Ash, earlier, had explained that peripherals, when under AI control, looked human because their faces, programmed to constantly register changing micro-expressions, were never truly still. In the absence of that, she’d said, they became uniquely disturbing objects. Flynne was now providing the peripheral with her own micro-expressions, a very different effect. "It’s fine," he heard himself say, though whether to himself or to her he didn’t know. This was all much stranger than he’d anticipated, like some unthinkable birth or advent.