People – romantics, poets, and fools of all stripes – like to say that the cockpit is the beating heart of every mech, but in reality, it's more akin to a brain. A human being, bereft of a heart, dies in mere moments. That is all there is. It cannot simply be replaced. If an appropriately sized shell, fired from an appropriately sized weapon strikes the brain of a living organism, however, it is possible to live. You may not enjoy the state of your existence past that fateful moment, and your functionality will likely be severely limited by it, but you can survive.
The machine is like this, too. It is a vessel. A shell. A suit to be worn, a weapon to be wielded. She is equal parts skull and multi-ton artillery platform, and exists at such a scale that you, her pilot, are both the brain in control and the steady hand on the trigger. Equal parts iron fist, and keen mind.
I walk into the hangar, and I see our newest acquisition locked into the repair dock with dozens of techs scrambling over her ravaged face. That's How I Got To Memphis is a beautiful machine, but she, like many souls in this god-forsaken conflict, has been brutalized beyond recognition. She's like me in that regard.
I gaze upwards at Memphis's ravaged chassis. Her armor is pockmarked by small arms fire, uneven sprays from shoulder-or-head mounted rotary guns. This machine was built to fight like a man-at-arms, in a melee on the front line. To fight and die with a blade in hand, not be slowly riddled down and whittled away by gunfire from afar the way erosion conquers a mountain.
To call the weighty slab of folded steel in her hand a sword would do a grave disservice to the majesty of those who actually forge such instruments. A sword is a graceful, oft-noble thing in a universe of high-yield explosives, and supercharged beam weapons. This is not that. This is a butcher's cleaver, to be wielded with a brutal but no-less-precise hand.
Memphis's pilot must have died with it in her hand, because it was still there. Steel fingers clenching around the handle with the posture and bearing of a white-knuckled grip. She died before her body even knew it could die.
I think we should all have the chance to go out that way. It's how I want to die. Full of fire and vinegar, charging head-long into the face of it. I want to die believing I am immortal. I want to die so quickly that I never realize that I am not.
There is a gaping hole in That's How I Got To Memphis's chest, cracked and singed plating surrounds the place a cockpit used to be. The concentrated beam of plasma was so hot that it not only instantly destroyed the cockpit, but warped the surrounding surface, and melted it down, dark and glassy like the face of a smudged mirror.
I know what I said about the cockpit being the brain, not the heart, but my gaze circles the gap in her armor like water pulled down a drain, and I just can't shake the thought that she's just like me.
I feel that way sometimes, like a blistering ray of supercharged, superheated energy has cut straight through my sternum, and boiled my insides to liquid. Like there is a hole there that cannot ever be fixed, only replaced. I clench my fist, and I wish that I had something to hold like Memphis holds her cleaver, because all I feel is the sharp pain of knuckles in the fat of my palm.
I miss you. Of course, I miss everyone we've lost in this pointless conflict, and I know that it is selfish to value the life of a woman I love over the countless hundreds of thousands of lives we've lost in this sector.
… but if I may be selfish, I think I have earned it. Just like That's How I Got To Memphis, I have survived untold horror. I have lived where others have died. I have lingered here, a blood-soaked revenant haunting this battlefield, surrounded by the ghosts of my charges, my comrades, my superiors, and of course you. You, my beautiful, darling wife.
If I may be selfish, I miss you. I can live with everything else. Though I may be beaten, burned, brutalized and broken. Though knives may pierce my flesh, and those that wield them may jerk and twist their blades. Though bullets may shatter my skull and scramble my brains. Though my bones may be battered to dust and my body broken down for scrap. These things can be replaced. These things can be put back together, and I can be sent out to fight and to kill, made to experience the loss and horror again and again.
… but the one thing I fear I will not survive losing is you. If only I'd lost my brain, rather than my heart.
Perhaps Memphis will be my last partner. Perhaps this will be my last sortie. Perhaps we'll finally follow you, wherever you've gone.
