Pride was a fascinating thing to observe in beings who hadn't earned it.
There was a version of pride that existed because it had been produced naturally, forged through genuine adversity and genuine achievement and the earned confidence of someone who had looked at something difficult and come out the other side of it changed.
That version had weight. It pushed back!
It made decisions regardless of consequence because it had calculated the consequence and found the consequence acceptable.
Then there was engineered pride. Superbius pride. The kind cultivated into a being's foundations through careful Gilded methodology, installed the way any other capability was installed, present as a feature of the existence rather than as a truth of the being. It looked identical from a distance. Up close, it revealed itself the moment a real test arrived.
The test had arrived.
