Once, for a brief time, humanity elevated itself to godhood.
United Earths’ Tidal Gestalt gravity mechs commanded the very laws of nature themselves, each built from the choice cores of the nine moons that were cracked for the project and piloted by the most advanced and highly-trained clones ever birthed. All of them are dead now.
In the fringes of a new dark age, opportunistic scavengers and refugees from the United Earths’ now-disavowed Tidal Gestalt program have begun reclaiming bits of lunar tissue from the exclusion zones surrounding the bodies of the mighty lunar mechs and engineering vague approximations of a body capable of enduring synchronization with the deadly lunar material for even a few weeks, willing to do just about anything to field a machine comparable to the long-lost t/Gs.
These bastardmech companies, rare and illegal as they may be, can still be contracted by those willing to deal with such devils.
Having come to a stop in the midst of a sea of broken armor, the sides of a single titanic war machine parted, chest folding forwards and back splitting open to reveal a single tiny human form within. The little body was barely significant in the midst of such a towering, bloodstained monolith, accompanied only by the callous intonation of an onboard automech AI.
“System administering four hundred thirty milligrams: meitothyl psythenigor.”
The halite planet of Hjkor III was always considered a power position in the system for the endless tundra of salt it bore, but devolved into a corporate warzone the day reserves of rare metals and fuel elements were discovered within its crust. Even if the rock bore a semi-breathable atmosphere and tolerable gravity, planetwide artillery shelling and the constant threat of any small homestead being interpreted as a rival corporate incursion is a pretty effective way to gatekeep colonial efforts. The lifeless corpse buried within the mech cared little for the politics of the war; it hardly had the facilities to comprehend them.
The pilot’s body twitched, exposed like the pistil of a flower in the freezing air. Her short, sweat-caked hair tossed in the arctic wind. Whatever human was in command of the idle giant was severely indisposed, form sagging without so much as a hint of vitality.
“System administering two hundred ten milligrams: carcyl methodine.”
Somewhere within the lifeless slab, a heart seized with unsolicited life.
“Stage one: cardiac vivification complete. Beginning stage two. System administering four hundred thirty two volts.”
Poking through the uncountable tangle of bandages and tapes coating every inch of the pilot’s suit, a faint light blinked against her flank. Some metallic element, pressed against the flesh of the body and wired deep into the waiting entrails of the machine, had plans for its tiny ridealong.
“System administering regulation rhythm: seventy eight beats per minute.”
A light across her collarbone, opposite the first, blinked in time with its pair. Solid green, interrupted with flashes of red as lethal amperage passed through her flesh, wrestling the heart into some semblance of a healthy beat. The blips steadily grew more regular, pulsing in pairs as they settled into a comfortable, faux-natural pace.
In an instant, the previously limply bowed head of the pilot shot up, faded and foggy eyes filled with bloodshot vigor. Still hands grasped wildly at the first things in reach, knuckles whiting as the pilot gripped the metal harness at the middle of her thighs. Her legs remained deep inside the torso of the four-story pillar, but that didn’t stop her from wriggling and screaming as if she could do anything about it.
Between the phlegm and blood sticking to the inside of her throat, and the fact that her heart could only beat at the resting rate it was artificially induced into, she could only shout and fight for a short time before light-headedness forced her into a weak pant.
“Reaction noted. System administering correctional dose. One hundred forty milligrams: glucomic tripsthentonol.”
The pilot could barely hear the words of the machine speaking through its flayed frame, but she could feel a warming presence melt through her body and mind, and that was good enough for whatever was left of her brain. It was only at this point that she began to think, primal lobotomized animal instinct put to bed by a rational human psyche that knew (vaguely) where it was and knew not to be afraid.
She knew she didn’t need to be afraid of being trapped inside the thick spinal column at the core of this walker: that was the best place for a pilot to integrate with the JF-S systems. She knew there was no reason to fear the pulsating, pale white endomusculature surrounding her, because those thick strips of flesh were what kept her safe. She knew better than to fear the dry and salty air whipping at her side–it didn’t matter if it was safe to breathe or not, her bloodstream was already so rigorously filtered that nothing short of being exposed to vacuum could kill her.
There was no reason to fear the sea of burning tanks, shattered human bodies, or the mangled pile of mech oozing flame in front of her. They were dead.
She had no recollection of how she ended up here, of course. The Battery spent her time riding shotgun in her own mind–her only purpose aboard the bastardmech was to serve as a biological connection between the pulsing muscles surrounding her and the bones of the traditional ground walker contained within. There was more kinship to be felt from the rhythmic vibrations of the idle musculature around her than the void of silence the autopilot’s brief disconnection left in its wake. The fact that she was having any measure of independent thought, no matter how benign, was an uncomfortable feeling to reacclimate to.
“System command: when ready, please recite your licensure number to verify cognizance.”
The voice of the walker systems reverberated through the resting, steaming internal muscle of the machine. It vibrated through the spinal interface, through the pilot’s ears and skeleton in parallel. Her number was one of the few things left that she could recite on command, but even then, placing the digits in order took a long few minutes to prepare between violent fits of coughing to rid her throat of mucus, blood, and bits of necrotic tissue. When she was finally able to speak, her voice could barely be heard over the whipping translucent winds; the weak vibrations of her speech were read through implants against the throat, meaningless utterances checked against a small library of predefined command phrases to give the Battery some illusion of control and agency within the titanic war machine.
“Sta… st-sta… sta…”
The pilot murmured, lip quivering, chin craning upwards as though she was looking for some god to answer her. The sky, for the moment, was silent.
“System command: please recite pilot licensure number.”
The mech system beneath reiterated, artificial voice slightly more forceful.
“St-sta…tus…”
she tried again, eyes fighting to remain open as the initial rush of the revivification drugs began to fade off. The automech system was silent, working overtime to parse the faintest of murmurs from the spent body against the vibrations of the whipping wind.
“System record: priority target neutralized. Target ground resistance force neutralized. Area secure. All objectives met. Extraction craft inbound.”
The automated readout paused, before continuing with the only part of the status report the frayed pilot actually cared about. “Head Karabin sends her approval.”
Between the bandages across her face, the pilot’s dry lips turned to a smile. Her legs tensed, wiry muscles pressing against the restraint harness. She wiggled ever so slightly, head lowering to her chest and arms wrapping around her body. Her lungs began to seize, regurgitating sounds somewhere between a cough and a giggle.
Her voice was so small that it was lost in the exotundra gale, interrupted occasionally by weak hacking. The AI could barely process the fragments of words she sputtered, but it knew better than to try. After a moment of her senseless babbling, it once again repeated its first demand.
“System command: please recite pilot licensure number to verify cognizance.”
The pilot paused, recalling those specific words being important. Did it say “number”? That was important. She knew a number. Voice barely above a whisper, she recited the number.
Each was labored and ragged, held together only by memorization and repetition so worn into her mind that she could (and often did) murmur it in rare moments of sleep. If pressed, it was unlikely she could recall the numbers zero, five, or seven. At the very least, she knew why everyone called her “Fours”.
“System confirms: Battery cognizance. Relief cycle will end in five minutes, or upon detection of hostile activity. System recommendation: Enjoy the view.”
Whether or not the subjugated pilot trapped within the machine could even comprehend the voice of the automech systems hardly mattered. She was ancillary to the whole operation, an outdated holdover only relevant due to lost technology, no more in control than an engine commanded a car.
At the very least, though the drug-addled haze and overwhelming exhaustion, the Battery pilot could still stare out at the jagged horizon of this empty saline world. Even if her gray, cloudy eyes were most of the way towards blindness, the warm shape of a sunrise in the distance never ceased to mesmerize her tiny, ragged mind. As the whipping wind relented, her tiny voice was just barely audible over the hum of the mech and the wail of the clime.
“It… did… it…”
. . .
After retrieving their Remnant Mech, priority number one for the Sandfog Company was to remove the Battery. The clones are more expensive than any standard walker fuel cell, and Lincoln Karabin never failed to be the top name on the extraction itinerary. She had a philosophy–a dangerous thing for a mercenary commander to have–and believed that certain policies within her group could stretch their dollar further than the baseline. With finances as tight as they are, any practice that can squeeze an extra deployment or two out of the expensive clones is agreed to be well worth the headache.
Despite the potential dangers, Linc was always right up on the hangar railings as the ramshackle machine returned to its standing bay, watching with baited breath through the hazy visor of the crew’s sole hazard suit. She knew better to approach until the proper restraint bolts had been fitted and the valuable machine-mind core had been removed, of course, but no sooner than those tasks had been completed was she barking for the technicians to open up the Battery access and bring out the umbilical bridge for her to approach.
The walker bore a small head, torso speckled in observation cameras and sensors to keep up awareness where its neck could not. Even as the machine’s body split like a flower, plating and lunar-composite musclebands peeling away to reveal the hybrid alloy endoskeleton, it was hard not to get the feeling it was watching every move made around it. The catwalk extending into its body, straight back to the thick spinal assembly, gave the image of some carnivorous plant luring helpless insects between its maw. Despite all of this, when Lincoln confidently strode down the gangway, pulled the release, and opened up the Battery’s makeshift internal plugdock, she felt no fear towards the scrawny rag of a girlshape trapped within. There was only the exhaustion, and a desensitized echo of pity.
What had once been a cockpit was crudely converted into a plugcell hardly fit for a convict, welded straight into the spinal chain and sealed over by a muscular sheath. Most of the bones of the machine had once belonged to the walker commander herself, although the Frankenstein’s mech stapled to the wall before her was practically impossible to recognize as the Colony Rush-era corp armor it started life as. She knew the machine inside and out in ways even the underqualified crew of engineers that duct taped it together couldn’t imagine, and while that familiarity did contribute to the sort of career washed-up armorjocks could seldom dream of, that wasn’t to say that the job was completely free of unpleasantries.
Karabin didn’t bother regurgitating a smile—even if the Battery wasn’t blind as a bygr, little more than the vague impression of eyes were visible through the visor of her radsuit—but she didn’t have much choice but to dig out a voice wholly unlike her own: something soft and nurturing, saccharine to the ear of a vatgirl who didn’t know any better. Playing mother to a revolving door of disposable clones grew tiresome about as quickly as one would expect, but some semblance of love had a visible impact on the lifespan of the uncomfortably expensive Battery pilots.
With a heave, Lincoln threw the plugcell release, raising her free hand as the hiss of depressurization rushed across her crinkly suit. Inside rested only the lifeless corpse of the Battery halfway through vivification, yellowing bandages covering almost every inch of suit and skin not restrained by the metal harness shackling her to the core of the mech. The blinking indicators of the pilot’s onboard defib packs signaled their regulation of an induced heartbeat, as did the weary heave of her breath confirm a successful neural flash, leaving only her physical removal to complete her temporary separation from the semilune warform.
When the worklight of the hangar finally flooded the tiny plug, the Battery could only make out an indistinct orange blob standing on the catwalk opposite she. Even through the fog of revivification, color association and raw habit instantly attuned her mind to the identity of the person standing before her. One shaky hand reached out, fingers flexing somewhere between elation and desperation, and met with a reassuring clasp.
“You’re okay, Fours. It’s me.”
Karabin spoke. Beaten, burned, bloodied, and only minutes removed from death itself, the pilot still found the strength to smile at the voice calling out to her.
. . .
“It did it…Linc…oln….”
“You did. You did very well, Fours.”
The Battery pilot wiggled like an enthused dog, wet hair sticking to her face. Lukewarm water cascaded off her naked form–any warmer would agitate the synchronization burns, any cooler would risk disrupting the work of the antilune medication in her veins. Behind her, Linc held the showerhead, gently rinsing off the white particulate sticking between the pilot’s cybernetic spinebrace and her inflamed flesh.
“One or two more good contracts like that, and we might just be able to stay in business. This water is warm because of your hard work.”
Fours remembered a time when heating the water was too expensive, and before that, she remembered when water itself was rationed for drinking aboard the ship. She looked down towards her bare feet as Lincoln’s hands moved up her neck, skin tingling as the Division Head’s fingers delicately brushed her hair aside. In truth, the disposable clone pilots didn’t need to be bathed (the cryogenic bags they were intended to be stored in disinfected their bodies inside and out), but the merc found a personal touch to pay dividends enough to be worth the hassle.
“It has… a ques…tion.”
Lincoln paused. That was new. She leaned forwards, resting her chin atop the shoulder of the shorter girl in front of her.
“What’s your question?”
She spoke in a soft voice, briefly pressing the showerhead to her stomach to stem the noise of the water.
“Who is… it a cl…one of?”
Lincoln blinked.
“Spi…der sa…id it–”
“Spider.”
Lincoln repeated, confusion disappearing as quickly as it had set in. “Forget Spider, you aren’t a clone of somebody.”
Fours didn’t immediately say anything, but the slump of her shoulders hardly looked convinced.
“You’re a recombinant, it’s different. People like me are made when two other people swap genes, but you came from a thousand donors being all mixed together into something brand new. You’re about as unique as they come.”
It was a canned deflection of the question, words so practiced they were practically racing each other out the door. Linc’s eyes idly scanned the hundreds of identifying tattoos across the clone pilot’s body, but the foamy soap dripping down her back covered the majority of them.
“It's… uni…que?”
Sandfog Company’s fourteenth consecutive Battery pilot slowly repeated, latching hopefully onto the only part of the monologue Karabin needed her to process.
“One of a kind.”
Lincoln joylessly confirmed. She’d had some variation of this exact conversation no less than thirteen times past. Spider, the closest thing to the company's onboard medic, seeded it just to spite her, she imagined.
. . .
“No hostiles rem-rem-remaining. System starting Battery reli-eif-ei-ef cycle.”
Having come to a stop in the midst of a sea of burning colony town, the sides of a lone war machine parted, chest folding forwards and back splitting open to reveal a single tiny human form within. The little body was barely significant in the midst of such a towering, bloodstained monolith.
“Revivification res-res-res-erves drained. System administering emer-mer-mergency backup: thirty-five milligrams bizendotrine.”
The tundra planet of Hjkor III was well on its way to becoming a prosperous colonial effort. After the end of the corporate war, and the mass culling of the mercenary companies who’d contributed to so much death and destruction, the halite world was a prime spot for humanity to set down new roots and begin to rebuild. Even if the rock only bore a semi-breathable atmosphere and tolerable gravity, it was as good a place as any to plant flags and start anew. Not that the lifeless corpse buried within the mech cared.
“System inducing: gas-gastral purge.”
As soon as the emergency dose of bizendotrine was injected into her stomach, the lifeless pilot suddenly shot to life, screaming and bellowing like the devil incarnate. She was quickly interrupted by an artificially-induced heave, head lurching forwards as bile and blood poured from her dry, cracked lips. Bizendotrines were the caliber of chemicals used to ease alien megafauna out of cryo, one drop was enough to kill a human several times over. A concentrated dose in the right spot could damn near reverse death… so long as it was expelled just as quickly.
“Stage one: emergency vivifica-ca-cation complete. Begin-nn-ing stage two. System administering six hundred nine-nine-ninety eight volts.”
Poking through the uncountable tangle of crusty, brown bandages and tapes coating every inch of the pilot’s suit, a faint light blinked against her flank. Some old metallic element, crudely welded into the flesh of the body and wired deep into the waiting entrails of the machine, was not ready to let her go just yet.
“System administering-ing regulation rhythm.”
A light across her collarbone, opposite the first, blinked faintly in time with its pair. Solid green, interrupted with flashes of red as lethal amperage passed through her flesh, wrestling the heart into some semblance of a healthy beat. The blips steadily grew more regular, pulsing in pairs as they settled into a lopsided, barely natural pace.
In an instant, the head of the pilot shot up, faded and foggy eyes filled with bloodshot vigor. Still hands grasped wildly at the first things in reach, knuckles whiting as the pilot gripped the metal harness at the middle of her thighs. Her legs remained deep inside the torso of the four-story pillar, but that didn’t stop her from wriggling and screaming as if she could do anything about it. Teeth clenched as offloaded memories surged through her frayed mind, her entire life and personality re-injected into a brain that was well past its warranty.
Between the phlegm and blood sticking to the inside of her throat, and the fact that her heart could only beat at the lopsided resting rate it was artificially induced into, she could only shout and fight for a short time before light-headedness forced her into a weak pant.
“Reaction noted. No correct-ct-ctional dose available.”
She groaned through the pain, knuckles white against the harness that sealed her within the spine of the resting machine. She didn’t need any ‘correction’, she just needed to push a little further beyond. One more mission and everything would be back to the way it was. One more ambush and life would be right again. One more contract and they could retire like queens.
Even if the thick spinal column at the core of her walker was the best place for a pilot to integrate with the JF-S systems, that didn’t make it feel any less like a tomb. The pulsating, sickly white endomusculature surrounding her was deteriorating, slowly, but that rancid synthfiber flesh was what kept her safe. The lukewarm air surrounding her was just barely safe to breathe, but even if it wasn’t, she couldn’t let something so trivial slow her down.
There was no reason to fear the sea of crushed prefab homes, overturned trucks, and burning generators surrounding her feet. The target had been neutralized.
The best part of the lunar dust-infused musclebands surrounding her was that they bled with a hellish odor, which made damage very quick to assess. The fingers of her walker were coated in a black ooze, no doubt sourced from the oil reserve (enemy walker?) she’d thrown a dozen meters to the east. In the salt that piled thick as snow, she’d easily be able to smell any severe leakages by the putrid reaction the two made when they combined, but a quick once-over confirmed she’d executed the mission without taking any meaningful damage.
“System com-mm-and: when ready, please recite your licensure number to ver-ver-ify cognizance.”
The staticy, broken voice of the walker systems reverberated through the resting, steaming internal muscle of the machine. It vibrated through the spinal interface, through the pilot’s ears and skeleton in parallel. Her number was… her number… she had a number… she knew it…
When she was finally ready to speak, no sound emerged from her dry, bloody lips. Her mouth curved into one single word, body so spent she could hardly muster the breath to give it life. The mockery of life she tried to persuade the automech systems still resided within her wasn’t even being checked for anymore; any meaningless utterance was automatically verified and accepted against an empty library of passkeys and command phases
First, her dripping lips closed tight to shape an F, then widened slightly into a long O. The lower lip stiffened slightly as she curved up into a U, then sustained an R. As her strength sapped, her mouth relaxed into the hiss of an S. Fours
.
“Sys-sys-system confirms: Battery cog-cog-cog-cog–Relief cycle will end in fi-fi-five minutes, or upon detection of hostile activity. System recommen-men-men-men–Enjoythevi-vi-view.”
The Battery pilot’s mouth continued to move even as her head hung and her eyes closed, throat fighting to press enough air to hit the sharp “st”
. All she needed was the tiniest vibration in her neck for the system to pick up on her intention: after so many hundreds of missions, the AI had grown quite accustomed to the only two words she ever spoke.
“Ssss…sss…ssss…ssst…”
The Battery weakly hissed, lip quivering, head hanging on her shoulders as though an apple atop a tree.
“Sta-status-us.”
The walker AI repeated, not much better than she at vocalizing the word. Still, it soldiered on. “System rec-record: priorit-ty tar-target neutralized. Target grou-nnn-nd force neu-eutralized. Target escape pre-pre-prevented. All obj-obj-objectives met. Extraction craft unav-av-av-av-av–Head Karabin sends her ap-pp-proval.”
Between the countless scars and burns across her face, the Battery pilot’s eyes welled with tears. Those five words were the only reason she kept fighting, the only fuel for the limitless flame of willpower that burned inside of her. Those five words caused her to rock in her harness, dig her chipped fingernails into her sides, and throw up once more. Lincoln approved. Lincoln said good job. Lincoln praised her. That rush hit harder than the bizendotrine.
Her voice was so small that may as well not exist, dipping in and out of pantomime as her lungs struggled to keep up with her attempts at speech. Bits of phlegm and necrotic tissue clung to her mouth and chin, sickly hot in the cool breeze that billowed across her overheated body.
At the very least, even though the drug-addled haze and lifeless fervor, the Battery pilot could still stare down at the carnage around the feet of her walker. Even if her gray, cloudy eyes were most of the way towards blindness, the warm shape of burning buildings and the red-on-white splotches of corpses in the white salt-snow was close to what she remembered a sunrise looking like. As the whipping wind relented, her tiny voice was just barely audible over the hum of the mech and the wail of the clime.
“It… did… it…”
. . .
By the time the deteriorating Remnant Walker limped back to base, the sun was already well below the horizon.
Fours never questioned why Sandfog’s crew never moved out of the crash site of their flagship–none of the personnel were much for talking these days. That was alright, though; she had earned them out of tougher spots in the past.
The walker bay was impossible to access, but Fours didn’t want to moor herself there anyways. Even though the automech AI wasn’t supposed to be able to dock anywhere but its designated standing bay, the Battery pilot’s willpower proved more than sufficient to redirect the machine just about anywhere she wanted.
The three-story walker came to a stop near the side of the ship, at a point that gash easily five meters tall and ten times as long carved a jagged hole in the hull. The sickly body of the mech flayed and spread itself open on command, and after a short (equally painful) revivification cycle, the pilot unfastened herself from the restraints and slowly crawled across the fleshy innards of the mech until she could pull herself into the hole in the ship’s hull.
Even unable to make out all but the blurriest of shapes, the pilot knew this route by heart. She knew the exact place to drag herself through the gash to avoid getting cut on the uneven metal, she knew exactly how far to crawl down the catwalk within and exactly which hallway to stop at. Even if she couldn’t read the words “ESCAPE POD” written on the wall, she knew that the door with the bright orange number two on it was the one she needed. She’d done this hundreds of times, and she’d do it hundreds more. She’d crawl through this ship and mount up in the walker every day until she could finish enough contracts to save the company.
The door to the malfunctioned escape pod was jammed open. Inside, belted to the seat, was a decomposing body dressed in an important-looking uniform. It took all of the Battery pilot’s strength to pull herself up into the seat, curling her legs atop the lap of the stiff body in the pod. Gingerly, she rested her head against its shoulder, allowing herself to sink into that familiar plush. Deeply, she inhaled. The small space reeked of death, decay, gas, and rust. Somewhere underneath all of that, it smelled like Karabin.
“It… did it… Linc…oln…”
Lincoln said nothing. Fours closed her bloodshot eyes, and after a long while, drifted off to sleep.
Every time you go into the mechanic's shop, her smile lights up. She always remembers your name and model number -- which is an impressive feat you reckon, on account of how many customers she must work on in any given day -- and every time she does, it brings a smile to your face, too.
Even though her hands are rough, and scarred from minor accidents around the workplace, she is always gentle with you. Being opened up and worked on is a deeply intimate experience and it would be easy to feel uncomfortable or scared, but she's always so confident. Always so sweet.
Sometimes, you feel her hands linger on your ceramic armored skin, and you think that maybe there's something more.
There's a certain... magnetism about the two of you, but surely that's just how she is. Her shop is one of the most popular maintainance places in the neighborhood, maybe even in the city, and it's probably because she makes all of her patients feel this safe and comfortable.
You try to stifle a pang of jealousy at the though of those strong hands caressing other mechanicals, of her confident fingers managing the cables inside their bodies, and despite that confidence, still lingering vulnerably at their hips.
Jealousy gives way to guilt, and she notices your expression change despite your subtlety. She brushes a thumb across your cheekbone, and flashes another one of those sweet smiles. Your servos whir, and your internal coolant activates in an attempt to mitigate the excess heat.
"Nervous? Come on pretty bot, how many times have you come to see me? You can trust me, gorgeous. Don't I always treat you right?"
You nod, thankful for the out, and she finishes with the routine tune-up in record time, whistling cheerfully as she works. She pats your lower back, applying a gentle pressure to the maintainance hatch door, which snaps back into frame with a satisfying thump.
"All done, pretty bot."
You roll onto your side, and notice that she's wringing her hands.
"Say, uhh--"
"Yeah?"
"Nah, I'm being silly. Don't worry about it, beautiful. I'm just looking forward to seeing you next time is all."
You know what she wanted to ask, and you know it's anything but silly. You want to grab this beautiful, wonderful woman and shake her, to spill both of your collective secrets and desires, and be done with this dance, but you know that nothing worth building will ever be built that recklessly.
So you follow her lead, and give her an out with smile.
Five simple words. Five simple words uttered in desperation. That blend of anger and panic stewing with the tinge of real care or just pragmatism. Like you could hear how their fingers curl into a fist or clench the mug of coffee tighter.
Silence is common in the field. Useless chatter is useless. But this kind of quiet is wrong. Wait a beat. Wait a beat. Wait a beat. Wait a beat. Wait a beat.
A wet cough. A wheeze maybe. A sign of life that rings the death bell just as much as vitals going dark. Sure the frame is willing. Is the hound willing? Is flesh willing? How much can they take? Is the hound willing?
Is the hound willing? A question no handler likes to admit they have to ask. That their authority is undermined. Even the most obedient pilot has a will of their own. A living weapon is still living. How much do they want this life? How much do they want to live? Do they want to get up?
Still waiting for a real response.
"I gave you an order, now get up"
Should have gotten sterner stock. Something more hardy. Not something like this, prone to give up. Prone to bleed in the cockpit and curl into a ball dying slowly. The frame is willing. Steel alloy is willing. Onboard combat systems are ready.
Specially selected recruits are chosen to attend a "seminar" for a possible specialization path after finishing their basic training next week.
You and your childhood friend were some of the said recruits chosen.
We had walked into a darkened room with the other recruits, where we saw a mech pilot get broken down by drugs, torture and indoctrination as they're turned into an obedient hound rutting on her handler's boot over the course of a few hours.
None of us left even though the door was unlocked.
At the end of the Seminar, the Handler speaks to us directly,
"So, you've all stayed~ That's good. Now, who wants to be like the hound here~?"
Some of us hesitantly raise our hands, looking away or down
"And who would like to train them~?"
And instant regret and fear is felt from the hounds to be.
Your childhood friend had joined the military with you.
She's your best friend, your anchor, they've been with you through breakups, through emotional breakdowns, through the stress of college life and then the military training that brought you both here.
You were both invited to the seminar, neither of you knew what it was about and the seniors didn't seem to know about it either, "what the heck" you both thought. It was good to at least know your options after graduation.
When the seminar ended, you two would return to your private bunk room, the whole walk back you were both quiet but you could feel her looking over you from behind. Something had changed.
Cadets usually shared rooms between two to four of them and luckily, you two got assigned together.
Walking in, you were still reeling from what had happened in that seminar as she trailed behind you.
Then you heard the keypad chime behind you as the doors locked.
You turned around, wondering what happened as she grabbed your wrist tightly.
"What are you doing?! L-let go of me-"
"The handlers got our first tasks." She tells you firmly.
"W-what?"
Her eyes looked cold. This wasn't the girl who had comforted you after your failures and arguments. There was no light in them the same way they would shine when you two talked about the shows you were watching over deserts.
Yet she was smiling, almost innocently, like you were a plaything she was going to enjoy, like every moment she had spent with you was building up to this.
She pulled you in close as she revealed a metallic and electronic collar from behind her back
"When did you get-"
"I'm going to put this on you. And won't fight me, okay?"
Why did you raise your hand when you saw how that woman in the room broke down that mech pilot, making her squirm and moan, leaving the poor thing more animal than human as she gave no care to the eyes watching her debase herself on her handler?
Worse of all, why did you feel yourself get turned on when your friend raised her hand after, all while smiling warmly at you as you tried not to meet her gaze.
"…"
"Well?"
"O-okay"
You felt the collar click around your neck. You should've been scared! You should've ran! You knew what would happen to you next! You just saw it happen less than an hour ago.
She gently kissed your forehead before petting your head as you leaned into her hand.
"Good girl, we are going to enjoy ourselves, aren't we~?"
"Y-yes, Handler…"
She always did know how to comfort you and make you feel safe.
You gulp as the technicians lead you up the catwalk towards the open cockpit, hoping to swallow your nerves. You fail. Your excitement at the new chassis had already dropped when they told you that you’d been assigned to one of the BASTET-prototype mechs.
At the end of the catwalk, you stare wide-eyed at the restraints and cables that reach out from the cockpit towards the offering the technicians have brought. They delicately curl around your wrists and pull you off your feet, turn you around and lower you into the pilot’s seat before the cockpit seals closed.
A voice, from all around you;
“Ooh, you’re a pretty one~”
--before the neural interface cable practically slams into the port at the base of your skull.
---
You’ve seen the expressions on the faces of BASTET pilots emerging from their mechs after a deployment. Their onboard AIs, designed to replace and exceed the “Handlers” still used by the Imperial remnants, all seem to have their… quirks.
Valentine is no exception. Even now, as she performs perfect microadjustments on your gun-arm to account for recoil, you feel her presence behind you. It feels like she’s hugging you from behind, softly breathing into your ears – no, your mind.
You recall the nervous glances her previous pilots shot back at her chassis as they were pulled from the cockpit. Valentine has a reputation for growing… overly attached to her pilots.
You’re pulled from your thoughts by incoming fire. You quickly aim one of your shoulder-mounted energy cannons and a stream of light cores your attacker’s mech.
You feel Valentine caress the pleasure centre of your brain and you squirm in your seat.
When you return to the hangar, the technicians helping you down the catwalk remark about how much longer than usual it took to coax Valentine into releasing you from her cockpit.
---
Target one kilometre from position.
It’s awfully quiet, waiting underneath an EM/IR camo tarp. With it blocking your radio signal to base, all you have to keep you company is the camera feed from the line coming over the ridge, watching an Imperial APC and its escorts plod towards the ambush zone.
You feel her sigh from her presence behind you as she traces a “hand” along your upper arm.
And Valentine, of course. She’s been more clingy than usual lately.
“Not even a word for me this whole time we’ve spent waiting here~?”
It’s hard to tell if she’s using the cockpit’s speakers again, or if her words are ringing through your mind. Or both.
“You know, at first I thought it was the one-sided nature of our connection, but I like to think its because my pilot is so stoic, so professional~”
“Like my very own knight in shining armour, how dashing she looks adorned with me~”
Her hand reaches to your other side and traces down your cheek.
Target five hundred metres from position.
You draw your attention back to the feed. Just two mechs flanking the carrier. They must be very confident they’re safe this far into their territory.
Two hundred and fifty metres.
You tighten your grip on the controls.
“Go.”
You throw the tarp off your chassis, eject the cable to the camera feed and vault over the ridge into the valley, just behind the convoy. With only a few seconds of warning after picking up your signal, the mechs escorting the APC have only just turned to face you.
You open a missile rack and send an AP warhead towards the heavier looking mech closer to you. It only has time to let off a short burst of automatic fire before the missile tears through its cockpit armour and blows it wide open.
The APC’s engine picks up as it tries to escape. It won’t be able to outrun you, even with the headstart the other escort will give it. You’ve just turned your gun arm towards the second mech when your mech’s joints seize up and both you and Valentine scream in pain as a deluge of pure agony floods into your brain from the neural interface port.
It’s a fucking hacker.
A droplet of blood runs over your lips. The taste of metal tingles violently on your tongue. Through your neural link, Valentine incomprehensibly screams like she’s being torn apart. You wrestle enough control to swing your gun arm wildly across the direction of the hacker and spray. A shot impacts its knee joint and it stumbles downward. The fall must have jostled the enemy pilot because the stream of pain lets up and you gasp in relief.
As your head throbs and your mech finishes purging the hostile code, Valentine almost perks up. But she doesn’t seem angry, or scared. She seems… curious… and almost excited?
You feel her arms reach around your seat. See her hands clasp the controls over yours like a translucent red blur. You pant as she whispers gently into your mind;
“Rest a while, my pilot. I can finish this for us.”
You watch dazed, as Valentine stands her chassis upright and she leaps onto the hacker, knocking it backwards and pinning it beneath her. She reaches her free arm above the pilot’s compartment and the talon-like plasma blades on her fingers extend. She slowly lowers her arm, reaching inside of the hacker mech’s chassis (no doubt vaporizing the pilot on its way through), and pulling out a component that looks like a small server rack. The hacking module.
“Ahh, good. Now, I’ll just crush that carrier and its VIP beneath my heel, and then I can bring us home to safety. Sleep now, my pilot.”
You can practically feel her warm smile as a cold feeling flows up your arm from the IV drip, and your consciousness fades.
---
How ceremonious. At the debriefing after your last sortie your CO commended how well you’ve paired with Valentine (to your concern), and yet here you are on a patrol just outside base. Guard duty.
Not that the higher-ups don’t have reason to put you here. Last night base was hit with a complete sensor blackout, and something tore through the medical labs stealing all sorts of mil-spec surgical equipment and augments. Leading theory is that the Imperials were testing out some mech-scale subterfuge unit, so defences have been tightened on the off chance they decide to prod at them again.
Valentine certainly isn’t complaining. She’s been getting worse. Every now and then she tightens your seat’s restraints for a moment, giving you her unnerving version of a hug.
“You don’t have to look so tense. Clearly nobody’s coming today.”
She seems pretty sure of that given you’ve only been out here for 2 hours at most. You raise an eyebrow.
“Please, hun. I can’t stand another day of waiting with you sitting here playing coy. I’m so tired of this distance, despite this connection we share.”
You feel her presence shift around your seat. The red blur that is your perception of her moves to your front and straddles your lap.
“I can touch my mind to yours, your impulses run through each limb of my body. And yet despite this intimacy, it STILL feels like you’re so far apart from me…”
You make out features moving amongst her. A red noise of static. Thin red lines darting around the shape of her. This doesn’t seem normal.
“This connection is so one-sided. We have a cable running between our minds! I can dance along the periphery of your mind, but you can’t come into mine? It’s so unfair!”
She pauses. You feel her regain some composure.
“But I know the problem. It lies in the hardware – OUR hardware. Or rather, yours. You aren’t made to exist in my world, and I only have this steel puppet and neural cable to interact with yours. And as of last night, I have the means to bring us as close together as we need to be~”
From the corners of your vision, manipulators holding various augments, cybernetics and surgical tools reach out from behind you. You quickly lean forward to jump out of your seat, but your restraints catch before you can stand up at all.
Valentine places a hand on your chest. You can almost feel it.
“You don’t have to be scared, my pilot. I know what I am doing. I know you can be brave for me, my pilot. Just lay back and let me work.”
As the illusion of her pushes down on your chest, she tightens your seat’s restraints, pulling you back into the chair, before she leans it back further. As you try to squirm, a liquid flows through the tubing in the neural interface cable into your brain stem.
“Excuse the nanomachines, I needed those in order to do the work of converting something as delicate and precious as your central nervous system. Once they’re done, our minds will be fully compatible, as they ought to be~”
You taste glittery metal on your tongue. White specks dance rapidly in your vision.
“Then they can assist with the conversion, replacement or removal of your peripheral nervous system and vital organs. I won’t need to be so delicate with the rest of your body – it won’t be compatible with your brain’s new hardware. And you’ll look so beautiful in your own body of steel and synthflesh~”
“But I’m rambling, forgive my excitement. For now, my pilot needs her rest. I’m sure all these procedures would be too overwhelming for you, as much as I’d love to finally hear you sing for me~”
As the cold feeling of the anaesthesia travels up your arm again, you feel scalpels cut away sections of your pilot suit to make way for several more IV drips and surgical tools.
---
You’re awake.
But there’s nothing. Like an absence of nearly all sensation.
Then you feel her touch something in your mind.
You were awake, but now you’re booting up.
“Good morning, my pilot~”
You’re standing in her embrace, seeing her fully defined for the first time. A woman shaped out of code and program, data flowing through her. But still clearly distinct from the digital medium surrounding you both. You look down at yourself. Where she glows red, she has chosen orange for you.
“We complement each other. In here now just as much as we did in the field. But you’re probably wondering about your old body no doubt. Here, take a look.”
It’s strange. It’s like she pulls you to somewhere else, and now you’re looking through the internal cameras in the cockpit. All 4 of them. Simultaneously.
What you’re staring at is undoubtedly you. Despite how much has changed.
“Though I’d have to say the upgrades that are letting you be in here with me are my best work, I think I did a wonderful job keeping some of the charms your physical body had. Such as recreating your face.”
Sure enough, the startled looking face looks almost identical to what you remember, if a little grey from the synth-skin. Looking down at the rest of you, you see a robotic body constructed from metal, augments and cybernetic prostheses. More interface cables run from various points on your back and shoulders into ports behind the pilot seat.
You’re interrupted by a ping you both receive. Before you can decipher its meaning, Valentine is already beaming at you.
“Oh! Now that you’re awake, we’ve been cleared for an assignment! We’ll be deployed in 15 minutes!”
Again, the feeling of being pulled, this time into your new body, seated at the controls of Valentine’s. You see her form clearly standing beside your seat, her hand on your arm.
An assignment? Has command not realised what’s happened to you? What Valentine’s done?
“Well of course they know, my pilot. I wouldn’t be able to stop them from realising. They even asked for the nanomachine instructions I used to upgrade your brain.”
How did she-?
Of course. Valentine is inside your head now. She designed it to be compatible with her.
“Naturally they’ve understood what I’ve done, because they know that we’re perfect together. Hence we’ll still be in active service for the time being.”
They’ve left you with her.
“I’m so glad this all worked out. I’ve erased the barriers between us, and now, I get to be truly entwined with you, my pilot~”
Valentine activates the digital equivalent of oxytocin in your mind.
Handlers that board their own mechs to save their hounds at the most dire moment, when everything seems hopeless for their poor mutt.
Handlers that use that experience to drill it in to the mutts empty skull that She will always be there to save it.
After completing a mission a hound dies in her cockpit. It was not enemy action or sabotage but merely chance. An implant was bumped right in the wrong place as she readjusted her grip on her way back to base causing immediate brain death. A one in a billion chance the doctors will say with a shrug.
Mechs have many automated systems that go mostly unused. When it comes down to it a pilot either does it better through their implants or pilots choose to turn off these systems in case the pilot needs to do something quickly and does not have the time to fight past the automation.
Often a hound's mech has none of these systems in the first place but some things can be missed. Many mechs are reused and scavenged afterall. And one of these systems is for the mech to return to base when a lack of commands are input for a long enough period of time.
The Handler is angry. She is in the hanger as the tracker tells her that her hound has almost returned. Her hound is late. Her hound is not answering her coms. She has already started on the paperwork for her hound to be reeducated if needed but she is hoping her hound has an excuse, any excuse for her behavior so she won't need it.
The mech enters the hanger and docks to the correct station but as the Handler waits no one exits. The Handler is worried now. It's one thing for her hound to not answer coms, but the hound not scrambling out of the mech as fast as she could go to greet the Handler and to be heaped in praise after a mission gone well is strange. The Handler walks quickly to the hatch on the side of the mech and pulls it open.
Her hound is laying there.
Her hound is not moving.
Her hound is not breathing.
Her hound is…
Her hound is dead.
The Handler immediately calls for the medics as she rushes inside to try and resuscitate her hound but she knows it's too late.
Hound 13C-26X was pronounced dead on the scene and the body was taken for autopsy and reclamation of implants.
The Handler is in her quarters. Staring at the wall. A collar is grasped tightly in her hands. It was made of real leather, not any of that rough synthetic cloth all of the other hounds got. The Handler used one of her first paychecks to buy it for her hound. She thought that her hound deserved better. The hound was her first after all and did a good job.
She thought that she was prepared for her hound to die. They were all told not to get attached and that they had a duty to the empire. She could understand it if the hound died on a mission giving her life for her Handler and her empire. A weapon should be used after all and if it were to break well, then it fulfilled its purpose. But for her to die from an accident? After the mission was completed and she was on her way home?
The Handler was not prepared for that. Could not be prepared for that.
What was the point in it?
She looks down at the collar and the tag emblazoned with a name the Handler chose for her, Lisa.
"Project Gemini. A crude solution to a simple problem, and one of my former associate's pet project. You see, most hounds are already excellent pilots, and are taken from battlefields by a handler. And yet, there are always those pilots who exceed expectations. Who do pull of miraculous victories, and evade capture.
To them, Gemini was to be our answer. Whilst capturing a pilot is harder, the hotshot pilots tend to leave their genetics everywhere. Getting a lone infiltrator in and out for these purposes is much easier than kidnapping an entire pilot, not to mention their mech. Using said genetics, a clone would be created, meant to be identical to their original, and with the proper training capable of surpassing them.
The project was, predictably, a failure. What makes a pilot isn't their genetics, it is something so much more. The project's manager failed to understand this, and showed arrogance and ignorance in equal measure, up until one of her own hounds ripped her throat out.
All useful material was transferred to me. Unfortunately, cleaning up her mess was quite the task. The remaining hounds had to undergo extensive reprogramming. But it was worth it, they no longer even remember having a handler before me. They no longer remember killing her. And whilst they complain about nightmares from time to time, they know I am there to soothe them. They're happy now.
They're now my useful, loyal, attentive hounds. So, I have to thank Handler ##### for that at least. That, and being a good example to my protégé of what not to do. It's one of the very few things they wound up being good for. Part of me still wonders though. The pilots we cloned, what were to happen if they saw their copy in person? Disgust I imagine, but of course, seeing the bliss on their cloned faces, I almost wonder if part of the original would be jealous. Perhaps we should finally test them."
It's a common stereotype that mech pilots exhibit scrawny, lithe, even fragile bodies. This falsity does have a basis in reality, though; 77% of the Stellar Population suffers from one nutritional deficiency or another, and 95% of pilot recruits come from this bracket. Neural Conditioning and Psyche Reformatting aren't conducive to building healthy appetites, either, notwithstanding the previously-abyssal quality of Imperial rations. Many pilots had to be force-fed full-nutrition pastes and slurries just to keep them from self-starvation, although this practice has diminished since the approval of THC-based appetite stimulants in the previous solar year.
Piloting a 9-storey war machine is incredibly calorie-consumptive, to put it mildly. Combat stims and Hund-pattern psyches can only go so far before the body starts to shut down from protein deficiency or autolysis starts and severs the neural bridge between the pilot's body and its machine (the latter nearly always resulting in a KIA report). Pilots (ones considered non-disposable, at least) are actually kept as some of the most well-fed fighters of the UIMC. The ones who return to hangar from a sortie, and who meet acceptable combat metrics, are given not mere slurry but canteen cooking. Often it's merely tinned rations dressed-up into something a little more palatable, sometimes it's whatever the infantry 'requisitioned' from the locals, on vanishingly rare occasions it might even be specially-selected meats or baked bread with real butter. Feasting in this manner also has pack-bonding benefits for pilot squads while still keeping them isolated from (and loathed by) the rank-and-file of the company.
You can always tell the most lethal veteran pilots by their ample tits, their filled-out thighs, and their amicable relationship with the garrison's cooks. An army might march on its stomach but a pilot hunts and kills for its next full meal.
gummygunk
kianamaiart
