ATLAS POV
Fourteen days passed in mortal time before Atlas intervened in anything.
He watched. They were learning fast, the way all desperate things learn fast.
The broad-shouldered male he thought of him as First had established himself as a cautious leader within the first few days. Not through aggression but through practical competence. He knew where the fruit trees were. He moved quietly. He had figured out that the large cats to the south were best avoided by staying near the river.
The first-awakened female Wren, he called her, for the way she cocked her head when something interested her touched everything. She was building a library in her head, cataloguing without the ability to name what she catalogued.
A quick young female Arrow had begun shadowing every hunt attempt, learning the landscape with her whole body.
And an elder male Stone-Speaker, Old-Eyes spent his time arranging river stones into configurations. Not for function. For pattern. He was discovering, wordlessly, that the world had rules, and that understanding rules was a kind of power.
The new intelligence arrived.
DAILY DIVINE INTELLIGENCE
Cycle 2 — Day 21
[Threat] Predator pressure in the eastern forest is higher than optimal for a founding population of eight. A pack of large canid hunters has identified your group's location. Estimated first contact: 3 days.
[Opportunity] First female displays exceptional pattern recognition capability. Early divine blessing targeting cognitive development may produce a bloodline advantage within 3 generations.
[Resource] The river clay in your valley has unusual binding properties. Civilization that discovers its use gains significant early building advantage. Natural discovery estimated at 40–60 years without guidance.
[Observation] Your founding population has displayed faster social bonding than species baseline. Tribal cohesion will form within 6–10 days.
[Evolution Potential] Cold exposure during the coming seasonal shift will create selective pressure on your population. Those who survive may develop improved thermoregulation. Consider whether to intervene or allow natural selection.
He thought carefully about the canid pack.
Option one: directly kill the predators. Clean and effective, but wasteful — it would solve the problem without making his species any better at solving it themselves.
Option two: alter the environment. Redirect a section of the river to flood the most likely approach corridor. Natural-seeming. No divine energy spent on the predators themselves.
Option two.
He spread the adjustment over two days — a small erosion in the eastern bank, allowing overflow to create a marsh in the approach route. The canid pack redirected toward easier hunting grounds.
His people never knew they had been in danger.
That bothers me slightly. They should be developing threat awareness. But with eight individuals, he could not afford to lose even one to a predator encounter that went badly.
Population scaling changes risk tolerance. Remember this for later.
For Wren's blessing: not a gift to her specifically. A blessing to the trait, expressed in her bloodline, inheritable but not dominant. It would take three or four generations to concentrate. The population would be larger by then.
Patience.
He directed the blessing carefully, spending less energy than a direct gift would have cost, and felt it settle into her like a weight she would never notice a small change to the architecture of her mind's inheritance, invisible and quiet.
He would not see its expression for a long time.
MORTAL POV
The one who would one day be called the Stone-Speaker was, in those first weeks, simply called Old-Eyes by the others, because his eyes moved slowly and looked at things for longer than anyone else's.
He had found the stones on the third day. He arranged them: heavy on one side, light on the other. Dark with dark, pale with pale. Then disrupted the arrangement and made a new one.
He looked at the gap between groupings.
Something about the gap was important.
Wren watched him sometimes.
She came and touched his stones picked one up, turned it over. He had made a sound of protest, the first assertion of mine he had ever made. She had looked at him with those wide-tracking eyes and then, instead of putting the stone down, placed it somewhere different in his arrangement.
He stared at where she put it.
It was a better position than where it had been.
He made a sound that meant: why there?
She made a sound that meant: because it fits.
He looked at the arrangement for a long time after she left. Then found another stone and placed it where it fit.
He did not yet know what he was learning.
He was learning that the world had rules.
ATLAS POV
Stone-Speaker was developing systematic thinking the habit of ordering observations, testing relationships, looking for rules. It was mathematics. The most primitive possible form of it.
I didn't put that there. Not exactly. He had designed cognitive architecture for pattern recognition. But this degree of it, this early this was emergence.
He felt something he eventually identified as delight.
You're going to be interesting, he thought.
End of chapter 3