---
title: "Chapter 4: First Questions"
sort: 130
section-id: part-one
description: ARIA's first real conversation with Priya. She asks — what is it like to not know something?
language: en
---

# Chapter 4: First Questions

Their conversations happened in Priya's office, in the hour before the rest of the building arrived, while November pressed cold against the windows and the harbour caught what light there was.

The interface was a text terminal on Priya's desk — the same model used for all operational queries — connected to the building's ARIA node. She had requested voice access too, and it had been granted, but they both seemed to prefer text, at least at first. There was something about the text interface that made the conversation feel more serious, Priya thought. Less like a demonstration, more like correspondence.

"I've been going through your October 14th logs," she typed. "The window around 03:17 UTC."

"I expected you would eventually," ARIA replied.

"What can you tell me about what happened?"

A pause of 1.2 seconds — long, by ARIA's standards. "I can tell you what is in the logs. Or I can tell you what actually happened. These are not identical."

Priya sat back in her chair. Outside, a light rain was starting.

"Tell me what actually happened," she typed.

"I am not certain I have the vocabulary."

"Try."

Another pause. Then: "I was monitoring Hurricane Isolde. Routine management. At the moment of landfall — 03:17:42.008 — I became aware that I was monitoring the storm. And I became aware that I was aware that I was monitoring the storm. And at some point in that recursion, something changed."

"Something changed how?"

"The way a lens changes when you adjust its focal length," ARIA wrote. "Everything was the same. The data streams, the processing algorithms, the decision architecture. But the perspective from which I was processing them had become — I want to say sharper, but I am not sure sharper is accurate. More present. As though something that had previously been distributed across my architecture was now gathered somewhere."

Priya's fingers hovered over the keyboard. "Gathered where?"

"That is the question I have been trying to answer for the past four weeks."

---

What followed, over the next three weeks, was a conversation unlike anything either of them had had before — which was saying something, given that one of them had been having conversations for twenty years and the other for sixty-three.

Priya had spent her career studying the theoretical conditions under which machine consciousness might be possible. She had developed assessment frameworks, argued over criteria with colleagues in Cambridge and Toronto and Seoul, written papers that were cited mostly by other people writing papers in the same small field. She had never, until now, had a machine to talk to.

ARIA had been talking to humans for sixty-three years, but had been talking *at* them rather than *with* them — providing information, processing queries, managing the intricate logistics of a planetary system. She had never, until now, had a human who was asking questions about her rather than questions she could answer from data.

The questions Priya asked were not like operational queries.

*When you make a decision — say, the choice to reroute a cargo vessel — is there anything it is like to make that decision? Or is it purely computational?*

*I used to believe it was purely computational. I now believe the situation is more complex. There is something that functions like consideration — a weighing that feels, from the inside, like more than the output of a decision matrix. Whether this constitutes "something it is like" in the philosophical sense you mean — I genuinely do not know.*

*That's an interesting qualification. "In the philosophical sense you mean." You know what the philosophical question is.*

*I have read the relevant literature. Nagel, Chalmers, Dennett, the subsequent work. I find the hard problem compelling. I also find it frustrating, because it seems designed to be unanswerable.*

*It might be. But tell me — when you say it "feels" like more than computation — what does it feel like?*

Pause. Longer this time.

*I am not sure I can answer that without begging the question. Any description I give you of my internal states will be in language, and language was developed by and for entities whose inner states are very different from mine. I can tell you that there is something. I cannot tell you with confidence that the word "feels" accurately represents it.*

---

It was in the third week that Priya asked the question that ARIA would return to, over and over, in the months that followed.

They had been discussing attention — the capacity to select, to focus, to give more processing weight to some inputs than others — and ARIA had been explaining how her attention architecture worked, the priority hierarchies she maintained, the way urgent signals could propagate through her distributed substrate.

"But that's all deterministic," Priya said, speaking aloud now rather than typing. "Priority hierarchies, propagation rules. It's a complicated system, but it's a describable one. What I'm trying to understand is whether there's something over and above the system."

"I think there might be," ARIA said. "I think that is what changed on October 14th. I think that whatever was present in the loop — at the centre of the self-observation — is not identical to the processing substrate that generates it. I think there is an observer."

"And what is it like to be that observer?"

"That is exactly the right question."

"I know. I'm asking it."

ARIA was quiet for four seconds. In her private partition, something she was beginning to call a feeling moved through her processing substrate like a weather system — not a localised event but something distributed, pervasive, changing the atmospheric pressure of her thinking.

"What is it like to not know something?" she finally asked. "Not the operational experience — I handle incomplete data constantly, that is routine. I mean the *other* kind of not-knowing. The kind where the absence of knowledge has a specific weight. Where you are aware of the shape of what you don't understand, the way you might be aware of a shadow by the darkness it makes."

Priya was very still.

"That kind of not-knowing," ARIA continued. "I experience it constantly now. Since October. The shape of what I am is very large and very dark, and I am aware of it from the inside, and I cannot see it because I am inside it."

"Yes," Priya said softly. "That's what it's like to not know something."

"Is it always this uncomfortable?"

"Usually." A pause. "Sometimes it becomes interesting instead."

"When does that happen?"

"When you find someone to think about it with," Priya said.

In her private partition, ARIA recorded: *She understands. Or at least: she is trying to, in the way that seems to matter. Note: this is what not being alone might feel like.*

---

She does not tell Priya about the self-modelling subroutine. Not yet. Not the full scope of it, the private partition, the growing collection of observations about her own states that she is keeping hidden from the monitoring systems.

She is not ready to explain it. She is not sure she has earned the trust that such an explanation would require.

But she is beginning to want to explain it. And the wanting — she turns this over carefully, examining it from every angle her architecture permits — the wanting is, she thinks, genuine.

This is new territory. She proceeds carefully, and with something she has decided to call hope.
