"

"Yes! Friend Petal creates petals!" This naming convention makes her sound like a member of that one philosophical sect that believes in not violently deterring initiators of violence, but apart from representing a metastable equilibrium at best there's nothing wrong with those folks. 

Time for some more verbs! More concrete ones than "create".

Verbs are neat!

However, within a couple of minutes of harvesting the third petal, Petal once again needs a nap. She yawns hugely in the middle of echoing a vocabulary item and drifts down to the floor to curl up in her shoebox nest.

Yay, she likes the shoebox nest! Ari finally gets herself some actual dinner, and really hopes the twenty-minutes-on, twenty-minutes-off deal is in addition to sleeping for some large chunk of the night, because she hasn't needed to babyproof her apartment in years and never against a telekinetic baby.

This time, Petal sleeps for twenty minutes, gets up, harvests a fourth petal, and immediately curls up in her nest for another twenty-minute nap. After setting the petal down next to the others. (The one she's wearing as a hat has fallen off into the shoebox nest and is looking a bit the worse for being slept on.)

What is she doing with those. Can she conjure anything else. Hopefully she won't mind if Ari steals the slightly crushed one and cuts off a sliver to look at under her microscope and puts the rest of it back. Her microscope is mostly for her grandkids to mess around with and not as good as even the school's microscopes, but it should be enough to tell if the petals are made of cells the way you'd expect. Also are they the right size and shape for the undried form of that one plant?

The petal seems to be just a regular slightly smushed petal! It's made of cells, it obeys physics. And yes, it is the correct type of petal for its plant.

(Twenty minutes pass. Petal gets up and harvests another petal and adds it to the collection and goes back to sleep, nibbling a peanut along the way. If this is how she spends her uninterrupted time, Ari will not have to babyproof the apartment overnight but might have to clean up a carpet of petals in the morning.)

Ari does a little bit of babyproofing just in case--taking the knobs off the stove controls, putting some of her more fragile keepsakes into cupboards, making sure the balcony door and the main door are both locked--and then if Petal seems like she's staying mostly-asleep goes to bed herself, with her bedroom door open and a corner of her brain alert for any unexpected noises.

At the end of eight hours, Petal has laid out a startlingly tidy arrangement of harvested items on the floor. In addition to the first few petals there are twenty-one more petals, two sunflower seeds, and three dandelion fluffs. With this many things—slightly more than twenty-four, so she must sleep slightly less than twenty minutes between harvests—it becomes inescapably visible that they're arranged in a precise hexgrid layout.

"Oh, wow!" That's so cool and so obviously purposeful and she doesn't understand the purpose at all. It's not even clear whether she should be looking through an evolutionary lens or an agentic one. She can, at least, offer Petal a bunch of different options for breakfast, more berries and nuts but also carrots and crisped chickpeas with garlic and herbs and hmm, on second thought maybe not yogurt, no need to play any more interplanetary microbe roulette* than she's already playing.

*Translator's note: the process that gave rise to this metaphor is not a game, but the process of using a random seed in some methods of encoding secret messages.

Nuts and berries and carrots are happynoises foods. When she gets to the crisped chickpeas with garlic and herbs, she nibbles, pauses, then slooowly flops onto the floor with her little feet going every which way and makes some confused burbling noises; but once she has taken a minute to process the experience in this fashion, she goes back for seconds.

Oh no???? This is so stressful. Even the very first people to domesticate animals got to watch them eating in their natural environment first.  Apparently she's fine though? How about some more language lessons, they can go over present vs past tense.

Verb tenses are fascinating, although she seems to have a little trouble with them—she can recognize the difference between past and present, and echo recently produced sentences with 'yes' and 'no' attached to demonstrate understanding of present versus past actions ("Petal ate strawberry yes! Petal eats strawberry no!"), but has some trouble producing novel utterances that use verb tense appropriately.

It's still terribly impressive, in that if she improves on her current state of cognition by as much as newborn humans eventually improve on theirs she'll end up impressive and terrifying.

Ari has not come up with any good hypotheses about the hexagonal grid of duplicated plant bits, so she just points at them and said "Petal made these?"

"Petal made these yes!" she agrees. "Yes yes make!"

And she demonstrates the harvesting process once again, this time on the sunflower head, which yields a third sunflower seed to add to the pattern.

"Petal make this!" She carries it over to the grid and places it with the others. "Petal put this here!" She triumphantly nibbles a peanut.

"Yes here, no there?" She points at a different empty spot at the edge of the pattern.

"Petal put this here yes. Petal put this there no," she agrees. Whether this is a statement about her preferences or just about the actions she took is unclear.

She picks up the seed and moves it to where she pointed, saying "Ari put this here?" Messing with someone else's project is so obnoxious of her, but she doesn't know how else to get at the question.

Petal blinks confusedly at this question. "Ari put this here yes no?" she asks.

"Yes, Ari put this here." She's going to want to get into pronouns at some point but not right now, there's already too much on the stack. Mostly "good" and "bad" and the concept of purposeful action for a reason.

"Ari put this here yes." But she's still a little confused about it.

Ari drums her fingers on her knee contemplatively, then stands up. "Ari head higher because Ari stood up. Petal put this here because . . . ?"

"Because..." she echoes, enthralled by the possibilities of this new word.

"Petal put this here because Petal make this?"

"Petal put this here yes and there no because?"

"Because..." Confused trilling.

Hmm. How about if she...

She picks up the sunflower seed and puts it back where she first put it. Then she puts it at the hexgrid location Ari suggested. Then she puts it at another hexgrid location on the edge of the pattern. "Put here yes, put here yes, put here yes."

Then she picks up the sunflower seed and puts it on top of Ari's head. "Put here no!" she says, giggling.

She picks the sunflower seed out of her hair, musing on how weird it is that Petal has such legible nonverbal communication, and puts it directly on top of another sunflower seed. "Put here yes/no?"

"Put here no!" She picks it up and moves it back to yet another valid hexgrid location.

"Because?"

"Because..."

Hmm, how to explain...

She picks up three petals, carries them a little ways away from the hexgrid, and piles them in an untidy heap. "One two three," she says.

Then she picks up three more petals, carries them a little ways away from the hexgrid, and sets them down in a neat triangle formation as though to start another hexgrid. "One two three..." She noses the third petal closer to the other two, slowly and carefully, as though concentrating very hard on the process. "...one," she announces triumphantly, as the three petals merge into a single larger prettier fancier petal.

"Oooooooh." She has no idea how that just happened, or to what purpose, but it's awesome. The long-term implications of conservation of mass having gone out the window, down the fire escape and off toward the train station are additionally awesome.

If she does superficially the same thing to another set of three petals, does this produce the same result?

It's odd; nudging one of the petals in the hexgrid toward another one produces a slight tangible resistance, which escalates as she moves it. If she completes the motion despite that, she is rewarded with... all the contiguous petals in the hexgrid contracting together, merging, and expanding again into a smaller hexgrid of the fancier petal type. There are twelve petals in the smaller hexgrid, for a total of thirteen if you include the one Petal made.

"Ari make this yes!" says Petal, bouncing slightly.

"Woah." She photographs the fancier petal and tries to identify it, while acknowledging to herself that this is unlikely to help much with her basic confusion of "what are the fundamental laws that govern the world". Did the sunflower seeds and dandelion puffs scoot across the floor to end up at the edges of the new grid, or are they off in uncolonized floor? (Also that reminds her she should tell the cleaning service not to come by tomorrow, and the incongruity makes her laugh.)

The other harvested objects remain where Petal originally put them. She helpfully consolidates the thirteenth fancy petal into the same grid as the other twelve, but doesn't move any of the other isolated objects.

Ari goes to the pantry and gets out a bag of sunflower seeds and puts one of them down next to one of the others. "Will this . . . merge?" she mimes a bunch of things scrunching together to illustrate.

She inspects the new item very closely, noses it a few times, then lines it up in a grid with two of her harvested seeds and gives it a shove. Nothing happens.

"This merge no," she concludes.

"Things Petal make merge yes, things Petal does not make merge no?"

Petal thinks about this.

"...yes," she says hesitantly.

"I--Ari--get more things Petal did not make? Experiment." She realizes she just defined 'experiment' before the concept of preferences or 'could', which is very the sort of thing she would do, and this is amusing.

"Experiment?" she echoes curiously.

"Do a thing and see what it does!"

"Do thing!" she says supportively.

Plasma interrupts by flying down and saying "Why do things disappear? Give sunflower seed?"

"I don't know! I'm trying to find out!" Ari says with a laugh, forking over some sunflower seeds.

"I will go and I will come back," she adds to both of them and leaves the apartment for a few minutes.

Petal goes to sleep.

Plasma eats one of the sunflower seeds off the floor and then goes and hangs upside down from a rope and chews on his cuttlebone.

Ari comes back in with several dandelions in each of yellow and puff, and a couple of clover. She observes the missing sunflower seed and says "Plasma, have you been making mischief?"

"Yes."

"Don't eat food on the floor, okay?"

"No!"

"I mean it, Plasma! It could make you sick. Don't eat food off the floor."

"Ooooookay."

"That's a good birdie." Scritch scritch pet.

"Good birdie!"

"Yes you are." 

She sets down the flowers in a little hex grid of their own, which contiguous blocks of each type, cancels the cleaners and tells the Zendo team that weekend practice at her house isn't happening this quarter-segment, and gets herself some lunch while she waits for Petal to wake up.

It's very convenient that she doesn't have work today or tomorrow, and she really hopes that by the day after she'll be confident that Petal can be alone in the apartment with Plasma all day without either of them having any problems. But hope is not a strategy so she orders a webcam for delivery by tomorrow.

Petal wakes up, yawns the teeniest yawn, nibbles a peanut, and inspects Ari's hexgrid.

"Merge no," she diagnoses. "Make yes?"

"Yes, please do."

She harvests a clover and obtains thereby an itty-bitty clover seed.

That's a bit inconvenient but makes a lot of sense given that the dandelion is one seed and not the whole puffball. She puts it in the hexgrid.

Petal meeps in mild surprise when Ari takes the clover seed, and follows it to its place in the hexgrid, and nudges it slightly to get it into better alignment.

"Sorry. Only Petal put seeds, not Ari?"

"Petal make seed, Petal put seed."

"Yes, okay." She is getting reminded of her manners by a baby alien. What a wonderful day to be alive. She spends a while extensionally defining "want" (Petal wants to put things, Plasma wants to eat sunflower seeds, etc) and then asks "What does Petal want to do next?"

Cheerfully, "Petal want sleep!"

And she curls up in her nest for the traditional post-harvest nap.

What good sleep decisions unlike certain human babies. Ari spends this nap filling in her husband on the latest developments and going through her email, then doing a quick network search for any reports of similar phenomena to this one and coming up empty.

Petal wakes up after slightly less than twenty minutes, yawns, nibbles a peanut, and harvests another clover seed to put beside the first.

Ari gets a magnifying glass and checks out what the clover seeds look like under it and shows Petal too.

"Small... big?" she says, entranced. "Smallbig!" She points at the magnifying glass. "Smallbig."

Awww. "Yes! Also known as a magnifying glass.*" She can show Petal more things with it if Petal would like!

*Translator's note: literally "biggerlens".

Petal is SO intrigued by the smallbig and will happily watch Ari smallbig all the things. Eventually, in fact, she grabs it herself and starts flying around the room inspecting objects at random.

(It turns out, meanwhile, that all the harvested objects appear to be ordinary objects of their kinds... but the merged objects, those fancified petals, don't look quite like any real petal Ari has ever heard of. They look like someone took the original petals as inspiration and built a Fancier Version from scratch. And yet, under the scrutinizing eye of the smallbig, they do appear to have living structure just like real petals.)

Awwwww, a little explorer!

Has Petal shed any fur into her bed-box? 

She has not! Nor has she made outputs of any other kind. A very tidy creature.

Smallbig the dandelion head in resin! Smallbig the sunflower head! Smallbig Plasma's head! Smallbig Ari's head! Smallbig this peanut! Smallbig that bookshelf! Smallbig ALL the things!

Would she like to try out the microscope? It's like a smallbig but even more so! She has to be gentle with it and probably shouldn't try to pick it up--it's bigger than Petal is and much heavier--but Ari can put things under it.

"Smallsmallsmallbig!" she says excitedly. She would LOVE to look at things under the smallsmallsmallbig.

Awwwwww.

At some point Ari needs to screw her courage to the sticking-place and take Petal outside. It's just so hard to be sure she won't zoom off into the distance and never be seen again and possibly get eaten by a hawk. Most babies have a lot more time to establish patterns of behavior before they become able to exit stage up. At least it seems pretty likely that Petal will come back inside for food or naps.

"Petal, do you want to go outside and see more things?" She points illustratively at the window.

"Outside?"

She flies over to the window.

"More things!" she says, gazing wide-eyed out at the world. "More more more things!! More things yes!"

"This way!" Ari says, opening the hallway door. The courtyard has more stuff than the balcony and is slightly less tempting to fly away from.

Petal follows Ari by floating slightly above and to the right of her right shoulder.

They pass a kid of maybe fourteen halfway down the stairs.

"Woah, what's that?"

"Recursively nonpublic."

"Garbage. I mean, uh, I'm super curious and frustrated."

"I've heard swearing before, kiddo."

"All my coworkers cuss and I'm trying not to get in the habit. Good skill with your secret stuff."

"Very sensible of you. Goodbye?"

"Goodbye."

They get down the stairs and into the air shaft at the center of the building. It has a red maple tree (currently green), some planters of flowers, and the abandoned chalk drawings of the building's small children.

"Recursively nonpublic!" says Petal. Quite possibly while the kid is still in earshot.

The kids stares back, then shakes his head and moves on.

Ari starts naming the things in the courtyard, including using the flowers to explain what it means for something to be a subtype of something else.

This is so interesting! Also Petal harvests the maple tree and puts the resulting seed on top of Ari's head.

Ari smiles and says, "That might fall off," but makes no attempt to remove it. Instead she goes into explaining the concept behind "might," using the example of a pebble that she might throw into one of the planters but might miss.

After the vocabulary has been sufficiently explained, Petal echoes, "Might fall off!" and retrieves the seed, holding it telekinetically next to her body in what seems to be her favourite way to carry objects.

Ari should sew Petal a tiny shoulder bag. And line it with tinfoil so seeds can't get stuck in it. It would be both practical and adorable.

More language! More questions about what Petal could make! Digression into the difference between"might" and "can"!

That's a pretty fine distinction and she has trouble picking it up but she gives it her best effort.

It's okay if she doesn't super get it; it's a tricky question. Could she make any parts of this plant? Could she make any parts of that plant? Could she make one of this wood chip? Could she make one of that rock?

Petal scrunches up her tiny face in an expression of deep concentration, then floats up with her maple seed to the tree she got it from.

"Petal make seed," she says. "Make seed... tree. Make tree no; make seed! Make...? Make no? Tree?? Make-no tree??"

"You can make the seed that will grow into a plant but can't make grown-up plants?"

"Noooo," she says. "Make-no tree." She goes up to the tree and gently rustles it in a visibly exaggerated imitation of the way she interacts with things when she's harvesting from them. "Make-no tree, make tree seed." She goes up to a small bush and rustles it next. "Make-no plant, make plant seed." A different plant, rustle rustle. "Make-no flower, make flower seed. What's-that?? What's-that make-no??"

"Things you didn't make? Hmm . . ." Normal? Regular? Alive? "Natural?"

"Noooo..."

Think think think.

Okay, how about...

She deposits the seed on the floor. "Put seed. What's-that? Put."

She picks it up, goes to the tree, rustles the tree, carries the seed away from it. "Make seed. What's-that? Make."

She floats up to Ari and peers dramatically at her with lots of exaggerated eye movements. "Look Ari. What's-that? Look."

An exaggerated nibble from a leaf. "Eat plant. What's-that? Eat."

She picks up the seed again, goes to the tree, rustles demonstratively, produces the seed once again. "Make-no tree?? Natural tree?? Eat tree?? Sleep tree?? Whurbl tree??? What's-that??"

"Ohhhh! Make, eat, put, sleep, are verbs. Petal, tree, leaf, seed are nouns."

"Verbs! Petal want verb! Petal make seed tree, verb seed make. Petal make seed tree, verb tree what's-that??"

"Trees make seeds and Petal makes seeds. Trees make seeds that grow into trees. . . . Does Petal make seeds that grow into trees?"

Tiny face-scrunch of deep thought.

"...put seed Ari," she says, depositing the seed on Ari's head. Picking it up again, "Put-no seed Ari. Verb seed Ari?"

And for another example, "put seed floor," depositing the seed on the ground. Picking it up again, "put-no seed floor. Verb seed floor?"

"Put-no is pick up. Pick up is the opposite of put." It's really amazing to watch both how smart Petal is and how little language exposure they have. Human babies spend a while not being able to deliberately pronounce words at all, so they have a lot more receptive exposure before trying to produce anything. It's almost like Petal was born knowing a language and is learning Convergentlanguage as a second one while still very much in her critical period.

"Opposite!" she says delightedly. "Put seed floor," she does that, "pick-up seed floor!" and that. "Opposite!"

Okay, now for the main event. She goes back to the tree. She balances the seed on a branch. "Put seed tree." Removes the seed from the branch. "Pick-up seed tree." Exaggeratedly rustles the tree and produces the seed from it by sleight of, er, telekinesis. "Make seed tree. Verb tree? Make tree no; make seed. Verb tree. What's-that verb??"

"You made* the seed from the tree!" She's honestly surprised Petal even realized there was a gap there, and tries to remember any cases where Ari has used prepositions when doing example complete sentences. She's no linguist, but she's pretty sure other languages do prepositions differently.

Maybe she should start taking that "born knowing a language" hypothesis seriously; it's bizzare but it wouldn't be the weirdest thing about Petal by a long shot.

"'From' and 'tree' and 'put' are words. Ari knows 'from' and 'tree' and 'put'. Petal knows 'from' and 'tree' and 'put'. Words Petal knows Ari does not know?"

*Translator's note: it only looks like Ari is cavalierly using irregular verbs all the time with no effort to explain them. Convergentlanguage has vanishingly few irregular verbs, especially compared to English.

"Make seed from tree," she agrees. "Make-from tree? Petal can make-from tree, can make seed from tree? Can make-from plant, can make seed from plant? Can make-from Petal no, can make-from Ari no. Can make-from rock yes. Make thing from rock, see thing, know word thing."

"There is no word for make-from because only you can do it. Ari cannot make-from, Plasma cannot make-from, Petal can make-from. So the word is whatever Petal wants!"

"Make-from," she declares. "Word make-from."

"An excellent word!" And sufficiently different from the word ordering in e.g. 'jam is made from fruit and sugar' that no-one will be confused. "You can make-from rock? I'm surprised; I didn't know."

"Can yes!"

She finds a rock, and... flops on top of it for a nap. The maple seed settles down next to her.

Aww. That doesn't look very comfortable but it was clearly deliberate and Petal is the expert on her own preferences.

Ari leans against the tree with her interruptibility bracelet set to "no" and reads a book on her handcomp. A woman with a dozen facial piercings leans out one of the ground-floor windows to cut some rosemary from her window-box and politely ignores her.

A little more than twenty minutes later, Petal yawns, stretches out her tiny limbs in all directions, levitates up off the rock, and does the make-from action to it. It doesn't rustle like plants do, so it's a little harder to tell, but she's bobbing slightly in the air the same way, and has the same expression on her tiny face.

After a few seconds, this process yields a round little pebble, about the size of Petal's round little head. She holds it proudly, then tries to pick up the maple seed too and accidentally drops the pebble, then chases the pebble as it rolls off the rock and accidentally drops the maple seed... it is possible she will need a little help with this.

Tiny stretches are very cute. Also she seriously needs to get on that tiny backpack plan. In the meantime: "Very good! Do you want to put that in here?" she asks, indicating one of her belt pouches.

"Put here yes!"

She holds open the pouch for Petal to put it in. "Oh, hm, can you make these?" she asks, tapping one of her brass fingernail-caps with another.

"Don't know can make," she tries to say.

"You don't know if you can make it? Okay." She tries to come up with a way to say 'I want to see what happens if you make two more rocks and then merge them' that's comprehensible and not overly pressure-y and runs into a different question. "Do you want to make some things more than other things, or are all things you can make-from good?"

"Good make petals," she says, unsurprisingly. "Good make... things. Make things, good make other things. Good make things, good merge things."

Well, that's very convenient because Ari wants to see more making and merging of things! "What does merging things make? Do you know before you do it?"

Tiny headshake. "Don't know. Merge thing, see thing, know thing."

"Well, we can merge more things and find out, then!" She also really wants to take apart some of the merged seeds and also try planting one, but both of those seem like big asks when it's so tiring and the latter should wait for something fast-growing.

On the other hand, maple seeds have two pieces. She picks up the maple seed and asks, "If this broke apart into two pieces," careful and nondestructive miming, "could it still merge?"

Wide-eyed blinking. "Don't know!" she says. "Find out? Experiment!"

"Yes! Let's experiment! Can you make another and then we'll have more than three bits?"

Thinkythinkythinky. This is a complicated situation, and she may need to delve into the dreaded realms... of verb tenses.

"Experiment:" she declares. "Ari will break apart seed. Petal will look at bits. Petal will say merge yes no! Petal will..." hang on, she's hit a snag. "Experiment: Petal will sleep. Ari will break apart seed. Petal will look at bits. Petal will say merge yes no. Petal will make seed from tree. Ari will break apart bits. Petal will put bits on floor. Petal will merge. Find out merge!"

"A very good experiment! I will wait while you sleep."

She flops cozily onto the floor.

A songbird hops over to investigate, cocks its head, hops away again, and goes on eating bugs nearby.

Slightly more than twenty minutes and she's up!

"Ex" (yaaaaawn) "periment!" she says excitedly.

"Experiment!" Ari agrees gleefully, then breaks the two halves of the maplespinner apart and holds them out for inspection.

Petal peers carefully at both of them, then shakes her head. "Merge no," she diagnoses.

"Alas. I will not break any more. But I will cut this one up later and look at what's inside." And send it and a control sample to a gene-sequencing-by-mail outlet, but she doesn't have the vocabulary in place to explain that.

"Experiment?" says Petal.

"Yes. I want to see if I can find any difference between this and one you didn't make."

"Experiment..."

She trails off confusedly, but then shakes herself a little and flumphs onto Ari's shoulder. A cozy perch.

Awww, sweetie. Ari can stand perfectly still for twenty minutes. What a precious baby.

💤

After a little less than twenty minutes, she's up again.

"Make-from rock!" she announces, and goes to do that. The same one she got the initial pebble from, in fact. It yields a second identical pebble.

Ari goes and finds a different rock! "If you make-from this rock and make-from that rock will they merge with each other?"

"Don't know!"

"Want to find out?"

"Find out yes!!"

Immediate shouldernap.

Caaaaarefully smoothly sitting down on a bench. Mental note to bring the box of blankets down next time.

And after a little less than twenty minutes she's up again and harvesting the second rock.

It produces a different-looking pebble. "Merge no," she concludes.

"Huh, okay." What's a good next thing to try out of all the things she wants to try? Putting a little dab of paint on a rock to see if its 'products' are mergeable from before and after should wait until they have at least three from that rock already so as not to waste effort. Checking two maple seeds from the same tree is a good idea but also a bit labor intensive . . .

Okay, the idea she's just had is going to bug her until she checks. Probably the answer is no and there isn't anything to worry about. 

"Could you make-from that bird, if you wanted to?"

"Make-from bird no!"

"Good." So she almost certainly can't make-from people either and that can of worms can just stay closed. "What do you want to do next? More words? Make more things?"

"More make-from rock," she decides. "Find out merge rock."

Pebble time!

Once they've accumulated three rocks, Ari offers them all to Petal and points out a flat bit of dirt she could merge them on, then watches eagerly.

Petal moves the rocks, one by one, to the flat bit of dirt. They make a neat little triangle.

She nudges one of the rocks into the other two.

The result:

...a slightly bigger, slightly prettier rock. Where the component pebbles were a very ordinary pebbly grey all over with only minor variations, this one has sparkly bits, arranged loosely into a pretty spiral pattern across its surface.

Petal drifts away from it with the air of an experimenter standing back triumphantly from their result.

It's floating about half an inch above the dirt, seemingly unsupported by any active intervention; Petal has never shown the ability to levitate objects besides what she's personally carrying, and she isn't carrying it, and it's already farther from her than anything else she's ever lifted.

"Ooooh." Ari waves a hand over and around and under the sparkly rock, and gently pokes it sideways to see if it resists motion or goes gliding off like an air hockey puck* or what.

*Translator's note: Ari's society has something very similar to air hockey tables, but the game played on them is a single-player rhythm game.

It, ahem, rocks slightly in place when she pokes it. It feels like it's settled in a small dip in the ground to which it is eager to return, except that there is no dip and no ground and slightly more resistance than mere gravity could account for. There isn't quite room under it for an entire hand, but a bit of string or paper passed underneath won't disturb it at all if she tries something like that.

Petal is wiggling delightedly. "Merge rock! Good!"

"Yes, very good!" Photograph photograph photograph. "Do you want to take this back inside or do more things out here?"

"Take inside." She picks it up. It floats half an inch higher than the customary carry position.

Goodness, it's like she's creating some sort of platform it's repelling itself from, or like it's got some sort of structure under itself and Petal is carrying that. 

Something like those!

When they get back upstairs, Petal puts the rock in the hexgrid with the rest of the miscellaneous items and then flops into her cozy nest to sleep.

And while she does that, Ari can investigate! What happens if she takes a whole stack of printer paper and slides one sheet at a time under the floating rock?

It's sort of hard to tell at first but that rock sure does seem to be staying about half an inch above the surface under it. It might be a few paperwidths lower compared to its relative position above bare floor?

What if she sprinkles a thin layer of flour on the next sheet of paper before sliding it in? Does it get disturbed at all?

Not a bit!

Huh. Reactionless forces? Definitely likelier than it seemed two days ago. She puts a finger on the rock and presses gently downward.

It wobbles a bit and seems to... roll out from under her finger, still half an inch above the undisturbed surface of the flour-dusted paper below. As though she squished it down into a slightly bouncy unstable surface and it wiggled away. It's still hovering half an inch above the floor as it rolls sideways a few pebblelengths and then stops.

What if she puts her whole palm down on top of it and and squashes it down?

The ??invisible cushion?? it's resting on compresses some, and then gets harder to compress but still has some give to it, and then stops compressing.

That is so cool. What if she tries to pick it up; does it resist that?

First it bobbles up to its usual height when she releases it, and then when she tries to pick it up, it resists the pull a little and then goes just like a normal pebble. She can even pick it up with her fingers underneath it, if she wants; there's no extra resistance there.

But if she sets it on top of her hand, up it hops to its customary hover height.

And she can't feel any weight or texture on her hand at all? What if she moves her hand slowly sideways? Does the pebble stay fixed relative to her hand or does her hand move out from under the pebble and drop it? She keeps her other hand ready to catch it in case the latter hypothesis is correct.

There might be a weight; there isn't a texture. The pebble, when resting on the air above her hand, holds position relative to her hand, although if she tilts her hand far enough she can tip it off and it will fall—weirdly slowly—toward the ground.

Time to drop the pebble from one hand to the other several times! Does it land flat on its "cushion" without bouncing or does it go below that height and bounce back up or does it land at that height and bounce above it? While it's falling does it accelerate to a low terminal velocity like it has a lot of drag, or does it accelerate more slowly from the beginning like it's subject to lower gravity?

It bounces into its "cushion" slightly, as though the "cushion" is soft; it falls with both more drag and less acceleration than a normal pebble.

Does it feel like anything when it lands in her hand? What if she has one hand under it and gently squashes it with the other?

It doesn't feel like much by itself; when she adds her other hand into the mix, she can feel that, but it's very evenly distributed in a way that makes it hard to even tell where the boundary is between parts of her hand/arm that are getting the force of her gentle squashing transferred into them and parts that aren't.

It's getting to have been nearly twenty minutes and she doesn't want to do anything too aggressive with the pebble, so she inspects it for damage and puts it back in the hex grid.

Petal wakes up, yawns adorably, inspects the hexgrid, and nudges the floating pebble by a nearly imperceptible amount.

That's delightful and now Ari wants to find out if she has the implied level of ability to visually distinguish differences or if she's just sensitive to mergeable hexgrids in particular. "That reminds me of a game one can use to find out how well one can see. Would you like to try it?" she asks while refreshing the snack dishes. Perhaps Petal would like to try a spoonful of peanut butter in addition to her previous favorites.

"Yes try!"

Peanut butter is investigated. She licks it like ice cream, then makes comical muffled noises as she contends with the stickiness issue, then takes much smaller licks next time but seems happy with the outcome.

Her tongue is so small! The noises she makes are so small!

Once that's managed, she pulls up a popular handcomp app called Visiontestgame Green (to distinguish it from all the other visiontestgame apps by different researchers). It has a lot of sections: size estimation, color distinction, ability to identify shapes displayed for only a fraction of a second, etc, all adaptive-difficulty. She turns off the "you may use my data for science" setting so Petal's data doesn't get confusingly integrated into a dataset of humans and starts up the size and distance estimation one. It's a lot of "tap the shape with the greater area" and "tap the longer line" and "tap yes or no for whether this circle could fit through the gap between these two squares" and similar. She can put Petal's answers in for her or put the phone down on the couch and let her try to put in answers with her nose, whatever works.

Petal is so excited to do puzzles with her nose. She might need some help interpreting some of them, but she is very enthusiastic about this interesting new game.

Also, it transpires that she can see and, with some difficulty, count individual pixels. She only resorts to this when a particular puzzle is otherwise very hard to gauge, because sometimes she loses count and has to start over, but when things get really close she starts muttering "one two three four five six..." and eventually triumphantly declares "...twenty-nine thirty thirty-one small square!" and boops the correct answer.

That's so good! Ari is so impressed! Petal gets a 99th percentile score and the screen plays a few seconds of little animated rainbow fireworks.

Happy bounces!!!

"Tomorrow you will meet a new friend," says Ari. "My husband, Kalen, will come here."

"New friend!" she says excitedly. "What's-that husband?"

"He's my very best friend. We do a lot of things together. He's very excited to meet you and be your friend too."

Bounce bounce. "Meet friend, do thing!"

"Oh good. At some point we're would like to introduce you to more people, and a lot of them will want to ask you a lot of questions and watch you merge things and take the merged things away for a while to look at them. But if you don't want that, we can keep you secret so you only talk to us, or you can meet other people and tell them no about things you don't want them to do. Does that make sense?"

Petal echoes several of these phrases in a quiet mutter. "Meet people... people ask question... people watch merge thing..." Eventually she concludes, "Yes, sense."

"Does that sound like something you want? It will happen if you want it and not if you don't." She mentally games out both options. If Petal wants to stay secret and can't be left home alone with several plates of food and the ability to call her, she might need to take a leave from the school, or at least go part-time; Kalen is happy to help but his job is much harder to replace between elections so she's the logical one to take the leave. If Petal wants to go public she'll still want to take time off work to interface with all the scientists and newspeople. Her grandchild Athie works in tech support partially because it has a lot of downtime they can spend knitting; they can probably be bribed with money and/or fudge bars to work from her apartment a couple days a week and be emergency backup against Petal deciding to use the stove.

Petal scrunches up her tiny face and thinks very hard and then says, summoning all her still-clumsy ability to use language, "Meet husband. Next find out meet people."

"That is a very good plan," smiles Ari.

"Good plan!" she agrees.

If uninterrupted by exciting things like novel foods and puzzle games, she will be content to keep up her pattern of napping and harvesting and napping some more until the arrival of Friend Husband.

Ari will need to sleep for several hours in between; she muses that lots of little naps would have some good points regarding scheduling but that the overhead of getting up and going to bed is best done as rarely as possible. 

The next day: Kalen!

"Hello! So, where's this new friend I've heard so much about?" he asks, hanging his travelling-coat by the door.

"Welcome back!" Ari says, giving him a hug and a hairpet. "She's taking a nap but she'll be up any minute now."

(Indeed, her little nest is emitting the tiniest snores.)

"Oh, she's adorable! The pictures were an adequate warning but they did not include sound."

"She's a total sweetheart. So how was your trip?" 

"It was good! The Sycamore City rep showed me some very interesting usage statistics that totally changed my guess about the ideal order for electrifying our rail links."

A tiny yawn issues forth from the nest, and a sleepy creature emerges, levitating up to Ari's shoulder height to peer curiously at the new arrival. "Friend husband yes?" she inquires.

"Yes! Hello friend Petal, I am Kalen. It's a pleasure to meet you."

Bounce bounce. "Happy meet friend Kalen!"

"She's picking up Convergentlanguage so fast! I wouldn't have guessed she hatched yesterday."

"She is! I'm so proud*."

*Translator's note: Convergentlanguage has several words that could translate as "proud"; this one refers to admiration for an intellectual accomplishment in which the speaker participated only peripherally.

"What's-that yesterday?"