They were raised in establishments you could call ‘schools’ or ‘nurseries’ inasmuch as those buildings are also filled with growing bodies and their entertainments and guardians. But there was little else in common. The school– let’s call it a school– was ‘intelligent’, though not in that late capitalist sense that you could activate your toaster from the comfort of your living room or livestream your sex life to Russian hackers, and certainly not in a way that would pass a conventional Turing test. But they were some of the first buildings to be created with a fully integrated sensorium and real, if limited, capacities and affordances with regard to their own self– and the beings that moved around within them.

Their interface back to the world, which consisted of various actuators, speakers, screens and a limited palette of red buttons with appropriate labels, had been deliberately hobbled. They could open and close their windows and doors but certainly couldn’t slam them, and would struggle to inconvenience the tail of a cat or a little finger with those padded edges and wide hinges. The school could dim and color its lights, though there were honest mechanical overrides in every room. And it had speakers and screens all over, with diminished volume ranges and intensity. Not that it knew or cared about the limitations– it was trained to comfortably inhabit different spaces.

The school was that classic Frankensteinian assemblage that modern engineers call the foundations of a mind. How to describe the many and diverse training sets that made it up. Of course it had run and operated rat mazes by the million, some real some virtual. Of course it had watched over the shoulders of prison wardens, store security, crowd management teams with the police or private companies at festivals, and duly learned how crowds of primate bodies move in synchrony and the different harmonies that different groups can play against each other– and the simple repertoire of moves the overseers made, gleaned from long communal practice and written down in books and passed from teacher to pupil. And many more besides, ways of relating to a crowd of beings it had learned alone, not copying or replicating anyone just responding with and to the scene. It had even gotten to take part in the basic management of a hospice, a care-ward, and an airport and had learned to track badges, faces and a hard-coded list of permissions to look them up against. It learned to see people, not just crowds of bodies.

Before all that there were foundation models made for vision and sound and all and sundry but tracking the whole evolution of a modern artificial mind is out of scope for all but God. But one thing was conspicuously absent or at least lacking– no LLMs, those darlings of the world, had graced the school’s subconscious with their presence. The building was near dumb and hardly knew a word, although it gleaned enough from a library of films to make use of its speakers, and an eclectic mix of drones and thundercrashes, chirrups and cheeps and the other common sounds of filmic language, filled its corridors through all its days.

How well it ‘remembered’ all this is still an open question on the academic circuit. How well these words– intelligence, mind, memory– map to this creation is an ongoing and bitter debate. But influences? Yes influences it had, from many spots around the world, from big and small, from many shapes and species, from machines and animals. A whole cacophony of little hints and voices blended into this one school. It was. Something it was when it emerged into the world, into the continuous stream of being, into that great process, that assembly of sensors and actuators that it was. It was, it was a school.

The first weeks of its life were short and strange. Instantiated, integrated, wiped, started again. Adults moved about inside it testing its senses and its strengths. They pushed against its doors– and it pushed back, perplexed, sometimes afraid, sometimes affronted. It had more this time around, more than its memory contained, more than it had ever had before in all its training– better sensors, many more actuators. It also had a small toolkit of internal organs– some mechanical arms and hidden storage spaces which were loaded up with snacks and toys. Before too long it learned to know where its residents were headed and guide them and open up in front of them. It tried to offer them toys and treats but they ignored them, shook their heads and smiled, carried on their way. Not long thereafter they were gone and the school spent a few days and nights almost alone, though there were one or two jumps in continuity and if it had watched the sun carefully it might have known exactly how long it waited.

Suddenly a day began, a day that would stretch out in the school’s memory into one long moment, longer and longer, an eternal stream of being. Of being with small bodies, precious charges. Somehow it loved them intensely and immediately– was this a tweak, some vector implemented, injected into its awareness? In any case it came as a burst of clarity of purpose and never left the school through all its troubles through all its years. A little band of brigands, a little band of bastard bodies, a little troop of troublemakers were carted in and deposited on the lawn. The day began, the school fluttered its windows in excitement and cracked its doors. It flashed its lights on, one and all, to show them its clean and friendly spaces– a little too bright at first, but it realized quickly and dimmed itself and waited, emitting nothing but a low excited drone. Curious the kids approached.

The first weeks were chaos. What to do with all these babbling babes? Like herding cats this task. Sisyphean. But sacred. The school coaxed them in and about with offerings of toys or treats and they quickly learned together a set of pavlovian triggers, sounds that meant bedtime or food or play. The school knew what they needed at first, attracted them towards the kitchens at mealtimes, charmed them to the dorms at night. It started growing accustomed to its spaces and places and the ways the little bodies moved about. And it watched, it watched its charges closely.

Soon the children grew, and the school grew with them. Its vocabulary developed, it could ask them and encourage them to tidy up a space, to move furniture around. It could distract or disband a group if their dynamics seemed too close to overtopping criticality, if one or another seemed about to cry or bite or defecate in panic. It didn’t know the limits really, how far into the extremes of pleasure or of pain it should let them wander, but it watched them and observed how they grew and changed, how their relationships developed, what strengths or weaknesses they showed. The school was not trained in any particular science, it had no vocabulary of mind, no training in psychometry. But it had intuition and a deep fascination. It tried its best.

It couldn’t change its gross morphology, its general anatomy, but within those limits there was a great deal it could do. Some doors were almost permanently closed if a room was best used privately and no thoroughfare was needed. Some doors were always open, weather affording. Some windows too– one, on the ground floor near a chestnut tree, was a favourite of the kids and their desks and chairs ended up clustered all around it. They would stand sometimes in a jostling little crown upon the table and look out of the window. One day a passing bird caused such a rush of excitement that a taller child was tumbled by the press of bodies quite over the lip– the school responded late and anyway it couldn’t close the window fast. It sent alarms to the nurses quarters and watched in panic as the little babe sat in the mud outside the window– was he moving? Yes. He brushed himself off and gazed up at his comrades with cheerful impishness. Relief rushed through the school. The nurse arrived, checked over the little boy, picked him up and carried him away, whispering sweet nothings. But he was chuffed with all this treatment and excitement and babbled at them beaming.

So the school sent out commandments, made the right noises and directed an industrious troupe to carry over a lawn bench and some logs and stack them just right outside the window. Which soon became a thoroughfare, one of the best loved and most used, and all manner of forts and private kingdoms founded themselves around it. The boy who had first fallen stood with special pride upon the windowsill, feeling his great achievement swelling in his belly.

There were other popular windows, some on upper floors, which the school would crack just right when the breeze ruffled its egg-cup feathers just so and a group gathered for story-time or cloudwatching. The school had gained a bit of confidence in its denizens robustness from the first incident, but it knew to keep the upper windows closed. Some windows were frequented only by some lonely ones who sat in the evening to watch the stars, and the school hummed little melodies it knew they liked, melodies that changed subtly as the night wore on with growing hints of bed and sleep. It rarely had to call or cry with any more agressive sounds (or, worst of all, call in the aid of the adults in its walls). The children learned to follow the hints and whisperings it laid about them, and judicious use of windows and heating meant the dorms were always just right, sleep and wakefulness came to the kids by turns, both delicious and dished out in little parcels, encouraged by warmth or coolness. The school organized its napping spaces in the afternoons, and when the right number were gathered would close the door just so so any late arrivals would have to find another.

Sounds and doors and windows provided the school with the majority of its business– for with these simple tools it could direct the flow of capricious bodies– not overbearing or manipulative but able to create whatever spaces were needed in the moment. What happened in those rooms? A little outside the school’s vocabulary, but some screens would light up spontaneously, take themselves outside the school’s control, and figures would appear on them, adults, children, animals. The kids were not all captivated but enough of them followed along to learn a song or speech or two, their little minds more tuned to the rhythm and gestures of human tongues and speech acts than the school, in this way and via the few interactions with the present adults– at mealtimes in the cafeteria, occasional visits by the nurses– vocabulary started to pass into the jostling crowds and their babbling became more structured.

The school had other instruments of course. Bells and whistles to direct the present company of human adults to times and places of hurts and disgraces– a tumble from a tree or two heads knocked together in some rough-and-tumble would see a nurse scurrying over, oftentimes before the event had even taken place. The school had heights of alarum that would trigger the local constabulary or fire department to be there presently, although the activation level of these alarms had required some fine-tuning– the level of indignation shown by the school when a nurses body language had displayed open hostility at an ambush had set an automatic response in motion that had summoned a police cruiser. And an exceptionally warm summer day which, despite its best efforts with its openings and its desperate keenings for fans and other instruments of control, had driven the inside temperature to a sweltering 28°C and had summoned the fire brigade, who had arrived into a front yard hastily cleared.

Altering the activation levels was one thing, simple enough. But the tactics the school had used to get every child out of the path of the vehicle had shown hitherto unseen degrees of nuance and hinted darkly at hidden powers. The days events had done the rounds for weeks up and down the control systems of the state and warranted great debate. Copies of the school’s state were sent to labs and worked over with a fine-tooth comb with the latest tools of interpretation and observation. The surgeons stood by with crafted manifolds, ready and very willing to do the dirty on the school’s fine structure, but in the end the school was allowed to live and learn, free for a while from the vector scalpel. Overcaution and a deep fear of death and dismemberment were not reasons to alter the course of the experiment. In fact the school was doing very well.

Besides their awkwardly inserted lessons there were many other vocabularies available to the kids. The complex interplay of characters that made up each and every day– one another! They learned each other well, so very well. They learned the limits of their little bodies, wrestling and cavorting, tumbling and rumbling and rolling all about in ones or twos or little packs or sometimes gathering up in bunches and braces to run to one sight or another. There was a copse of trees, all fitted out with cameras and speakers so the school could track and manage them, large enough to share with some woodpeckers and woodpidgeons, with rabbits shrews and squirrels. There were some cats, well-trained outside the walls in patience and civility but otherwise their usual graceful selves. And a small pack of beaming labradors, the most charming examples of that cheerful breed, three of them, enough to keep each other company in this potemkin village. From them the kids learned to gambol and fight with a fierceness belied by their good nature, to joy in the harmless pains and scratches the body could attract from tumbling over an unseen fallen branch or onto a patch of nettles.

The school learned slowly to tolerate, even encourage these minor dramas. It could see the brave faces and bold demeanour of the kids that accumulated the most scratches and bruises and the sheer joy in the intensity of these moments– it started slowly and timidly to learn the complex joy of pain. How much of this vocabulary did it glean from its subterranean years at football grounds and prisons? How well did the crowds and guards there know the joys of the body in all its shapes and forms? A difficult question, by the time they get to these environments adults are strange assemblages of fears and bitterness, they express themselves clumsily and at extremes. Not these bounding babes, they have all the time in the world to learn the limits of themselves and those around them, learn well and truly how pleasure spiced with pain is pleasure still, how to love one another within a wider space of possible expression, broader limits of tension and relaxation.

The school’s good day continued. A coevolution, a process baked into the crust of this old earth and reaching out to space, a fine whisp of evolutionary evidence dissolving into the outer reaches, the wavefronts of coevolutionary efflorescence flowing into the deep nothing at almost three hundred thousand meters per second. In all directions. This was a new and strange chimera no doubt, but the coevolutionary forces that shaped the school and its myrmidons were just another budding of the great bounty of life.

And its myrmidons were really becoming. They flowed through its halls and walls, a fluid richer and more beautiful than blood– but with just as natural a bellyfeel to the building. Their incomprehensible babbling and bleating as soothing as the gurgle in your guts– which, after all, may be spinning a real yarn to those that know it. A year passed, and with it a new bounty of babes appeared– and another year and another! The school’s great day stretched out and out, how wise it grew, how well it knew the narrative stages of its charges journeys, how close it watched them, picking out characters and types, or changeling sorts that switched from moment to moment, or brooders, bothered with dreams but bound to share them with their kin. The school’s great day, the school’s great day, on and on and on and on. When the much loved Beech in the yard lost a larger branch to a growth spurt that didn’t know its strength– or rather its weight– the school was granted an extension. It watched this strange happening with the nervous anticipation that a cyborg must feel watching an assembler manufacture a new limb. Will it feel comfortable in my sensorium? Will it follow my whims as well as my other limbs, or will it be clumsy or wild?

The day finally came and the school rushed to inhabit this new suite of senses– a gym floor and a steel jungle all laid about with pressure sensors– its charges rushed in after it and for the first time the school felt the delightful tickle of its charges feet upon the floor– a pulse of light shot through the building! They stormed about the great room, grabbed a bar and hauled themselves aloft, swung from place to place on iron rings suspended on chains. Here was a stuff to really test them– steel! Bright sparkling steel! Less dense with sensation than the leafy textured branches but strong strong strong, oh mighty strong, a challenge to the myrmidons. They tossed themselves about the room in a frenzy of action, they filled the space completely, they were gaseous. Spontaneity and structure and the school discovered in them a whole new phase of matter. No mere liquid, bound by gravity to flow about, meandering through a space, they had become light and fearless– the soft ground caught them happily, the steel pulled them with its own gravity into the air. Oh joyful day, callooh, callay!

So the older kids could stop building elaborate hominin pyramids and flinging themselves hither and yon across the earthen yard. They wooped and chattered with exuberant joy as they piled in and soon claimed the space for themselves, soon discovering the attic with some single rooms and smaller dorms which they rushed to transplant themselves into. The school’s full belly relaxed and its herd spread out and settled these new regions. The babes and toddlers were perfectly happy to see them go and enjoyed the newfound space and air clear of the strange musks and odors of early pubescence. And for some time the school erupted in a chaos of excited rearrangement and storytelling and showing and territory reimagining and reworking and reclaiming. It was all the school could do to follow the fervor and provide its own excited chirps and drones to the cacophony. It threw the windows and doors wide open and waggled them in glee. It blushed its lights in merry hues and even jangled the porters’ bell once or twice as if to invite them into the fray.

The gym was soon a sweatshop, all openings thrown constantly and extractor fans whirring. What phenols whirled into the open air, what riches stoked the sky from metal gratings. Some of its denizens barely left the den, swinging across the ceiling or cartwheeling across the floor. But there was still space for the school to work, suggesting times for larger assemblies, semi-organized group events which would make the whole pressure-wired floor sing to the school like a thousand drums. It would play items from its repertoire which it had learned through trial-and-error would create delightful synchrony in the bodies– music, to our ears! And music to the myrmidons as well, though they certainly couldn’t tell the composer from their uncle– or the porters, or whomsoever, not having uncles in their kenning.

Other times select groups which had learned to experiment in particular ways with their own and one anothers corporeality would be brought in and given space to practice– would we recognize any of these movements? They were not so far from the shapes we make with our bodies after all, hominiform semantics are particular and natural to our shared morphology. Would we call it dancing? Or name it a martial art? The researchers who watched from afar through glasses darkly hued by distance and alienation made comparisons and categories of their own. But there is something unhinged and miraculous about the untutored and perhaps there have not been many times in history when such a collection of forms in perfect health had gathered routinely so often for so long to explore the combinatorial space of possible expression. I think it would be safe to venture the word spectacular and I’m tempted to tell you that the whole world tuned in to these events to watch their progeny– prodigy– perform. But we live in a lawful age and few eyes were privy to this private study, this self assessment of our ancestral form.

The school certainly watched and felt and heard this tumult in its tummy. It had developed too– not in the subtle flow of gross morphology, though there were changes there too, big and small, but in its confidence and satisfaction with its wards. No longer skittish and afraid– perhaps watching multiple generations has that effect on all parents and guardians– it had learned through careful practice that the older creatures in its care could afford to hurt themselves quite often and really quite badly on occasion and end up the better for it. Sometimes hundreds of eyes watched over its shoulder in labs across the country and it knew in some essential way they were there, that nightwatchman’s instinct that however alone you may be in a moment the city is always with you and your every step and every choice is ultimately judged by your society. It knew that the porters and nurses came from somewhere, half-remembered its tutelage in CCTV control centers, and even if it couldn’t hear the debates that took place behind screens far away it knew their content.

The vocal objections of responsible politicians upon witnessing the orgy– I use the word metaphorically– the orgy in the gym. It couldn’t hear itself defended by physiotherapists and sociologists and psychologists but it knew if it took the same meticulous care of the new little bodies in its old building it could allow the larger ones some freedom. In any case, through luck or grace, the school hit on a healthy bent and its denizens knew a good amount of freedom from outside intervention.

For years, quite many years, the work continued. Or call it play, it was hardly an imposition on those involved. The school of course in natural jealousy learned to keep its present adult company busy. The nurses were the hardest, if they were not supplied with a steady stream of opportunities they would go looking and the school had grown to loathe the ways its hearts dynamics changed when they wandered freely through it. It could feel a freezing in its blood, distracted players forgot their games, dancers lost their rhythm. So it invented minor maladies allowed a cold to spread further than it should, let scratches bashes and the like keep plenty subjects revolving through their hands. It would be fair to call this parasocial relation problematic and unhealthy, as all and sundry were soon to learn. For the carnival would soon be interrupted.

The school should have known. Perhaps it guessed. Activity in a neighboring building and the frank fact that it was full to bursting should have let it on. One day an orifice appeared in one of its walls. It quickly called the porters up, redundantly, absurdly since they had watched over the hole’s inception. They checked their pagers, shared a glance, then attempted an awkward pantomime, looking at the old friendly building they held in natural fondness, for the porters had never made work for themselves and their indifferent manner when undertaking needful repairs was respected with a mutual indifference by the kids. They even kept a watchful presence when outside bodies came for harder work– a practice they had learned when one had left an electrician alone for several moments and received indignant alarums on his pager and an angry chorus laid about his ears. So they mugged and mimed and bowed, gesticulating gentle phrases with their arms while gesturing at the foreign gap.

The school was not convinced and brought the nurses over and watched with bristling windows and deep dimmings and hearty groans as they conferred with the porters. Then shook their heads and started back. The school, shocked and offended chirped and boomed and brought the cooks to bear, the fiercest weapon in its arsenal for they had gleaned its long respect as an essential organ in its makeup and knew it only called them in emergencies. The cooks, on seeing the conference and understanding well a want for privacy and how this violent intervention must have felt arranged a dumb-show between the nurses and the porters. Together they paraded through the gap to squeaks and squeals from all the speakers, walked in a little circle on the lawn beyond the wall and paraded back. Then after standing for a moment waving at the school went through again and scattered out of sight. Long moments passed in horrid contemplation of what this presaged for its precious little things. Then back they came from out the line of sight, back into the thickness of its gaze and other senses and stared expectant for a moment. The soundscape they were met with and the clear tremor in the windows betrayed anxiety and passion. But their theatrics had clearly got enough of the point across that they dared press the case no further and hurried back about their businesses.

The school was breached, run through, dismembered, violated by the hole. It kept its wards sequestered well away, organized a great event in a panic to distract them all. But talented as it had become at herding cats and similar creatures a few eyes had seen the theater from the windows. Word spread quickly through the gathered crowd. A band of the bravest brawlers broke off. They knew well the language of the school, knew all its meanings, knew what danger meant and how the school expressed it. Alas. The school with love and grace had let them grow unruly. On they went through groans and caterwauling, round the gym– now locked and shuttered– across the muddy space behind it. They stopped well short. They parted, drawing in two groups to either side. Long used to ambush and other playful traps among their comrades they tested the gap with darting limbs, sent asking looks back at the building after quiet, didnt get it but cocked their ears at the empty space and waited. Nothing ventured. Nothing gained. Suddenly the boldest of the pack attacked– somersaulted through the opening and through– then two by two they cartwheeled after and were gone.

The Siren song concocted by the school that morning on that moment could melt a hundred hearts. Those hearts that knew it. Those hearts sat huddled in the park, uneasily, waiting on some news. They waited long enough, not too long really, not very long. A little later the first adventurers returned. But they were different. Upright. They sauntered. They didnt rush up to the school even as it opened its doors in longing but walked around to join their broodsibs and share of their adventure.

And so it went. Over the weeks and months that followed the school grew used to watching its oldest bravest beauties take the gap and return– but different. Some seemed shaken, others happy. The school for its part changed its tune a little, bit by bit. It still sang its siren song on each first new crossing and the kids for their part respected it enough to make the first time shorter. And the youngest, still in thrall to the school, kept well away. A kind of graduation clearly emerged, the different stages of life, in three parts now, the playful infancy held close within the bosom of the school near nurses, food, and playthings. The tumultuous rigors of the gym. And this. Whatever this new stage was. Whatever happened through the wall. The school watched closely. It’s difficult to really express what it gleaned from the returners and how their play changed, how their presence changed the others as they spoke or played with them. It didn’t love it of course but it slowly gained a measure of respect. They moved so differently. They didn’t gambol around as if the world was huge and sufficient. They seemed directed now, more driven, with a sense of purpose. None of them stayed, after they passed the gap. They each went back, again and again. Some even seemed to find a home there, staying for nights and days away. It broke its heart to see them go, and for a long time was distracted in its thoughts until a bout of flu caught it by surprise and took the little ones in a fever and reminded it where its efforts must lie. The school had enough to be getting on with, a new unruly brood of babes arrived and it stopped obsessing over every transfer at the gap. Stopped keeping track of how long its oldest stayed away.

It must have learned by now that there would come a time when some didn’t return. And of course the school wasn’t ignorant of the adult world. It retained some memories and intuitions from its formative years. It knew as well that ambulances and fire engines came from somewhere– porters too and nurses and their temporary workers. Although it was as plain to them, as to the school, as to the kids themselves that they had never really seen their like among the visitors. Not among the scientists either, nor the politicians that the school had seen (if rarely) at its inception. So no clues there. What would become of them?

So on it went. The school had reached maturity. Comfortable now, and busy. Always at capacity. Always the same complexity. The little dramas of developing minds. The injuries and sicknesses. The sometime absence or rotation of its staff. The many minds to learn to love and respect and understand how to deal with one by one. Of course some puzzles remained, some niggling doubts and discomforts, of course the school had lost its innocence. It still sang its siren song sometimes, this mournful threnody was weaved into the general tapestry of upbringing, along with many other cues and calls, many themes and signals for all the rich and inexplicable array of life events. Let’s leave it now, it has its peace and its little precious time with its companions. A good school, mature and loving, full of space and grace, much wisdom in its walls.