#hazediver

[hazediver]

The sun hung high above the NEST.

Sephy didn't hate the sun, she didn't even dislike it, but heat was dangerous. The pilot suit could cool her down, maybe, but it had failed before, so now she couldn't trust it. Frankly she couldn't trust anything they gave her to help with her sickness. The medicine, the neural dampener, the pilot suit, the remodeled interface, it all worked most of the time, not all the time.

It was the most frustrating part, because when these things failed, she had to account for them. She wasn't just responsible for herself, she was a HAZED. She had to protect people, protect the company's assets, to complete the mission. She wanted to do that, she wanted to be good at it, but it took so much just to fucking exist.

They had already loaded her Hazediver onto the helicopter. The humanoid mech, a fusion of top-of-the-line biotech and robotics, the absolute pinnacle of anything post collapse humanity could hope to build, was, in the company's eyes an absolute failure.

When they first built it, they had to pump it full of a double dose of stabilizer just to get the bones to form - after, it took sixteen doses of the same drug cocktail to keep the thing up and running, else the synthmuscle and nervous system started to break down. One of the techs joked that it must be addicted to the stabilizing solution, and the name stuck. ADDICT.

ADDICT's central macroorganism was lithe, wraith-like, almost emaciated in appearance. Nearly 80% of its genetic code had been deviant from the design pattern, and only the core of the organism, the torso and lower hip, had been deemed viable for use. Both legs had been replaced by sharp, almost skeletal prosthetics, and each arm had been replaced with a weapons cluster, a heavy plasma cannon and a bayonet.

Sephy sat herself in the cockpit, affixing the helmet over her head and connecting each of the neural plugs. One, two, three. ADDICT, to the dive system, to her. The “sensory haze” washed over her as she lost control of her limbs, the dive system redirecting her nerve impulses to ADDICT. She spun up the bio-reactor, feeling the pulse of energy from ADDICT's core reach out into ADDICT, into her.

She was inside the dive.