One of the ways we managed to cheat time in getting the Super-Maneuverable Assault Gun pilots operational in the numbers that we needed, in the timelines that we needed, was to focus on an initial batch that we devoted an exceptional amount of time and energy into and then ported back to every new candidate pool in a fraction of the time.

Under normal circumstances this would have been impossible, condensing a full combat applications & super-maneuverability theory course to such extremes would be uselessly truncated, but it was actually the OFNIR units themselves that solved the issue: by rebroadcasting a recording of the transmitted & received signals from an Assault Gun’s black-box it proved possible for conditioned & receptive minds to internalize it as their own set of memories, like they’d actually lived through the experiences themselves. They would actually respond with subconscious instincts normally associated only with combat veterans of significant field experience. With the right tweaking we were able to strip out superfluous experience and increase the speed of information inflow and just like that a multi-year training course is a two month virtual course. Post-training analysis indicated that alongside the neural-plasticity boosting drug regimen this conditioning results in actual physical changes to the pilots’ neural structure independent of the changes caused by the installation of the neural interface ports.

The pilot selected as the basis of the primary template program was particularly suitable for a number of reasons: her initial adaptation to the OFNIR interface had been exceptionally quick compared to the rest of the test pilot cohort, she registered many of the return signals as pleasure stimuli rather than the pain or disorientation most common, and she suffered no mission-detrimental neural impairment before expiring in combat (again, an outlier to the rest of the test pilot cohort which mostly expired as a result of non-combat injuries during the evaluation period).

The only notable downside to this process, and it is one we’ve continued to grapple with since implementing it, is that we have to build procedures very carefully and proceed with significant caution and constant monitoring of the subjects due to the potential for total personality collapse. Even the slightest indication that they’re mentally collapsing early into exposure is considered a red flag alert and the subject(s) in question need to be removed from OFNIR Rebroadcast exposure immediately or risk permanent psyche & brain damage. Continued training after this point is technically possible but will result in an unrecoverable overwrite of the pilot’s personality.

- Taken from Project STURMGESTALT development documentation

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We came to in a cramped dim room, all of us laid out on a cluster of cots with the rest of the pilots. Someone had removed our helmet, and a tired looking medical tech was doing cursory vital checks. We let them grab our wrist, saw them nod, and when we sat up they were already moving on to the next cot. The pilot-commandant was in the doorway, the first we’d seen them since before any of this had started, before anything that had mattered had started.

It spoke in the short, choppy way we knew we spoke on comms. The way the pilot-self did. “First hurdle clear, worst over. Recover, then back out the gate.” And with that she was gone again, stepping back out into the hangars in the same not-quite-right gait. Its confidence and the strange tics we now shared were comforting in the post-sync comedown.

Meise-11 was nowhere to be seen in the room, and we didn’t ask after it.

We all ran a dozen more of the training missions. It took a few days, several rest cycles and more between-sortie maintenance work than the hangar technicians seemed willing to undertake gracefully. Every time it was rapid-fire violence, from the moment we cleared the cradles to the moment they locked the collar down again we were moving, shooting, thrusting, dodging. 

Every kind of target, every kind of mission profile thrown at us in a random sequence that seemed, mercifully, to be designed more to break us in than to break us. Eventually we were able to run multiple missions back-to-back, no need for the desync, for the brain-scrambling disconnections. Eventually even the shock of those lessened from incapacitating to merely disorienting, and soon all we needed. It became comforting, almost like the lull of the training modules but without the pain of them being forcibly integrated.

It was towards the end that they introduced versions of the things they’d really made us to fight. Oversized mechs, lumbering titans with too many skittering limbs and too many scattered support drones and field guns. What the average person thought a ‘walker’ was supposed to be, what Assault Guns had been designed to kill. The pilot-self in us didn’t feel much beyond the sting and pleasure of the return feedback, but it felt something here. The memory of anger. Of fear. Of need, to tear these things apart. That hunger for their machine-blood predated us. We could almost feel like it must predate the pilot-us too, something coded in so deep it would override everything else.

The goliath they’d set for us was battlefield scrap hauled away from where it had fallen the last time this planet had been on the front. It dwarfed us, the WARSPRITE-us, and when we rushed inside the minimum firing arc of it’s largest weapons our trio was shaded from the sun beneath it.

We had never moved so fast. Only part of us had, in memories like dreams. We knew the sensation, knew the correct inputs, the instinctual dodges to make to avoid the clouds of flak and the traces of close-defense fire. We took shots almost at random, without slowing down, at the array of support crews that ringed it. Simulated positions took simulated fire, chainguns ratted like jackhammers and heat build-up warnings rose from our chest as our mind bloomed with the exact sensations of live fire.

No shot missed. No round went astray. The three of us moved like we’d rehearsed the maneuver for a week straight, putting gauss rounds perfectly into the same few sections of armor and superstructure. We wanted desperately to get the kill, to land the final blow, but it was Meise-1 on the third orbit that had the opening. Up close, the barrel jammed inside the torso of the oversized tetrapod itself, and then a reactor-kill. It nearly felt real. The feedback bleed from it alone sent us spasming in the cockpit, grinding in desperation against our own harnesses again. Meise-1 visibly shuddered, and then it was back into the formation and we were returning to base with only that pilot-controllers voice over the comms.

“Target reset. Chalk 1 RTB. Chalk 2 cleared next.”

It felt like the closest thing to a ‘good job’ we’d ever get, so we took it and rode the afterglow of a mech kill all the way back to the hangar cradles.

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The parameters of STURMGESTALT are defined primarily by guardrails put up by CenCom’s ethics committees, not by theoretical technical limitations or actual engineering problems. Under the worst possible conditions this means that other nations may be capable of eventually replicating OFNIR technology and implementing similar combat applications unchained from human conscience and the guiding principles of Perpetual Liberation which our nation would never allow to exist. The threat this would pose to PLR security cannot be understated.

I must reiterate an earlier statement of this report: the following sections should not in any way be misconstrued as advocacy for further research into CenCom censured projects. It is presented here only for the purpose of developing sufficient mitigation & defensive strategies if our enemies gain access to OFNIR.

Technologically viable but politically incompatible STURMGESTALT variations:

• Child soldier pilots. Technically possible and could be more receptive to the training program but this circumvents the basic human rights established by the General Constitution of the Perpetual Liberation Republic. Conscription in conjunction with the existing baseline adjustment & template projection program is legally sound and morally acceptable.
• Engineered Human Entities. Possible but completely antithetical to PLR principles. Even broaching the subject of EHE production is rightly considered to be a subversive act open to the most severe censure.
• Engineered Non-human Entities. ENEs present the same concerns, and the line between the two is ill-defined. Moral concerns, if not strictly legal ones, preclude the possibility.
• Fully Autonomous Control System. The lack of direct human control over any weapons system will not be authorized by PLA or CenCom authorities.
• Permanently hardwired pilots. Implementable with existing technology but in addition to dangerously mirroring the labor assignment caste structures the PLR fought so hard against on inception the actual performance gains are projected to be minimal while the subsequent increased strain on the pilot would result in much earlier cognitive decline and significantly higher program costs.

At this time we know of no credible threat to the security of the project or the secrecy of the underlying technology, but if it does become broadly available we fully anticipate unscrupulous state & non-state actors to use any combination of these in their own development programs.

- Report to Perpetual Liberation Army Headquarters, Committee on General Ethics 

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