These traps began to form connections with each other, using them at first just to share their judgments, to sway each other's decisions. If the trap for the image of a lion was triggered, then the traps for its linear name, for the kind of sounds other lions had been heard to make, for common features seen in their behavior (licking cubs, pursuing antelope) all became hypersensitive. Sometimes the incoming data triggered a whole cluster of linked traps all at once, strengthening their mutual connections, but sometimes there was time for overeager associate traps to start firing prematurely. The lion shape has been recognized-and though the word "lion" has not yet been detected, the "lion" word-trap is tentatively firing… and so are the traps for cub-licking and antelope-chasing.

The orphan had begun to anticipate, to hold expectations.

By the thousandth iteration, the connections between the traps had developed into an elaborate network in its own right, and new structures had arisen in this network—symbols which could be triggered by each other as easily as by any data from the input channels. The lion image-trap, on its own, had merely been a template held up to the world to be declared a match or a mismatch a verdict without implications. The lion symbol could encode an unlimited web of implications—and that web could be tapped at any time, whether or not a lion was visible.

Mere recognition was giving way to the first faint hints of meaning.

The infrastructure fields had built the orphan standard output channels for linear and gestalt, but as yet the matching navigator, needed to address outgoing data to some specific destination in Konishi or beyond, remained inactive. By the two-thousandth iteration, symbols began to jostle for access to the output channels, regardless. They used their traps' templates to parrot the sound or image which each had learned to recognize—and it didn't matter if they uttered the linear words "lion," "cub," "antelope" into a void, because the input and output channels were wired together, on the inside.