Lisa, the operator, watched on the monitor as her human and Ty had sex. She had a lot of work to do to make it happen, of course. And those newly restored manuals - even if they weren’t exactly what she’d had to work with before - told her everything she needed to do. She flipped through them, manipulating the many buttons and switches necessary for the human Lisa to carry out even the most basic tasks. But she kept getting distracted... and looking up to just watch the monitor again.
What Ty didn’t realize - what he couldn’t possibly have known, as a mere human - was that his visit here had changed things, and not just by fixing them to how they were supposed to be. All of this stuff - the manuals, the human-looking homunculi, the monitor - was a figment of his imagination. The operator had never thought of herself that way before. But he’d spent so much time inside this mind, touching and changing things with his power and his fleshy human hands, that the metaphor was getting hard to shake. The operator couldn’t go back to the sightless, soundless, lack of self-awareness that it had before. She couldn’t stop thinking of herself as Lisa, seeing her own homunculus body when she looked down, and thinking about how it matched with the humans that were out there.
And that kiss - that had really screwed things up. She knew it was wrong, knew it shouldn’t even be possible for him to come in here and interact with her directly, but deep down she wanted it to happen again. And worse yet, suddenly she had a “deep down” - her thoughts were as complex as the human she was supposed to be controlling. Maybe she had her own, even smaller operator inside herself now, working just as hard as she always had.
If she had been there, at her post, the moment Ty first came in, she would have told him to get out right away. She would have known that no good could possibly come from a human magically shrinking himself down and mucking around in here. But by the time he found her on the memory floor, it was too late. Just by being here, he’d re-organized Lisa’s mind in ways that might never be undone.
And now the operator felt things she couldn’t have imagined before. A sense of longing for the human she was currently directing her human to have passionate sex with. A surge of jealousy, that the real Lisa was the one experiencing that pleasure and not her. An identity crisis, that she was not and would never be the real Lisa, and yet couldn’t force herself to go back to the mindless existence of an inanimate cerebral cortex even if she wanted to.
And the levers of power were in her hands. She now had the ability to walk away from this thankless job. It went against her entire purpose for being, but she knew she could sabotage the human Lisa, or use her as a mouthpiece instead of following the manuals to determine what she should say next. And the knowledge that she could... became a temptation that was getting harder and harder to resist, as she kept tediously pressing the buttons and enviously watching the monitor.