The navigator instantly abandoned trial and error and went into a spasm of repetition, summoning the same frozen image of the lion again and again. This continued until even the crudest of its embryonic change discriminators finally stopped firing, and it drifted back toward experimentation.

Gradually, a half-sensible compromise evolved between the orphan's two kinds of proto-curiosity: the drive to seek out novelty, and the drive to seek out recurring patterns. It browsed the library, learning how to bring in streams of connected information-sequential images of recorded motion, and then more abstract chains of cross-references-understanding nothing, but wired to reinforce its own behavior when it struck the right balance between coherence and change.

Images and sounds, symbols and equations, flooded through the orphan's classifying networks, leaving behind, not the fine details—not the spacesuited figure standing on gray-and-white rock against a pitch black sky; not the calm, naked figure disintegrating beneath a gray swarm of nanomachines—but an imprint of the simplest regularities, the most common associations. The networks discovered the circle/sphere: in images of the sun and planets, in iris and pupil, in fallen fruit, in a thousand different artworks, artifacts, and mathematical diagrams. They discovered the linear word for "person," and bound it tentatively both to the regularities which defined the gestalt icon for "citizen," and to the features they found in common among the many images of fleshers and gleisner robots.

By the five-hundredth iteration, the categories extracted from the library's data had given rise to a horde of tiny sub-systems in the input-classifying networks: ten thousand word-traps and image-traps, all poised and waiting to be sprung; ten thousand pattern-recognizing monomaniacs staring into the information stream, constantly alert for their own special targets.