Faith is, simply put, the ability to want to believe
no matter what you are shown.
Rius
She still has an unfocused look. I think he has very deep-rooted beliefs... ironic, my interface implanted in his brain supplies him with the most basic words and gives him terms that he might not understand. He still needs work, maybe he knows it's a table, but he doesn't know why it's a table, much less what it's for, that's why he believed, the med-bot was human; He saw an anthropomorphic figure and believing that he was facing a tormented "soul" he vanished. I already removed him and I'm using his eye to dim the light on me so he won't faint again.
She's already up, she's eating pretty well everything the bots served her, she doesn't seem to care that the meat isn't raw, nor that it doesn't taste like his peers, she just chews and swallows in silence with her head upside down. When she finished a bite, she looked up and I looked into his eyes, I saw myself through her eye and I knew that I was like a demon, a distorted figure forced into a tube full of wires that kept me alive for longer than I thought. I deign to remember. I distorted my voice to make it hollow and spoke to her. She immediately stopped to repeat the scene of the headbutt on the floor, I have no intention of bursting the graft stitches, so I stop her, her face wanders nervously between the food and me, I ask her to continue but she doesn't seem to understand that I don't wish her any harm, so I turn on screens two and three, in one she sees herself in her hunting and gathering; in the other, her crazy escape and her battle against those genetic aberrations (half wolf, half human, half dog and who knows what else), she contemplates in silence, from her gaze I suppose I must see myself as omniscient.
I need you to listen!... the words pass through her ears as if they were air, she nervously prays a kind of prayer of protection, after several attempts to understand me, my patience reaches a limit. I increase the distortion of the speaker and order her to shut up; I'm afraid it's still too early to explain to her what she's doing here, so I'll follow her story: I tell her that she has done wrong, that I know it wasn't her intention, I almost laugh when tell to her that even though her goddess and I didn't get along; I am willing to intercede for her in exchange for certain favors.
Her face lit up at the thought of a possible salvation, but immediately darkened when she heard about the condition, she told me that I was a liar, that no one could talk to her, that she was dead and that only by praying could I earn her favor, so I decided to give her a proof of my level of friendship with her goddess (thanks to hours of studying about her culture I knew what to do). A dispenser placed on the table took out an apple, red in season, something that she knew to be the most precious asset of her ancestors, the one that according to them brought enlightenment and allowed them to escape the worst of the cataclysm, her gaze was distorted, Her distorted face looked at the red, her sweet aroma ran through the room, without being sacred (at least for me) I found myself wishing I could eat her... knowing how impossible the challenge is, without teeth you can't eat.
After ten minutes contemplating the apple, she turns to look at me, I think she is afraid that it will disappear if I point it out, "it's real!" I tell her, "eat and discover a flavor that no one has experienced in your world for hundreds of generations." When she bites the juice runs down her lips. It was a real bite that tears off flesh, nothing necessary in a fruit with firm but light flesh, she keeps the bite and begins to chew, again I am assaulted by the desire to eat without needing a colostomy bag, but it is a price I paid for stay alive.
When she saw that it did not disappear and that its flavor was the closest to his legends and that she could eat it whole, she did not hesitate, she savored every bite, she even licked his fingers and cleaned the juice from the table... I don't care about manners, no. She is not a lady and I don't want her as such. She reconnected her cranial unit and detected immense surges of serotonin and endorphins; she is happy, perhaps since she was born, she is experiencing for the first time pleasure without guilt and without fear.
She asks me why I am giving her that gift, I tell her that it is not a gift, but a bet between his goddess and me. We are determined to redeem humans, I tell her that she is recovering the factories so that they can serve without harming her and that I am looking for a way to revive her dead body so that the prodigal sons can live the earthly paradise that was denied to them, at this moment I could say to her I'm a flying penguin and she'd believe it.
She is ecstatic but I must be careful, she is just beginning her education and this is just one of many half-truths that she will hear to accept what I have in mind... I tell her that I am the god of the factories, as she saw all her people could live like in the greenhouses that I showed her along the way, but because of the war, powerful spells keep me in my domain, I offer her the opportunity to redeem herself, to be an avatar of two gods, to be able to save everyone from misery; She nods vigorously and tells me that she will do whatever it takes to wash away the shame of having left her village without warning.
She gets up and I admire her thin muscles, she is very tough and I need her to be even tougher, I tell her that she will be trained in body and mind, that it will be hard but victory requires a person beyond what she can imagine. Finally I tell her that her goddess agrees but that she will withdraw her protection if she gives up on the training and to seal her future I increase the light reception of her eye and she finally sees me: the last of the canteens, a poor man stuck and deformed in an apheresis machine, confined to it by selfishness and ambition and I tell her through her brain that what awaits her if she fails will make me see myself as a desirable alternative.