Some warbling in the background tickled Athena’s ear. It might have been words, but she was in the<em>zone</em>. Once the engineer reached her special place inside her mind, all annoyances were ignored. She had been reading much about the human brain of late; LEONA had reached an impasse with the man-machine interface, particularly in the area of the “fuzziness” of the brain. Imprecision was anathema to non-intelligent systems, which included every AI ever built thus far, and so it fell to Athena to create some kind of translation system.<br/><br/>This was a huge obstacle, of course. Biology and psychology were not Athena’s strong suits, as she very much preferred precise systems based on decision-making, and evolutionary processes had no interest in precision or decisions. It was purely randomized trial-and-error, Athena’s hell realized. Even a decade and a half into the twenty-first century, scientists had not nailed down exactly what nutrients the human body required to work at full effectiveness. It seemed like such a basic thing to need to be understood, but the body was so infuriatingly complex from billions of evolutionary tweaks. Gene expression from nature versus lifestyle just made everything worse.<br/><br/>With hardware and software, everything performed exactly as designed. Any flaw was clearly attributable to the designer and was correctable with reasoning and a minimal amount of trial-and-error if you had the kind of mind Athena did. Her own structured mind lent itself well to LEONA, but such was not the case for the adrenaline-powered instinctive minds of the other pilots. LEONA had a rough time interpreting bravado and rage. And so it fell to Athena to grasp at understanding treatises on the human brain, despite the best minds in the field still not having enough understanding on their own terms. Athena knew that, given enough time, she would be able to overcome all of these issues with raw processing power, but that was miserably inefficient.<br/><br/>As Athena worked all this out in her head, the warbling from earlier had wiggled its way through her synapses, finally getting to its destination and registering as words. She turned, seeing Ryan Kodo assaulting her with conversation from across the bay. They often liked to do that around here, even when an Event was occupying most of their attention. She had never made much effort to be personable, so she wondered why they never seemed to find her as insufferable as she inevitably found them.<br/><br/>“Idle hands are the devil’s playthings,” she droned, her voice being amplified as well, but this time by the Shogun’s crowd control speakers, giving her voice a considerably more sinister timbre than the puny megaphone was capable of. It was some nonsensical saying her father always liked to trouble her with. She supposed it had some deeper meaning, but didn’t care. The drift pilots don’t want me out there showing the world that they might become obsolete one day. Saving the world isn’t my concern, anyway. She honestly cared little what happened to herself or anyone else as a result of the kaiju attacks. All that really mattered was that she had the opportunity to do what she loved. It was one of the few emotional impulses she recognized in herself; the urge to build. The heat death of the universe meant all of this was irrelevant in the end, anyway.