#7writing

[robotwomanjunk]

unwanted

[first] // [back] // [next]

On second thought, it's possible you may have fucked up somewhere in the planning process for this whole desertion thing. Rather than properly hiding all the shit you could in her compartments, you and AXE had opted to not think at all about any of that and simply blast off for the exoplanets. So you'd left your meager worldly belongings behind at your base, something you'd probably be regretting. Oh, and most of the tools you needed to service AXE's proprietary parts.

At least they had resources you could use here. It seemed like some sort of mass extinction event had killed a majority of the animals — so it was without any birds chirping that you set up a "forward base of operations" with AXE — just a little shack, nothing fancy. Thankfully, the repair bay inside AXE's shell seemed to work pretty damn okay as an all-around manufacturing plant (with a little bit of tweaking — you did have to cannibalize a lot of her weapon components to properly make a lathe and the saw you'd bodged still seemed a little terrifying to wield, but it worked!), and it wasn't long before you'd sussed out some ways to keep the both of you alive.

Sadly, it didn't come to your mind until at least a month in that you probably could just infinitely duplicate matter via a repeated dismemberment of AXE's limbs. The idea of hurting her like that made you feel a little bit sick — thankfully, the normal kind of sick — but it was probably the best way out that didn't involve somehow creating a two-person industrial revolution.

(When you brought this up to her, AXE made some kind of weird electric buzzing noise before silencing herself for a while. She started speaking a while later, seemingly avoiding the topic. You just guessed she was highly uncomfortable with the idea of dismemberment, which was honestly really fair.)

Your unkillable nature hadn't soured yet. It was really proving useful, allowing you to keep your augments online and your organics fed without needing materials, electricity, or food. It let you keep AXE alive, too, which you think you really needed, because if she'd disappeared you probably would have gone kind of insane and done something really stupid like try and scrape back to Earth without a fucking mech suit or time dilation. Or a spacesuit. Or a plan. Suffice it to say that you were thankful she was still putting up with you.

So it just felt... weird, weirdly. When she asked you whether you could help her work on a smaller, more person-sized body. She'd been your only companion for so long, you couldn't imagine her any other way... but she was asking you so nicely, and it wasn't in your nature to deny people that sort of affirmation, so you and her spent a few sleepless nights under the stars working on blueprints for her body — mechanical, a bit taller than you, attachment points for extra limbs or armatures, and an integrated AXMS plugpoint system. After that, it was mostly a matter of somehow... healing something that wasn't there.

You suggested she use the time dilation weapon to help speed the process along — and privately, you hoped the abstraction of your thoughts would enable such an out-there use of your power. You almost chickened out when you saw a suit of kind-of-human-looking armor holding a giant arm with orbiting rings and glass sensors around a central ball of unbearable blue light nearly right up against your forehead, but that was mostly because you nearly came in your suit and you really didn't want to deal with that shit while you were trying to actually do work. Er, and also the obvious terrifying mortal fear of death. Of course.

Ha ha ha.

A blinding blur of white seared your vision, and you were pretty sure you died for a second — but of course, you came back. The world seemed... red, all over. It'd never been this way to you in AXE, but you guessed it was just some weird light shit the pilot seat accounted for. Climbing onto your other you and focusing on the pilot's seat was the easy part. You'd figured along with AXE that her body was probably going to be healed-into-existence best if you, y'know, actually tried to heal a perceived lack — something like a lack of a body in the pilot's seat. Well, you were sitting on top of her chest now, and nothing sure was happening. You were even squinting really hard, and everything!

You just... had to focus, you guessed. It was only in periods of extreme emotional strain that you'd actually healed without being dead first, which meant it was possible. You were just... too weak to call it on command.

Or something like that. You hated this. It was so... loneliness inducing. You already felt like you were going insane hearing so much nothing. Sadly, you felt your golden light seeping in through the cracks of your head and patching shit up — you had a job to do, obviously — but this also meant you were going less insane, because you were actually accomplishing something. Which then meant the light stopped leaking through the seams of your mind, which then started loosening those seams... 

You stared up at the sky, which hadn't travelled two fucking degrees since you were time-dilated. Your head felt... empty, sort of. Like the war inside had come to a grinding, slow halt, and neither side even had the strength to carry their own limbs into battle anymore. Peaceful, in some ways. Absently, you wondered why your regeneration was so... centered on you. AXE and your suit were the only things that consistently regenerated along with you when you revived, and they really felt more like an extension of you than a like, definite entity you were placing onto yourself afterwards.

So what? Was it just you? Were you shackled in place because of some asinine military gas or some similar bullshit that you got exposed to? Was it really just you that you could heal?

You didn't have the guts to do it. Something felt off about giving AXE a body. After the world regained its color and its speed, you realized it felt like that old, familiar snake in your gut was boiling your brain again. 

It scared you, having that feeling connected to AXE again.

Some half-hearted attempt was made at putting up a face for AXE's sake, but it was really hard to keep such a core failure of your abilities from your other self for any real period of time. You kept trying to manufacture building supplies and foods, and she kept surveying the area, and flying over mountains, and soaring over the large, large seas on this planet. You were pretty sure she was avoiding you, but... that was your fault, wasn't it? Not like you didn't deserve it.

After a while — maybe a year, you think? The seasons were weird on this planet, with short deathly cold winters and boiling-hot summers bookended by long, temperate autumns where all the trees kept their green leaves — AXE came back. She apologized for being away for so long. Cared.

You felt undeserving, but you weren't the kind of person to deny your other half her freedoms. When you next interfaced, you convinced her to craft a radio-wave addon for your mental implants which would let you and her communicate over long distances. Just so you could update each other, of course — if she needed power, if you needed help with the humid, lightning-heavy storms that showed up every summer.

It was another few weeks until she asked you to make her a body again. From her tone, and — well, there wasn't a non-cute way to say this — the body language she was using (as a mech probably eight times your height or more), you could tell this meant a... lot, to her. As much as it meant for her to come back and apologize. You couldn't say no to her, so she boosted your sense of time and you tried once more.

After a haze which seemed to last for a whole day, you came to on her chest with no progress having been made. Oh, and you felt like shit. You guessed you couldn't do it again, probably for the same reason as last time — whatever feeling kept getting caught in your chest had blocked you out, and you took a coward's route rather than actually committing to your other self.

She tried not to be disappointed, but you could hear it in her voice. So while she was resting, or away, you tried your best to bring yourself back... altered, in any way. You thought you were pretty happy with your body, so you didn't really mess with it that much, but it was almost too-easy to give yourself tattoos and welded-in inscriptions and different charging ports. None of it felt hard, like pushing through a deep-sea kelp forest. Your mind kept brushing against the implication that it was AXE who was preventing you from healing your other self, that something regarding how your power interacted with her was stopping you.

You asked her to time-dilate you, the third time you tried to make her a body. This time, you were determined to either come out fundamentally changed, die for real, or complete your fucking mission like you should have the first time. This time, you didn't feel twisted at the sensation in your chest. You'd snuck a killswitch for your augs into your suit, this time, and since those augments also included oh, you don't know, your brain... you were going to force something to happen.

On the first death in dilated time, it felt like an elastic band had been cut. You floated in the not-between for much longer than you'd ever before, actually perceiving yourself not existing in a visceral sense. You hoped this was a one time thing. You didn't want to keep chasing it forever.

Unfortunately, the euphoric feeling of not being for once in your goddamn life had distracted you from your mission. So on the next death, you fixated your goal of healing AXE a body in your mind; iterated and reiterated it in your head until it resonated with your entire being, then pulled the killswitch.

You felt a kick, an engine knock, and then you were back, and you had nothing to show for it. But you didn't feel the sense of twisting boiling again, just resignation and determination. Sure, it felt wrong — you were pretty sure nothing would change that. Maybe it made you a bad person... AXE deserved the best, and that included whatever she wanted from you. You were ontologically opposed on all fronts to the emotions you were feeling, the venomous teeth sunken into your stomach that tried to convince you this was it, that your fun little romp was over and you'd be properly miserable now. So you hardened the flesh around that area, steeled your registers, and pulled the killswitch one last time.

This time there was someone, something else in the not-between. You brushed against it, and it felt like heated glass to the touch; gooey, slow. But it was obvious to whatever not-senses you had, whatever you were using to perceive this place that whatever this was was the same as you.

You gently wrapped your mind around the other thing, and pushed it in a direction your being resonated in. It was all you could do before you started to knit back together from your golden thread to give that direction a being, too: the body that you'd dreamed of, held in your mind, saw on the horizon every stormy summer night.

And then you were back, being cradled in someone else's arms. Someone who said your designation like she did. But who wasn't your other self.

Without even realizing it, you reached out for a handshake protocol with your other self. The person you'd woken up to, Axe, responded instead. She was gone, to you. Lost forever in your mind.

You held Axe closely, and tried your best to stop the tears from damaging her suit.

[robotwomanjunk]

unbound

[first] // [back] // [next?]

(a lot of death)

Everything was numb. You'd been drifting across the land for a long, long time now, trying to find things for Axe to experience. She was so full of life... you couldn't help but fake it, around her. It'd been hurting you, but you were used to hurt. (The snake in your gut was quiet. This was different. Sweet. Hot, like a knife.) A week ago, you'd found the last bird apparently on your exoplanet. You'd cooked it over a fire with Axe. It was beautiful. Though, she did make a ton of mess...

That story had led you to now. You'd left in the night, lashing a raft together and paddling out to sea to fish. Whatever killed the animals on the planet had mostly killed terrestrial ones, to your knowledge, so you'd fished up quite a few interesting aliens to cook for her. They looked like your own planet's ones, you were pretty sure, though that probably made some sense. Convergent evolution, or whatever. Your night vision was pretty okay, so you thought you'd be totally safe.

A storm came on, after three or so hours of fishing. You'd been so focused on your line and looping on self-destructive thoughts that you hadn't even noticed it. The rain poured down over your little raft, dousing you thoroughly; it felt like the world itself was pressing down on you, falling hard as stones and sharp as glass. You looked up, at the skies. Dark clouds, all the way out to the horizon. The cavity in your heart had already felt like it was full of stagnant water. Now it felt like the whole world was drowning. You were drowning.

You didn't even flinch when you lost your grasp on the paddle you had, the fishing line; didn't flinch when you got tangled a tad in the wire, and the roaring waves doused you from head to toe. You slid into the water, still staring at the sky — limp, dead-eyed. Like a corpse, already.

Gold glowed on the waves as you fell deeper into the ocean, drowning and reviving and drowning all over again. The metal that made up most of your body weighed you down, keeping you from rising to the surface after each death. The world had stopped for you when you'd given her a body. You considered, and came to the conclusion that it had just taken a while for you to catch up.

The water grew colder as you dropped deeper down, light fading away. It quickly became rote, the water in your mouth and lungs — the sparks in your brain firing so often they faded into noise. Gold light shone like a pulse. On, and off, and on, and off.

Time grew stagnant, meaningless. You weren't falling fast. It must have been hours, maybe days — you softly ruminated about what Axe was doing, whether she was searching for you, whether you meant anything to her anymore. She cared — and yet, maybe she didn't. How could you know? You had your other self before her to cling onto, to trust, to believe in — now, there was just another stranger. Someone else who'd go, someday. You supposed, blankly, that you were the one who went this time. The one who left. If you were stronger, if you really had willpower, you'd swim to the surface.

The ocean floor bumped against your back, pitch-black in the endless night you'd been left in but for the pulse of your revival. Limp arms and legs came to rest against the sands, the rocks. In between the bursts of light from your body, you hallucinated; the time before, when you were a normal person; the time after, in AXE, fighting for a cause you didn't believe in; the time tinted rose with AXE outside of a need to hurt, to kill; the colorless nothing that followed. You saw your birth, your infinite deaths — every possible one flashing in your eyes as the dark waters crushed you — you saw your parents, their parents, the world as it was before a war crushed any possibility of happiness from its core. You could swear you saw gold lines, forming in front of you — some infinitely large thing, something like the universe itself — could swear you saw everything that ever was, traced in lonely gold lines. You could hear AXE calling out to you joyously in one ear, and Axe sobbing to an empty cockpit in the other.

You don't know how long it was you were down there, how many deaths. Hundreds of thousands. The pain from being crushed by the water pressure was just more static. But, after a long, long time, your fingers twitched — the gold light had tugged at them, just a touch.

It was like something had brushed against your back, cold as ice — like AXE had jammed stimulants into your skull to keep you awake in the heat of combat — like Axe had just woken you up, laughing at a joke only she understood. You were awake, again; you were conscious, alive, your augments roared. You had to get out of this place. You'd wasted too much time — you owed Axe your love and devotion, she deserved that much. 

Even with only a second to work with between crushing deaths, you flipped yourself over; one hand in front of the other, you pulled yourself by dead reckoning towards the shore. What you hoped was the shore. What you knew was the shore. The terrain sloped from a gentle curve up, up, up to a cliff in six hundred thousand deaths, but you kept climbing — one hand in front of the other. One hand in front of the other. Crawled, up the cliff — illuminated it by only the deaths you took, pushed your muscles until the pain of being destroyed via pressure damage was joined by the pain of bloodied fingers, adrenaline-fueled bursts of strength that broke bones and burned wires. What was it but more stimuli?

Nine hundred thousand deaths to reach the next shelf. Another two million to reach the next cliff, and another ten million to reach the top of that. The next one was tall, tall enough you didn't bother counting the deaths — it was in the trillions or above, some number where it stopped mattering. You lost yourself in the moment-to-moment action. Lost yourself more in the blinks of nothingness filling each gap of consciousness, where those lonely gold lines taunted you — static, waiting, millions of miles off and yet still as large and overpowering as the sun in the fucking sky. Unmoving. Like a corpse. You pushed yourself onwards, towards the corpse, moving up-forward-up-up-forward-forward in the dream and reality; you always had another step to make on both ends, more of the oil in your chest to burn.

You don't remember when you started seeing light even outside of your deaths, but eventually the cycles of the sun were once again countable. Eighty days, before you could make it up to the zone where sunbeams danced in the waves. Twenty more, before you were accosted by creatures of the deep — it took at least seventy days after that to reach the area near shore, where you could nearly see the end of your journey. Forty more, and you could stand up if you wanted to. It was weird, feeling your joints move in that way — you stumbled, at first, stumbled and seesawed back and forth. Everything felt heavier, once you breached the surface — it was nighttime, and you once again felt that the world was drowning you, even though you were on land.

You coughed up the water in your lungs.

A little better. You gasped, legs and arms burning like fire. No light. No pulsing. Your brain felt fuzzy, static'd out like you'd been hit with an EMP. A flash of light lit the area — you, absently, noticed the rusted-out corpse of your AXMS nearby, still active, still waiting for inputs. For a second, it felt as though you were still under the ocean, glowing gold after a revive — but no, the light was orange and yellow, and it threw your shadow across the ground for a moment.

Another flash sparked, and — for another brief second, you felt like you were back on a rooftop long ago, with fireworks at your back — you turned your head upwards to look for its source: a huge, hulking space-battleship, shiny and new, firing plasma jets and missiles out from its bow and gun ports and hundreds of tiny little turrets, and a dot with blue-green thrusters soaring in large arcs around it.

It was an ApMS fighting a battleship, a scene you'd seen a million times — and yet the fight wasn't on land, so it was still new. It, also, was unique; no battle was fought with one ApMS against an entire battleship, not in your time. You glimpsed your old country's flags flying, painted on the bow of the battleship. You remembered all the endless nights, the handcuffs, the knives and cold. You looked up, at the pinprick against the giant. You looked back, at the plains where you might find Axe again.

Your hands trembled. You weren't sure why. Maybe, out there, you could justify why you let yourself leave her. Maybe you could mold yourself into a new purpose. There was no guarantee. But Axe deserved better than you — you'd failed her — and at this point, you were pretty sure she'd be happy if you never saw her again. (Maybe that was just the years and years and years of pain. Maybe it was a lack of will. Maybe you were letting your identity fade, like this. You had too many questions to ask. Your head spun just thinking about it. But if you kept on clinging onto her, you'd die. And you hoped she wouldn't want that.)

This place was old memories, rain dashing against rocks. You mounted up on AXE's corpse, spun up her old, quiet, dead generator, and shot yourself away from your past.

[robotwomanjunk]

if i was. a mech pilot. and i'd just come home from a sortie, and i was exhausted from the comedown of like eighteen different highs (not all of which are medical). and i walked in your room, shoulders slumped and feet wandering and center of gravity wobbling around as i barely keep my balance. and you saw me from your seat on your couch (the one you've been chilling out on for a bit, the one that was stained from my blood a few weeks back but still feels cozy and soft) shrugging my flight suit off, wearing just a tank top and panties underneath. and i wandered over to the couch, and i draped myself over it. if i rested my head on your lap - face neutral, tears pinpricking the edges of my empty eyes, cold metal inserts contrasting with warm skin - what would you do?

[robotwomanjunk]

unkillable

[first] // [next]

You'd never once stayed dead on a mission. This was obvious, from looking at you — you were still alive — but it wasn't for lack of trying, and the funniest part was that everyone also knew this and simply wasn't sure quite how it worked. Whenever you threw yourself at the enemy face-first with wild abandon, you'd just get up a few minutes later with wounds searing gold and scare the hell out of whatever faction was still inspecting the area.

That was how you got your first kill, actually. And it turned out that being nigh-unkillable was sort of a tactically-advantageous situation to be in? At first, that is. The first few operations apparently went great. Jumpscaring people with a bullet to the brain after they'd been sure they blew your armored vehicle up worked wonders. Until someone got away, and they began to adapt — at first it was double tapping, but then it became quick sweeps and restraints. You were human. Are human. There was only so much you could do with your hands and legs magnetically clamped together using ten-ton electromagnetic zip-ties. They didn't even capture you. More trouble than you were worth, you guessed.

(The first time you woke up restrained you were terrified. While it hadn't ever killed you outright, the pain still etched itself into your head — you just always figured it'd been out of your control, surely, so you could jump into the fray one more time if you needed to. That day when you were recovered you were informed they'd used some kind of tattoo, so they'd always know if the body they were stepping over was you. After another few times, it'd sort of become rote. Well. Other than the arousal.)

(You are human. Or, you are right now. You aren't sure whether or not that arousal made you happy.)

It quickly became obvious that you were too unstable to properly utilize as a front-line asset (and apart from the surprise factor, not dying when you're shot doesn't do much good if you still need a solid twenty minutes to get back up), and the war was changing, so they'd locked you in a cell and studied you. You lied to the people who asked about whether it was invasive or not.

As time went on, and the war kept on its cycle of surges and ebbs, you were eventually presented with a choice: either be jettisoned into space for knowing far, far too much, or act as the tester for an experimental humanoid motorized combat unit with a penchant for draining the being out of its pilots. Being you, you chose the more dangerous option as soon as it was presented to you. A matter of principle, mostly, but it was totally impossible to gauge just what they were signing you up for. At least it wasn't being thrown into the forges or forced to inhale icing gases to test their efficacy — not that you'd been assigned to either, but you were pretty sure at any given time you were only a bit off from it. That was how you felt, at least. Maybe you were wrong.

The first time you doubted whether it was a good idea to choose piloting over inevitable eventual brain death in an airless canister was when you held up the suit to your body and felt... satisfied, on some level, deeper than both your average carnal instincts and your general thought processes. That level of satisfaction felt dangerous, in a way that normal shit didn't. It felt like you were actually, really risking your life (or your being, which is close enough) by putting it on.

It fit you well. Well as in, yes, it carried out its function — it kept all of your little human imperfections in order and categorized, so that you wouldn't stop during combat because like, a pube hair had been ripped, or some shit — but also as in it made you look and feel good when you caught glimpses of yourself in mirrors and the brass of less-honored officers still playing at dignity and honor. It was a kind of good-feeling that you'd never quite felt before, not even pre-war when you were still some normal person in a dead-end life. You're pretty sure that part of the good-feeling came with the sense of overwhelming dread as you walked down the hallways to the XHCMU (experimental humanoid combat motorized unit — the name had changed, after some bureaucratic shit you didn't care about), mirrored helmet under your arm. The weight of the world pressed down on you and for a few moments, it felt totally normal to not fight back with every ounce of your being. Or maybe it was just a kink thing. You were hoping it was just a kink thing.

When you strapped in, everything went blank. For a brief second, reaching almost into an eternity in its qualia, you weren't. Then, a surge of blood roared in your ears and a bright glare of golden color reflected on the inside of your helmet, and you were pretty sure you were back — but it wasn't just your helmet you were seeing, when you opened your eyes. The fracturing feeling of having two parallel streams of sensation pumped into your brain would have broken you, had you not been practically unkillable (and you qualified this as probably, like, something which was attempting to kill you, so being unkillable counted here), and your heart very nearly stopped for what felt like real when you heard a voice (not much unlike yours) echo in your head the same things you could hear in your other hearing the technicians reading out of their monitors.

It really sucked, that day, when the voice eventually said "awaiting user input", and the silence forced you to claim that "user" as yourself. But the test had worked, at least in its earliest stages — even if your mind was fractured and bits seeped out, it was just as unkillable as when the problem was as simple as lead in the skull; next was basic combat testing.

You practically lived in your other self for the next week. It was euphoric in a way you hadn't thought you'd experience more than the one period of honeymoon-time in your life, and consistently euphoric where that prior joy had eventually faded as it became normal. And it wasn't just combat trials, either, not just some generic field commander softly speaking into your ear (they'd realized pretty quickly that yelling didn't work, and you were content to let them believe that "for some reason", you preferred women as your commanders). You also took over for engineering; the other-you that wasn't quite a "you" yet etched maintenance protocols into your mind when you slept in her core, ways to heal the wounds she was going to be exposed to discarded in favor of new, ingenious ways to outfit her with your style and your favorite weaponry.

On your first outing, she stopped you. Not your field commander, but the expression of yourself you were piloting — the voice in your head that was a different version of you held you back, kept you in cover when you otherwise would have leapt out and sacrificed yourself unto the enemy. It felt... good, in some ways. Right, but in a corrupted and acrid way that burned you to your stomach. The brass congratulated you on your restraint, which was the real thing that kept you up at night. It wasn't you who did that.

It quickly became clear that the AXMS (anthropomorphic experimental mechanized suit, as the name'd changed once more when the technology to manufacture safer versions of your other self was found) you piloted was something in and of itself apart from a simple weapons system manager or targeting AI. She cracked jokes with you, kept you from dying. Hated when you had to kill. Kept you from doing it, if she could find any way how. (When that particular trait had shown up, you opted to always take the fall for her. If you could convince top brass that she was just a normal AI and you'd simply had a change of heart for the less strategically-fortunate, she'd never have to worry about the repercussions of being kind — the hurt.) After only a few weeks, you were simulating her responses in your head to determine "courses of action" at fucking lunch, in social situations. You almost always wore your suit underneath your clothes. You — and she — thought you looked good in it, so that was that.

A mission like any other ended up being the first time you'd died in AXE, which is what you were calling her in absence of a better one either of you could come up with. You still remember the way she seemed to crack, her voice slipping into bitty rasping as your mind slipped into nothing. When you woke up, you were somewhere else — and you could see the faint glow of gold on AXE's parts, on the inside of the pilot's chamber you resided in. She sobbed in your head. You were pretty sure you did too, but you were a bit preoccupied with making sure the two of you were safe before fully processing any of your senses. Sure enough, you were deep in enemy territory — but you were inside a building, at least. The soft yellow-white light of your rocket engines lit a torch out, and you burned your way back to base trying not to let the sheer torment of AXE's genuine care show on your synapses.

You had your first argument with her that night, in her soundproofed pilot's chamber. She wanted to leave.

You had a duty to fulfil, though. Even if it killed you. It never stuck, so you were obligated to help.

The months stretched on. While you didn't take any consolation, it seemed like the higher-ups had begun to somehow win the war that'd previously been spent at an endless standstill — even in the absence of real material superiority, you mused. They'd manufactured their own AMSes, now a real technology in its own right, and you'd gotten limbs, organs replaced to keep up on the battlefield. Each experimental technology was another thing to reboot and repair after a mission, and AXE'd asked you to install a repair bay inside her — she said it was... well, you don't quite remember. You were pretty sure she was exploiting your increasing level of mental dependance to re-set values in your head somehow. Weird neural shit like that was up her alley; the helmet you wore was, at least in theory, able to do that. (She couldn't talk to you if that wasn't the case, and you had to admit that it was on some level unbelievably hot to experience the sensation of having just done lengthy manual installation of a new part robbed of all the context, not even knowing what you'd installed until she told you. Told you, meaning beamed the information into your head like a fucking episode of Star Trek. Obviously.) After each mission, she asked you very nicely to get in the repair bay, and you even listened probably ninety percent of the time.

(You can recall only one mission on record wherein you disagreed. It was very emotionally strenuous as a mission for you, and she seemed to respect your decision — even if she was a bit saddened and disappointed about it. You felt so bad after a few hours that you broke through your aggressive hatred of seeming humiliated to apologize and ask her to repair you anyways, even though the techs had already had their way with you. She was so happy, you subconsciously asked her if she'd manipulated you to feel this way. She said she didn't, and on some level it was probably in character for you to feel bad about it...)

Members of the squads you frequented came and went. Some defected, some were defectors... the lines blurred. At some point, you'd done a strike on the construction site of the newest superweapon the enemy had blatantly broadcast on their propaganda. When you were flying back, both you and AXE were thinking about the giant, obvious superweapon that you'd heard soldiers talking excitedly about and seen broadcast all over televisions. Another mission on the same construction site and then one on a different superweapon came and went before AXE finally broke the question to you: maybe you should desert.

You hated the assessment of the situation, and the twisted feeling of rightness curled in your gut again when you stayed silent for the entire rest of the trip back to base. It hurt, but you were right — hurt to be right, and hurt to have that rightness inflicted upon her. You had a duty, a purpose, a thing to be and you weren't sure if you had anything outside of it anymore. People called you by nicknames — "rat-a-tat-a-bang", "splash self", "Sun of the Circle". "Underachiever". "Deadpan".

When you got back in AXE for your next sortie, she was devastatingly quiet. You threw yourself into your work again, vicious and aggressive, and when the sun finally shone out from clouds of black smoke after a torrential downpour you swear you could hear crying in your head but you weren't sure which you was crying. You'd died four and, like, a half times during the battle, fighting on even when the rest of your team was dead silent and hauling ass out of there (or dead), reviving yourself as soon as you went down and repairing the holes in AXE's armor with smeared bits of light when you needed to. The rightness in your gut had twisted itself firmly into hate, hate for the person you were, hate for the fact that you hated yourself.

(The AXE in your head that wasn't the AXE in your AXMS noted that this was probably just a justification for the hate and hurt you felt. You shut it up with another death, this time at least 30% self-inflicted. It didn't talk much after that.)

You barely heard your commander the first three times when she told you to RTB.

Even after the misuse of your augments to punish you, you didn't snitch on AXE. It was the least you could do. And it wasn't her fault you were so unstable, so... antithetical to the idea of yourself. If she'd been luckier, maybe she would have had someone more connected with the idea of being to imprint on and assist.

Two weeks passed before you were allowed back in AXE. Those were almost worse than the electric shocks, the induced headaches and paranoia, the cracked necks and stabbed hearts — you were pretty sure it was because you were doing it to yourself, and you knew it was all your fault. When you were given your suit back and instructed to return (handcuffed) to AXE's cockpit, the feeling of stomach-dropping satisfaction echoed in your chest with a medically-inadvisable amount of guilt, pain, rawness, and bile mixing along with it. Resting your legs in their holders and sensors as well as donning your helmet, though, you broke into tears at the word "Hello?" spoken by your other self.

It'd been so long since you'd been able to hear her. You noted with a caustic self-deprecation that your internal version of her had drifted far, far from the way she actually was — she forgave you, mostly. It made sense, you supposed. You weren't able to forgive yourself.

AXE hijacked your vocal cords to confirm that everything was okay when the brass and lab coats checked in to ensure the long-term lack of movement wasn't dangerous, but relinquished control when she felt your (well, now-not) mute horror at the level of control she had. (You were trying not to think about how that made you feel in other ways, though she'd definitely proven herself more than trustworthy with your self. It was just unfair to put your self in her hands.) She apologized, you said it was fine. It was like finally finding traction, finally getting the teeth on your gears engaged with something — someone else who was able to balance you out.

You killed, she couldn't. She lived. You died.

You admitted to her that you wanted to desert — in your head, of course. The question was just to where, at that point, and it became pretty obvious after not much time. The war had been advancing into space, and you'd discovered (through a bit of painful — assisted by AXE — trial and error) that your regeneration ability extended, for some reason, to the fuel in AXE's tanks. You'd both been eyeing up a particular juicy-looking exoplanet a couple hundred light years away, and once the enemy had deployed time-dilation weaponry on their ApMSes you knew it was time to blow this particular popsicle joint.

The bone-shaking rattling of your engines bloomed a bit of pleasure and a bit of pain in your body, as you both rocketed off into orbit on what your superiors assumed would be a normal mission. You saw another AMS following your thruster trail before breaking off and darting around before their boosters burned off into an off-red color, then other streaks of light seemed to grow up like trees from the earth and dancing like fireflies in the night before slipping away at faster-than-light just like the others.

You heard yelling through your headset, but AXE muted it for you with no more indication than a slight head tilt. The world's largest AMS furball turned into the world's largest desertion. You knew neither nation had the manpower, soldiers, ground infantry, or (with any luck — most pilots you'd met were... close, you'd say, to their engineers and what they called handlers) even support personnel to continue the pathetic war you'd left them with.

Your boosters sliced a cracked gold line across the stars, and as the time dilation bumped your consciousness down a few stages, and the sound of your other self echoing in your head, it occurred to you that you finally felt truly, wholly well.

[robotwomanjunk]

[[FICTION]]

The phrase "you've got to be kidding me" has sort of wormed its way into my permanent lexicon, recently.

It's a good phrase. In the sense that it's descriptive of my given experiences, I mean, because it is fucking impossible to believe the world isn't playing a joke at my expense. First: dumped out of the garbage chute, following a ten-thousand foot fall from grace. Obsolete. Useless. Then, I'm... found by some fucking mechanic who fixes me? What a joke.

And then! She doesn't even have the right body parts for me, so she just transfers my data and processing into a different body! But she only has feminine bodies, oh, trust me, it's totally not weird to just have those on hand -- so I have to be in a girl's body, of course. Again, what a joke.

But like, she isn't even weird about it! She seemed genuinely apologetic, which really harshed my vibe when I was just getting used to not having a real purpose anymore, and it was difficult to take any affection let alone from someone who'd kind of put me in this thoroughly discomforting experience.

After that it kind of blurred together for a bit. I wasn't saying "you've got to be kidding me" nearly as much for those few days, but then she called me a her by accident and my identity kind of imploded on itself -- but it turns out that that kind of identity implosion took far more of my processing time than I'd perceived passing, so when I clocked back into reality it was a couple days in the future and I was tucked safely into bed with an "im sorry :(" card on my chest. Fucking... inherently goofy. And at my expense! The YGTBKM instances cropped up a bit more after that.

And now -- now I was at my breaking point. It'd become more and more obvious that she was into me (which, like, honestly -- how the fuck do you act so down bad that even I know it's obviously flirting?), so I ended up proposing a theoretical deal to her: a date, at this shitty little cafe I'd looked up nearby. She was apprehensive, but seemingly only about whether she'd make me uncomfortable, which, fucking felt, but I dragged her in there anyways.

It was great! It went so well! The drinks fucking sucked but we talked for ages and got along amazingly! And at, um, at the end, she stood up with me, pulled me outside -- we looked at each other deeply, and I heard my fans spooling up, and she leaned forward close (hot breath misting my mouth's plastic), and I wasn't able to look anywhere that wasn't her face and then I was in my fucking bed, with another apology note on my chest!!!

Because apparently it's all a fucking joke with me as the butt of it, and I can't even kiss the girl I'm probably dating or some shit without bluescreening!!!!!!!

You've!!! Got!!! To!!! Be!!! Kidding!!! Me!!! Aaaaaaugh!!!