#confluence novel

[riversidewings]

Once, a lifetime ago, a young engineer designed the pilot interface on the Mark 18 Nioh.

Two decades later, her tachi doll wife always bites her lip when the interface meets the port at her nape and the connection goes live.

Euphoria. Becoming one body with the work of her wife's hands.

[riversidewings]

Once, she was an engineer designing interfaces. Now, she's an executive at the facility's open house, cutting quite the figure in pencil skirt and black leather tanker boots, explaining the capabilities of the latest wave of upgrades to the Nioh platform.

"Yes, the tachi over there-- that's my wife who piloted unit 3-39 today," she beams.

They have gone from colleagues, to human wife and wife, to a cishuman-transhuman couple pledged to mutual service. But she has embraced the changes, risen to meet them. They both have.

Wielder and wife to the thickset doll in the techsuit, striding over with blue hair finally free of the helmet now tucked in the crook of her arm.

"Lucky," says the Wielder to her guests, her voice shaking in awe. "I'm…I'm very lucky."

[riversidewings]

"is it true what I hear about the dolls up in Naruko?"

"What, that they fought the imperial army to a draw and set the doll rights movement in motion over a century ago? c'mon, that's grade school history there--"

"YEAH OBVIOUSLY. But is it true that watchmakers do housecalls for them?"

"Oh! Yes."

[riversidewings]

I write mech piloting as "what if a trans woman was so gay for her wife that she could wear a tank on legs that slung 105mm shells downrange?"

[riversidewings]

A Santaku Dynamics Mark 18 Nioh mech pilot wearing a shirt that says HEAVY ARE THE HIPS THAT WEAR THE 105MM SMOOTHBORE.

She's a bottom, so she finds it extra funny.

[riversidewings]

Combat doll mech pilot spending a little too much time under her squadmate's mech with a Sharpie. The platoon CO later comes by and finds KILROY WAS HERE crossed out and KILROY WAS A MOTH written below.

"You fifth-gen dolls, man," the platoon leader groans. "I swear."

[riversidewings]

The dolls sit in a circle after their debrief. Their line of mechs, kneeling and hooked up to umbilicals, wait in their revetments.

They have slung tungsten downrange, pounded up and down the slopes of the Ōu Mountains.

Now they share beer as skewers of meat cook over the fire.

It is the blue haired tachi fanning the flames. Her duty discharged, she has come back from fierce metal guardian to ample-curved mother to the team, singing softly as she tends the cooking fire.

She is everything of which her foremothers once dreamed.

Back home, across the bay, her wife and daughter are waiting for her. But here, tonight, with her kinfolk in cybernetics, she is also among family.

[riversidewings]

Once, when she was human, she hurried everywhere. But now, after her cyberization, with reinforced skeletal structure, mech interface wiring, and a chassis that was as much synthetic as biological, the tachi doll walks with steady, measured tread.

Even as a weapon, she now knows a strange peace.