"No, but we guessed we were from a Two."

"Because there are two of us!"

"Very logical."

Wow, he would Not want to turn into two people and lose all his memories. Maybe they'll get them back if they combine again? Oh, but they should know what Two was trying to do first.

"Two was trying to make Zero. Which is the number of things you have when you don't have any things. Can you . . . take . . . the difference of yourselves? Is that safe?" If he gets the small children deleted from existence because the concept of nothingness is an infohazard that would suck.

"I don't know what taking a difference means," Left One says. 

To explain or not to explain? Oh, his mouth appears to be explaining without him.

"It's when you compare two numbers to see which is bigger and by how much. Like Two was bigger than you are by one block."

Left One looks suspicious. "I don't think that comparing me to Two could make me be Zero. That's not how numberblocks work."

"But maybe you could split, like a numberblock," Right One says. "Except you don't... split... because you only have one block...?" Right One looks very puzzled.

"Hm," One says, and then tries very hard. 

And there are two Ones and one floating mouth with a numeral 0 above it.

"Hello!" she says. "I'm Zero!"

That's creepy. Awesome, but creepy.

"Good job! Hi Zero, I'm Bruce." He's just gonna refrain from explaining fractions for a couple minutes while he gets used to there being a disembodied floating mouth with what his brain is convinced is a blank staring eye.

"We're going to be a Two again."

"Hi! I'm back! It worked! --How did it work?"

"You can split off nothing and then that makes a Zero. I don't think you have to be a One to do it."

"Cool! I want to make a Zero."

"I don't see any reason why not! If the Zeros decide they don't like there being two of them they can merge into one Zero and then maybe since the result will still be a Zero they won't lose any memories. Unless having two sets of memories of the same events sounds like no fun, then maybe wait."

These children are very cute,  but he doesn't have even a vague sense of what things are good and bad for them and it's stressing him out a little. Or maybe they're just very childlike adults, given the total absence of parents, and he's being ridiculous.

"Ooh! I want to know if I get two sets of memories! Learning is fun!"

"It is," says Two, and they concentrate very hard and spin off another Zero--

Who immediately merges with the first Zero.

"Two sets of memories!" Zero reports. "I'm going to know EVERYTHING."

They're so unafraid of everything. Probably because they're used to being numbers the way he's used to being human, even if they don't have episodic memory. It's frankly endearing, creepy eyeless mouths and all.

"If you're going to know everything you might need to go look at everything! What else is there around here, do you know?" Allegedly there's a Three somewhere, unless they merged with someone (some-n?) else.

"There's One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, and Seven," Two says, "and Bruce, and the mirror that copies numberblocks, and trees, and toys, and food, and monsters!"

There being a mirror that copies nunberblocks just seems correct and reasonable, in a dream-logic kind of way. Clearly additional population in a species like this has to come from forking. Can it copy him? Something to think about more before mentioning it.

"What do you guys eat? What are the monsters like?" Are the monsters complex numbers. Or irrational numbers. That would be kind of hilarious.

"We eat things that smell nice and are easy to chew! If something smells bad or is hard to chew it isn't good to eat."

He's not sure what he was expecting, there. "What are some things that smell nice and are easy to chew?"

"Pizza and ice cream and salads and spaghetti!"

"I like to eat those things too!" For all it's hard to get decent vegan pizza around here. Way harder than the ice cream. Oh wait, he's dreaming, if there's dream pizza he can totally just eat it. (Bruce is a broke grad student with broke grad student priorities.) "So what are monsters, if they're not numberblocks or the same kind of thing as me?"

"Fluffies fall on you and then they tickle you!"

"Oh, that sounds annoying." On the one hand: adorable. On the other hand: if the integers themselves are beset by annoying creatures, what hope does anyone else have?

"Can I meet the other numberblocks?" He's pretty sure two is significantly more mature than a human two-year-old, and One and Zero seem about the same as Two mentally, but meeting Seven still feels like the best way to get information about whether this is a society with adults or what.

"Yes! We should go on a walk until we find them."