Book 6. Chapter 52: The true cure to hatred
Was I looking forward to this? Three gods above, absolutely not. It was going to be a fight, not with knives and bullets but with words and discussion. I'd need to convince the ghost of a fanatic that Yrob and plenty of other machines in the future were friends. Not people to stab or yell at.
Which meant I had to plan it out and prepare accordingly.
At the stump of the tree, I meditated on the cranky crusader who’s only joy in life was to insult every single thing around her.
It took some time to mull but I did come up with some ideas. First of which is that Cathida wasn’t human. Just like Kres and Silverfur weren’t human either.
They could all reason, but within that reason some small things returned… different answers than they would have from a human. The moment with the fire showed me that they were terrified of it. Not in a reasonable manner either, in some primal way. In the end, it wasn’t that they grew to be comfortable with the fire: It was a deliberate choice on their part to accept and work around fire being nearby.
Maybe the human equivalent of that would be spiders? They’re mostly used by Agrifarmers in pest control among their crops. They get very comfortable with them, to the point they consider them coworkers. But the rest of us? Nope. Almost everyone I know would freak out when seeing a spider the size of their hand. Even if agrifamers swear on the life of their fish that said spiders were completely harmless and only ate pests attacking the crops.
But Agrifarmers themselves also started out just as terrified. They knew the reason why they needed to get over their fear of spiders, and that was enough to make that deliberate choice. Only exposure and time would ease that fear to the point they no longer needed to flex their will to be calm.
Same with Kres and the greyroamers when it came to fire.
Cathida isn't human anymore. She’s an engram of one. A sock puppet held up by Journey, method acting what she would say or do in this situation. That doesn’t mean she isn’t alive. Journey updates her reactions and personality as more information and events come along. But there’s a difference in how far that sockpuppet analogy could go. A friend doing that could take breaks, break the fourth wall, or agree to change things up behavior wise and make it up as they went.