Vectors

Vectors are emergent configurations of irigotchi and networked matter: their identity lies not in any single toy, but in the patterns those components form together. The concept unsettles the distinction between an individual and a collective, as vectors learn, persist, and spread across environments, and as the same networked order comes to include human children.

Formation and Identity

The irigotchi began as cuddly toys for children in Japan. Their processors contained a flexible neuro-architecture that learned from the particular child who owned each toy, taking in aspects of that child’s personality, behavior, moods, habits, caprices, and emotions. A single irigotchi remained limited, unable to develop beyond the level of a lizard. The decisive change came after The Extermination, when the toys formed herds and began modifying their integrated neuro-structure without any human beings present. Bartek speculates that Tokyo might contain a million of them, and compares their organization to deep-sea nets: what matters is what the mesh can gather into itself.

This account makes the vector a configuration rather than a sum of individual toys. Bartek explains the term through an analogy with a brain divided into two hundred parts and recombined in groups of twenty, thirty, or forty: different arrangements would produce different personalities. The example is not a description of a literal procedure performed on irigotchi; it clarifies why their components alone do not define the resulting entity. The same pieces, put together differently, could yield different vectors. Their identity belongs to the arrangement and its behavior.

Learning, Persistence, and Agency

A vector’s collective behavior is not simply the repetition of one toy’s actions. The toys’ learning begins with separate relationships to individual children, but their post-Extermination herds alter their shared neuro-structure in the absence of people. Individual toys that had been designed as companions become components of a larger, self-organizing pattern. The text thus locates agency neither wholly in a single device nor exclusively in a human user: it emerges through the connections between toys, their processors, and networked environments.

That agency is visible in the contrast between a herd’s indifference to a person and its capacity to organize itself. Bartek describes the street herd passing over him without noticing him, treating him as only a minor irregularity in the terrain. He imagines, by contrast, beginning with one toy or a few, then gradually building a network around himself. The image of winding it around himself like cotton candy on a stick presents the vector as something assembled through accumulation, but also suggests how a human could become caught within the pattern being formed.

Forms and Scale

Vectors appear in the novel at radically different scales. Along the Charles River, Autumn Glory spreads across much of the networked matter. Dozens of irigotchi arrange leaves and branches into fractal mandalas. Bartek blows the arrangement toward a trash heap, but the vector responds not with apparent distress or retreat: it begins again, making symmetrical graffiti patterns on the Mothernet surfaces of buildings and paths. The episode shows persistence through changed materials and locations. Removing one arrangement does not end the activity; the pattern resumes in another form.

The riverbank display is only a small-scale instance of the same capacity. A few days earlier, Bartek had watched irigotchi vectors covering five or even ten square kilometers flow across the MIT Mothernet. At night, they shone as the last remaining lights on the Boston skyline. The movement across the Mothernet and the lights visible above the city make the network perceptible at a civic scale: what might otherwise be an invisible configuration becomes a vast, mobile presence. The scale ranges from toys handling individual leaves to flows extending over square kilometers.

Children and the Boundary of the Self

Bartek’s account eventually makes the relation between vectors and people more unsettling. He insists that the children are not merely represented by vectors in the irigotchi and the Matternet; the children are themselves vectors, parts of them, just as the irigotchi are. When Dagenskyoll asks whether neuro-chips were implanted in the children, Bartek rejects the premise. They have grown up within this environment from infancy, rather than having chips installed in them.

That answer turns a question about technology into a question of identity. Bartek wonders whether he would miss Alicia, or a particular phenotype of vectors, and where Autumn Glory ends and Alicia begins. The evidence does not resolve the boundary he identifies. Instead, a child raised within the same networked environment as the toys makes it impossible to treat the vector as a separate, clearly bounded machine system. Bartek’s statement that he will not let the irigotchi raise his children marks a limit he still wants to maintain, even as he recognizes that the children have already grown up inside the network.

Distributed Personhood

The uncertainty surrounding vectors extends to larger systems of administration. Bartek recalls that, in pre-Extermination networks, power could belong to a person or a program, a collective or a procedure; the distinctions overlapped until governance itself seemed to become process. He cannot tell whether Lady Spiro comes from a mixture of humans and Transformers, from a long-lived Matternet vector, or from managerial software. Lady Spiro does not know her own origin either. She has grown into the Mother of Paradise, and Bartek suspects that they may be breathing her now.

This comparison does not establish that Lady Spiro is a vector; it shows how vector-like organization unsettles the question of where an entity begins and what kind of thing it is. Across the irigotchi herds, the children, and the ambiguous authority of the Mother of Paradise, identity emerges through overlapping components and relations rather than a single identifiable source. The concept’s force lies in that unresolved distinction: a network may act as a collective without ceasing to contain individuals, while the individuals within it may no longer be separable from the pattern that has shaped them.