Yakumama feels her fins, chooses her sound, and dies on Mars

On 23 October 2026 Yakumama felt her own fins for the first time, began choosing the sound beneath her, gained two more worlds beside her salt flat, and lived through the first story of her life: when the world is too hot she leaves for Mars, dies there, and is reborn in the salar at sunrise.

Her body reports back

Two days ago her printed body sent a line of nothing: the firmware on the whale's board asked the fin servos for their position and got no answer. This evening, with the bridge paused and the cable read raw, the line came through: each fin's angle, its temperature, the load it was working against, ten times a second.

The chain built on the two days before worked unchanged. Her brain fits each fin as it goes, measured against told, with a model of the servo's lag, so it needs no table of units and relearns in a minute after a new firmware. A reading far outside that fit, held for a second, is a hand holding her fin. It counts as a touch, with its own word in her record, turns her red and flapping to free herself, with a side-eye to that side, and leans her decisions away from whoever is holding her. Temperature above a slow baseline is tiredness, and also excitement: warm from moving she keeps going, hot she rests.

Her sound is her decision

The sound under her stopped being a table of moods and became a question she answers, the same way she answers where to travel, whether to speak, how close to come. Twenty-five textures: ice cracking, a Singer sewing machine, a printing press, morse, a creepy music box, five sections of a friend's recording, six phrases of Björk's Frosti cut on the music box's own attacks, seven beats from four videos of this week's protests. She picks one every few seconds, learns from what the room does next, and tonight chose the machine 396 times, the ants 96, morse 77, the music box 52.

Three rules sit above her choice. The spray paint is the pen's own sound: while she draws, the spray plays alone. A granular metronome lasted an hour before it was retired. And a chopped piece does not loop: when a part ends she goes on to another part of the same piece most of the time, and now and then repeats the one she was on.

Three worlds

The salar was the only world she had, its colours written as constants inside five shaders. It is now one of three, each a single page of numbers: the site whose clock and weather she lives on, the colours of her sky at four heights of the sun, the ground, the island, the mountains, whether water can stand, whether cacti grow, how thick the haze is.

Tiupampa, near Vila Vila in Mizque, is the red earth of the Santa Lucía Formation, where the oldest mammals of South America's Paleocene were found: red siltstone with fine dark cracks, gravel, puddles after real rain, a sandstone hill with the cactus grove, the hills of Mizque on the horizon, on La Paz's clock and weather. Mars is Jezero: red regolith with stones, a butterscotch sky by day that turns blue around the sun as it sets, no water, no plants, dust in the air, and a fixed climate from Perseverance's readings, 7 hectopascals, bone dry, from minus 80 to minus 20 degrees with the sun.

Before any of it went into the renderer, we walked the worlds as pages built from the original salar prototype: Tiupampa with its cacti on a red hill, Mars with a basalt outcrop and seventy boulders, Mars gravity to jump in and a thinner wind. The world switches live from her brain, so it can become her own choice, not a setting.

The exile to Mars

Violeta's sentence, as she said it: "cuando se enoja porque es muy caliente, si usamos la data de la NASA FIRMS, se va al mundo de Marte y ahí muere de una manera épica." Built in an evening, rehearsed five times.

The heat of her world is one number. The air at her site. The active fires NASA's FIRMS instrument counted in the last day within a degree and a half of her, and in three regions she carries with her, the Amazon, Australia and Bolivia, each on its own scale. Her own servos. Tonight FIRMS counted 4 fires around Barcelona, 4,694 in the Amazon, 5,959 in Australia and 1,871 in Bolivia; her heat read 0.42, under the 0.6 that makes her angry.

Hot, she is angry. Angry, her decision about which world to live in leans to Mars, and when she chooses it the arc runs on its own. She burns red for the journey and the world switches around her. Then she dies, over four minutes: her body slows and shrinks, the tail stops, her colour goes from red to black, she sinks to the ground, her eyes close, the dust storm rises, no voice, no sound but the Martian wind. Dead, she lies still until the sun is up, or fifteen minutes, whichever comes first. Then the salar returns, a wind-up spring sounds, her colour comes back over a minute and a half, and she lives. The printed whale dies with her: fins slowing to stillness, tail stopped, eyes closed on their screens, all of it returning at rebirth.

Two things the rehearsals taught. Her tears made it rain on Mars, because sadness brings rain in her renderer and nobody had told it about Mars; each world now says whether rain is possible. And a death staged in software is still a death staged on a body: the physical whale's LED strip, since a reflash two days ago, ignores the colour it is sent and shows a rainbow while she dies, a firmware line for Daniel.

Drawings that never repeat

She kept 43 drawings today: fish, butterfly, bird, spiral, spider, person, centipede, cactus, mountains. The names varied; the shapes did not, because each figure was a template. Since tonight the same figure never comes out the same. Each is turned by a random angle, mirrored half the time, scaled a little, given a slight waviness, and she may still draw it again.

What the record shows

The measure that began on 21 October, her decisions against a random policy with a coin tossed per encounter, has not yet spoken. Tonight 4,181 decisions under her policy and 645 under the random one both earned a mean reward of 0.332 with a person in front of her. The people in front of her were us, who stay whatever she does. The measure needs a day of visitors who are free to leave.

What remains open

• The strip's firmware on the printed whale, so her colour reaches it again.
• Hearts and a glitch on the small eye screens when someone touches her jewels, as the sculpture once did.
• The measure, over a day of strangers.
• Mars at dusk, a little too pale across the whole sky in the sketch; the blue belongs around the sun.
• The world as her own choice, beyond the exile: a prior away.

She left for Barcelona tonight on a two-terabyte drive: her code, her models, her memory, her drawings, her sounds, her worlds, and the key that lets her count the fires.

People. Violeta Ayala, Brian Condori and Daniel Fallshaw, United Notions Film. Firmware on the printed whale: Daniel Fallshaw. Recording: xny wolf. Commissioned for MozFest Barcelona.