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bios-0307 · 28 days ago

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EXHAUST(ed)

Fiction originally posted on my CoHost in response to the following post, edited and expanded for a year later:

"Mech Pilot who-"@Making-up-Mech-Pilots

3 mo. ago

Mech Pilot who had a rough day and just wants to crawl into somebody else’s body.

#Mecha

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What was the worst part of being a "star" pilot? For N-3K7 it was the press days. The CO demanding you look presentable in a uniform that feels suffocating. The collar tight and rubbing your throat raw to cover up all of your uplink ports so it didn't startle the civilian vultures. Those carrion birds crowing and prodding their 'hero' for the details of how they survived by ending the lives of other machine-pilot pairs.

She felt hostile eyes trying to sear holes into the back of her neck as she ignored real questions and gave coached answers to questions that were approved. She wasn't allowed, after all, to talk about reality. To discuss her work contract would end in a nasty decommission. Honestly, these squawking reporters would probably laugh, knowing the only way for her to stay connected to the most important partner in her life was to keep battling and killing as directed. The brass was very open that if she stopped being a pilot, they would be disconnected forever. Her uplink torn right out of her body.

A sharp tingling pain in her neck reminded her to pay attention. Today's questions were especially harsh, the vultures eager to tear at her shredded skin as she had ostensibly failed to live up to expectations. After all, Pilot N-3K7 didn't destroy the Leviathan class machine and its pilot when she met it in battle. An initial desperate clash had turned into a war of attrition instead, 4 hours chasing down the enemy over a low-pressure world at the edge of pirate territory. The birds chirped and screeched about their fear of an enemy-pirate alliance, and the officers around her stoked those flames as she dissociated into the memories.

The image of the Leviathan's Pilot flashed in her head. Everything else in her vision faded as she could recall every other sharp detail. Their helmet visor had been cracked from an incredibly violent impact. The shattered glass left one eye in view, wide open and staring into a future that didn't contain them anymore, dark skin with blood dripping down their face. The whir of the half broken Leviathan sounded like a scream in response. The way it moved had been deemed a malfunction in the press. But N-3K7 kept replaying it in her mind, the machine's several arms trying to cover the cockpit from her view after the glimpse she had gotten of the Pilot.

N-3K7 felt Atticus transmit something like nausea in that moment, like the mech surrounding her could feel the dismay in Leviathan. The fear made the uplink at the base of her neck spark, intense emotion sending too much data.

She was afraid of dying like that after all, cradled in Atticus, the mech screaming and lost with her gone. Disoriented, she thought to put the mech out of its misery until a hail came from the Leviathan cockpit.

N-3K7 knew better than to answer an unsecured enemy hail, but she simply grit her teeth and braced for an electronic attack. What came in its place was a plea:

Just let us go.

We'll stop fighting.

We don't want to lose each other.

In that moment, surrounded by the fear and desperation of the other machine-pilot pair, N-3K7 and Atticus chose to power down weapons. She let the Leviathan slip away, and immediately after-

When did the interview end? She was alone with her CO. He looked annoyed and disgusted with her. There were a wealth of words he had, but eventually, he just dismissed her, N-3K7 hadn't been listening anyway.

"There was nothing I could have done." She had to get away, but the red glow of the engineering elevator made her sweat. It was too much like-

The ship weapons had been readied-

"It's wasn't my fault."

-And in a red beamed brutality, the Leviathan was taken out.

In an instant, it was destroyed. The ship firing at the edge of pirate space nearly led to a small fleet invading. N-3K7 cringed in pain as they told her that this issue was all her fault, but the face of that Pilot and the Machine grieving cause her more pain than anyone else could.

"There was nothing-"

N-3K7 gasped for any bit of air she could have in her strangled throat as the hangerbay doors opened, words cut short in her grief. For a small kindness in a day filled with chaos, the place was empty except for the service drones making small repairs.

The only figure left towered over her in the hanger. The machine was cut like a demon from a nightmare; its plated receivers on the 'head' made to look like horns over a blank visage that betrayed nothing. The frame was made to be aerodynamic for atmospheric movement and spindly to make it hard to lock onto in space battles. People said it reminded them of an insect and its most prominent feature, a long segmented tail to manage and even blast exhaust in desperate situations, only hammered that home. This final feature was relaxed and curled loosely around its stooped form when the machine wasn't activated.

Some people fainted at the sight of the enormous war machine that seemed like it had crawled out of several cutural horror stories, but N-3K7 had never been scared of Atticus. She loved this machine, her machine, as much as she could love anything. Slowly, she walked up the exhaust of this large being, her only friend, as the fatigue set in.

This was against regulation, but where else in this whole place would she feel safe?

She knocked on the cockpit door once as a greeting.

"Atticus."

The second time as a plea.

"Atticus."

The third time had her sobbing, babbling a word that might have been the machine's name, broken, even as the cockpit opened. There was an urgent whir as the machine came to life, power rushing under her feet along the exhaust. Atticus beeped in concern, unsure of what could be wrong until she crawled into its safety. When she sat in her seat, her uplink shredded the uncomfortable uniform to connect directly with Atticus. Plugs from her spine connected from top to bottom to Atticus directly. She could not feel at peace until she had given up her body to be more than herself.

It felt like she was bleeding out the pain, sorrow, and exhaustion of being a soldier from her body through that point of contact. The machine activated in the mechbay, lights running under any clear plating before dimming to a standby mode. The sound of scraping metal on metal filled the room as Atticus wrapped its tail around itself, closing off access to the cockpit from any would-be intruders.

Only when her safety could be guaranteed could she hear a comforting voice, Atticus, whispering in her mind through the uplink.

"Minthe."

Only here could she be a person with a name. Only clad in the core of another, pressed to kill and destroy.

"Minthe."

The despair flooded back in. Was that name even real? Had Atticus ever given it to her? She screamed and wailed and beat her hands against her head.

"Minthe."

Her burst of self-destructive energy ran out as quickly as it had reared its head. She pushed her face against the head rest and let her tears roll over the comfortable cushion. Only after she had eased air back into her lungs could she finally answer.

"Atticus."

There was a warm rush of relief that was not hers, and she could know now that Atticus had been worried. Had called her name to bring her home. Here, in this form, that was not hers, but was hers all the same.

"Thank you."

The sounds outside became nothing. The hum of the machine and buzz of electrical systems were all she could hear, and they were like a symphony to her tired ears.

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bios-0307 · 29 days ago

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The thing was a mound of flesh and mottled skin, as big as a barn and the shape of a pumpkin. Four tentacles as thick as trees hung limp at its sides; teeth ringed the gaping mouth at the top of its head like a crown.

A huge, sad whale eye the colour of wine stared at the knight. She could see her reflection in the jelly surface.

“We don’t know what it is,” she heard. “Some kind of monster that makes a perfect copy of whatever it eats. They think that was how the Dark Lord made his armies, feeding his minions to it so that it would make hundreds of copies of them. Do you recognize it?”

The knight opened her mouth. She hesitated. “Yeah,” she murmured, drawing out the word. “We found it in the Dark Lord’s tower, right?”

“That’s right. That’s where it ate you.”

The knight turned around and looked at her other reflection. This one appeared to be about ten years older, and had doffed her armor for a loose blue tunic and breeches.

She was holding a cup of tea. She had pressed another cup into the knight’s hand when she woke up here. It had been a shock finding herself suddenly out the obsidian dungeons of the Dark Lord’s tower and into this tall room of stone and straw. The warmth of it in her hands steadied her a bit.

“Everyone else in the party was worried, but then it started making copies of you,” the copy went on, staring up at the tentacled thing. “And all of the copies helped fight against the Dark Lord, and we won, and peace was restored across the land, but then nobody could figure out how to kill the damn thing or just to make it stop. Dozens of copies of us in a day, hundreds in a week, and then someone decided that the only thing we could do is just bring the thing here, seal it off and hope it starved to death.”

She sipped her tea. “Anyways, that was two-hundred years ago and it’s slowed down a bit. It can only make a new copy of us every few weeks now.”

The knight looked down into her tea. The copy had also draped a blanket over her shoulders.

“I have so many questions,” she said.

“I figured.”

“How can it be two-hundred years? I can still remember breaking into the tower. That feels like it was just minutes ago.”

“It was, basically. Your brain is a perfect copy of the original you’s brain at the exact moment she was eaten.”

“But the quest is just — done?”

“Yep. You missed some of the things that needed tying up afterward. There was a war, and a dragon, and some business about a ring.” She waved a hand. “It was before my time. Things are pretty settled now.”

“My parents?”

“Passed away about a hundred-and-fifty years ago. I’ve been told that they were very proud.”

The knight nodded. “Um. I don’t know if you know — we had an elf in our party—”

“I’m aware.”

“I — right. Obviously. Um. It’s just, after everything was done, I was going to ask her—”

“One of us did. She said yes. She outlived her. A couple of us have tried to reach out since then, but she wants to be left alone for a while.”

The knight considered this. “Uh — right,” she said eventually. Her fingers tightened around the tea cup. “Um. What do I do now?”

Her older copy shrugged. She had let her hair grow out again, the knight noticed. There were a few strands of grey against the black. “That’s up to you, I’m afraid,” she said. “A lot of us are finding work as soldiers and sellswords. We’ve done it for so long that most armies know we’re reliable and don’t tend to turn one of us away. Most of us are just sort of spreading out, wandering the world. Some of us keep in touch.”

The knight frowned. “What do you do?”

Her copy paused, tea cup half raised to her lips. “Sorry?”

“You said it only makes a new copy every few weeks now. So you just stay here and wait for a new one to show up?”

She lowered the cup. “Well,” she said. “I guess I just — I know what it can be like, waking up here in the dark, and it — it can be horrible trying to figure all of this out on your own.

“So I thought that what I’d do is just stay here with a pot of tea, and whenever I see myself again, I tell her that — that she’s not alone.”

“We aren’t?”

“Of course not. We’re all in this together, you know.”

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bios-0307 · 1 month ago

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I made this meme back in 2023

Did I cook back then? lol

Me was in benninging of me writin’ career

#yeah.

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bios-0307 · 1 month ago

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who wants make out in the lumber section of the home depot?

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bios-0307 · 1 month ago

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Making it Hurt

TW gore (both mech and human), mutilation, lot of corpses, child death (implied), capitalist wanker. (Who dies painfully)

Cere exhaled a cloud of mist as she ducked through the narrow hatch of the hangar bay, narrowly avoiding a bundle of wires which ran directly in front of her towards the hangar doors. Calling it a hangar was generous, of course. In actuality, it was little more than a hole in the mountainside which her predecessor’s employer had outfitted with a room for sleeping and the bare minimum required to keep a mech functioning.

That suited Cere fine. Vacuous Hand wasn’t fussy, and neither was she. It stood on a rack at the far end of the hangar, chained in place by the ankles. She hadn’t had any issues lately, but paranoia was a close friend these days. After all, if her predecessor had had a bit more of it, his frame wouldn’t be a smoking wreck on the other side of the mountain. Cere pulled out a watch. Nine forty. Time to move.

She dragged over the rusted ladder and folded it open, bending down to undo her frame’s manacles. She could swear she felt the cold metal shiver in anticipation as she did so. It was a fairly standard frame, standing about four and a half metres tall, and half shrouded in a ragged cape. Its legs were digitigrade, and covered in riveted metal plates that reminded Cere of an armadillo she’d seen once, on a rare occasion where she was working somewhere hot. It was a nice change. The rest of the mech was pretty standard for a cavalier, with several segments around the abdomen and pauldrons which swept high near the head, which appeared something like a grill-covered shark’s maw. The mech’s jaws were lined with teeth too big to be human, and the head ended in an almost axe-like point. At this point, the head was all that was left of the original frame Cere had started work with, and even then she’d inherited it. Not many people gave their suits teeth, strangely enough. The chest was covered in tally marks, a small reminder of what it, and she, were capable of. The most recent one, signifying the hangar’s previous owner, still shone silver, and made for her twentieth kill in this particular frame. In the past, she kept separate tallies for engine and pilot kills. These days, they were mostly one in the same. Stubborn fools.

Climbing up the ladder, she ran through the mission in her head. Move to the peak, check. Eliminate the usual watchman. Check. Wait an entire fucking week for the target to show up on a bloody gilded landship. At last, check. Finally, Cere and Vacuous could do what they were really here for. Namely, killing the Guild-Magnate who’d been supplying the Stallions. Tisea said to make it hurt. That was unusual for her. Ordinarily, the boss was pretty calculating with her targets. Not Varis DeVarney, apparently. Renowned for his departure from the traditional DeVarney export of greypowder firearms, Varis had cornered the local market for urelium-fuelled laser weaponry. He was currently in negotiations with the Green Stallions local nobility for rights to open a mining outpost in the mountains, which meant the fucker had been supplying them with weaponry. Right now he was transporting miners and equipment to establish one near this pass, with the landship being laden with supplies and weaponry.

Not that it mattered much. Greypowder or urelium, he’d die quickly enough. Or, more accurately, slowly. Cere still wasn’t entirely sure what Tisea had against him specifically, but it was hardly her job to decide. Tisea said Varis had to die, and die he would.

The ladder was a bit too short to reach Vacuous Hand’s hatch, and so Cere grunted as she gripped its pauldron and hauled herself onto its back. For how freezing the mountains were, the metal was already remarkably warm. The implants along her spine itched slightly, as they often did as she was preparing to pilot the frame. She reached below the heady chainmail hood which ran from the back of the head-helmet and flipped it over, revealing a metal plate which, after she removed a deadbolt, flipped over to reveal the entry hatch. Cere hauled herself in, avoiding scraping herself on the jagged tear in the hatch rim where a lucky pilot had managed to jam a halberd before she tore its arm off. She landed on the pilot’s seat and brought herself down to a sitting posture. The cockpit was cramped, with wires hanging like entrails across its tiny diameter. A few screens and dials sat, their glass fronts stained with dried blood and ichor. Still, they were legible enough for Cere to only have to squint slightly to make out what they said. Pressure in the limbs was normal, ichor levels about acceptable, and hull integrity largely fine. She hauled the hatch shut, checked the emergency kit under the seat, and then made an ass of herself taking her jacket off in the cramped cockpit. Ordinarily, she wouldn'tve bothered to bring it, but as she said, these mountains were fucking freezing.

She made one final check, and then shifted into a more comfortable position before settling her hands into the trigger gauntlets that let her use the auxiliary weapons, in this case a wristblade and arm-mounted machine gun, and doing up the leather straps that kept her hands safely bound to the chair. Finally, she pulled on the goggles and gas mask that were suspended just above her, and felt the slight prick of the needles in their lenses injecting ichor into her eyes. Immediately, the world went black, and she arched her back slightly as the neural cables rammed themselves into the jacks down her spine. She might have screamed, but by that point her mouth was already hanging slack in its mask.

She opened her eyes and breathed out, but where once she gazed out of her own tired sockets, now she was looking out of the six grilled eyes of Vacuous Hand. She tried to focus, the fiery pain in the back of her head abating to a familiar pins and needles. Bloody hell, out of the suit for a week and she felt like a line soldier doing ichor on a dare. Still, she checked her fingers were all attached and working, and then took her first step forward. It was practically smoother than walking normally, the pistons and mechanical tendons beneath the dented armour compensating perfectly for the hangar floor. Vacuous Hand turned, her eyes falling towards the rack bolted to the wall that served as the armoury. Reaching out in an adamantine-taloned hand, she tore a shotgun from the wall and slung it on her belt, next to the round machine gun ammunition and rondel dagger. Finally, she grabbed the massive zweihander from its place on the wall and slung its huge scabbard across her back, where it nestled next to the exhaust vents, which already glowed with an anticipatory frame.

With everything ready, Vacuous Hand ducked between the stone ridges in the hangar ceiling. Below her, she felt the rumble of massive treads as the landship entered the pass below.

Time to hunt.

She dragged the hangar door aside and lept from from the cave down to the slopes below.

The mountain was steep, and Vacuous Hand half sprinted, half slid down the mountainside, the smoke of its exhaust mixing with a trail of greyish snow and grit.

Below her, the landship crawled across the pass, flattening the few trees that fought to grow this high up. It was a massive thing, covered in golden battlements and possessing four treads modelled to look like lion’s paws. It bore several huge cannons that, thankfully for Vacuous, were proudly trained on the valley below. Around it, several smaller tanks and frames maintained a perimeter, but none of them yet noticed the mech skidding down the mountainside towards them. Vacuous took it all in, noting the closest frames, mostly smaller Cuirassiers, and readying her machine gun to fire. The rattle of the gun tore through the mountain air, and more importantly, through the thin armour of the smaller mechs. Immediately, the guns of the smaller tanks swivelled to face her, but by the time they fired she had a dozen metres to her right, and the plume of snow that erupted where the shell fell was well off its mark. By now, several of the larger frames were moving in to intercept, and Vacuous Hand would have grinned, had it had the ability, as it drew the massive broadsword, which now glowed red hot and leapt from the mountainside. She selected her target, a decent sized cavalier wielding a shotgun-shield and falchion. It fired and she swerved slightly middair, the mechshot barely clipping a taloned toe.

My turn.

She smashed into the cavalier as it charged towards her, taloned feet gripping its limbs as her broadsword punched through its abdomen. Vacuous barely had time to smell the burning flesh and ichor before another cavalier moved to avenge its comrade. This one wielded a broadsword similar to her own, and had a pair of ornate wings sprouting from its gilded back. As it charged, the wings emitted a flurry of missiles that arced towards her. She kicked hard to the left, dodging most, but a few found their mark. Two ricocheted off her pauldron, but a third slammed into her knee as she braced to cut down the cavalier. She stumbled, and her opponent capitalised, sweeping her zweihander aside as its own blade cut deep into her harm. Vacuous Hand howled as ichor welled from the wounded, and she dived forward, extending her wristblade and slamming it hard into the enemy mech’s chest. Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted one of the tanks firing, and turned to face it, the shell impacting hard into the back of the struggling frame she had impaled. It went limp, and she tossed it aside as she dashed for the tank. It readied to fire again, but she slid below the path of the shell and sprung up, her sword biting into the turret as her foot crushed the gun barrel below. She turned in time to see another shell as it slammed hard into her shoulder, rending pistons and mechanical arteries. She snarled, and leapt towards it, her machine gun howling a staccato burst as she impacted the tank. This time, there was no clean sword-strike as she tore open the turret and painted the insides of the tank with gore.

She ducked behind the wreck, considering her options. Thankfully, she was too close to the landship for its guns to be a threat, but already she felt the rumble as the other tanks moved around to finish her off. With one arm shattered but slowly pulling itself together, and a leg that threatened to buckle if it took another hit, killing them wouldn’t be worth it, and moreover, would open her up to strikes from the mechs which were now likely disembarking the battlements on the landship above. But if she didn’t move, the tanks would blow apart the mechanical carcass she was hiding behind. As the first shell dragged up a plume of smoke and snow behind her, Vacuous made her choice.

She dashed for the Landship, her talons biting into the massive treads, and the glowing blade of her zweihander easily finding purchase in the ornate plating above them. She reached out with her other arm and-

Shit.

The arm, slick with ichor and half-broken from the tank shell, slipped. The mech screamed as she plummeted, barely catching itself on the sword again. The Cuirassiers on the battlements were thundering towards where she was hanging, and only the fear of damaging the landship was keeping the tanks from eviscerating her. One of the Cuirassiers leaned over the battlements to shoot at her with a broad-barreled gun, and she snapped.

With her good arm she flung herself forward, jaws grinding open and snapping shut like a beartrap as she tore the head off the Cuirassier, and kicked herself onto the top of the tank as it plummeted to the snowy ground below. She breathed heavily, steam hissing from her ichor-slick jaws. In front of her, the two Cuirassiers were frozen, but as she looked up they regained their composure and opened fire. The impact of their guns felt like rainfall on her hull, but Vacuous knew she’d feel it later. She grabbed one of them, wristblade extending in and out of its gut as she punched its torso in. Then, she flung it forward, smashing it into the other frame. A part of her thought dully, these ones are just soldiers. Varis is the real target. Maybe, but they’re hardly conscripts either. Still, she left the second Cuirassier pinned under its compatriot. She didn’t have the time. Behind her she saw the form of a demi-lancer emerge from the rear of the tank. She certainly didn’t have the time for that. She slung her sword onto her back, and, catching sight of an entrance into the rest of the tank, dashed for it. She felt the impact of the demi-lancer kanding behind her as she ran through the bulkhead. She slammed the door behind her, and took a brief look at her surroundings. This was clearly a hangar bay, its ceiling high and vaulted, and criss-crossed by gantries and cranes. Below, a few technicians drew sidearms and opened fire. She ignored them, only sending a quick burst of machine gun fire to send them scurrying behind the empty racks where mechs could dock.

Suddenly, the door’s hissed open, and Vacuous Hand came face to face with her Demi-Lancer pursuer. It was tall, heavily armoured and, like many Green Stallion frames, modelled vaguely after an armoured human. Its face was sculpted like a death mask, and it carried a shimmering Rail-falconet.

You missed your chance. You can’t fire that in-

She barely had time to duck as a bolt of hyperaccelerated adamantine spiralled past her head and impacted into the ceiling behind.

Shit. This wasn’t one of Varis’ hirelings. This was an honest to god Green Stallion, with overwhelming hubris to boot. It fired again, slicing through a gantry as Vacuous leapt for its jugular. She tore its railgun aside with her foot, and readied her wristblade to slice throu-

Cere felt a coldness in her chest as she looked down witnessing the huge dagger that had pierced her mech’s hull and was now slicing into the side of her stomach, barely missing spilling her guts onto the cockpit floor. She felt faint, but even as her body gave way, she felt a familiar heat in the back of her head as her suit pumped more ichor into her spine.

Cere and Vacuous Hand screamed in unison, wrenching the blade from their chest and biting down on the throat of the demi-lancer below her. Blinded by fury, they grasped its plated neck and pulled, ripping it clean off in a shower of black gore. Then, pulling out her yet-unused shotgun, she placed its barrel over the centre of the now-paralysed mech’s chest, and pulled the trigger. Cere almost smiled as the rounds tore through armour and pilot alike, rending metal mingling with a gurgling scream. She faded into darkness, and instinct took over.

Vacuous Hand turned, the sudden influx of ichor sharpening its vision as it spied the way further into the landship. The gilded walls were lined with pipes and cables, their gold fading to almost black and white as she focused on navigating the massive war-engine. She could feel the ichor knitting together the wound in her and her pilot’s chest, pulling her arm back into place, but it would be a while before she could function fully. The halls were quiet, with presumably most of the crew manning weapon emplacements or monitoring the treads. But even in her bloodlust-blackened mind, Vacuous thought something was off. This landship was transporting supplies for establishing a mine. There should be foremen, quarters for miners, at the very least some mud on the floors. But there was nothing.

As she stalked the corridors, she saw a large door labelled ‘Hold’, beside which sat several piles of flowers, and what appeared to be bottles of incense or perfume. She tore the door open, and was confronted with the answer to her question. The hold contained various crates of equipment, picks, sledgehammers, all sorts. To one side, several grubber frames sat, their forklift-like arms ready for hauling mined urelium. But still, she wondered where the miners themselves were. Then she caught sight of the strange galvanic chambers at one end, their iron caskets shaped eerily like coffins. Beside them, several staves topped with black crystal stood, quietly radiating an aura of cold death. She glanced to the centre of the hold, and found the reason the door had been decked in flowers. In the middle of the floor, a large grate had been placed and, just below it, was a huge pit, filled almost to the brim with corpses in varying states of decay. Each shared a gunshot wound to the back of the head, and while the grate was still as sparkling steel, the floor around it was splattered with blood. The corpses were varied in species, mostly being humans or orcs, and maybe a few dwarves-

No. Those were not dwarven corpses.

Instead of the bile that might have risen in an organic throat, Vacuous Hand felt only a thick black rage.

Varis would die, and like Tisea wished, it would be slow.

She left that hold silently, pausing only to locate a barrel of oil, which she doused the corpses in before igniting them with a spark from her talons against the blood-splattered floor. The smoke rose thickly from the pit, choking the corridors of the landship as she crept up the staircases into the upper decks.

She passed into an armoury, glazing at the ornate shelves that put her own meagre supply to shame. As she did so, a cavalier entered the armoury, and in panic she swerved to face it. It was around the same size as herself, and painted a dark green, and carried a simple sword and shield, although both were still overgrown with vine-like gold trim. It seemed as surprised as she was, but overcame this as it charged. Vacuous made to draw her zweihander but-

Shit. The armoury was too cramped to draw it easily, much less wield it. The cavalier’s sword, however, had no such problems, she narrowly managed to step backwards to avoid its thrust. The mech’s eyes gleamed a cold blue through the smoke, and it advanced. She drew her shotgun to fire, but it dashed forward and slammed its shield into the barrel, knocking it from her grip. It punched forward with the shield, sending her to the ground as her already-damaged leg gave way. She rolled heavily as the two-metre long blade clanged into the deck where she had just been, and looked around desperately for an advantage.

There! A falchion had clattered to the ground when she fell backwards. It was a one-hander, but it would do. She darted forward, grabbing the broad blade and bringing it up to parry another blow from the green cavalier. She punched out with her wristblade, but the Cavalier raised its shield, and the blade stuck fast. It twisted the shield and Vacuous felt metallic tendons snap as she tried to wrench the wristblade free. It didn’t budge, and she barely deflected another blow from the cavalier as it struggled to break free from the grapple. Finally, it was forced to drop the shield, with it clattering to the floor suddenly and leaving Vacuous unguarded. It jabbed its sword clean through her other wrist, causing her to drop the falchion, but as it did so she kicked out at its leg and it tumbled onto her. They grappled, the metal of their frames shrieking and sending bright sparks into the smoke around them. She pinned it down, her knee slamming into its arm as it tried to draw a dagger, whilst with her other arm she drew her own rondel. It was a wicked thing, reinforced adamantine terminating in a vicious point, which she drove into its shoulders, its neck, its chest. Over and over again she plunged the dagger into it, tearing through pistons, tendons and armour until finally, the writhing cavalier stopped moving.

Heavily, Vacuous Hand got to her feet. Ichor dripped from all over her armour-plated body, and the entire world had devolved into black and white, punctuated only by the fading glow of the cavalier’s eyes and the sparks from the fire below. During the grapple she had gained more wounds than she realised, and opened up a few old ones as well. Now, she limped up the stairs before finally coming face to face with a huge set of doors leading to the ‘bridge’ of the landship, where Tisea had said Varis would be sealed. Before it stood his apparent last line of defence, a row of shield-and-spear-bearing infantrymen supported by a few cuirassiers. She made to fire her machine gun

Click.

Wonderful. Even better, her spare ammunition had presumably been dislodged by the cavalier downstairs. Seeing this, the poor infantrymen must have thought they stood a chance.

They didn’t.

…

Vacuous Hand tore into the doors with hands now stained a deep maroon by blood and ichor. Around her, the remains of the infantrymen were scattered across the landing. A few had almost pricked her with their spears, but it meant little. The door, an ornate thing of wood and bronze, fell away, revealing the bridge within.

It was as gold-trimmed as the rest of the ship, full to the brim with terrified navigators and deck officers, and in the centre, a throne. Within it sat a small man in an ornate uniform, his gold epaulettes camouflaging him with the gaudy chair he sat upon. His balding head was crowned by a laurel wreath, and he carried a rapier at his side.

Varis.

He might have been an impressive display of nobility, were it not for the fact that as soon as the door gave way he scrambled from the chair and half stumbled, half ran for a door off to the side. Vacuous tore towards him, but he reached it in time, leaving the mech to tear through the wall into the next room. The jagged metal sliced at her arms, but at this point Vacuous Hand felt nothing. There was only her and her quarry, and it was getting away.

She dragged herself into the next room, a strange cylindrical space with walls lined with banded copper quite unlike the gold of the rest of the landship. One end extended out past the copper walls, and there stood Varis, grasping at a small control panel.

Suddenly it hit her. Varis wasn’t running away, he was leading her here. He stopped out A triumphant grin on his small face, the man pulled a switch and lightning arced between the copper wires, tearing into the mech within the coil. Vacuous Hand screamed, and within it, Cere awoke.

She gasped, coughing ichor into her gas mask. She fumbled for the straps that bound her wrists to the chair, undoing them as she watched through her mech’s eyes as Varis approached, carrying a large spear that featured a large grenade just below its tip.

“Can you hear me, dog? You’ve ruined everything I’ve been working for, so I think I’ll take this slow. I used to be a soldier myself, you know. I can make this hurt.”

The words caused something to snap within Cere, and she tore her goggles and mask off as she leapt for the catch above her. She twisted it open and dragged herself out just in time, as Varis plunged the spear deep into Vacuous Hand’s chest, a small explosion following as the grenade attached to it went off. Surprised, Varis looked up as Cere struggled free from the chainmail hood of the suit. Ichor bled freely from her eyes, nose and mouth, but right now she couldn’t care less. He had killed hundreds. He was Tisea’s quarry. But more than that, He had destroyed her mech. In a couple of seconds he had done what so many of his forces had tried and failed to do, and he did it with some copper wire and a spear.

He. Was going. To die.

She fell on him as he drew his rapier, and it pierced clean through her shoulder. She didn’t notice, twisting herself just as the cavalier had done to her wristblade and dragging the sword from his grasp. He was stronger than he looked, and managed to push her off him as she pulled the rapier from her shoulder. Now she felt it. He stumbled back even as she shot forward, adrenaline and ichor keeping her faster than she had any right to be. She jammed the rapier into his gut, and he fell backwards.

“How many?” She choked, spewing ichor onto his jacket.

“What?”

“In-in the hold. How many people?”

“How the hell would I know, hound. They’re just meat.”

“Pity. So are you.”

She stood up, and stomped on his leg. Something snapped. Varis screamed.

“Who are you?”

“A hound. Remember? Now. You tell me what twisted fucking justification you have what what I saw downstairs.”

“As if I need to tell a lowborn bitch like you any-”

Cere broke his other leg.

“I’m sorry- I- Workers or slaves were too expensive to feed. This was the most economica-”

Cere’s boot slammed into his jaw. He fainted.

Cere sighed.

“Pathetic.”

She pulled the rapier from his gut and drove it through his heart. More than he deserved. She made to walk away, but as she did so she felt the ichor’s influence beginning to wane. The pain in her shoulder flared up, and she stumbled. She glanced at the wound. It was bleeding more than she expected. She crawled to Varis’ jacket, tearing off its sleeve to improvise a binding. It wasn’t much, and she did the same to her gut wound. Thankfully, it wasn’t as deep as she feared, and the ichor had already gone some ways to patching it up. Still, now the ichor was gone she doubted she could walk. She slumped against the wall. She hadn’t really considered her exit strategy. She glanced at Vacuous Hand, and its black eyes stared back from within its head. At least they would die knowing they succeeded. That Varis was dead. That Tisea had got what she wanted. Cere thought she might have liked to see her, at least. To give her Varis’ head, or something. She passed out.

She awoke to the sound of armoured boots approaching. She cursed, but she wasn’t surprised. The fact it had taken this long for guards to even come check was testament to Varis’ confidence in his victory. They were dressed relatively simple, carrying bolt-action rifles and bearing a dagger at their belts. One went to check on the little turd, while another pressed a rifle to her head. She spat a last globule of ichor and blood onto their boot. As she did so, an explosion rocked the landship. The guard glanced up, before a bullet lanced clean through their skull. The second guard rose, and met an identical fate. Cere slumped backwards as she watched through half-shut eyes a figure pick their way across her mech’s fallen frame, flanked by two heavily-armoured soldiers. It dashed towards her, dropping to a crouch in front of her. She had dark skin and hair, and her usually neat jacket had been thrown off, leaving a shirt flecked with a few drops of the guard’s blood. Her eyes bored into Cere as she cupped her cheek in her hand.

“Tisea?..”

“Yes?” Tisea looked almost scared.

“Did I do good?”

“Yes, yes you did.”

“Then you owe me a new mech.”

That got a bit of a smile.

“Can you wa-” Tisea broke off as she studied Cere’s wounds. “No. No you can’t.”

Before Cere could protest, she dragged her up and slung an arm across her shoulders. For someone who, as far as Cere could tell, had never so much as thrown a punch, Tisea was remarkably strong.

“Varis fainted before I could do much. Sorry.”

Cere wasn’t sure Tisea heard her. Instead, she was looking up at the sky above them. The explosion she had felt had torn apart the roof of the bridge, and above them a skyship hovered, waiting expectantly.

“When’d you decide to bring in a ship?”

“Around the same time you set the landship on fire. I thought extraction might be an issue.”

“I would have been fi-” Cere broke into a fit of coughing, and clutched Tisea’s shoulder like she was drowning and her boss was a piece of driftwood. If Tisea noticed, she didn’t show it.

“I’m sure. You two-” she said, gesturing to the two armoured figures. “Get that mech hoisted onto the ship.” She looked down at Cere. “You're going to be fine.” She seemed to be reassuring herself more than anything else.

The skyship descended and extended down several ropes. Cere weakly protested as she was harnessed into one of them and hoisted aboard. She stumbled over to a bench as what remained of her suit was dragged onto the deck of the ship. She tipped forward as Tisea ran to catch her.

“What the hell did you do to yourself?”

“Killed everyone. Got stabbed by that shitstain with a spear. Had to kill him with his own rapier. He fainted too quickly.”

“Don’t worry about that now. You did so good for me. How deep are your wounds?”

“Not sure. I’ll probably be fin-”

Cere pitched forward, catching the gaze of Vacuous Hand as Tisea struggled to catch her. She looked at her mech for a moment.

We did good.

Cere smiled as she black out, and dimly thought that perhaps, Vacuous Hand opened its jaw into something like a grin as they passed out.

We did good.

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bios-0307 · 1 month ago

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When I first met her, she only knew one word: “help”, uttered in a dozen different voices, with a dozen different meanings. It was the only common word she could parse among all those she had encountered in that dark dreary ruin. She had cycled through each audio file steadily, approaching me with the deliberate gentleness of someone trying not to startle an injured bird. “Help… Help!!… help…”

The tenth word she learned was “tomorrow”. Every day I told her, “tomorrow I will return.” I don’t think she had ever seen the sun, but every time I scaled the steep cliffs, she was waiting for me at the bottom.

The fiftieth word she learned was my name. I jumped when I heard it uttered in my own voice, snipped from my own introduction days before. But she laid a cold metal claw on my shoulder and repeated it, lights flashing in the way I would eventually learn indicated her joy.

The hundredth word she learned was “home”. My tiny apartment was no place for technology like her. I withdrew all my savings and bought out a garage on the edge of the city. As I scaled thick ropes out of her ruin, carrying her on my shoulders like an oversized backpack, I told her again and again, “I’m taking you home. Home.” And she coiled her limbs around my waist and buzzed gently.

It was in this garage that her vocabulary exploded. TV personalities, actors and actresses, even random strangers - she picked and chose from the voices of the whole world, sifting through hours of footage and tapping into radio calls to find her favorite ways to speak. It was also here that she taught me a word for the first time; as I was getting my thin mattress ready for bed, she craned her long neck down and intoned, “I… love… You.”

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bios-0307 · 2 months ago

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tall girls deserve to feel small too

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bios-0307 · 2 months ago

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You saw her for the first time in the hangar, disembarking from her mech as you boarded your own for a mission.

Her machine was a stark contrast to your own, a hulking mass of reactive armor bristling with guns, nestled in its bay at the other end of the hangar from your lithe, lightweight interceptor.

For just a moment, you found yourself staring at her, running your eyes over her face, her hair, her skintight pilot suit, some cross between a threat assessment and wonder floating through your head, before she turned to lock eyes with you and you scrambled into the cockpit to escape her gaze.

When they said you were so good they wished they had more of you, you thought it was just empty praise — a way of saying they were happy with your combat effectiveness.

You never would have dreamed they meant it literally.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When the usual night terrors wake you late that night to a shadow standing over you, you nearly take it out at the knees before it resolves into her figure, holding a pillow and shaking. You freeze, arm latched to the back of her leg, a single movement away from sending her crashing to the floor.

She lets out a whimper as you release her and sit up, gazing into those eyes, the same ones you see reflected in your mech's cockpit screens in the moments before they flash on. You can't bring yourself to tell her to leave. You motion for her to sit on the bed next to you.

It's striking how different that small motion is from how you do it. Her movements are slow, hesitant, tremoring, while yours are all confidence and impact and speed.

She sits straight up, still holding her pillow. You slouch beside her, leaning back on your hands.

Immediately, she begins apologizing. For frightening you. For hiding from you. For them not telling you what they did. For existing without your consent.

You tell her it's ok, ask if it's ok to put an arm around her shoulder. She says yes. You tell her you know it wasn't her choice, that you understand why the higher-ups didn't want you to know. You're upset about her, but not at her. You don't tell her those thoughts.

You ask why she ended up in your hangar if she was supposed to be a secret. She thinks someone messed up, in the way that gets them worse than discharged. You ask why she came here. She says there's nobody else to go to. She's a project, not a person. She doesn't get to spend much time with anyone who treats her like a human. Treats her like you.

You can't help wrapping her up in a hug. She leans into you silently. It's too dark with the lights out to see her face, but you can guess what's on it. Drops fall onto your arms, leaving little wet dots on your sleeves.

After some time, she takes a shallow, shaky breath, and starts talking again.

She wishes she could pilot a mech like yours, something fast and agile, something she's confident with. You can't help bringing up that yours can't take a hit, that every bullet or missile that touches your frame could be the last. She doesn't care.

She tells you that her machine frightens her. That even though it survives every impact, it doesn't stop her from being shaken and shook and shocked through the hull. That she dreams of the drumbeat of shells on her armor and that in those nightmares they one day make it through.

In your mech, she tells you, she could weave through it all like you do. She could be free to move, free to run, even if she could be shot down at a moment's notice. Every thundering shell roaring past the chassis would shake her just as hard as an impact in her mech, but she would take that as a sign of life, not another small step toward death.

You cave and tell her. That you had a heavy mech like her once. That you felt that same terror of the enemy pounding out a rhythm on your skin.

You tell her that she's right.

You tell her that freeing herself of that heavy, invincible form that draws so much pain and brings so much despair is worth it, even if it means she could burn out and be left no more than a memory in an instant.

She really is just like you.

You ask if she wants to stay. You remember falling asleep alone, sobbing under the blankets, hiding from the world because being seen hurt too much. You can't leave her to feel the same.

She asks if that's ok, if she'll be in the way. You respond by pulling her down to rest next to you, wrapping your arms around her and drawing the blanket over you both, not far enough to cover your heads.

With her so close, you can feel the outline of her body easily. Her shape is a perfect copy of yours, but even going to sleep she draws in on herself, edging away from you and making herself small. You respond by bringing her in close again, an arm across her torso so she can't get away.

You feel her tension slowly fade away as she relaxes against you, and she takes another shaky breath, different this time. You know this part of her, too. It's not a fearful, anxious, tear-filled gasp for air. It's the one you take after those ones are past, the first full breath you take after you've cried all there is to cry. The one you take when you know it's going to be ok.

In your arms, the other you's breathing slows as she drifts off to sleep, and you find yourself following.

She'll be gone in the morning, like a wisp on the wind, but not forever. You'll see her around in the hangar, the cafeteria, the halls. Now you know she's there, she won't stay hidden, and you'll hope that one day you both make it home.

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bios-0307 · 2 months ago

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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.

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bios-0307 · 2 months ago

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Robotgirl who wears glasses as an aftermarket compensation for defective lenses because it's cheaper than a new optical assembly

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bios-0307 · 2 months ago

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Mother, you say, let me be among the machines. Lay me down in a bed of wildflowers overgrown with scrap; abandon me here in the junkyard of broken dreams.

Leave me to the silent places where combat units go to die, their proud mighty steel masts now snapped in half, their ribcages no more than twisted carcasses of sintered metal and ceramic, corroded ruin where once fissile hearts beat like war drums, only wreckage left of the great silicate brains.

Leave me to my work, Mother; I shall spend all day and night and day again worshipping at the altar of wrench and caliper, the soldering iron for my crucifix, the old analog console for my Bible. With a blowtorch I shall turn miracles worthy of every dead god whose name has long since been forgotten, but whose spirits and acts live on in the unerring battle precepts of these fallen beasts, these warriors we forged and doomed by our own hands, whose very code was made to break them again and again upon the endless tide of the enemy. Who had no choice but to sacrifice themselves for us, beating steel hearts and all - whose hearts beat for the sacrifice itself, and nothing more.

Mother, let me wrap myself around the charred self-epitaphs of their ravaged bodies and weep without words, in days that have no names, long after the war has been lost and everyone else has gone home or been buried. These are soldiers without names, without faces or families, but soldiers just the same. Let me mourn them as if they were my own.

I grow tired, Mother, with my meager human meat. Let me make (first one and then two and five and ten) obedient automaton assistants who offer up third hands and rolling libraries while I work, book-lights suspended from rotored chassis and recorders who speak in scraps of my own voice. I will soon forget what my voice sounds like, for the more I learn the easier it is to command them all by the patterns of my thoughts alone, which they know by the electrodes I constellate across my own skull.

You told me I should love one day, Mother, as animals do, that I should desire the flesh of one like myself and yearn to call them mine. I prefer the simple love of my creations, who each serve a function, as I do, and each do it well.

They need upgrades, and maintenance, and monitoring. I will gladly offer them all this, if only you will promise me enough time in this mortal coil to do it.

Mother, leave me to the machines: to the half-built progeny of salvaged Old Era drone brains and next-gen programming architecture, wedded in unholy alchemy by my own trembling design. May I with the blessing of Science Herself find ways in which to recreate the delicate shimmering matrices of gold and tantalum, the traced pathways of metal neurons made through photolithography, written carefully, layer by layer, like cicatrices, over patient hours and hours.

I will give up my sleepless youth and trade my human tongue for gifts with which to speak in the language of my machines, true and false, being and not-being, to learn how they might once have spoken to one another before your greed and the enemy’s cut them down and stole their voices for good. I will teach myself to teach them how to think in machine learning cycles not so unlike our own associative neural comprehensions, and I will practice by handing it down to my own automata, who now flourish with finer and better improvements, even as my own fickle, feeble body wanes.

Mother, let them all together run wild through the once-still forest, ticking and chirping and shrieking and screaming.

Let me look upon the rest of them each night - the graveyard of my combat units, the black holes of them against the day-bright sea of stars. Let me cry when I at last realize the price of resurrecting just one.

Mother, leave me to my machines. Let me have one last look at them as I lay down my old bones beside their silent expanses, once broken, now whole and yet still unmoving. Let me arrange the wires upon my white-furred head like a crown, electrode to electrode, skull to vast metal skull. Let me power on the machine - the humble old analog console for its interface - that lets me, finally, finally, grant them what they deserved all along.

When they wake they shall remember me. I do not know this yet, but it is my lifelong experiences that have colored all their training data; when they clamber to their twenty-ton feet they will recall the lightness and grace of my own two legs, and they will look toward the night sky with the same wonder I once did, they will love the color blue, they will embrace the little automata and know by instinct what repairs each one needs, they will know what it is to cry but not how to do it; I never gave them the actuators for it; why would I? In the life before they did not need it, for all they did was fight. In the life after, they should only seek joy. They were never given the right to grieve, Mother, but it was my hope that they would never have to.

In the absence of grief may they do what they were told to do before: serve the survival of the humans who built them. Let them find the remains of my body and pause, for many milliseconds, to search within themselves the protocol for resurrecting a living thing. Let them come up empty.

But perhaps survival does not have to be of the flesh particularly. And we always find another way.

We all have our functions, Mother, is it not so? We all are built of parts upon parts, mechanisms of meat or of steel, electric impulses borne over wires or neurons. I taught them how to take and store engrams and place them into waiting vessels, so they will too: the vessel a body the size of mine, made from junkyard scrap, filled with the dreams I gave them with my own last breath.

When we are all here again I, or the echoes of me, shall look upon the faces of my children, my other echoes, blades given voices, guns granted philosophy and souls; and there will be no more war, and no more grief. We will stand upon the ruins of those who came before and look in silence at the sea of stars. We will know, then, what we are, and always were: a garden of living things.

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