Input Lag (mech)
We got a phrase in engineering, "slow as a nerve".
See, when a signal needs to move from your eyes to your brain to your limbs, even pure reflex takes point three seconds at the minimum. Someone less than a football field away fired an anti-tank at you? By the time you can start moving, you're dead.
So to get around that, we wire all the mech systems directly into the brain. Ports everywhere, camera feed into the occipital lobe, hydraulics listening to the motor cortex, get them used to it from day one of training and they adjust completely fine. Their superhuman reaction speeds? One-third thanks to combat drugs, two-thirds to wired shortcuts - though the pharms division would have you believe it's the other way around.
And that twitchiness they get in downtime? The thousand-yard stare? That's not PTSD—okay, maybe sometimes it's PTSD—but it's also just how you start to behave when everything feels a quarter-second out of sync. Psych was calling it 'dissociative interfaced anhedonia' last time I checked. Normally humans have all sorts of cognitive tricks to paper over their own body's latency, but when these get trained out of you... ever tried to take a selfie on a slow phone where the screen can't keep up with your movement? Everything feels like that to them, all the time.
...so anyway, I made this. Processor running a basic sim, authenticator, radio. Point it at a pilot, it sends sensory data to their ports, listens for motor data, keeps the sim updated. The moment that the loop starts up, they stop moving, zone out. I read through the sim data of the first few and they just... look around. Walk. Touch their own face.
I give them five, six seconds of that. Then I switch the sim off, and while they're reeling and disoriented I walk up and tell them that if they want more, they have to follow me somewhere more private.
They're not quite unaware of what happens next. Anything I do to their body still gets passed on to the brain. But when you have two sensory streams coming in, and only one feels real, it's surprisingly easy to ignore the other. All I have to do is make sure they're presentable by the time I switch the sim back off.
