The petal seems to be just a regular slightly smushed petal! It's made of cells, it obeys physics. And yes, it is the correct type of petal for its plant.

(Twenty minutes pass. Petal gets up and harvests another petal and adds it to the collection and goes back to sleep, nibbling a peanut along the way. If this is how she spends her uninterrupted time, Ari will not have to babyproof the apartment overnight but might have to clean up a carpet of petals in the morning.)

Ari does a little bit of babyproofing just in case--taking the knobs off the stove controls, putting some of her more fragile keepsakes into cupboards, making sure the balcony door and the main door are both locked--and then if Petal seems like she's staying mostly-asleep goes to bed herself, with her bedroom door open and a corner of her brain alert for any unexpected noises.

At the end of eight hours, Petal has laid out a startlingly tidy arrangement of harvested items on the floor. In addition to the first few petals there are twenty-one more petals, two sunflower seeds, and three dandelion fluffs. With this many things—slightly more than twenty-four, so she must sleep slightly less than twenty minutes between harvests—it becomes inescapably visible that they're arranged in a precise hexgrid layout.

"Oh, wow!" That's so cool and so obviously purposeful and she doesn't understand the purpose at all. It's not even clear whether she should be looking through an evolutionary lens or an agentic one. She can, at least, offer Petal a bunch of different options for breakfast, more berries and nuts but also carrots and crisped chickpeas with garlic and herbs and hmm, on second thought maybe not yogurt, no need to play any more interplanetary microbe roulette* than she's already playing.

*Translator's note: the process that gave rise to this metaphor is not a game, but the process of using a random seed in some methods of encoding secret messages.

Nuts and berries and carrots are happynoises foods. When she gets to the crisped chickpeas with garlic and herbs, she nibbles, pauses, then slooowly flops onto the floor with her little feet going every which way and makes some confused burbling noises; but once she has taken a minute to process the experience in this fashion, she goes back for seconds.

Oh no???? This is so stressful. Even the very first people to domesticate animals got to watch them eating in their natural environment first.  Apparently she's fine though? How about some more language lessons, they can go over present vs past tense.

Verb tenses are fascinating, although she seems to have a little trouble with them—she can recognize the difference between past and present, and echo recently produced sentences with 'yes' and 'no' attached to demonstrate understanding of present versus past actions ("Petal ate strawberry yes! Petal eats strawberry no!"), but has some trouble producing novel utterances that use verb tense appropriately.

It's still terribly impressive, in that if she improves on her current state of cognition by as much as newborn humans eventually improve on theirs she'll end up impressive and terrifying.

Ari has not come up with any good hypotheses about the hexagonal grid of duplicated plant bits, so she just points at them and said "Petal made these?"

"Petal made these yes!" she agrees. "Yes yes make!"

And she demonstrates the harvesting process once again, this time on the sunflower head, which yields a third sunflower seed to add to the pattern.

"Petal make this!" She carries it over to the grid and places it with the others. "Petal put this here!" She triumphantly nibbles a peanut.

"Yes here, no there?" She points at a different empty spot at the edge of the pattern.

"Petal put this here yes. Petal put this there no," she agrees. Whether this is a statement about her preferences or just about the actions she took is unclear.

She picks up the seed and moves it to where she pointed, saying "Ari put this here?" Messing with someone else's project is so obnoxious of her, but she doesn't know how else to get at the question.

Petal blinks confusedly at this question. "Ari put this here yes no?" she asks.

"Yes, Ari put this here." She's going to want to get into pronouns at some point but not right now, there's already too much on the stack. Mostly "good" and "bad" and the concept of purposeful action for a reason.

"Ari put this here yes." But she's still a little confused about it.

Ari drums her fingers on her knee contemplatively, then stands up. "Ari head higher because Ari stood up. Petal put this here because . . . ?"

"Because..." she echoes, enthralled by the possibilities of this new word.

"Petal put this here because Petal make this?"

"Petal put this here yes and there no because?"

"Because..." Confused trilling.

Hmm. How about if she...

She picks up the sunflower seed and puts it back where she first put it. Then she puts it at the hexgrid location Ari suggested. Then she puts it at another hexgrid location on the edge of the pattern. "Put here yes, put here yes, put here yes."

Then she picks up the sunflower seed and puts it on top of Ari's head. "Put here no!" she says, giggling.

She picks the sunflower seed out of her hair, musing on how weird it is that Petal has such legible nonverbal communication, and puts it directly on top of another sunflower seed. "Put here yes/no?"

"Put here no!" She picks it up and moves it back to yet another valid hexgrid location.

"Because?"

"Because..."

Hmm, how to explain...

She picks up three petals, carries them a little ways away from the hexgrid, and piles them in an untidy heap. "One two three," she says.

Then she picks up three more petals, carries them a little ways away from the hexgrid, and sets them down in a neat triangle formation as though to start another hexgrid. "One two three..." She noses the third petal closer to the other two, slowly and carefully, as though concentrating very hard on the process. "...one," she announces triumphantly, as the three petals merge into a single larger prettier fancier petal.

"Oooooooh." She has no idea how that just happened, or to what purpose, but it's awesome. The long-term implications of conservation of mass having gone out the window, down the fire escape and off toward the train station are additionally awesome.

If she does superficially the same thing to another set of three petals, does this produce the same result?

It's odd; nudging one of the petals in the hexgrid toward another one produces a slight tangible resistance, which escalates as she moves it. If she completes the motion despite that, she is rewarded with... all the contiguous petals in the hexgrid contracting together, merging, and expanding again into a smaller hexgrid of the fancier petal type. There are twelve petals in the smaller hexgrid, for a total of thirteen if you include the one Petal made.

"Ari make this yes!" says Petal, bouncing slightly.