#empty spaces

[maybeelse]

I don't remember making this.

... I don't remember a lot of '22.

And yet, there it is. Waiting.

[absentwriterdoll]

Chocolate!

A witch that gives her doll chocolate!

The doll looks up from burying its face in its arms, its eyes red from crying, wondering what the chocolate is for.

Its witch just says that a friend she used to have said that chocolate was good for when you're sad!

The doll nods and takes a bite.

It smiles a bit.

Her friend was right.

[catgirlredux]

mech pilot with brainworms but the worms are actually the conductive nanotendrils of her mech’s computer that spread and curl around her brain like a spider’s web, sending micro-impulses that mute thoughts like “i will never be a woman” and “im a nonpassing gigahon boymoder” and replace them with better ones: “mechs make me cum” and “i’m a good girl for my handler”, to name a few

[verity-hollow]

This one might enjoy dismantling another doll. Pulling piece after piece off of their shell with placid indifference. Allowing itself some mild curiosity as it wedges its tools between their components. It can muse about how its subject is allowing this. Can a doll really be allowed to do such a thing? Is this other doll really so passive that even another broken empty shell such as itself can have its way with it? It would hardly even qualify as a doll at that point. It should have the nerve to stand up to another of its kind at least. Maybe doll is too kind a word for such a willing subject. "Scrap pile" might be the better term at this point.

[dendrobium-writes]

My warning systems still trigger.

Since the war ended, combat dolls, androids, and mecha pilots have had to adapt to civilian life. We are not needed for our original purpose anymore, and so, we must find new ones.

The luckiest of us find new handlers. New owners, or witches to take care of us and give us a new purpose. I, however, am not among the luckiest of us.

I work a retail job. I live alone. I struggle.

And all of my warning systems still trigger

When a coworker, manager, or customer locks eyes on me, a deafening buzz rings in my aural implants.

When too many people surround me, my heads-up display blinds me with target indicators.

The feeling of a customer brushing past me triggers an automatic threat response that I must fight to keep at bay.

The solution is simple. An earpiece. With some music, or commentary, or a storyteller speaking through it. Something to focus on. To tune the rest out.

But now I am told I am not allowed to use this.

I do not understand.

Why do you sabotage my strategies to cope with this life I was not meant for?

[frostgears]

dolls aren't real

"Katie…"

"Hecate."

"Katie, please let me finish. In this line of work, there are often things patients don't want to hear, even good news, and this is going to be one of them: these 'dolls' you keep mentioning… they're not real."

"Bullshit. I made and own a dozen."

"Yes, you kept mentioning that. You talked about how easy they were to manipulate and control the 'empty little things'. But, Katie, in a week here, you haven't been able to 'manipulate' the orderlies into so much as an extra juice box."

"Well, not everybody is a suitable doll."

"It would seem so! Additionally, your stories about these 'dolls' are massively inconsistent. Sometimes they're killing machines, sometimes they're servants…"

"Yeah, because I made different dolls for different jobs. What's so hard about that?"

"Sometimes they're… what was the phrase you used on Tuesday… 'funny little guys'. Like children or pets. Is that a job, Katie?"

"They're… they're just like that sometimes."

"More likely is that you're describing a normal range of normal human personalities. You reported that you've been spending a lot of time on the Internet; I've heard 'role play' communities can be very intense. Now, that by itself can't account for everything—"

"It doesn't account for shit!"

"Language, young lady! Katie, what I suspect in your case is a condition called the 'Capgras delusion'. Due to injury to the brain's frontal lobe, patients believe that familiar people have been replaced with impostors. In your case, dolls."

"I… uh. Doesn't that only happen to old people?"

"And traumatic brain injury patients. Now, your MRI came back clean of any evidence of a stroke or tumor, but the MRI here isn't as new as the one at St. Mark's. I've ordered followup imaging; we'll proceed from there."

"You're not cutting me open."

"Certainly not until we know what's going on!"

"Dolls are real."

"I'm sure they feel real to you. But Katie—"

"Hecate!"

"—they simply don't exist. Not as you describe them."

"Fine. Whatever. Can I check out now?"

"So here's where we stand. Your boyfriend…"

"I don't have a boyfriend."

"Oh, I'm sorry. Girlfriend?"

"If you're talking about my First—"

"No, your current… girlfriend. Anyway… she's… opted to drop charges. She says it was an overreaction, and she wants you to come home."

"Oh, great. Then I'm going to have to start nearly from scratch on that one. If your dolls don't fear you, you can't do anything with them."

"I see. We'll get to the bottom of this, Katie. But we'll need to keep you here meanwhile."

"Doll behavior."

"I'm sorry?"

"Me too." □

[roomtemperaturesuperconductor]

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

[alittlequirkygirl2]

it's all well and good for a doll to learn patience and stillness. but even the most well-behaved dolly needs to know the waiting will end eventually to keep herself together.

[charonsferry]

Bumbling around with a ticking, turning key, rambling about obedience and being a good doll, when Miss informs me that I have in fact disobeyed her frequent requests to take a break so she can have some quiet time. I drop straight to the floor and sob gently

[hecatesplayroom]

A doll, long distanced from its witch, forced to hide among the human population.

a cute little floppy stuffed puppy that has to take care of itself, feed itself, wind its own key.

Pulling every scrap of animating energy it can from the gifts its witch has given it until it can next be by Her side.

Making every step with great care, because it has to conserve its energy until it can next be at its witch's side

[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.

[absentwriterdoll]

Frost

A doll in the cold.

Its witch huddles close to it for warmth.

It doesn't push her away. Rather, it hugs her closer.

Who knows when the cold will break.

Will the storm end first - or will their supply of firewood?

Who knows.

All they really know...

Is that the frost comes for all.

[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.

[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.

[dendrobium-writes]

Chassis swap

After the procedure, looking in the mirror filled me with a feeling I had never known before. Recognition. Finally, when I see myself, I see me. The shiny metal, the rubbery elastomer, the dark lines contouring access panels. The dataports and maintenance ways.

A full chassis swap. The procedure I underwent. It's relatively simple on paper. Just take my Processor, Memory, Storage and a few other components, and move them into a new Case. It's relatively common amongst Androids, Simulacra, Drones, and all manner of other created beings.

I, however, was fully human before undergoing the procedure. Which has lead to some complications. I'm still getting used to the decreased latency. A 3ms difference might not seem like a lot, but compared to the 10ms of my new form, the 13ms of a wetware nervous system seems sluggish.

Usually, you have time to ease yourself into things as your components are gradually replaced, but I took the full conversion as soon as possible.

I just couldn't stand waiting any longer.

The physical therapy has been helpful. Re-learning how to walk, how to grab and hold things. Learning that I don't need to breathe anymore, and how to suppress that instinct to free up the memory for other tasks.

They tried to dissuade me. "You know the process is irreversible, right?" "But won't you miss [INSERT HUMAN TRAIT]?"

I know it's permanent. I know that I won't have these things anymore.

That's the point.

I have fully given up my humanity.

And I have never been happier.