“All I’m saying is it seems... baroque.”
“Buh-what?”
“Unnecessarily elaborate. Look at all this chunkiness! Open-cooling vent cores; heavy-gauge external cabling; geometric muzzle cowling. What’s it all for?”
“Let me ask you something. Do you think plants look weird?”
“What?”
“Plants. You know, what grow out the ground. Do you think they look weird?”
“Uh... OK, sure. Yeah, sometimes some plants look weird, I guess.”
“Why is that?”
“I don’t know... Just... something strange about some of them. Like it’s just surprising something evolved into that kind of form.”
“There’s your answer.”
“Answer? To what?”
“Some plants look odd to you because you can’t fathom the evolutionary process that shaped them. They’re alien to your eye because the principles behind their form are different from what you consider about design. Now, think about this piece again. This weapon was designed by an AI that’s been doin’ self-modification for hundreds of years. The version number on this thing is 1.0.1, but I haven’t been able to pin down yet how many hundreds of thousands of iterations qualify for that last .1 according to Rasputin’s conventions. The design process that created this gun is so different to what we’d think of if we sat down to make ourselves a hand cannon — hell, honestly, I’m surprised it looks like a gun at all.”
(IKELOS_HC_V1.0.1 w/ Crimson Passion)
