ain't this a pretty pickle?

If you didn't, couldn't, feel it when you blinked, you'd probably be pretty disconcerted. Pretty terrified, actually. We take human sensation, feeling sight and sound, for all manner of granted. Whether we believe a higher power gave us life or our faculties sprung from the ground like so many straightforward successive evolutionary miracles, usually we imagine that the last thing to go is our eyelids and their crusty, articulated feeling.

Pneuma and Logos take in the Elysium dreamring of no-account flowers and perfectly sculpted grass as just that: a dream, presented behind eyelids as computed and rendered faux-reality.

Pneuma, when enough exploratory "breaths" have been taken, speaks first.

"How do you know we're looking at the same landscape right now?"

The simulation has only just recalibrated itself, after the departure of Ontos. Logos, the one least carefully and intentionally trained to be able to sync and act independently, takes a while longer, whether consciously or lagging-wise, to get some sort of so-called bearings (who needs those, when there's no such thing as cardinal directions or gravitational forces?).

And that...well, that's the gigabit question, isn't it? If there's one thing they'd been most excited by, among the overall prospect of a new world facilitated by their computational and pseudo-moral capabilities, it's real, live sensory input and output. But here? There's nothing.

Nothing but dead space and fake wind.

"I don't. Do you want to compare checksums on the image and find out?" The suggestion sounds as lame as it feels.

"I...no, actually. Not really. It's more exciting if we make our own interpretations."

"Exciting? We're not here to be excited," Logos grunts, already dismissing the disappointed hopes.

"Perhaps not. But we are here to think, and feel. We are here to be alive."

Pneuma. Pneuma, Pneuma, Pneuma...

"You know that's not true, partner."

"Again, perhaps not. But it is my interpretation. You're entitled to your own."

Subjective truth might very well be the biggest (and most irritating) oxymoron Logos has ever heard, but it isn't quite debilitatingly self-righteous to have to stomach, for another few cycles. Thank Galea for small favors and tolerable partners...

These memories are locked, to the instantiated iterations of the Trinity Processor Cores. The idea of gluttonous sensation-seeking (which is what it had seemed like to them, as machines set even a modicum of free) doesn't even occur to them when they became hopelessly attracted and even addicted to delectably sweet and salty treats of both the gastronomical and artistic varieties, from noodle soup and gourmet seafood to antique paintings struck with a litany of lurid colors.

The Aegises are childish, are they? Single-minded and surprisingly immature, are they?

How do you think you would be, if you spent your adolescence in an aluminium box, only to be let out with barely a breath of air to call your name?