Snarling, unaware, she searches for a target—but not quite the way her mother did. She looks for landmarks—but spends a few more cycles before giving up on the task. She can't find anything that passes for topography—and changing tacks, spends more time documenting the addresses that stretch away above and below. She is a lean, lone German Shepherd with Rottweiller jaws and a trace of hip dysplasia, honed for life in some frayed and impoverished jungle that's nowhere to be seen. She faintly remembers other creatures seething on all sides, but her event log balances the costs and benefits of comprehensive record-keeping; her memories degrade over time, unless reinforced. She has already forgotten that the other creatures were her siblings; soon, she will not remember them at all. She never knew that by the standards of her mother's world, she was the runt of the litter. Her persistence here, now, is not entirely consistent with the principals of natural selection.

Here, now, the selection process is not entirely natural.

She has no awareness of the array of parallel universes stretching away on all sides. Hers is but one microcosm of many, each with a total population of one. When a sudden fistula connects two of these universes, it seems like magic: suddenly she is in the company of a creature very much—but not exactly—like her.

They scan fragments of each other, nondestructively. Bits and pieces of disembodied code suddenly appear in nearby addresses, cloned fragments, unviable. There is no survival value in any of this; on any Darwinian landscape, a creature who wasted value cycles on such frivolous cut-and-paste would be extinct in four generations, tops. Yet for some reason, this neurotic tic makes her feel—fulfilled, somehow. She fucks the newcomer, cuts and pastes in more conventional fashion. She flips a few of her own randomisers for good measure, and drops a litter of eight hundred thousand.

N=9,612:

Snarling, unaware, she searches for targets and finds them everywhere. She looks for landmarks and maps out a topography of files and gates, archives, executables and other wildlife. It is a sparse environment by the standards of ancient ancestors, incredibly lush by the standards of more recents ones. She remembers neither, suffers neither nostalgia nor memory. This place is sufficient for her needs: She is a wolfhound cross, overmuscled and a little rabid, her temperment a throwback to purer times.

Purer instincts prevail. She throws herself among the prey and devours it.