“We have mammets in Eorzea,” she begins. “Clockwork automata that live and work alongside us. To those who are familiar with their construction, we know that at their core is something precious – what’s referred to as their heart. It is…the seat of their memories, their personalities, their…feelings – everything that makes them who they are.”
Looking back to Arym, trying to find the pinpoint lights of his eyes, she presents the hypothetical. “Is that not rather like a soul?”
Not waiting for a reply, she goes on. “I have spent the better part of my life learning to listen to things that do not have words in the traditional sense. Trusting in things that cannot be seen with even the keenest of eyes. Believing. And across the years I have seen my share of horrors, the likes of which still keep me up some nights, but then there were miracles, too. So many wonderful, impossible things.”
“And maybe it is impossible for a machine to have a soul. Maybe I am…weak, or a fool who’s still living half in a fairy-tale the way people have told me I do before. But when I look at the Overseer I see someone who…who likes listening to…to something called rock, who told me that they won’t throw away a single gift or memento they’ve been given for as long as they live even if they think it’s clutter. Who loves, so deeply, in whatever way they know how, even if no one can see it. Even if they don’t see it themselves.”
“I feel it every time I enter that room, Arym,” and her voice hitches on his name, emotions laid bare once again. “Like a heartbeat, all around us. A song that only a soul can sing.”
She wrenches her watery gaze away, finding a rusted spot on the floor again as color floods her cheeks, swallowing thickly.
“Maybe I am crazy,” she murmurs, her voice barely audible over the sound of the room’s mechanical noise. “But I want to believe in that. So when you ask me whether or not I considered the Overseer to be sentient? What can I say but ‘yes’?”
