I didn’t see that pilot again for months. None of us saw anyone new again for weeks, we never even saw a real Assault Gun. It took days of surgery before we could even begin the training modules. When it came time to be wired up we remembered nothing except the way that the anesthesia felt like a warm embrace all the way down. Each time we came back up they’d done something, changed some part of us. They always had someone on hand to explain the procedure but the words meant nothing to me, only the new implant scars and embedded ports told the truth of it.
After the class was fitted with the interface ports the same generic uniformed PLA instruction cadre led us from barracks to neural rig pods and back twice a day every day, I don’t even know for how long. It passed like a blur for me. The neural input pods weren’t what we’d thought they would be. It wasn’t a simulation of piloting a mech in a way we could understand then, in a way any of us knew how to conceptualize like. It was a trial by purifying fire.
What they called training was flashing pulses of light that I couldn’t blink away from, that I couldn’t screw my eyes shut against. It was keening wails and sobs and a feeling like a spike being driven into the center of my skull until fire poured out of my mouth. I cried and vomited on my interface suit and bled from my nose until I passed but I never begged for them to stop. The ones that did were gone before they finished vocalizing the thought, unplugged and led off on uncertain legs. They had to carry me away some days, insensate and covered in blood and tears.
At first it was pure disorientation and noise. None of us could even remember what being inside the pods was like other than the initial pain and confusion when we’d stumble out of them hours after going in. They’d bring doctors through our barracks bays, and kinder looking instructors than I knew existed came through to try and put into words what we were experiencing. They kept circling around the same few phrases, things like ‘baseline adjustment’ and ‘template integration’ or ‘OFNIR rebroadcast’. It meant nothing to us, of course, but it must have made them feel better about what they were doing so they kept coming around and going through the motions of something like informed consent.
I wanted so badly to be a pilot, though. I needed so badly to be a pilot. I would have put up with any indignity, any torture to climb into the belly of an angel and it felt like they were merely testing that resolve, making sure we all really truly wanted it. That was foolish, of course. They didn’t care what we wanted, all they cared about was what our minds were capable of accepting, and the more they could inflict on them the better pilots we’d become. It was hyper-condensed training modules, beamed straight into the conscious & subconscious mind at the same time and it was elbowing out anything that tried to get in the way of total information absorption.
I remember when it first clicked, when we could see the fuzzy shape of what we were becoming. It happened to everyone at the same time, those of us that were left at least. We crawled out of the pods and looked around at each other and we just knew in that moment that something had changed. We started knowing things we didn’t know, moving a way we’d never moved. I wiped the blood away from my nose and walked across the bay with a stranger’s gait. The same gait we all shared now.
The same one the pilot had used.
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No technology is perfect on the first iteration, and few technologies have been as plagued by false starts and difficult implementation as the Omnidirectional Feedback Neural-Interface Rig (OFNIR) was. While the Unidirectional (UFNIR) models have widespread usage across all industries, the Omnidirectional models have been limited almost wholly to control over the S-MAG platform and its various derivative technologies.
Initial testing with OFNIRs revealed the first and most important issue to overcome: the human mind of the biological processor component is adapted to accept signal feedback going into it rather than merely out of it, but only through a very limited set of sensing organs with inadequate signal fidelity and throughput for the intended purpose of controlling an S-MAG.
Overcoming this through direct interface required attuning the signals and properly conditioning the receiver for them, with failure to do either invariably resulting in total nervous system burnout of the receiver unit within mere hours of equipment operation. With proper conditioning procedures (consisting of surgical intervention, hormonal rebalancing & psychological sculpting) we’ve managed to increase the operational lifespan of the biological processor by thousands of hours of sustained signal reception & transmission before any operational degradation is recorded.
Requiring as little as 250 training hours on the biological processor to achieve optimum conditioning to begin with, this means that the average OFNIR-equipped S-MAG will have years of potential high-intensity combat engagement before needing said processor to be swapped out even with maximum projected field deployment rates.
Physical & psychological side effects of the various conditioning methods (especially the ongoing hormonal balancing component & initial psychological sculpting measures) are often alarming to the biological processors during that initial conditioning period. With proper guidance and a suitably tight control over the training regimen however this will result in very low rates of unsuitability but this knowledge must be incorporated into any training environment curriculum.
- Excerpt from Project STURMGESTALT Technical Implementation Report
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The weeks that followed hurt less, and the drugs they started feeding us helped. They said it was to prevent Desync Syndrome, to stop identity degradation or total mental collapse. Grim-faced medical techs told us that the baseline adjustment would hold but the rest of us might not, that our personalities could collapse around the training dataset if we weren’t careful. We took the drugs without really caring about what they actually did, who wouldn’t? Combat-stims and hormone tweak shots were used everywhere, in every job. Infantry grunts and mechanized gunners all had their own special blend cocktails, why not pilots?
Eventually whatever the conditioning program had needed to do, had needed to break through, it had done it. We learned quickly and quicker still every day. They poured someone else’s minds into our own and we absorbed a lifetime of combat experience and pilot training one flashing pulse of light at a time. It was never exactly comfortable, but once the line between your memories and the pilot-memories blurred the mind didn’t fight it so hard. It was like recalling a dream from nights ago, hazy in the feeling but still sharp in the details.
When we were herded together and marched from barracks to mess halls or training bays we marched with the same stride. We held our arms at the side with the same slight bend, like we were carrying phantom weapon loads. We turned corners with the same quick sweep. Our hands twitched in the same patterns to draw target locks on ranging systems we didn’t have, had never had.
Now we could remember exactly how to work the Assault Guns, the thoughts to think and the impulses to send, the ways to move our limbs and shift our hands to control the flight attitude or weapons safeties that had no physical interface. We lived through an entire war compressed down to micro-bursts of action, all inside the S-MAGs. Launch. Flight. Fight. Recovery. Launch. Flight. Fight. Recovery. Launch. Flight. Fight. Recovery. On and on. Our first dozen kills were virtual playbacks, rendered directly into our heads in realer-than-real fidelity and it rewired everything as it went.
It became harder to think like a person outside the pods by the end. Instead of crawling out of them clutching our heads and trying to get to anywhere else we’d stay in the cradles until instructors had to carry us away, the pain didn’t come from the sensor in-loads anymore it came from the absence, from the violence of disconnection from the OFNIR units. None of us had even been in an S-MAG yet but we were addicted to what the Assault Guns felt like and our senses were already deadening to compensate for the sheer amount of feeling we had from the sensor feedback.
It became harder to cling to what our baselines had been. We moved like we were ten times as tall, a thousand times as graceful. Twitching, flexing and thinking like we would be able to draw up target locks and firing solutions on the instructors. Trying to get radar returns down the halls, shaking with the exertions that should have fired every one of the anti-infantry pods we knew were grafted to our frames to clear out the room in the riot of blood and shrapnel we’d felt so many times already.
When the day-to-day blur started to break, when specific details and particular days started to stand out, our instructor-handlers began bringing us back to the medical suites with doctors whose faces we could never see. Final adjustments to our systems, tweaks to the neural ports and new hormonal and drug implants. We ran our hands over the barely visible scars they left, each new groove telling us more than the too-polite nurses could about what they’d given us.
That seemed to mark our graduation more than anything else: when they’d finally hollowed us out enough they stepped back and nodded and said the work was done. The instructors didn’t celebrate, didn’t slap any backs or shake any hands. They just signed paperwork, updated personnel records and got ready for the next cycle while the dozen or so of us still there moved on to in-field integration testing.
They hooked us into actual Assault Guns for the first time there. WARSPRITEs, the same S-MAG type that all the training data they’d soaked us in had been for. Seeing them towering over us sent a shock through the nerves and we had to physically restrain ourself from running over to touch the leg of the twelve meter frame. Muscles twitched in anticipation of climbing into it, of the release we knew that direct integration would bring us.
A peculiarity of the training program, slowly dawning on us as we looked up at the dozen WARSPRITEs in their work cradles: we had the experience of being in the cockpit, of operating in the field, drilled into our heads but there was nothing else they’d given us. There was no moment recorded before we sync with our OFNIR, no memory of what it felt like after.
We didn’t expect the darkness when they led us, all of us, over to the frames and up our assigned gantries. They slipped an unfamiliar helmet over our head that connected with the neural interface but blocked out the world. Deprived of sight and sound we wailed and firm hands latched at our wrists to keep us from lashing out in blind panic. More hands on our shoulders, one on our back. Leading us in silence and lifting us up those last few steps into what we knew was the cockpit.
The pressure was the first thing we noticed. Like a tight embrace, across our entire body. We socketed into the S-MAG like the last missing component and with a squeeze as it adjusted around us we came alive. We gasped for breath in a body with no lungs.
There’s no clear transition point between being and not being an angel. When you pilot through the OFNIR you don’t blink your eyes and then see through the machine’s, you don’t peer through it from a virtual screen emulator on your own eyes like the aerospace craft pilots do. Sensor returns, system alerts, target trackers: they all existed where our neural circuits melted into one another in the OFNIR and didn’t feel like an external interface so much as the aches and pleasures of our own body.
One moment you are something, then suddenly, startlingly, you are something so much greater and more natural. Something impossibly beautiful and full of violence. Something that needs to be released, now.
A feral need to escape flutters through us, in the heat of the engine core and the rising whine of the thruster pack that isn’t even on yet. We feel phantom surfaces fold for attack postures, targeting systems and close defense arrays trying to come online. Locked out. Disabled. Removed. Instinctive twitches and mental impulses to go through a pre-launch check entirely unanswered and we whine in desperation.
Physical lockouts? Like a collar around our neck, pinning us in place in the maintenance cradle. With so many basic sensors active but so little control given it felt like torture and our pilot-body thrashed in confusion.
DIAGNOSTIC MODE
DIAGNOSTIC MODE
DIAGNOSTIC MODE flashed in our head over and over again, rendered as a harsh rebuke.
“Meise-2.” a voice called to us “You’re struggling.”
We were Meise-2. Assigned by the instructors, one to us and the others, before we went to the hangars.
“Meise-2 we’re going to release your systems, one at a time.” the voice continued. It was one of the instructors, we think. The pilot-instructor?
An S-MAG isn’t piloted like a traditional mech. Like the lobotomized UFNIRs it has little in the way of a traditional cockpit and very few manual input controls, nearly everything passes through the neural interface rig instead. Pilots of an S-MAG don’t need the physical endurance or strength that the manual input mechs demand of their operators, and they don’t need the physical coordination of juggling so many different control input surfaces either. In syncing with the OFNIR, in becoming part of the WARSPRITE, we didn’t even feel a difference between oneself and one-other-self. The lockouts were like phantom limbs, we reached out to systems that we could feel the so-recent memory of and feel the ghost of activation with nothing else happening.
When the first system unlocked we thrummed with excitement. We could feel it in our spine, arms moving free and legs tensing as the diagnostic & coolant lines pulled out of our ports. Technicians were already pulling away, their own final checks finished. The next system were the vectored thrusters, arrays of nozzles and vanes tensing and untensing with nervous flexes.
DIAGNOSTIC MODE
SYSTEMS GREEN
The gantry retracted from where it lay across our chest as Meise-1 stepped forward and then darted off through the now open bay door, their launch pack registering as a bright bloom of heat on the sensor flows. We fought the urge to think the thought that would make non-existent weapons track onto that beacon.
“Meise-2, ready.” the voice returned, and we obeyed, stepping out onto the bay with a few familiar strides, turning just like Meise-1 had.
LAUNCH
The impulse hit our feed and we were away before it consciously registered. Pure instinctual response, perfect replication of the pilot we’d been rewired to mimic. That we’d been rewired to be. We maxed out the speed as quickly as we could, we felt the place where the heat from our reactor heart met the coolant system and the exchangers where they dumped the excess. We felt the warm bloom in our core and across the engineered muscles that held us together, pouring more and more energy in as we twitched and dived around the sparse trees beyond the hangar, following near enough to Meise-1’s path. Meise-3, then -4 all the rest were behind us now and doing the same. IFF beacons and sensory pings told us as much but there was something more, something realer than that: we could feel the pull of something at the edges of our senses. The self was like a bubble that became permeable at the edges, our OFNIR signals so strong around the frame but mingling with ambient noise further beyond the shell. We could feel something like the ghost of the other Meises, some feedback from the place where our souls were radiating out into one another that skipped beneath the surface of our regular sensor handshakes.
We knew this feeling without knowing it. The pilot we had been knew this, the pilot we had become had inherited it with so much else. Expected but surprising, confusing but not unpleasant. Connected now on a wavelength no enemy could know to jam, could understand how to interrupt. There was nothing like language passed across it, not even a solid sensor in- or out-flow, but still we knew that even blinded we would see each other just as clearly as now.
There was a target ahead. The reason for the training exercise, the simulated goal. A field fortification simulator, full of cardboard stands and blinking sensory and signal emulator packs. A high velocity gun opened up on us and we dashed to the side to dodge it, as Meise-1 and -3 closed the distance in a half-moon perimeter.
Perfect synchronization. Without individualized combat experience and years of neural drift we were like fingers on the same hand. We synced our moves effortlessly, thoughtlessly, on pure impulse. We knew where we would be, so we knew where all of Us would be. The gauss rifle clutched by Meise-1 barked a signal, simulated fire beamed at the very real defense guns inside the target complex.
The phantom hits registered and the largest of the hostile sensor returns faded from our mind. We were right behind, still burning in at attack speed while Meise-1 completed their own run and spun, darting along the ground with a trail of displaced dirt. A chaingun on our shoulder chattered, spitting out a stream of dummy chalk rounds that exploded in puffs against a line of cardboard & steel cutouts that retreated back down their pop-up mechanisms with the impacts.
TARGET KILL
“All Meise, return to base.”
We felt it as a shiver down our spine, the kill-tally sending feedback tremors through us despite the artificiality of it. The system didn’t distinguish between real and unreal, between training runs and combat drops. Feedback was feedback. We savored it, as we broke off and spun on the opposite track of Meise-1 and gasped with the strain of the frame-creaking Gs. Behind us Meise-3 turned short, executing a spin inside the target zone with a wild sensor-flash of their chest-mounted laser arrays firing. If it had been anything more than training noise it would have set the targets ablaze. We could neary feel what Meise-3 must, the ache in their legs with the sudden turn and pivot as they boosted up and out of the kill-zone back the way we’d come. A memory of something, a feeling of having done that ourselves so many times, filled in the sensory blank.
Further along the target tracks we could see the rest of the Meise flight, on sensor feeds and OFNIR bleeds, as they circled and strafed their own simulators. Even as we processed it we kept to our turn, taking it wide and fast until we circled back around on the compound in time to watch directly as Meise-1 burned through it again with a flicker of sensor-sims projected from a pop-up missile rack. Total target saturation, complete obliteration in less time than it would have taken for most outposts to raise anything other than an automatic alarm. Mission success. Satisfaction.
We felt part of ourself drool against the helmet as we slipped into position in the trio and tore back towards the hangar bay. To the next void in our mingled memories.
The nervous looks of techs and hangar staff we knew. The armed infantry squads with the anti-mech weapons just in case a pilot went off-program were familiar, almost welcome, sights. The nervousness just after stepping back into the cradle and before disconnecting from the WARSPRITE was a well-worn groove in our mind now.
The shock was new. We understood, immediately, why we were always nervous to disconnect, why we always had that suppressed urge to flee instead. Merging with, becoming, the S-MAG had been an indescribable relief. Returning to what we’d been, blind and dumb in an instant, was misery. Every nerve in our body was on fire, tingling with awful sensation and then nothing. Like a candle set to burn then blown out as quickly.
A crew chief had to open up the cockpit access panel and physically pull us out. We just shivered, slack-jawed and insensate as they set us down on the gantry. We were still blinded by the helmet when new hands with stronger rougher grips hauled us up and threw us over a shoulder. We went limp, and passed out somewhere between the cockpit and the relief room.
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