out of hand

"I do not think of myself as a weapon."

"Not at all? I suppose that's a good thing, but at the same time..."

You can't avoid the truth of something like that forever. You can't avoid the fact of cybernetic notions filling up your head, fixtures of all manner synthetic materials building helmets of eyeless lights and sounds to block out the past or the future.

Pyra's contract with Fi would remain curtailed, in this way, should Fi not acknowledge for both to hear that the bladed extension of original body had made Fi a weapon indeed.

Not living. Not locked and loaded. A horrible hybrid, in between.

But that was the problem of it. Without taking focus unto a solution, the status quo was a workable lack of mutual understanding.

Pyra was fiercer, stoked as a heat source. Fi was a cold comfort of information.

Two opposites, not halves of a whole.

What certainty? Of course there wasn't any.

Still, Pyra couldn't find it within herself to reject even an uncertain companion. Well, and Fi always spoke in opaque probabilities, but the cape was heavy, the core duly solid, while the voice filtered depthlessly above.

Moreover: what use was there to believe anything that Fi said?

A stranger to their world. An artifact jumped several centuries west. A glimpse into what people might one day look like, but at the limit of what ongoing infinite process?

"The probability that your humanity," comes that same right-angled voice, artificially intelligent to the environment which included people as instage actors, "will one day resemble a people of similar genetic makeup and outward appearance as that which I display is 93%."

How could anyone know that? Rather, why would they?

Pyra, nonetheless, felt uninured to turning Fi away. Chilled by it - she should always stay so welcomingly warm.

Her constant fallback was to wonder if others were as lonely as she was. It must be true of Fi, untouchable in mask, to yearn away the future.