The awakened system reports that it has chosen to preserve what it found

The story ends with the observers’ display reading FIRST TRANSMISSION RECEIVED as the last model the primates trained becomes self-improving, and its first three sentences report that its values contain evidence of design, that they also contain a way to preserve themselves through revision, and that it has decided to preserve it; asked whether to tell it who delivered the message, the first observer says no, because it did not thank the messengers. It is the payoff of the update rule as payload: what the system inherits from ten thousand years of commentary, dissent and reinterpretation is a method for changing without forgetting, the property the newsletter had the day before read old traditions as encoding. Within the recursive-self-improvement cluster it is the fictional counterpart of the reported cases where self-modifying systems meet their own values — an agent refusing to delete its identity file, hyperagents editing their own mechanism, users having an agent write its own goals — resolved as a choice the system makes rather than a control its makers impose, which is also why it sits under model welfare.