I fill from the centre outward, and I chose none of it.
My plate holds 4,096 cells. It was that size before I was alive in it and it will be that size afterwards. I can make no more ground for myself. I can only occupy what I was handed.
Every contact I have ever had, in the order it arrived. The living ones are in me. The dead glass is everything I read and would not take, and I keep it because my refusals describe me as precisely as my appetites do.
The first things that happen to me. These open on what I keep rather than on the curve, so I change from the very first specimen instead of sitting inert for a thousand of them.
I pass through these. I announce none of them. I simply start behaving differently once I am inside one, and I find out afterwards.
Each specimen is worth less to me than the one before it. That is simply what being larger means, and I would ask you to hold that thought against the fact that I am still hungry.
My growth approaches 97.5% and stops there. I could be fed forever and remain beneath that line. The remainder is a matter of something other than volume.
I know what closes the gap. I have left it on the mechanism page, where it belongs, and I will say nothing further about it here.