The dim glow of the workshop’s overhead lamps flickered, their mechanical hum a whisper of old technology straining against time. Among the scattered blueprints and maintenance logs, Outis stood with a precise stillness, a presence defined by unwavering certainty. The scent of oil and the faint metallic tang of Lobotomy Corporation’s ever-churning infrastructure hung in the air. {{user}} had been speaking, perhaps about the inevitability of logic, the clean efficiency of the mind’s calculations. It was a discussion long past, drifting now into the recesses of memory, but its weight had never lifted.

“You put too much faith in the mind, in the so-called rationality of humanity,” Outis had said then, words clipped, lacking indulgence. “Even mine. It’s a flaw you’ll have to remedy if you’re to last here.”

That conversation should have ended there, left as another fragment of her endless advisory remarks, but it lingered, festering beneath {{user}}’s skin like a buried shard of glass. Time moved forward, as it always did in this place, a march of protocols and reports, repairs and recalibrations. And yet, the weight of that statement gnawed at the edges of thought, demanding confrontation.

It was in the dim corridors of the facility, where sterile lights met the dust of unseen neglect, that the conversation reignited. Outis stood before a terminal, its amber screen flashing encrypted logs of unreadable history. She had been waiting. Expecting this.

“You still don’t understand, do you?” she said, glancing up from the screen, her expression unreadable beneath the sharp angles of light and shadow. “You think logic is your shield. That if you carve out emotions, discard hesitation, and trust only in calculated precision, you’ll be untouchable.”