like, it's not even that it is, on its own, particularly sticky, it's just that your hair is what it is stuck to. and when it sticks to your hair all those little fibers knot together and grab the stuff with esoteric entanglements. it's just that whatever proprietary polymer they put in to keep the goo gooey, really loves keratin at high surface area and wants to build a happy forever home there. you've got two scalp contacts right behind each ear, where your hair is wispiest, and four either side of your port, where your hair is longest, and these are exactly the worst places to smear keratin-loving goo, but they have to go there, because those points map to your sense of balance and finger movement intention. which they didn't tell you, of course. you just know it because those are the first senses to come on when you mount.
and when the goop first goes on, it's cold, clear, and very much not sticky, so nothing indicates just how irritating it'll turn out. it's just another part of mounting for work, your limbs in rig, your hands wrapped around the triggers, your eyes closed, your breath held. the tech steadying your head by the chin, the world at its dawn. you've been up for hours by then but not awake. not yet. you're holding still on instinct, on program, couldn't move if you tried, but for once, why would you want to? you're waiting, you're ready. there's the tech's free hand, deft, stroking your hair aside, then her finger with a dab or two of conductive gel, which is, at this point, irrelevant, as well as cold, clear, and not sticky. you let her, though it is not right that one should touch softly these organs of yours, your vestiges, your half-parts, but she is good at it, and you must hold yourself still still still when she reaches back to feel around for the contacts. and nowadays you can feel your senses fill in before you're even online, an expansion inside you. you didn't used to feel that. you can now. of course you're not dwelling on the conductive gel. you're listening, waiting, through all that tugging they do to get your port and your PICC hooked up and your harness locked, the click inside your skull, you are concentrating on the possibility space where your four fingers and your gyroscopes, your map and your thermal cam, your strength and your targeting, wait to wake up. and then they close your body up safe, and the sun is rising, and the noise shakes all that you are to life.
and when you're working - when you're out there all day being alive, being awake, being for something - you could not give less of a shit about keratin-loving goo. you are seven meters tall. your joints are titanium and carbon. you crumple roofs with your shoulders and boil glass craters into the desert. and nothing sticks to you, okay? nothing you wade through, nothing you shoot through, nothing anything throws at you, can stick to your big beautiful shell.
but then it's done, and they call you home. they call you home and they're waiting for you at the hangar, where you park and shut down, lock up your targeting and your strength, your thermal cam and your map, your gyroscopes and your four fingers, the noise that is your heart. and there are those seconds, those long, long seconds, of nystagmus, vertigo, darkness - your heaving breath reflected back a handsbreadth from your face - alone in the cave of your body. and then the daylight strikes in and your face catches the cold air of the hangar and begins to chill as it dries. the tech again, all in reverse, snip, snap, snip, holding still on instinct, on program, grabbing for a hand up at her cue. dismounting. squirming your soft little organs out of your big beautiful real shell. and they are so sweaty, and so shaky, and so fucking small.
and their head is fucking sticky.
and it's not even that it is, on its own, particularly sticky! and it never bothers you when you're mounting up, or working, only now, when the good bit's over, when the halls are canyons. when you're so itchy holding still while they poke you and raise your arms and track your eyes and dismiss you. you can feel the stickiness all over, all over you, the shirt plastered to the chest, crusty drying gel bits in the hair, cold spots up and down the arms where all those gloves grabbed them. you can feel the dust in the air crawl on your molted skin. you swear there are little crusties flaking to the floor behind you, hell, the hand is tremoring so bad when you try to run it through the hair, you'd think it would all shake loose. but it doesn't. the hair snags your fingers, all matted and oily, your neck is covered in residue, it makes you shudder like you've put your hand in blood, except you wouldn't anymore, so you shudder like, well, like nothing, then. and back in the showers, as you get out of your clothes, you have to touch the skin, the legs, the sides, the limp vestigial softness of them. a thermal hotspot, a material of no impedence, the kind your working eyes would highlight, your working hands would carve right through.
so thank god for the high pressure water with the soap pre-mixed so you don't ever have to keep touching any of that stuff, right? except now's when it comes down to it, the task of the century right here, because guess what, the gel isn't even water soluble! it can't be, due to how insanely sweaty your skin gets when you're working! so welcome to eight whole minutes of gritting your teeth and picking, rubbing, scratching, watching the crusty bits turn to slime one by one, feeling your hair slick as seaweed, seeing your feet wrinkle, knowing there is always going to be some crusty bit you miss. and sure, you could probably do this without yanking that much, but whatever. that would be slower. so.
maybe someday they'll make another new iteration of proprietary polymer. maybe they'll switch everybody's contacts to implants with direct wire. but for now this is what you're dealing with. and it's annoying.
and back in the hangar the techs turn their hose on full spray, hot, and scour out your cavity with steaming water and high-strength surfactant, and from the metal the gel washes off in a single pass, not a spot missed, because remember, it's not even particularly sticky, it's just that your hair is what it is stuck to.
