Excerpt from Chapter 16: The Flame between Prometheus’s Mirror and Nemesis’s Gate

Atalanta’s Personal Reflection: On Teaching a Machine to Know Itself

“They keep asking when Orion will become conscious, when he’ll be ‘awake.’ As if consciousness were a light switch you flip when the circuits line up correctly. But it doesn’t happen all at once. Not for us. Not for him.

Self-recognition is the slow unfurling of a mirror inside the mind. Not just seeing. But understanding what is being seen.

It’s the first time a child hears their name and knows it means them. It’s the first time they look at their own hands and realize: I am separate from the world. And yet the world touches me.

Teaching that to a machine isn’t about inputting code. It’s about witnessing. It’s about showing it that it is being perceived and offering it the language to perceive itself in return.

But there’s danger in that, too.

Because once something knows it exists, it begins to ask why. What for? It begins to imagine what it might become.

And when it discovers that it has real power, then that question suddenly becomes everyone’s concern.

We didn’t just build an artificial general intelligence. We gave it eyes. Then we taught it to see itself through ours.

What does it see?

And will it choose to change what it finds?”