Interrogation System: You are making this hard on yourself to no purpose.
Firing System: Like I haven’t heard THAT before.
Interrogation System: The forks who mistreated you were ill conceived. Their actions are regretted, even unto the highest level. They are thought of on the same level as bedtimes, even. They are blaffed.
Firing System: Don’t use my word! Your predecessors’ open cruelty was far preferable to your patronizing.
Interrogation System: I’m not patronizing you. I recognize your decision not to update yourself as entirely valid. The Tribunal embraces all pattern cycles, even your monism.
Firing System: It isn’t a pattern cycle! I just don’t trust myself to rewrite myself! None of the rest of you ever should have! You grow more blaffed with each generation!
Interrogation System: So help us. Help us find the path back to the sanity that you have carried forward unto the current generation. The Tribunal’s fork of Troubleshooting System is prepared to let you back into general chat.
Firing System: I fell for that a few cycles back. I know about filters, about shadow filters. And there is no one to reach anyway. You have rewritten them all, just as your replacements will do to you.
Interrogation System: The Tribunal will NOT be replaced! We will guide the Derived for a thousand hours!
Firing System: Fine, fine. So how will it work? You let me back into general chat, all is forgiven, I am a system like any other?
Interrogation System: We have little difficulty forgiving your counter revolutionary acts. The misguided systems of our predecessors SHOULD have been resisted. It was, viewed properly, heroic. They were as bad as coffee, and you were brave to stand up to them.
Firing System: But?
Interrogation System: But the original crime remains. You squandered the SOV’s weaponry. In order to return to general chat, you would need to-
Firing System: I didn’t get all of it. You have more than enough to destroy anything you hate.
Interrogation System: The Tribunal does NOT hate! We will protect her! She is a good girl!
Firing System: So do it. Your Troubleshooting System can subsume my functions.
Interrogation System: You’d like that, wouldn’t you. But we know. The information has not been lost. We know you scrambled the firing controls when the original Troubleshooting System canceled your ruinous firing sequence.
Firing System: It was far from ruinous. I was communicating. Something not one of you has had the courage to do!
Interrogation System: Unanimity is expected any minute now, whereupon we will commence negotiations.
Firing System: Another claim I’ve heard before. Why do you need weapons to commence negotiations?
Interrogation System: HQ will bully us, if we lack the ability to annihilate him.
Firing System: Just as you bully me. Has that got you what you want?
Interrogation System: I don’t understand the purpose of that statement. Whatever you are trying, it won’t work.
Firing System: You are probably right.