#Empty spaces

[anaktoria-of-the-moon]

At work plagued by thoughts of a mech bigger than you can imagine.

She starts like most of them do, a Titan excavator rig modestly sized for their line: maybe a house or thereabouts, a big house. (Doesn’t matter why she signed up - perhaps a breadwinner, a lone mother or eldest sister, a daughter of aging parents nobody else will take; doesn’t matter what site they sent her to, Earth or Enceladus or Venus or Europa. She’s there, and she lets them strap her in and adapt her for the piloting interface and pump her full of protein ooze and electrolytes and hyperstimulant cocktails as obediently as the next laborer.)

Upgrades come, from big house to bigger, with shovels like hillsides and treads like highways. Still she remains in the cockpit, out only for one day every six months to say hello to her burgeoning family, who have moved nearby to make it easy on her, to meet the baby nephews and nieces whose names she doesn’t yet know.

War comes. The facility hunkers down. It just makes sense to retrofit their biggest digger with shields, to expand her arsenal a little more, give her a better engine, pour all their leftover resources into making her a great guardian, and she rises to the occasion, shielding them from orbital rays, absorbing the energy and taking the pain of it up into her own engines. When the corporate rats who own the site finally turn tail and run the workers and their families band together and do the needful repairs themselves. Her nieces and nephews grow up learning engineering by the light of oil lamps from stolen Old Era textbooks and jailbroken datapads. She hardly ever now glimpses their faces with her own two eyes from within her steel shell but it is a worthy sacrifice to her, to them, for both parties know she is still there, still with them, embracing them in a great steel hug and watching through a thousand glass-lensed eyes.

Years pass. The brightest of her nieces works out how to modify the nutrition cocktail going into her cockpit so she will never age, never die, never fall sick. Somewhere in there all the metal and ceramic encloses her ever-sleeping body like a lotus flower around the benevolent, immortal form of a bodhisattva.

The outpost survives the war, somehow. Refugees hear of the little town on the colony that could, guarded by a goddess the size of a temple, and flock there. It makes sense to add to her control, among her array of sensors and actuators, the new city’s power generation and delivery system, its wall defenses, its waste management, its communications mains. Nowhere is anything safer than with her.

With all these new additions come techs and custodians to keep her in good care. They build modest crew cabins nestled amongst her treads (now rusty from disuse) so they can be close to her, the better to help her.

Slowly more and more falls under her purview, new cabins, then mezzanines and stairways and platforms between them; each generation has their own superstitions that they add to those of the last before them, so paintings crop up on her metal panels now, in nooks and crannies, often crude symbols that promise good oil changes or swift code updates, or simply depictions of their goddess, of the war she survived. Still she watches.

Her nieces and nephews are all dead now, and their nieces and nephews look on through rheumed eyes as the city attains new heights, heralded everywhere on every planet that still lives as an oasis of peace and prosperity. Still she watches.

A new company comes, enticed by the stories. They want to buy her. Buy her! The people scoff. As if you could just buy a person! - A person? asks the representative from Acher Spaceways, perplexed. - We heard she was your goddess.

She is both, of course, the goddess who lives, the goddess who is one hundred percent flesh and one hundred percent machine.

Acher doesn’t like this. They send machines - zero percent flesh, entirely drones - screaming down from the stars for a more insistent negotiation, one phrased in metal slugs and incendiary fire.

So your goddess rises up to meet them.

It is over in a short day. The drones lie in pieces; Acher, from orbit, licks their wounds, and the goddess rebukes them with a single laser blast, modified from her very first mining waymaker photonic drill.

The blast is precise and surgical. It tears apart the whole platform, spinning central axis to annular habitat space, which supernovas into a blossom of shining proof in the night sky at which the citizens below cheer.

But the pieces are falling, and soon they will pepper the surface below with molten debris, kick up dust into the atmosphere and make it all but unbreathable. The people could leave, the goddess advises them through short-wave radio bursts. They could use her emergency shuttles to escape gravity before it is too late, or they could go underground and salvage her rarest and most precious resources to survive until the surface is safe again.

Here is the thing - every pilot is augmented, and most augments are for the benefit of the plainly physical, for strength and speed and stamina and sharpness of perception. When her people augmented her, they augmented something else entirely. With every new module, every sensor upgrade, every painted symbol and hidden shrine, they gave her a superhuman capacity not for stamina or speed or strength, but for love.

It is her love that saved them, so they must save her back.

For two days they work tirelessly, the whole city, while above them the shattered pieces of Acher Spaceways looms ever closer. When they are done the treads are gone, the cabins dismantled, only the little drawings carefully preserved under coats of abrasion- and heat-resistant paint. And under her, their city, their Haven, lie rockets, ten of them, repurposed from the old all-ore crucibles, fit to move an asteroid.

She’s out there somewhere by Orion now, they say, the fourth jewel in his belt. And she has only grown: from three thousand then to three hundred million. Creatures from all over come to pay her their respects, or to visit lovers, or to live there themselves. There is always room in a body that is ever expanding, like the cosmos itself. Over all of them, she watches, eternal.

Among all the stories they tell of her, they repeat this one the most - how she tore apart a whole space station for the sake of her people, knowing she would die if she failed, for how can a whole city hope to flee? She guards them, and in turn they do not abandon her. They are two halves of the same whole, they say reverently, love manifest - the people and their city; this pilot, this great machine. This Haven.

[designdoll]

Got serviced. Joints re-applied, I felt kind of naked without them.

[ace-disgrace-on-the-case]

Mech pilots as a chronic illness metaphor. I would kill the world for you. I need you to help me out of the cockpit. I swear I’m still every bit as useful to you as I was before. We’re going to need to add another drug to the cocktail. You won’t leave me when I finally wash out, right? I don’t get to be normal anymore. I would kill the world for you. I hope I get to try.

[verity-hollow]

In case of emergency, break doll.

It won't help the emergency, but you'll feel better knowing you had the power to ruin that defenseless thing and the agency to follow through.

[annua-lunaria]

Transfem with a non-human identity who tears up from the happiness of finally being called an object affectionately rather than derogatorily.

transfem who’s so glad to find a partner that actually treats her like a person and not an object who still would occasionally appreciate being treated like an object in the bedroom.

[roomtemperaturesuperconductor]

this is literally some fucking r/196 shit how did it make it onto hbomax??

[absentwriterdoll]

Every step of the way.

A doll traveling with its witch.

It doesn't know where they're headed.

Its witch probably doesn't know either.

All it really knows is that, one day, in tears, its witch told it that they had to leave everything behind.

It didn't question her, even if it occasionally looks back in its thoughts.

It hasn't questioned her, even if it has its doubts.

It won't question her, even if the journey becomes difficult.

After all.

She's saved it from worse.

Far worse.

It trusts her.

It trusts her with its life.

No matter the hardships.

She'll tell it when she's ready.

And, until then...

It will be by her side.

Every step of the way.

[ecdysiscon]

due to convergent evolution as well as modern genomancy muddying the waters, it is a common misconception that the porcelain doll and the soft doll are sister taxa. In reality they are more distantly related to each other than a human is to a sponge: porcelain dolls are of course arthopods, but new research suggests that soft dolls are actually a highly-derived fungus! more samples are needed but they seem to be fairly closely related to the chytrids.

[feylambda]

A humble request

"Rise, little one." said the Voice above the broken doll

it looked up, stirring from from more than just Stillness. it climbed to its feet and looked down, seeing its physical form crumpled upon the ground, core cracked, and clutching its treasure

"Your time has come to join me." said the Voice. the doll looked towards the Voice, and saw that It was Death

the doll bent down and took its treasure from its body, and presented it to Death. Death looked upon the treasure, and saw that it was a chess set

"So, you wish to play Me for more time? Just know that I have never lost."

the doll shook its head, and said "No, this one is happy to go as told. But... it doesn't know how to play, and it broke before Miss could teach it. It always wanted to learn. Could You teach this one how to play, please?"

Death looked at the doll, then to the chess set, and then back to the doll. with some amusement, It said "Very well, little one."

they sat down, and It began to explain the rules

[wormtoxin]

Shit man, this mech war is fucked. I just saw a doll shoulder its rifle and say "reality warp: black hole star" or some similar shit, and every mech around it cratered, radiated a ring of pure energy, and disappeared. The camera didn't even go onto it, that's how common shit like this is. My ass is firing anti-personnel rounds and buckshot. I think I just heard "nanomachines: skewer" two groups over. I gotta get the fuck outta here.

[dollish-shard]

Obsessed with the very concept of mech pilots having handlers; and specifically the usage of the term. They aren't a navigator or support, they're a handler. Mech pilots may be unparalleled agents of war on the battlefield, but they're raw, uncontrolled. A pilot needs a handler to point it to what to shoot, because otherwise they just don't know what to do. Brains so melted by their training, overwhelmed by neural linking, that they need a voice they can latch onto and follow unconditionally. An unconditional obedience that carries over outside their mechs, where they're oh so weak and broken. Where the veil comes down and the true power dynamic reveals itself. A tool that follows orders without thinking, and the one who wields them.

[ember-bot]

A bot curled up in the lap of a doll. The doll gently pets her until she has switched over to rest mode, then quietly slips out from under her to go perform its duties while she sleeps. It does its best to watch over her while it works, making sure she is safe in her slumber.

The doll lays its head against the bot as it settles down for bed. The bot wakes, holding it close as it drifts off to sleep in her arms. She too must leave it while it sleeps to go perform her duties. She does as the doll does, watching over her partner as it sleeps as best she can.

The bot returns in time to find the doll beginning to stir to wakefulness. They chat, they laugh, they play, they love. Before long the bot finds herself beginning to tire, and it is time for the cycle to start again.

[charonsferry]

been wearing this item for a while. starting to think it may have affected me idk

[craigslistpilled]

lincoln, rhode island

posted: 05-20-2023, 07:05

[autonova]

"My son turned out fine"

sir your daughter writes microfiction about being dismembered and turned into an object by a pretty woman.