"I guess? If I thought they were real people, I'd be weirded out too. But, like." He pauses, trying to figure out how the fuck to explain this to such a weird Akechi. He just hates seeing that face look so downcast.

"If it walks like a duck and so on, you know?" He would like to say If it walks like a cognition, but that may have been what set Akechi off before. "Like, yeah, it's good to make sure before you do an explosion, but I have. They aren't real. I know that as much I've ever known anything. I can back it up with a whole lot of past experience, actually, with real people and people-shaped things that weren't real. If I start saying oh, I don't know if that's real, for some reason, I might as well not know anything is real. I might as well not do anything."

Will that work? Who knows.