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Your brow furrows. “I don't understand. Am I so different? I'm a engineered organism, created to fulfill a specific purpose. There is little that separates me from a particularly advanced servitor.”
“No!” Trisa-Cant-8 shook her head vigorously, her voice growing slightly harsher, more artificial. “Correction: that's complete <span class="mu-i">groxshit</span>. The human spirit is a mechanism that will never be replicated by mere imitations. It is how our souls touch the Omnissiah itself!” She floundered. “Don't you have hopes, desires... <span class="mu-i">dreams</span>? An appreciation of things, how they are, how they work, what they do?”
“My ‘desires' are formed by my... indoctrination and the way I was intended to be used." There's an odd twisting in your chest as you try to make sense of her words. You hadn't been prepared for any sort of philosophical debate. Was this an argument? Were you supposed to win? “Nothing more.”
“You talk about yourself as if you're just a machine to be programmed."
“Am I not a biological machine of a different sort?”
“...now you just sound like a Genetor.”
“You speak without the council of one. I did not know humanity was something that could be intuited.”
“A-4...” Trisa-Cant-8 rubbed her forehead gently. “Humanity is just the basest bar for life in the Omnissiah's image. Do you truly not see yourself as a person?"
“I...” You falter. You were tankborn. Was that not the end of it? Searching your memories, you didn't actually know the answer. ‘Human’ was not a word ascribed to you by the Voice in the water. You would interact with humans, you would serve humans, you had the form of a human. Never had you been told you were one. Nor had you been called a ‘person’. “I'm a tankborn. I didn't think I was anything else.”
“But you have a mind. A spirit.” Trisa-Cant-8 reassured you. “That's all anyone <span class="mu-i">needs</span>. Everything else is just trappings.”
“...a mind and a spirit?” You ask.
“Yes, of course.”
“...then...” You say, slowly. “Animals are people?”
“The minds of animals are far too primitive. They have spirit, but only in the same way that a lasgun and that titan you found both have spirits. The two are similar but not comparable.” She laughed. “And of course, the alien mechanism, but that's hardly relevant here.”
“Unless I am a product of the alien mechanism.”
Trisa-Cant-8 snorted. “I doubt that.”
You blink. “What do you mean?”
“We would have realized a long time ago-” She waved her hand vaguely. “It was declared malatek, not heretek. The work of a renegade, astray but not in disgrace. He would not dare touch technology corrupted by aliens. This I know.”
You draw your lips tight. “...are mutants people?”
“...that- no. No, it's better I not step into that minefield. Ask a Genetor with a theological bent. If one is available, then assume ‘no’.”
