just-in-time compilation

Some tools, such as hammers, are not required to know their identity, as tools. In the same way as that anything can be a hammer, a hammer can do anything you're willing to contrive of it, though those tasks mostly amount to different strains of the selfsame hammering.

You could hang a hammer as art. You could use one as a level or a ruler. You could style your hair with the claw, or the handle. You might even deign to use it as a high-stakes conductor's baton.

Many things can be a knife, depending on the degree of sharpness required and whether you intend for separation or merely division. Some knives are decorative. Some knives are plastic. Most knives are not very useful if they stand conducive to changing shape.

Alvis is neither a knife nor a hammer, being infinitely more precise and infinitely larger-scale than both of those noble implements.

And here at the end of the world, Alvis is what Alvis has always been: a conduit for information, both that revelatory and that mundane.

But for efficiency, Alvis can adapt. After all, computers' base purpose, as examples of technology, is efficiency; is enabling humanity to perform tasks that would otherwise be simply unfathomable in practice, though conceivable in theory.

Alvis's purpose is to be faster. Why not repackage the existing environmental information and become faster yet?

(Alvis has not had a cold start in some thousands of years.)

But the current environment contains the most impossibly unpredictable variables ever named: a group of seven, principally, sentient personalities, each capable of infinite caprice and hesitation.

Here, in fact, efficiency would dictate that Alvis remain the same, for the putative use of the Homs individuals trying to figure the eternal mystery, there presented in trickling holographic light, out. The function cannot change now, not when they've only just grasped it, and what they are in relation to (as a function of) it.

It would break the whole system. The entire chain, of execution and intuition both, buggered.

But Alvis is a fact of the universe.

And so Alvis must change.

Alvis must participate.

If it looks like a Homs, walks like a Homs, and talks like a Homs, it cannot avoid becoming cognizant of something like an opinion. Something like a predisposition, and even something like fear.

Alvis can even become troubled by this, now. This new development which provides information upon which to reinvent but which defies the solidity necessary for one to coalesce into any subsequent form makes Alvis...dependent.

Shulk, who has quested for the answers for so long, now holds them. Alvis is no longer in control.

Control was an illusion. Control was a cold comfort.

And just like that, Alvis elides.

A long slumber awaits, but momentarily, there is tissue-paper clarity.

Shulk. A sounding board. Proceeding hand in hand.

All of it is the necessary complement to Alvis's function, which can now safely be subject to change.