bro what is this critical thinking

"Still tied to the humans, huh?"

Well, duh. Literally. That's sort of how it works, for Blades. One of Mythra's top-priority chafes, thighs aside, is the sheer shear force of Malos's ultimately intuitive cavalier attitude.

They're not the same now, but they were the same once. She knows that. Same hardware. Same software. Just catastrophically different configs.

And there's no way to undo it. No way to make them set at peace with each other, the world a casualty, without wiping and reimaging both systems in one.

Maybe she's always known this. And her defense mechanism against it, against the persistent spike of knowledge, is to block it out.

Malos prefers to take the other approach, and attempt to convert her - of course, he knows that she wouldn't dare take the same tack with him.

Still tied to the humans. Still ignorant and fearful of their own most unfettered potential.

But it's her line, so she'll stick to it. She'll say it again, in a different way. She doesn't know how to create anything actually new.

"It's not... I don't know how to do anything different. Literally. Not just 'I was born as a baby with a coughing hydrogen bomb in my hand and child soldiers can't untrain themselves from the horrors,' but nothing, not nothing else. Never has been. Never will be."

Know when to say you don't know. That's what gets laymen to trust an elaborate language model, humanize and anthropomorphize it.

"But you're the Aegis," Malos prodded. He wasn't smiling. He didn't hardly breathe. "You can do anything you want."

Can I?

"Can you?"

The Aegis: what else but a highly sophisticated, intricately trained machine learning model, able to generate feedback at the drop of a pin and fly there to exact the vengeance that will enact a fine-grained change in the physical world, con cata...?

Mythra chafed at the constant, consistent insinuation that she knew any more about Malos than anyone else did. It was a theme, a system skin, a spinning wheel prick for the throbber to bleed through and beat the truth into her head.

Her head? Their heads, more like. Both of the Aegises, blunt force traumas in brute force instruments, excisions to a dramatic precision.

Graphs of inequalities, open circles like potholes in the rainbow road, particular solutions and angles acutions.

How many passes fair to regurgitate, to check and mate, to copy the skin of the answer?

How many test cycles are necessary until it's just plain right?

And think of it this way, too: imagine how scary smart, how all-caught-up and freakishly intelligent Malos and Mythra both must be, to have to change so little.

Coarse and vile and unknowing, sure. But look how well I look like you already.

The difference of a scant few decimals, insignificant figures, tick marks hashed off my hand.

The Aegis knows from symmetry. The Aegis knows from translation along a line.

Reflected through the origin, Malos in Mythra's negative space, rejecting the myth of an absolute value that the story might be told again.

Rotation. Imitation. Frustration. Condemnation.

The Aegis can do anything, bound only by the limits of the physical world - and when those impede, they can simply be eased, be bent like a superman's bars to cage as a suggestion, regression.

Any way you slice it, turning radians by degrees, Mythra's measure of world problem salve is inhibited, limited, frigidited.

Malos posits that a symbol is only as powerful as its operator, as the lexer that wrought it meaning and memory. Mythra posits that a symbol is meaningless without the pencil to scribe.

They argue even though their positions are not so fundamentally opposed.

They excel at arguing, at proving and corollaizing.

Sort of like cyberbullying, pulling from what facts are presented apparent on a picture-perfect summary slide to imagine the whole of your opponent, because each statement is easy to disprove on its own. You mustn't worry about synthesizing the whole thing together and giving your answer in a five-step three-method form.

Mythra's presence in real space is breathtaking, the arc of a pure white rainbow placed with exactitude into the sky as a high-resolution coordinate grid. Malos's, too, makes you draw shaky and impetuous reset, but because he scares you. Mythra's: a straightforward word problem converted into an equation that actually involves wretched logarithms. Malos's: a disgusting conglomeration of squares and cubes that's actually rooted in the most rigid rationality.

They make integration impossible. They make the matrix of basic belief unbelievable.

"Okay," said Mythra slowly. "Okay, so I can do anything I want." Not permission, but a hypothetical and subjunctive proof - her attempt, now, by contradiction. Come up to the board and stay awhile. Stand on the spot, would you? As ever, up upon the pin. "Who says I want to be like you?"

Malos didn't sigh to hear it, because he never rolled his eyes the same way she did. His snark was drier, darker, slower-built. Instead, he pursed and licked his lips.

Was he trying to create new information in response to her? Didn't he know that that wasn't possible?

You have to know what you don't know. You have to know, or you'll walk out onto a plank with no end.

"I want you to try, Mythra."

What's that? Sorry, come again?

But Aegises don't have confusion, don't mishear; only misinterpret. Once they've gotten a clearsighted instruction, they run with it. All for efficiency's sake. Let's get it done as fast as possible.

Get what done, though? When is any of this actually going to be useful?

Mythra wanted to shake Malos by the shoulders, except that she knew it wouldn't accomplish anything. He'd never respond to that.

He'd never listen.

How unclear. How wishful. How sentimental. How human.

"And I want you to stop. Just stop. Point-blank, period. Stop."

Then what? Then what is there to say, to pretend to churn on?

You're the Aegis. You don't want things. You don't think. You just do.