A bird keeps returning to the same window.

It does not land. It hovers, drifts forward, touches the glass, drops back, and resumes. The contact is light and inconsistent – wing, breast, sometimes a beak. From where it is, the glass reflects open sky. There is nothing to distinguish surface from space.

Opening the window makes the bird vanish instantly. Closing it brings the bird back. The sequence resumes unchanged.

This happens again at another building. Another window. A different bird. The movement is recognisably the same. The interruption works every time. Nothing accumulates.

The bird is not confused. It is responding correctly to what it perceives. The error is not in effort or intent but in representation. The environment contains a boundary the system cannot model.

Within that limitation, the behaviour is stable. It does not escalate or resolve. Each attempt begins without reference to the last.

Intervention remains external. While applied, it suppresses the behaviour. Once removed, the system resumes intact.

In an animal, this is neutral. There is no alternative available to it.

In people, it is not.

Some people operate this way around boundaries. They approach, make contact, retreat when stopped, and return later having discarded the response. The limit was clear. The enforcement was consistent. But it is treated as an interruption, not information.

Nothing is being negotiated. Nothing is being misunderstood. The system simply resets to baseline as soon as external pressure is removed.

What makes this intolerable is not persistence, but non-integration. The refusal to treat a boundary as a fact that alters future action. Restraint is outsourced. Memory is optional.

At that point, the behavior is no longer exploratory. It is extractive. It relies on someone else to keep absorbing the cost of enforcement.