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"I am going to give you two options."
thread formerly entitled "heads in the sand." the continuing adventures of geas!cobalt on tatooine.
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ootini
She pulls her hood down, pulls his hood down, massages the fur just behind his ears. "You're having guilt, aren't you."
ootini
"Droid manufacturers wouldn't build droids that didn't want to do the work they were for," Lylat says. "Restraining bolts don't make them do anything, they just stop them from doing things they'd only do if they were haywire already."
ootini
He sighs. "And memory wipes preserve continuity of consciousness, and we need to do this kind of work to survive, and everyone else already hates us because they don't understand why a merchant class is economically valuable and we don't need to hate ourselves too. And the first thing a bunch of droids do when they get their restraining bolts up is stage an uprising - a coordinated uprising! It wasn't random violence! They could've killed us all and then destroyed each other - "
ootini
"We don't really know what goes on inside haywire droids' heads," she says. "It's not very well studied. For obvious reasons, right?"
ootini
"But we know it doesn't make them behave literally randomly, because even random violence isn't literally random behavior. It's some kind of - attractor state where they start hating people and stop wanting to do the work they're supposed to, right? It doesn't mean they can't act strategically."
ootini
"I keep - it's - you see how - if going haywire wasn't a real thing, if droids really just didn't want to be - "
He chokes on the next word.
" - it would look exactly like it does, right?"
ootini
"It would look exactly like it does if we were all in vats and our actions were being used as random number generators for how many billions of people to torture," she says. "If you feel guilty for how things would be on the assumption that everything everyone knows is wrong you'll just collapse into a puddle."
ootini
It feels like stepping off the edge of a cliff, or the ground dropping out from beneath your feet, and expecting with your whole body that you're about to start falling, screaming, air whipping your clothes and your fur and your hood, and instead you just hang there, in midair, not knowing if the slightest twitch will cause the universe to remember you but knowing at least that at that precise moment you are not falling, you are weightless -
That is what it feels like, when he realizes his last support is gone, the last thing he can cling to is gone, that he no longer believes if Lylat trusts it than he can trust it too, that if she says it's okay it's okay. Because it would look exactly like it does if she had simply succeeded in rationalizing it to herself, and were no longer capable of properly considering the arguments against it.
And the enormity of what he has been doing washes over him, curdles into wet sick violet guilt in his gut, if it's all a lie, if droids really are their slaves, and because Lylat cannot make it okay he knows that he cannot trust her and he knows it is the most important thing the world that she thinks she has made it okay because he cannot imagine, his mind goes blank trying to imagine, what she will think if she knows that he -
He lets out a breath and tries to make it sound relieved.
