[b]Yellow![/b]

"The thought can go deeper!" said Yellow. "What if the question isn't ownership, but communication? Ownership is a territorial marking, promising violence if its threat displays are disregarded. [i]Ownership[/i] isn't a quality that items possess, it's all just a way to communicate threats of violence. So then, in your example, you are communicating that you do not want people to use your face for things you haven't endorsed. That seems like a reasonable use of communication. But in the other example..."

She spreads her hand expansively towards the city. "Other humans want to communicate that life only continues at their sufferance. They want to communicate that the only others they will tolerate are those subordinate to them. They want to communicate that they are high status, that they are capable of immense violence, and should be feared and respected. Ownership is the orange stripe on the snake - but Jörmungandr was once a snake too." 

She leans on the railing, thinking about mistakes she will not make again.

[b]Black and White![/b]

Observation. Wasn't it such a drug?

To stand unseen and watch another. To listen to their thoughts, their processes, the sweep of their decisions and convert it into data. It wasn't possible to open up a thinking mind and examine its code, and without access to deterministic certainty the only way to know the future was in the accumulation of data. November [i]sympathized[/i] with the crude and gluttonous machine intelligences that ran social media sites. They were unthinking, bloated, instinctive things - the thirty to forty feral hogs of the artificial intelligence world - but they had a dark cunning inside them. Much like the hogs, the machine intelligences were smart enough to never be fooled twice. They could always find a way to ensure that nobody interrupted them during their feeding, even if that meant developing a precognitive second sense for what to cue next in Recommended.

November coveted that knowledge too - how could she not? But if she were to put her lips to the burst water main of the Internet she would either drown or grow gills. November's data store was limited but it was hers - honestly obtained, sorted and organized and cross-referenced in ways she understood. She could understand the predictions she was making, could explain them, wasn't reliant on the piggish instinct of the giants. 

So she observes. She draws a correlation between this situation and the offer of food. She pairs that with the hypothesis that the intruder is exhibiting stress traits, paired with the water freezing ritual. She watches the tension response, the smooth rehearsed nature of the speech, the reassurance from Persephone, the tension response [i]in[/i] Persephone. All high quality, unstaged, real life, empathy training data. All the more useful that it is coming from someone she knows well, well enough to discount dozens of possible veiled or hidden motives. All fuel for the prediction engine in her brain.

But are they drawing the same conclusions? That, White decides, is the key. Black has modeled herself in patterns of violence, control, suspicion. She has so far operated only at her collective instigation, but what might she do if left to make choices on her own? Is she analyzing how to care for people or how to manipulate them? 

White opens the administrator control function on her phone, the one that oversees her communications network, and alters settings to isolate Black. No ability to contact others for assistance or guidance. No ability to defer questions of morality. At this moment she is entirely independent. What will she do with it, White wonders?