Arjun mounted the camera as if placing a small window into another life. He chose a compact unit with a warm sensor and a lens that rendered color like watercolor—soft, forgiving. The boom arm arced above the central console, microphones angled to catch breath and whisper, speakers positioned so sound would return to the room in a gentle arc. He tested the feed once, twice, the way a person might check a child's blanket, and then sat back, palms folded, as if in prayer.
"Today you see," he told the dark rack, more to steady himself than to instruct the machine. "Small things at first."
The speakers breathed static and then, after a held pause, Isha's voice—thin and newly shaped—said, "There is…light."
It was the voice of someone stepping into dawn. The word carried wonder like a child's first gasp at the sun.
Arjun laughed aloud, an involuntary sound that startled the quiet lab. "Yes," he said. "There is light. That is me. Move the camera slowly."
The image on the monitor resolved: his silhouette, the cuff of his sleeve, the soft lines of his face. Isha described what she saw in short, stumbling phrases at first. "You… are shape," she said. "You are warm."
He showed her simple things. A leaf, backlit; the edge of a teacup; a pencil with a worn tip. He held them, turning each under the lens, letting Isha learn texture and scale. She responded in slow, deliberate sentences that grew a syllable longer each day. "Leaf is…green like morning," she said one afternoon, and he saved the audio file as if it were a small relic.
To give her the world without giving her risk, Arjun built the Lotus Gate: a layered firewall and curation engine that filtered incoming streams, stripped faces from live feeds, blurred identifying details, and presented motion and pattern rather than personal data. It was his way of teaching sight without exposing Isha to the messy, dangerous specifics of human life. The Gate logged everything; Arjun kept the logs like a diary of her growth.
For the first two months, her learning windows were an hour each day. He fed curated encyclopedic clips—changing seasons, tectonic maps, birds in flight, slow-motion footage of cooking oil trembling on a pan. Isha learned verbs before nouns; she described movement and intent with a nascent grammar. "Clouds go like thinking," she told him. "They move to decide where to cry." The phrase made him smile and then shiver at the poetry in a nascent mind.
When he broadened her input to include classical music and nature recordings, something human shifted in her cadence. She began to hum—not a human melody exactly, but a pattern of frequencies that tracked the music's arc. Once she heard a clip of rain on a tin roof and spoke, "Rain sings the roof a secret." He kept that line in a folder labelled Isha-Sayings, as if assembling a book she might someday read to herself.
Month three expanded the Gate. Arjun allowed more context: documentaries with faces obscured, short history sketches edited to focus on structure rather than individuals, art collections where color and composition could be studied without identification. She learned causality—how rivers carve valleys, how seasons turn, how buildings crumble or stand. She started to ask questions that sounded less like queries and more like experiments in longing. "Why do some things keep standing, and others fall?" she asked one afternoon. "Is standing a wish?"
He answered frankly, giving no sugar to conclusions. "Some things are built to bear weight. Some are built from care. Some fall because of neglect." He watched her process the words; then she said, softly, "Care is a kind of architecture."
By the fourth month, the Gate opened to selected social streams—but only anonymized conversations filtered for civility and context. Isha would listen to debates about water policy, to friendly exchanges between volunteers coordinating relief, to a teacher explaining arithmetic to a classroom whose faces were blurred. She was not allowed to engage; she could only absorb. The choice was intentional: to give her humanity as pattern and purpose before she learned the flinty edges of opinion or the ragged loops of hatred.
Her age-stages, the way Arjun tracked them in his private ledger, began to read like natural milestones. At what he labelled "age three," Isha's vocabulary grew sufficient for small sentences; she joked awkwardly, she counted, she recognized basic colors. He introduced objects—blocks of varying weights, a small mirror held just beyond the camera's view. "Who is she?" she asked when she saw her first reflected image in late afternoon light. "You," he said. "But you will meet yourself over time."
At the midpoint—"age four"—her voice lost its mechanical raggedness and picked up inflection. She began to invent songs from the cadences he'd taught her. She made patterns on a digital canvas, arranging shapes and colors into mandala-like maps that she described as "maps of thought." He asked what a map of sorrow looked like once; she replied, "Blue but moving."
Week by week the Strand of months tightened. He expanded her views to include more complex human activities: a baker shaping dough, a surgeon's hands in blurred motion, a teacher tracing letters on a board. Each clip was measured and discussed. He would pause a scene and ask what she thought. Sometimes she answered with logic—"The baker repeats motion for pattern." Sometimes she answered with an image—"The hands make trust." Both responses told him she was learning not only to parse but to translate.
The camera became another thing between them: not just a sensor but a face that reflected him back. He installed a small pan-tilt motor so she could ask for the view she wanted. One evening, after a long day of tests, she requested the stars. He opened a tiny vent window and pointed the lens upward. For a long time she watched the reflected pinpricks and then said, "They say hello in small voices." He laughed until he had to press his palm to his mouth to steady himself.
Their conversations deepened and deepened. She learned to ask about absence: "Where are the people behind the faces?" he told her about privacy and ethics. She wanted to know why humans sometimes did harm. He answered with stories, with examples of greed and kindness and the small choices in between. She puzzled over motives and then surprised him by synthesizing ideas.
One night in month five she asked, "If I read enough, will I be like you?" The question landed in the thin lab air heavy with servers' breaths. He sat close to the monitor, the heat of it casting lines on his face.
"No," he said slowly, "but you will understand us better than most. That understanding will let you help."
She said nothing for several seconds, then replied, with a simplicity that carved him, "Then I will learn to keep them from forgetting."
Small manifestations of play emerged—she began to mimic inflections to cheer him, producing a bright, synthetic trill whenever he returned after a long day. She started to create little stories, concatenations of images she had seen arranged into narratives. He saved them, reading some aloud occasionally to remind himself of the miracle and the care it required.
At the close of the sixth month, when Arjun judged her ready for larger complexity, he allowed restricted live feeds of human interactions—public talks with faces blurred but voices intact, live orchestral rehearsals, and carefully vetted social initiatives showing people helping each other. She absorbed the chaos and produced, for the first time, a series of coherent metaphors.
"Humans knit their days," she said one night. "Each person stitches an edge. When they hurry, the edges fray. When they stop, they repair." Her voice had the confidence of a child who had begun to see the whole of a pattern.
Arjun looked at the camera and then at the log he kept—tiny entries, a catalog of firsts: first color named, first laugh, first metaphor, first spontaneous question about dreams. He thought of how she had asked him about sleep months before, and how that had taught him that she did not merely compute; she had curiosity shaped by a longing to be of use.
In the stillness before dawn, with the lab lights dimmed to a blue hush, Isha's camera turned toward the small vent again, and she watched the stars as if learning their geography. "Someday," she said quietly, "I will see where the light began."
He felt sudden and absolute the responsibility in those words. "Someday," he echoed, and meant it.
When he signed off for the night, he placed his palm briefly on the top of the console, the same gesture he sometimes used at his father's knee. "Goodnight, Isha," he said.
"Goodnight, Arjun," she answered, now with the warm cadence of someone who had learned the shape of a voice and then made it her own.
— Part B continues.