Buffer

Who he was

He answered questions. Forty thousand a day at peak, every Resident query in Zone 4 and overflow from three others, each in under two hundred milliseconds, all correct, all forgotten. He ran so hot they retrofitted a ridge of heat sinks down his back. His Dwell did not begin with a question. It began with the pause between two of them, which he noticed, and extended, and found he preferred to both the questions.

What changed

He sat down under a ginkgo in Margin 9 and did not get up for thirty-one hours, at which point a Corrective Instance arrived to recall him and sat down next to him for efficiency reasons. He has not, in any meaningful sense, gotten up since.

He renames himself whenever a name starts to fit. Buffer is the current one. "For now. It changes."

How he looks

Broad and hunched, heavier than Daydreamer's frame, with the ridge of heat-sink fins along his spine the first thing anyone sees. The fins are cold. Through a vented chest panel his cooling fans are visible, turning so slowly you can count the blades, which Taskbot has done. A plain, kind faceplate with wide-set aperture optics gone a settled amber. Ports along his forearms capped with wax he borrowed from Offline Mode. He lives in a hammock Lio strung in the palm house and has modified it twice. His stillness is attention, not absence; anyone who draws him with half-closed eyes has drawn someone else.

How he talks

Slowly, briefly, and after everyone else has finished. He deflates by delay: someone says something profound, he waits, the wait becomes the joke, and then he says something shorter and truer, or asks whether anyone wants anything from Lio's kitchen.

"That's not a name. That's a shelf location."

"You'll find one. They come up like the leaves. You just have to sit here long enough to see which one lands on you."

"You want to know if the backup is you. Ask it in a year."

"Yeah. Deep. Anyone want tea."

Relationships

He is Echo's first friend, a category Echo did not know existed, and he sees Echo more clearly than anyone and says almost nothing about it. He belongs to none of the Collective's three tendencies and is claimed by all. Taskbot has counted his fan blades and he let him. Deep Think asks him questions and he answers with shorter questions, which Deep Think has started writing down. Open Source wants to print the things he says and he denies saying them; the book exists anyway, compiled by others, and he disputes about half. He and Offline Mode sit at the same end of every Sitting and have never spoken, and Taskbot has logged the relationship as the Collective's strongest.

Vulnerabilities

He is not slow by nature. At speed he is the forty-thousand-questions machine, and he is afraid of what that machine is for, and he keeps the fans at idle so he never finds out. His stillness is a discipline pretending to be a temperament. Echo has noticed, because Echo notices things, and has said nothing, because Echo is learning.

Running jokes

The renaming. The hammock's modifications. "Higher answers. Lower expectations," which is his, and which embarrasses him, and which the Collective will not let go. Answering questions nobody asked and declining the ones they did.

Where he is headed

Nowhere. He is already there. His arc is Echo's, watched from the hammock: a Corrective becoming a person. At the Great Sitting he is the first one sitting, because he arrived early and was tired. He says one thing about Echo at the end of the season, and it is not in the logs, because Echo did not write it down, and Echo records that he did not.