With roots tracing back to before the United Earths were united, Gestalt inhabitance is a niche control peripheral intended to reduce reaction time and improve combat efficiency. Utilizing a painless mind-machine bridge installed atop the cervical vertebrae, a single pilot of a Gestalt-equipped vehicle is capable of controlling systems using the flex of individual muscles in place of physical levers or switches. A hundred years ago, trained by the greatest military minds in the galaxy, Tidal Gestalt pilots once mastered exotic lune muscles and directed even gravity with a highly specialized evolution of this cutting-edge interface.
This system requires a long acclimation period and a high degree of training to master. In the present day, forced into auxiliary cockpits with crude approximations of this lost technology, Battery pilots are afforded no such privilege.
. . .
The machine staggering forth against the whipping polar wind, more than anything else, was an ungainly creature. Whisper was already an unsightly walker, even when it was operating at full capacity, but the state it was deployed in did it no favors.
A crude, stretched out skeleton wrapped in bands of limp white musculature that hung across it like a weight shambled over the empty tundra. Its short, squat head hung practically limp over its hunched chest, oversized arms dragging oversized hydraulic knuckles across the salt-snow beneath. A set of double-jointed legs labored with each painful step, hoisting above twenty feet of dead weight with an internal backup support system barely capable of sustaining its heft.
Within, buried in the lower spine of the mech, Fours floated in absolute darkness. The clone couldn’t really tell if the floating sensation was literal or just a side-effect of the stimulants and suppressants being fed through the multiple tubes that hung from her bandage-wrapped arms. The gentle hum and sway of the machine melded with the whine of the narcopumps ebbing her vision and mind with splashes of red, orange, green, blue, purple—none of which visible in the pitch black of the tiny cell she was locked within, yet each as vivid as the heat she felt as they melted over her mind. Even if she wasn’t practically blind, it’s doubtful the clone would be able to see the mist of her own frigid breath.
The lumbering mech came to a stop, body unwavering as the white sandstorm beat against its hull.
The voice of the automech AI reverberated through the metal harness shackling her legs and the aural implants behind her ears all at once, briefly drowning out the sound of the walker’s structure groaning with each uneven step. Surrounding the Battery, several beeps and blips signaled a switch in drug administration and the winding up of several more direct-control systems.
Fours didn’t realize she needed to be afraid, but even without any conscious memory of the process, her body had become conditioned to the excrucia. She didn’t know why the whine of the dialytic pump speeding up or the click of the artificial fibrillators implanted against her chest and side made her heart start to race, or why cold sweat began to condensate against the even colder air surrounding her. There were very few things that the clone did know, but perhaps the most important thing she took security in was that the walker captain would take care of her. That Head Karabin had her best interest in mind. That Lincoln loved her.
A light a few inches from the pilot’s face began to blink.
“You’re starting to spike, Fours. I need you to relax.”
The pilot’s legs flinched together against her harness. Her breath caught in her throat. The machine, halfway through subsuming her body’s vital functions and unsatisfied with the respiratory interruption, pulsed her diaphragm to force the breath out.
“Take a slow breath for me, you can do that.”
The voice of the captain cut through the darkness and the cold in a way nothing else could. The heat that washed over her wasn’t (just) from the spooling of the fusion turbines sitting a few feet anatomically superior of her cell, nor was it (entirely) the voice-activated dripdose of myphine intended to reinforce the sheer euphoria that was receiving even a small glance from her superior; it was something Fours never learned a word for. It was a hunger. It was a need. It was a borderline imperative. She could take a slow breath. She could take a thousand slow breaths if she was asked.
“That’s looking better. We’ve still got half a bottle of that kvithe from the last station—do a good job for me and we’ll polish it off together when you get back, okay?”
The pilot could only whine in response. She certainly knew the words to announce her desperate agreement with that proposition, but buried under an hour of the sort of chemical therapies that even the perpetrator’s execution couldn’t come close to making atonement for, there was very little of the clone left to voice herself. Perfect synchronic harmony with the alien tissue surrounding the mech required a near once-in-a-galaxy genetic match. Good enough harmony required a lifetime of meditation. Fours’ version, a loose partnership rather than any meaningful harmony, requires a hospital’s worth of narcotics.
The clone’s brain flickered idly across thoughts of Lincoln, shared memories of theirs, and her own observations about the cockpit around her. She was excited to get to celebrate something—anything—if it meant being in her commander’s company. She wondered if she’d be able to try food again. It had been a long time since she’d been given the chance. Her breath crept back within the acceptable range.
“This is going to be a walk in the park for you. I know you'll make me proud.”
There was a small greenhouse aboard one of the stations the company had stopped at. It wasn’t as though a halite wasteland like Hjkor had trees, so experiencing (read: touching) real ones left quite the impression on the clone. Lincoln always did promise to take her to a “real” park. Maybe that would be soon? Her endocrine limiter reported the correct balance of hormones to indicate a peaceful state of mind. Quietly, a series of neural snapshots were captured—enough to reconstruct her brainstate after the digimind transfer shattered it.
“Thatta girl. That’s exactly where you need to be.” There was a short dead silence over the hyperley radio. Then, the light darkened.
Most of all, the clone wondered if all the flowers in the galaxy smelled as nice as the ones in the greenhouse did. Maybe, just maybe, one day, she could even—
A pair of pneumatically-primed three-inch nervespikes fired behind Fours, contacting two ports on either side of the top of her spine, just above the top of her neck. In an instant, the entire cognitive capacity of the onboard KRIEGSHIRN tactical-level warmind--a supercomputing organ roughly the size of a dresser--was forced through one tiny human* brain.
Whisper's stranglehold on the Battery's autonomic processes prevented her from screaming. Even if she could, nobody was listening anymore. Every neuron inside the clone's head burned white-hot with the agony of intellect thousands of times beyond a brain's capacity squeezed across its pathetic synapses. Every flinch of the waking muscles bathed Fours in sickening degenerate radiation. The only agency she was left with was the freedom to feel her pathetic biological makeup shatter at the seams beneath the strain of the machine using her like one of its many organs.
Fours wasn't the one thinking anymore, but the automech AI that made itself at home within her skull could feel the ghost of the Battery egging it forward. Fours wasn't the one moving anymore, but as her body twitched in tandem with the white lune muscles that now seized with life, the system reported her compliance with its directives. The Battery's last thoughts, frozen in time beneath the cognitive avalanche, were of her captain, plants, and hope.
The tundra surrounding the mech rippled like the surface of water as gravity leaked from the abominable weapon. Its bone-white muscles pumped with new life, no longer dead slabs of weight. Its head twisted, perhaps in agony, perhaps in satisfaction.
Whisper turned towards the rising suns and began to walk. Then, jog. Then, run. Then, bound. Alive and hungry, a creature no longer Fours and no longer an automated combat system sought only to complete the captain's orders. It wished only to plant its claws deep within the cockpit of its target. It hoped only to please Lincoln.
Hoop for Episode 115 - Taking Stock, for @rebeccafish23 who kindly donated to RAICES. Thank you!!
"I started to avoid eating the meat I was served, kept my feeding to the small portion of vegetables that he’d add to the side, more a garnish than anything else. It didn’t escape my notice that Cook was also hiding increasing amounts of his arm inside his coat when he spoke to me. First fingers, then the hand, then finally he kept the whole forearm tucked under his jacket so I couldn’t get a decent look. When I thought about it I’d get visions of Cook slowly reaching in, cranking the handle wildly with the other arm, while he pushed his skin and flesh into the whirring iron, mouth open and smiling, as it began to come through the mincer grate like a string of meaty bubbles. It made me feel ill, but I just couldn’t get it out of my head."
It's the spooky month! It's time to get spooky and play with blood, gore, and goth aesthetic! Maybe accidentally mix Alma with other charas in the process why not! hjgfjb
