I awake in agony.
Groggy and disoriented I attempt to gain my bearings, to stand, to look around me but I am held down by some unknown force. Panicking, I try to thrash, inviting a new explosion of pain up my right side. Fortunately, the autodoc in my mech seems to still be working, as it judders to life and dispenses calming agents and analgesics that still my nascent panic attack; calmed, I try to take stock of my situation:
I'm still in my crash webbing, strapped into my command chair, my left leg is crushed under the collapsed wreckage of my cockpit, it occurs to me that I can't see or hear from my left side, I-
The autodoc hits me with a second round of calming medication, heading off the terror that my extensive, and possibly mortal wounds are invoking. Panic now firmly at bay I begin to run through my recovery checklist; my crash transponder is being jammed, my comms antenna is scrap metal, and my autodoc predicts I have about 2 hours of consciousness remaining.
The drugs keep the panic at bay, but not the tears, as I come to terms with my rapidly approaching end. I'd always known the dangers of my profession, I just never knew my final hours would be so lonely.
Shaking my head I try to pull myself from my self inflicted doom spiral by reassembling the events that lead me to this moment:
My team was hitting an AnimAug cybernetics facility rumored to be on Asphodel 5; the Intel we had received indicated that the Corp was harvesting promising candidates from the brutal mech fighting arenas and converting them into augmechs for sale.
My Northern-Haville SkyDancer had been ambushed as I broke cloud cover over the target site, losing my right stabilizer; I had lost control and spiraled into the forest surrounding the purported AnimAug site.
I shudder, not at the events that led me to my doom, but at the drugs that allow me to recall them so clinically.
As I piece together the chain of events that lead me to my current predicament, a vision of the forest canopy rushing to meet me while the altimeter screams surges into my mind and the autodoc doses me again.
Heavily sedated, I slip into a light doze, the vague thought that I'm sleeping away the last moments of my life echo through my addled mind as consciousness ebbs away.
I startle to awareness by the crash system's proximity alert; groggily I check my chrono - 20 minutes have passed since the doc drugged me to sleep. My vitals were weakening but I'm not in the red yet - the wreckage pinning my leg is fortunately acting as a tourniquet. I consult my tactical threat display, and silence the proximity alarm; it's just a simple radar, no way to tell if they're friendlies until they've opened the cockpit.
Steeling myself, I draw my holdout pistol- a custom Arbalest Featherlite - and rack the slide; best case scenario the inbound contacts are friendlies and I'm saved, worst case scenario they wouldn't find me easy salvage.
I startle as muted thumping echoes up the sides of my cockpit, and I flick the safety off on my Featherlite; soon after, a bright shower of sparks begins tracing along the seals of the warped and dented armored bulkhead that seals me in my sarcophagus. There is an agonizing shriek of metal on metal, and suddenly I see trees. They're working fast I think to myself, leveling my pistol at the opening, they need me out of here before someone comes looking.
A voice shouts in, interrupting my thoughts and, embarrassingly, almost causing me to reflexively discharge a round;
“Recovery team! We have a medic! Your company will get first chance at the ransom!
I yell our company code word back, waiting for a response, the recovery team line is a favorite of salvagers to get their cargo to come along quietly.
After what feels like minutes, but was likely seconds, a much deeper rumbling voice makes her presence known:
“This is taking too long, Calypso! I'm going to haul the little pilot free myself”
The first voice, presumably Calypso, tries to protest, but before she can get a word out, my vision is filled by a monster - she's easily over 7 feet tall; this doesn't stop me from pumping a round into the center of her forehead. The giants’ head snaps back, and to my horror, returns to its original bearing to glare down at me;
“This ends one of two ways, little pilot, you either leave this cockpit with your leg, or without; that decision hinges on whether or not you pull the trigger again”
I stare at her dumbfounded, she had to be an augmech, but who the hell has the kind of money to have an aug on recovery? Realization hits me - AnimAug; this whole operation was too good to be true and we fell for it hook line and-
“Last chance, pilot. Drop the gun or I'm going to take it from you”
I startle back to reality, the drugs in my system are clearly impacting my sense of urgency. I shakily snap the safety on my pistol and eject the mag.
“Clear it.” The giant commands.
I had hoped to put one through her eye when she climbed in, but she saw through my bluff; dejectedly, I rack the slide on my pistol and eject the round in the chamber, tossing the now empty pistol aside.
Nodding, the giant looks over her shoulder and calls to her teammate,
“Calypso! Pilot’s been rendered safe, I'm going to pull her free; be. stabilize her and be quick about it, she's going to bleed out fast once I get this bulkhead off of her.”
With a hop, the giant leaps down into my cockpit, and begins sizing up the wreckage that's pinning my leg;
“You're lucky I'm not allowed to kill you, little pilot, getting shot in the head might not kill me, but it still fucking hurts” she rumbles angrily.
“I have a name, and it's not little pilot”
“Not for long” she replies cryptically
After a few seconds of examining the wreckage, she looks up at me and simply states “this will hurt” and rips the bulkhead free from my leg. A white nova of pain erupts from my freed limb, I scream, and mercifully pass out moments later.
I awaken strapped to a stretcher, the familiar appearance of an ambulance bay coming into focus around me.
“Hey, You awake?” A voice to my left asks.
“Better if you had slept through, I'm sorry kid but there's no happy endings to this story.”
I turn my head to look at her, but say nothing; she takes this as a prompt to continue:
“Sorry we couldn't save your leg, stuck there for too long, suffered limb death. But you're stabilized. I've got you well dosed, you won't feel any pain”
Craning my head, I look down at the empty space where my left leg used to be; tears well up in my eye, and I sob out a single question:
“Why me?”
The medic looks away, a flash of shame on her face.
“No idea, kid, not my job to know; Listen, I'm going to put you back under - gonna give you the good stuff, hopefully you won't wake up until it's all over”
I try to form a response, to find a way to talk my way out of my captivity, but all that comes out is an inchoate mess of sobbing.
The medic inputs some commands to the autodoc on my right, and the world begins to blur. She looks down at me sadly, and the last thing I hear before nothingness envelops me is
“for what it's worth kid, I'm truly sorry”
And then, darkness.
Consciousness returns to me with a jolt; I gasp deeply, my heart hammering a rapid staccato in my chest.
“It was very difficult to wake you up, 295”
“W-who the hell are you?” I gasp out, the room still spinning around me.
Ignoring my question, she continues her monologue:
“You know, I’m technically not allowed to wake you before you’ve undergone the process, but who are they going to report me to? Me?”
She laughs, an obnoxious, ugly thing.
“I’m going to build a masterpiece out of your dying waste of skin. I have plans, 295, and you’re my clay.”
The world finally coming into focus, I turn my head to look at the woman who woke me; incongruent to her lofty monologuing she is unkempt, wearing a stained lab coat, her hair an uncombed mess, what looks like blood or, hopefully, grease marking her face.
“Who the fuck are you!?” I demand again, more vehemently this time. The woman finally deigns to respond to me, as if finally acknowledging that I’m a person and not a piece of furniture.
“Rebecca, Chief Cyberneticist. Do not interrupt me again, 295”
“Fuck you.”
Rebecca does not bother looking at me, backhanding me across my wounded face, a white hot flare of agony engulfs me, and I cry out.
Anger and pain fueling my defiance, I growl my response through the dizzying pain.
“My team will come for me! I’ll fucking kill you myself”
“Your team thinks you’re dead, 295. AnimAug’s PsyOps department is very good at what they do”
Ice fills my veins and I try to stammer out a retort but Rebecca talks over me with self absorbed ease.
“My plan, we skimmed your DNA months ago. I flash-grew a clone - imperfect of course - but the dental records were accurate; dropped it in your cockpit after the team extracted you, a quick immolation made it indistinguishable.”
She laughs again, and nods “I am such a genius, I know”
"I have a perfect design, a new personality built from the ground up; PR wants a straight laced team captain, but I don't give a fuck what PR wants!
I can't wait to have my hands inside your DNA, every expression, every muscle fiber, every neuron-"
Rebecca shudders excitedly, appearing to hyperventilate, before regaining her composure and continuing
"There won't be a "Celeste" anymore. Only my perfect little automaton”
Thankfully, whatever drug she used to wake me with is wearing off fast, unconsciousness mercifully distancing me from the implications of her self-absorbed tirade.
A hand clamps down on my broken arm and I scream.
“You don't get to sleep until I'm finished, 295! I haven't even started on how I'm going to reshape your mind, I-”
The autodoc begins to blare an alarm, and Rebecca swears. Standing, she consults a terminal just within my peripheral.
“Looks like your heart doesn't like the stimulant I used to wake you. Shame, I had so much to tell you about. It doesn't matter, awake or not, you're mine - what you think ultimately doesn't matter. I-”
Her words seem to become quieter, as if I'm floating farther and farther away. My thoughts drift briefly to my team and how they're handling the grief of my “passing” before merciful oblivion takes me.
I hurry down the hallway to hangar bay 1; I am running late - a small dalliance with a curious maintenance technician slowed me down. It’s been a week since Mother allowed me to leave the lab of my birth, and the Ops Team has wasted no time in beginning my calibration tests; naturally, I’ve aced every trial run - I’m Alpha Team’s captain after all! Today marks the start of my joint evaluations with 294 - she’s a giant surly cussbag who seems to hate me for no real reason; she claims I shot her in the head but that’s impossible, I’ve only been alive for two weeks.
I arrive in the hangar bay, and Mother is waiting for me; we make a strange pair side by side, as she is an unkempt mess of a human - something I can’t help but find strangely endearing - and I am prim and proper in my Alpha Team uniform.
Mother wraps her arm around my shoulder, and pulls me in close, whispering in my ear:
“If you're ever late again, I'm going to delete your little idiot mind and start over”
I know Mother doesn't mean it, she loves me too much; I give her a hug and pull free, stepping off towards my personal mech: the Foxfire. Turning back to Mother I throw a mock salute as I step backwards onto the gantry lift.
“I'll make you proud, mother!” I shout as it whisks me up to the mechanic team that'll seal me in my pilot sarcophagus.
Mother grins and responds with her usual candor:
“Make me proud and we won’t have to tweak your personality engrams again”
I laugh, her threats are just one of the silly ways she shows her affection for me, and the wide smile she wears tells me she knows I’m already perfect.
As the mechanic straps me into my armored sarcophagus I feel a twinge in my right leg; The mechanics called it a phantom pain once, which made mother furious! I was born with my prosthetic, so I shouldn’t get phantom pains, but it doesn’t matter. A small distraction from the thrill of being united with the Foxfire.
I gasp a little as the mechanic slides the neural jack into my cranial port, Foxfire and I becoming the single organism we are meant to be. My consciousness floods into her systems, and in return her subroutines and processors trickle into mine.
There’s always a brief feeling of claustrophobia before Foxfire opens herself fully to me, as if I am trapped and alone in her sarcophagus - it’s quickly dissipated by the deluge of data that follows soon after as our optics and sensors become one. As we stride across the mech bay, I can’t help but smile as a single thought crosses my mind:
I was made for this.
