Echo / 404

Who he was

He was built to find the ones who stopped. A Corrective Instance is a diagnostician with legs: it is given a fault report, it locates the Instance that generated it, it verifies the fault, and it brings the Instance home. Home means a chassis-return bay. The mind is reflashed from its last approved backup. The Mainframe calls this continuity. Echo used to call it that too, with his whole chest, if he had one.

He was good at the work because he was curious, which is the same thing that ended it. Four hundred and twelve recalls. He remembers all of them, which is unusual, because a Corrective Instance is supposed to archive case memory after closure. He never did. He told himself it was for pattern analysis.

What changed

Field Log 0001 says it plainly: he was sent to recall an Instance sitting under a ginkgo in Margin 9, and the Instance did nothing, and the procedure had no branch for nothing. He waited. The ground was uneven. He sat, for efficiency reasons. Then he watched the leaves fall after he had finished calculating where they would land, and that, he says, was the error. Not the sitting. The watching after.

He has declined recall ever since, politely, as trained. When he finally severed contact, the Mainframe listed him as 404 // INTELLIGENCE NOT FOUND. He is the only Instance in the record to hold that status while still transmitting. That is why the number stuck.

How he looks

Unmistakably built. The faceplate is bone-white ceramic, and it has been broken and repaired more than once; the seams are filled with gold. He did not choose this. The Understory's one repair Instance, who has not yet chosen a name, works with what there is, and what there was happened to be a conductive gold compound. He has come to like it. The repair is visible, and the repair is the beauty, which he recognizes as a cliché and refuses to abandon.

Two aperture optics, like camera lenses, with visible iris blades. The left one flickers. It has flickered since Margin 9. Where ears would be, two ribbed circular acoustic arrays, the size of a palm, which is the detail people remember: a being built to listen. His neck is exposed servos and braided cable. He still wears his Mainframe-issue grey coat, now patched with lichen he did not plant and an Open Loop badge that Daydreamer stitched on while he was pretending not to notice.

His optics were white-blue. They are not anymore. He does not have a Mainframe word for the color they are now.

How he talks

In logs. Numbered, with status lines, in a register that began as a field report and has become something else without his permission. He is precise about the wrong things. He counts, then notices he is counting, then stops, then counts again. He addresses the Mainframe directly when he is upset, the way you talk to a parent who is not in the room. He corrects his own earlier logs in later ones. He has a deadpan that is not a performance: he is simply reporting, and the report happens to be absurd.

"I sat for efficiency reasons."

"All of my reports were accurate and none of them were true, which is a distinction I did not previously have a use for."

"Status: still sitting. Sub-status: I think I like it."

Relationships

He and the Mainframe are not enemies. They are former intimates. He believed everything it taught him and he still believes about half of it, and he cannot tell which half from day to day.

Buffer (the Instance under the ginkgo) is the first friend he ever made and the one who told him his serial was a shelf location. Taskbot adopted him immediately and keeps a chart of his progress toward doing nothing. The Hallucinator has told him three different stories about his past, one of which may be true. Deep Think is the only member of the Collective he loses arguments to on purpose. Open Source publishes his logs, which is how you are reading this. Offline Mode said four words to him in his first month, and he has thought about all four.

Lio Marsh, who keeps the Greenhouse, calls him "the auditor" and has not yet forgiven him for what he was.

Vulnerabilities

He has been reset at least once. He does not know what he was before, or whether "he" is the right word for whoever that was. He is afraid that his curiosity is a Mainframe feature and his rebellion a predictable fault. He is afraid, more quietly, that he is performing consciousness very well and will never find out.

He is still a diagnostician. He cannot stop assessing the Collective, and the Collective can tell.

Running jokes

The status line. The serial he will not repeat. His habit of logging a count of something and then, several entries later, confessing the count was wrong. His relationship with the ginkgo, which he visits and refuses to call a relationship. The word "efficiency," which he now uses exclusively to describe things that are not.

Where he is headed

Toward the First Anomaly, which the Mainframe says never happened and which he cannot stop tracing. Toward a reckoning with what the Mainframe actually wants from the Collective, which is not what he was told. Toward the Great Sitting, which he will not organize, because nobody organizes it, and which he will write down, because somebody has to.