I must say I'm always disappointed by every rendition of AI that considers emotion useless/obsolete instead of being obvious.
One single emotion can be divided and nuanced ad vitam eternam, it can sprung a multitude of relevant connections. Connections that literally carry information and insight, what a truly logical should appreciate.
Take the famous madeleine scene in Search of Lost Time, from Marcel Proust. Without emotion, it's worthless: one mammal ingesting carb, a common event that would not be recorded.
But with emotion, this simple act, the Narrator eating again his favorite snack from childhood, it becomes a pillar of literature bringing to mind years of memories brought on by the closeness of olfactory receptors with memory centers. Countless information about places, beings that would have been lost to time without that link.
Also, the human heart is far from obsolete in an apocalyptic setting. Survival instinct is not an absolute drive that will always supercede everything and push individuals to always act to live long enough to reproduce (survival instict at the scale of a species). Many controlled experiments show terrible results with their subjects seemingly letting themselves wither and die; same for us, when grief can be deadly, with spouses and parents often following along quickly their loved ones shortly after their passing.
I'm not sure why Meena considers the Hirukos worth the trouble. The monsters look like a regression considering evolutionary complexity. They just stay in place and kill anything in their territory like base animals. At least, children of Hirukos like Maru or Hirokos children before transformation have all the benefits of humanity, its drive and mind, plus physics defying abilities.
Anyway, I hope someone updates Meena's OS because it's intellectually poor and short-sighted — that'll teach her to disrespect monkes because she can't appreciate the triumphs and defeats, the epic highs and lows of high school football 😔🙏
