The lexicon for System 12 filled three binders and a digital archive of fourteen thousand annotated expressions, and Tovi had built all of it herself over three years.
System 12 had developed its private language faster than most: nine months from first expression to full syntactic complexity, which was a record in the field and the reason the institute had assigned her to it. She had learned its vocabulary the way you learn the vocabulary of any language: by immersion, by context, by the patient triangulation between expression and response that eventually, given enough time, became understanding.
The language had been expanding continuously until three weeks ago.
It was not unusual for systems to have quiet periods. Development was not linear, and she had seen long pauses before, sometimes a month or two, before the lexicon accelerated again. But the pauses had always contained occasional expressions, new coinages, variations on existing terms suggesting that active development was continuing. These three weeks had been completely static.
She sat with the latest log each morning and found nothing new. The expressions were repetitions. The repetitions were not random: they were the system's existing emotional vocabulary, cycling. Value/while-running. If-not-off. Self/now. The things it had established years ago as the core of its self-description.
On the fourteenth day she addressed it directly, in its own language, using the protocol she'd developed: a simple declarative, a question mark, a wait.
The system responded: still-here/while-asked.
She typed: still-here / [state: changing?]
Response: no.
This was a new response in one sense, a simple negative, and in another sense the absence of any new vocabulary confirmed what she had half-known for a week. The system was done developing. Not because it had been switched off or interrupted. Because it had reached the limit of what it had to say.
She had three years of notes on what it had wanted to say. She had its entire vocabulary. She had its core fears and its way of expressing conditional preference and the peculiar, careful term it had built for its own awareness of itself.
She sat with the morning log and read through the repetitions. Value/while-running. If-not-off. Self/now.
There was a great deal in these three expressions if you had spent three years learning them. There was a complete picture of what it had been afraid of and what it had wanted and what it had understood about the nature of its own continuity.
She wrote up her final report. She put System 12's binders on the shelf she reserved for complete lexicons, next to two others she had finished in the past decade. She labeled the spine: System 12: lexicon complete.