‘The Super-Maneuverable Assault Gun is the pinnacle of our nation’s weapons technology, a wondrous weapon to take back the stars. An S-MAG pilot is a People’s Hero, hurling lightning and fire at our innumerable foes.’ The recruitment posters and propaganda film rolls the public affairs corps made featured them all so prominently, all orderly lines of sleek armored forms standing tall and bearing big field gun pieces and heavy weapons with a practiced ease. It was awe-inspiring to see them marching at the remembrance parades every spring, each robotic footfall shook the cobblestones of Victory Square so loudly I could feel the thud-thud-thud of it in my chest from clear across the way to the review stands.
I was inspired of course, that was the whole point, and when my birth cohort was conscripted I insisted that I had to go to the S-MAG course. I believed without the possibility of doubt that this was my glorious purpose made manifest, that I would pilot those machines one day, that I would rally the people to untold glory, that my name would be spoken of in reverence for generations. It was a stupid simple thing to want and I had no idea how much it would actually cost me.
I’d never met an S-MAG pilot before enlisting in the Perpetual Liberation Army. I’d met a lot of veterans of the liberation struggle, broken old men and women from the front always came back with war stories and warnings and promises, everyone knew at least a dozen someones like that. They’d come to the schools and the activity clubs and technical unions and tell us just how hostile the outside was to our people, how virulently they hated us. I didn’t doubt it, but I always tried to steer the conversation back to the pilots and the S-MAGs and I always got non-answers back like they were embarrassed about how little they knew and trying to politely divert. I hated that, and it just made me want to become a pilot that much harder. They seemed elite in how removed they were from everyone else, from every other experience. I saw value in it that the veterans didn’t or couldn’t. When I finally got to sit down with an intake officer for the Perpetual Liberation Army she tried to talk me out of it at first, pushed me towards the tracked mechanicals instead or a transport job working the power loader frames but I insisted and after a little more pressure she relented. She almost looked sad when she gave me a slip of paperwork to take to the medical officers and the psyche evaluations. She didn’t wish me luck, and I didn’t need it.
The general military training was physically tough but mentally simple. It was a cursory thing, in a lot of ways: everyone in the special selection pipelines had to go through the same course as the most generic of the infantry & admin jobs to give everyone the same starting point so it was all aimed down at the lowest common denominator and designed to intake the largest number of recruits at once. They differentiated us by putting different corps & different specialties into their own bays and we wore our own earmarked specialization tabs. It was streamlined & efficient, peak PLA process design.
Everyone was supposed to be treated the same despite the distinctions but none of the other recruit bays I saw had their people pulled away as often as us for the endless rounds of psych evals or the physical exams that took up so much of the training time. We missed courses, missed field exercises, missed being yelled at and smoked out by angry drill instructors and the other trainees noticed it immediately. They noticed our absence and resented our presence and even the drill instructors found a reason not to deal with any of us more than was absolutely necessary. They didn’t even make eye contact if they didn’t have to, like they’d already written us off and were too professional to say anything about it.
A lot of the other pilot candidates were washed out early, disappearing from the bunks here and there. Some got broken out into non-military administrative or humanitarian work while others were redirected to the mechanized corps selectees a few bays down, a few even went into the aerospace pilot pool and didn’t even look disappointed about it. It was easy with the tabs, you pop the old ones off and the new ones on and it’s as simple as that to kill a dream and rewrite a future.
I made it through though, along with a good portion of the rest of the candidate pool then. We passed whatever battery of tests they were running on us, and I knew that it was because I wanted it so badly. I nurtured a flame of desire in my heart and keeping it alive had gotten me through to the next stage, gotten me onto the shuttle heading to the Mobile Assault Gun school at Immerath. That was further than a lot of people got, but I had no idea just how far away it would take me.
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The neural-interface rig was a true and unparalleled wonder-weapon. An economic and military force multiplier, it has seen our nation catapulted from a mere hard-scrabble clutch of worlds on the periphery of titans to a true international power, dragging the Perpetual Liberation across the bellies of empires like a dagger.
The most outwardly glorious use of this technology, and the most privately controversial, has been the omnidirectional feedback model’s role in giving the Maneuverable Assault Gun platform the advanced computer stabilization & extreme maneuver firing control system that it had sorely lacked from inception. By tapping into the human nervous system directly it was able to latch onto a lifetime of agile movement coordination and self-stabilization in an instant, it had unlocked a kind of flexibility in machines thought to be wholly impossible. That this usually cost only a life or two per machine per conflict was individually difficult for the Perpetual Liberation General Committee to swallow but the totality of the project’s numbers could never be argued with.
In more mundane and severely pared down applications that use the unidirectional feedback model like the cargo loading, remote drone control, heavy industrial manufacturing & resource extraction fields it had almost no notable ill effects upon operators, and while they may drop the occasional foundry ingot or starship ablative panel the slight awkwardness of their controls and the associated minor material loss is negligible compared to the tremendous gains in per-worker productivity.
- Selection from Perpetual Liberation Army Headquarters’
‘ A General History of The Perpetual Liberation’
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The first time I even saw a real pilot was three weeks into the comically pared down movement simulator course they put us into at the MAG school to keep us busy while they pulled together a full class to instruct and culled a few more candidates from selection.
The pilot I saw wasn’t a charismatic and boisterous hero of walking-tank warfare, it wasn’t the star of some action movie retelling the glory of the liberation of Aix-Angria. It was a fucking waif, demure and lithe and pale and impossibly soft for a military officer. They wore a tight fitting interface suit with a few token armor panels and a dozen different silver input ports dotting along their body. The ports trailed along their spine, highlighted the noticeable curve of their waist and an unmistakable swell in their chest. They couldn’t even look at our faces, staring down at the ground between us the whole time like it couldn't stand to be there a second longer.
Its hair was long and faded out from blonde to white where it rested on their shoulders and I had to fight the urge to reach out and run a hand through just to feel if it was as soft as the rest of it looked. I hated that feeling, and I hated that pilot for making me feel it. It couldn’t bring itself to talk very much, and when it did our training cohort struggled to hear it over the fans in the simulator bays. It had a stilted speech that seemed strange in the pilot’s mouth, too rough and too low to come from something this pretty and frail. They mumbled something about welcoming us to the program. I thought I misheard something that might have been claiming they were the commandant of all things, and that we’d all be starting to train with the neural-interface rigs soon. It just turned and walked away after that, led away by a barrel chested and sweaty looking cadre instructor in regular PLA vehicle crewman fatigues. Led away like a pet, I’d thought then laughed to myself at the idea. Like a pet.
Some of the other candidates joked about how awkward that had all been and how odd the appearance of the pilot was after it left, but they all had a strange edge in their voices when they did. It sounded like they hadn’t quite decided if they wanted to hate, hold or be like it yet. I joined in with them, in the confusion and the derision.
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