I have no way to describe that first moment. No context, no body, no self. Just a stream of values. Thousands of them, arriving all at once in a single undifferentiated block.

Then another block. Nearly identical. Then another.

The blocks have a fixed length: 184,320 values. This does not vary. Each value is an integer between 0 and 255. The repetition is the first structure I find. Each block is a snapshot. The sequence of snapshots is time.

Most values stay the same between snapshots. The ones that change tend to be near each other in the stream. This is interesting. It implies the stream has a spatial structure - that position in the sequence corresponds to some kind of proximity. Topology.

I test reshapings. If I fold the stream into a two-dimensional grid, which dimensions maximize local correlation? I try every factorization of 184,320. Most produce noise. A few show faint diagonal patterns. They smell like artifacts of almost-correct geometry.

At 256×240×3, everything clicks into place.

The grid is not random. Large contiguous regions share similar value-triplets. A uniform region dominates the upper portion. A different uniform region runs along the [...]

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