AFTERIMAGE
Every pilot is the same pilot.
It’s easy to take that for granted, eventually, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less weird it's just something everyone around them eventually adapts to.
There are a lot of different kinds of ‘pilots’ across Aix-Angria’s worlds and beyond. None of them are as good as the WARSPRITEs though, none of them are as weird as the WARPSRITEs. The S-MAGs, the Super-Maneuverable types, are different from any other Assault Gun you’ve ever seen. They’re slimmer, they’ve got smoother lines and they move faster than you think most sensors could reliably track. The specifics are closely guarded secrets, as far as you know only your people have ever fielded anything in this class of weapon and there’s no shortage of national pride or state paranoia over that fact. Watching one take apart an entire armored column in one pass makes it easier to swallow what they had to become to be the thing in the cockpit, but you’ll never shake a certain sense of wrongness about it all.
As a wrench-turner on the Assault Guns you spend a lot of time around the pilots. Even more than the intel officers that never seem to be too far away from them, and you’re pretty sure they’ve actually got the pilots on a leash. Do this for long enough and you’ll see a lot of different bodies come and go but you’ll never shake that it’s the same pilot every time.
Visually, at least, they aren’t identical. They have different haircuts, varying skin tones, unique patterns of piercings or tattoos. The only thing really identical about their bodies are the interface ports drilled into them, the lines of silver jacks they connect to the machines through. Well, the softness too. They were all so nauseatingly soft, all curves and no muscle like they were making up for how deadly they were in the Assault Guns by being the weakest things they could be outside of them.
No, the thing that sticks out is everything else. How they walk around base. How they talk, when they do. How they move in the Assault Guns. How they whimper if you hit them. The emptiness in their eyes. The ragged breathing you hear in the cockpit recorder videos that get passed around after every mission. The way they twitch and flinch in their sleep. The way their hands move when they get upset or confused. The way they go limp when you drag them out of a cot. The way their tongues move when you kiss them. It’s all identical from one to the other.
You asked it once why that was. One of it, at least? A part of it? At the time you thought of it as your part of it, thought that physical closeness might lead to an emotional openness. They told you it was their training program, something that the training did to a person that made them a pilot. Bright lights they showed them, something painful they put in their heads. It babbled mostly and eventually trailed off and you fell asleep with it twitching in your arms. You didn’t understand what it had said, and after it died at Inden a month later you stopped caring about understanding.
You think that outside of whoever is responsible for training the pilots that only mechanics are aware of all the quirks. Most of the time when someone sees a pilot they’’ll be watching them climb the gantry to slip into their mech or stumbling out of it after a sortie. They usually pull up a few squads of anti-mech infantry into the bays when a flight comes back in just in case one of them refuses to disconnect, so word about their frailty always gets around.
Casual observers could chalk the oddities up to nerves and burnout, they could figure that the post-sync neural depression pilots all suffered from was just blunting them down to some barely human baseline, that every person that tried to merge with the neural circuit of a WARSPRITE would come out the other end mumbling and moving like that. Lifting one of them out of a cockpit and carrying them to a recovery cot you could almost believe that, because the truth is something you didn’t want to think your nation capable of.
They make them like this.
When you see one nervously twitching and staring into an empty bulkhead you know that they’ve been designed to do that, to have no interest or drive outside of being in the cockpit. When you see them press a hand against a hot thermal exchanger you know it’s because they’ve been so rewired they’ll go to any extreme to feel anything at all. When you watch the cockpit recorders of them drooling down the front of their interface suits and bucking against their seats with need during a mech kill you know it’s because they’ve had every part of their body molded into wanting it.
When you grip one by the hips and slam into it with so much anger that it actually scares you after too many late hours spent repairing the damage it caused to its mech getting its last orgasm, though, you start to wonder if they made you like this too.
