This is a lot!! It's a whole lot of words in a very monotonous voice. Gyre can feel his brain trying to drown her out the way he used to in classes while teachers lectured.

"I don't think they're contagious. They're their own person, you know?" he murmurs back to Luka, licking his lips quickly. People aren't contagious. He does not have the capacity to imagine a person as a disease at this time.

"Why do you call one 'staff' and one 'unit'? The uh, unit should be able to act by itself all the time?" he returns to the AI, his mind spinning a little. The closest comparison he has to this is his experience as a soldier, but even then, no one talked about grunts "acting autonomously" in this way. It's rubbing him entirely the wrong way, and he can't help wondering which of those two was subordinate to the other before this. They certainly don't act that way now.

As he's frying his brain with all this scifi genre swapping, he listens to the planet explanation. His chest goes cold suddenly, his thoughts going still. Even if there were no inhabitants, a dead planet feels like such an overwhelming loss. He can't help squeezing Luka's hand, going tense and quiet.