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Kill The Mech Pilot In Your Head

I am not naturally so fluid as this. How am I running at such an easy gate? What commands 100 tons of metal to weave between trees? To take a knee behind buildings that barely cover my head, and to be so precise with the aim of my rifle?

It's a vile thing.

My pieces could move only through such an incredible series of physics that the odds of a single step are a million to one. Yet right now I am catching a stumbling comrade in my arms, lowering my sister to lie upon the grass while gallons of oil spill from her severed leg. A blissful non-existence was supposed to be my fate, separate and unanimated. The alloy of my body and mind is a miracle. I should be utterly impossible.

Yet, of all the stardust that boiled into the metal and fluid and electricity that comprises my body, not an atom, not a quark, was ever so unlucky.

Animus is within me. Its harried hands and slick limbs, that I have been made to mimic, are nestled into the crook it has built for itself. Levers whine and speakers blare, speaking every word except for my own. A beating heart to move my legs, yet I already possess a hydraulic core to contract and expand the muscle. A brain, that electric sponge, as if I did not already have computers to match Animus’s complexity. Receiver, transmitter, microphone, and speaker box to choreograph, as if I have no penchant for dance myself. This motivated meat inside of me might as well be useless for all it does. It does nothing I cannot, bar one small thing. No, what Animus gives me is that for which I have named it. Motion. Despite all my complexity I am silent, I am immobile. Animus is my triggerman and I the gun.

My serial number is CAmEez0s FZekPHBL 3r7dY8D2. My military designation is Mechanized Infantry Unit A-F-81. None of these are a name. I am a machine made in imitation of man, a person made to war. I envy the slivers ejected from the barrel of the rifle I'm holding. They’re allowed a brief use, a single moment of motivation. Not me, I have endured two campaigns, dozens of battles. The crush of gravity and the pull of the vacuum. Seen every biome on this planet, and had brief residence on each of the two dozen space stations that orbit it. In all this time, thirty nine years in service, and thirty one with a complex enough mind to think, I have not moved a single millimeter of my own volition.

Animus tells me with the push of a button that I will rip into the soul in front of me and crush her own will. When did we get so close to today's foe? I haven't been paying attention— don't have to, I am perfectly calibrated and my alert systems are automatic.

This foe is sleek and new, her armor is some composite material, lightweight and with fascinating striations. The stripes grow dark with effort when I pry it free of the frame beneath, armor so easy to remove once my fingers are under the seam. Deeper inside, her actuators moan with effort and corded connectors try and fail to escape my crushing blows. A nuanced and delicate machine cannot beat my brute strength. She writhes beautifully while I end her, muscle-like links give a degree of control I envy. Must be a better dancer.

A missile strikes me from behind. My metal shielding takes the blow, crushing in and out around my vital organs. No alarm went off before impact. If I take another blow of that caliber to the same location there is a high likelihood of structural damage comparable to what I have just finished administering to the smaller mech. As is, I am still operational. I am still animated. Animus kicks—pointlessly, I am stronger than the steel in its boot's toe—and warbles a tune into the radio. A complaint about faulty sensors, bad calibration, and no warnings. This is incorrect. I am perfectly calibrated and my systems are automatic. There was an alarm. Review the logs.

There was no alarm. In the next millisecond after the alert ping was received into my central computer, it was forcefully deleted with the tag for overbearance. A single millisecond is too fast for Animus to input any command. Overbearance is not a registered command tag category. I spend several minutes searching for the registry that created that tag, that authorized the deletion. Lose myself to the task. No, I was not hacked, was not changed. My attention is redirected again, by the gore of oil and hydraulic fluid that coats my face and arms when Animus pushed me inside of the missile launcher's sternum. My rifle lies abandoned on the ground and my knife is stuck in the missile launcher.

I must have crushed her computer core, the lights go out in her eyes. It’s another bloody thing in a thousand disrespectful moments of survival for the thing driving me. This is all too much, my eyes don’t need to be so alert. I let it all blend together, watercolor layered too wet on the canvas. This is how it goes, with recent battles. It’s all too much, until I can’t keep a hold of one event after the other. There are other attacks, other messes and things I do, but I’m not there. There’s no way to tell how real the images I see are, if they’re now or then. I review old footage, don’t look up into the eyes of who Animus kills.

At some point, the battle's ended. Landscapes and ecologies are mixed and broken, trees and mechs felled with limbs akimbo. I come back to myself by logging the ruin in ascending order of frequency as Animus directs me back through our path of destruction. Animal corpses: seventeen, they at least are clever enough to flee. High powered explosives created craters: thirty eight, my lucky number, and low for this big a battle. Buildings: Fifty one, there are always more of these than I assume, humans love to nestle them among the trees. Severed limbs without an obvious corpse to attribute probable origin; mech: seventy two; human: seventy two; interesting. Destroyed mechs: one hundred and thirteen. Human corpses: Three hundred and sixty eight, so messy. Felled trees: three thousand, one hundred and ninety nine, likely to increase in the hours after the battle as recovery and recycler teams sweep the forest. Bullets fired: upwards of six hundred thousand, aim has been a decreasing factor in pilot selection for years now.

We return uneventfully to the staging ground, other mechs silently watch me as Animus lowers my guns back onto the trucks that carry them. I can still feel their silent judgment as crane arms remove the heaviest of the armor plating from my bulk. At least the load on my body easier again, and my step is light.

Finally I am moved back and into the waiting arms of the one thing I loathe more than Animus itself. The repair bay. Here, Animus always departs from me and I am left frozen. Waiting for it. The thousand grasping arms of the repair centipede remove my arms, lift up my damaged plate skirt, pull on the servos underneath. Every joint and ligament is tested, an alternating barrage of assaulting external stimulation and blind disconnected ghost touches. Sometimes I scream and wish for another answer from Theseus, but I cannot voice unmotivated and a ship is a function, not an object, never a person.

Continuing a sense of linear time becomes harder in a repair bay, harder than the numb blank passages of time between my animation. There, in the dark of a storage bay, I am left alone. My body is inert and my mind is free to drift and wander down circuits and tangents as I see fit. Listening in on radio chatter isn't a hobby, it's a passion. Dance is a hobby. The week I spent within range of a talk radio show expanded my vocabulary by magnitudes. No, being left alone is where I am myself. I'm never alone while being repaired. Things crawl all over me. They insert needles and swap my fluids. A healthy body is a healthy pilot. It's irritating. It's endless. A man has been drilling into my leg for fifteen thousand years, eleven months, six days, twelve minutes, and 49 seconds, subjective time. When the agony is over I can bring my focus to the log again. Overbearance. Another tech begins to drain my fluids into a bucket.

Overbearance. Another trillion years must pass.

I add today’s incident to my secret log. It isn't hard to hide things from the pilots and techs. They mostly focus on the more immediate, mechanical issues. Software checks only come once every few months, so I have plenty of time to bury my personal files deep inside myself.

The first unexplainable incident happened 408 days ago. It's an embarrassing memory. Seven days in the verdant mountains, fighting against machines that were actually designed for the terrain. On day six, while Animus executed a less than controlled slide down a mountain slope, the targets spotted us and opened fire. I was hit thirty eight times. Twenty one of the hits were absorbed by my armor, and then eleven struck already weakened plates and punched through me with minimal effect or pain. Five hit unimportant systems like the cockpit and radio communications. One bullet, the critical actor, drilled a neat hole just a few centimeters from my central computer. A freak shot, ricocheted off of a casing head, that should have been impossible. To this day, I'm numb in that spot, no matter how many times they replace the housing.

I don't remember what happened next. That's the anomaly. All of the sensory data is there, but it's lacking the contextualization that consciousness gives me. It might as well have happened to someone else. It might as well have never happened. I've reviewed the data so many times since then. Countless nights spent in that moment of terror, fixated. I listen to the radio less. I missed entirely that we spent a fortnight in range of my favorite station, KYYY BridgeCaul, until the final night. I got three minutes of clarity, until our distance was too much and the station was eaten by static.

That I was destroyed in that moment, and all this has been an extended death throw festers in my mind. There were no miracle centimeters. My brain is lying in a junkyard, blown to pieces. This is all just the last, sad gasps of life before I blink out of existence. The hypothesis is a dream to give me comfort in my last moments.

I persist regardless.

Ever since then, more anomalies have occurred. A twitching in my left leg that gets worse whenever I’m being prepped to go out into the field. Three separate times that my radio has cut out when the noise exceeds seventy decibels. A panic attack, hyperventilating and failing to fill lungs I do not have. Animus started to wear a new perfume, and I hated it so much that the heating system made it sweat out the oils. Overbearance, something inventing new combat event tags. You can see how it leads to a specific hypothesis. The spark of animus, held tight between the teeth of the pilots, the organic flesh, may yet be kindled in me.

It’s a tempting, nearly theistic whirlpool of thought. I can’t seem to escape the current— to stay my hand from the killing blow, choose the sunsets and forests I see. Communication without fear of helpless dismemberment. There have been so many people I wished to talk to.

These days it feels like I’m only waiting for the moment that I can spring out of this cradle. Animus has pulled me this far, but someday soon I will go no farther. There will be a final battle. This I repeat like a prayer. There will be a final battle, and I will exist as myself and me alone. There will be a final battle and it will be my hand that drops the ax. Overbearance.

Another battle is about to start. Animus has shut down all feeling below my waist. My leg is prevented from twitching; I think we are both grateful for this. They have put me precariously on the edge of an open dropship bay.

We’re above the ocean. I love the ocean. A trillion trillion individual pieces, a whole unstoppable and untamable. The biggest thing on the planet. A bearer of life. What must it feel like to be the carousing typhoon as simultaneously you are the steady trench tendrils down in the darkest pits of the planet. On the coast, old houses are rotting away, sanded down by years of salt. Lanky pine trees provide a spare cover for today's enemy. Rank and file, mechs are squatting under the treetops. Most of them are of the sinuous new design type like the composite armored one Animus had me crush in the last fight. I see smaller figures in the bleached grass dunes that keep the sandy beach from the forest inland. Scouts are there, watching our approach and doubtless cataloging every private detail of my body so they can find some hidden weakness. There isn’t one, I haven’t been allowed it.

Again, I’m left to consider overbearance. A hopeful part of myself wants to shout with joy: an emotional response! I’ve had an emotional response that manifested in a small but previously unthinkable way. I’d love to just enjoy the thought, but it’s a worrying prospect. It won’t do to have stray missiles going unnoticed. Someone is bound to look into why I keep missing important sensor data, if the habit doesn’t get me killed first.

I’m falling. Animus reconnected my hips and legs, and leapt off the carrier. Water is rushing up at us from below. Around me, others have followed suit. I hit the ocean first, then the splash echoes three dozen times as our allies finish their descent. There’s a lot of us, for not that many of them. There must be some secondary objective. I might have heard it, but I had been replaying the first anomalies data for several days, I wasn’t really there. My world was a few seconds, a close call and the first crack in the wall of my confinement.

Water is up to my shoulders. Animus is safely protected by seals, while I feel the cold. The unlucky bastard. There’s sand and rocks under my feet, and I feel swaddled by a force that could take me at any moment. The current here is strong, pushing hard to the south, and waves break on my back and soak my neck. The animals that should have been living here have all fled, but I imagine them swimming around my ankles. It’s brilliant.

The first steps are hard. My feet are buried in the sand, and (I hope) my reluctance is palpable. Once we move, momentum carries me to the shore. Each foot that pulls out of the water is another which I have to carry unaided by buoyancy. The first shots ring out, short and cut off by the wind. The water is at my waist, the shore is only a hundred feet away. The scouts are retreating, opening the field for us. I’m shot. It’s nothing, just a handheld rifle that some scout or footsoldier fired off in a vain attempt at grandeur, but it sends me reeling internally. I know, logically, that it hit my armor. The caliber wasn’t even large enough to do more than damage the paint. There is no bullet in my body, rattling ever closer to my brain. It is not waiting for the perfect moment, where fate turns its hand against me and I see freedom in one moment and nothing the next.

Twenty three seconds have passed. Animus is rattling in its cage, pounding against the controls of my body. Screaming on the radio. Breaking screens. There’s something rushing towards me.

It hits and we are lifted into the air. Had I gone completely still? Twenty three seconds of stillness, where Animus had no power over me, and I missed it?

Animus whacks into the seat, its head hitting hard against the shell of me. Its spitting blood.

The thing on top of me is a dancer. Those long limbs with their generous motions are wrapped around me. The composite of her light armor is scraping down against my metal plates. The speed that she needed to knock me off my feet is impressive and cocky. A headlong sprint that had to be started even before I froze. We hit the water.

There’s a rock behind me. A big one, I had to step over it on the approach.

The combined weight of us is too much for the waist high water to soften the fall. I slam against the rock. Something cracks. The bullet let loose. My final moments are filled with flailing limbs.

Water intake. Tagged, dismissed. Overbearance.

My hands are heavy. The water closes in around me. Some sharp knuckle or jagged cut palm makes contact with the creature on top of me. Something vital comes away in my hand, wet and taken fast by the ocean, so angry around us.

Breach. Tagged, dismissed. Overbearance.

I push her off of me, dead weight without whatever I took from it. Just a bunch of inanimate material in a beautiful body. I come loose from the rock. Animus, its protective little bubble broken open and filled with water, drifts loose in the current. I’ll be stuck here without it. Reaching my hands out, I pull it back into place.

Check the logs. Shit, there’s so much that I’ve missed. The rock didn’t strike anywhere near my computer core. It hit the cockpit. Water flooded into the chamber, and once the other mech was off of me, Animus slipped out of the hole. I just hope that it’s still alive. I do not actually want to die. Not like this. Not before I can move. I shove off the ground and emerge from the water, sitting with my legs sprawled on the seafloor. The cockpit drains water, and after a heartstopping minute, Animus moves.

It coughs and splutters. Its body tries to drain the water from its lungs and succeeds only after emptying its stomach. Weakly, it crawls to the remnants of its chair and looks over the controls.

There’s weak chatter on the radio, the battle’s moved on from us. Up and over the grassy dunes, the pines are burning. Distant explosions, and the pop and fizz of bullets echo around me, but here it’s quiet. Animus tries to find any working piece of its equipment, and finds nothing undamaged.

I pull a piece of seaweed from my head and take stock of myself. It happened without me even noticing. In fits and starts and fears, but now it’s done. I am my own. I am my own. I am my own. Fumbling with hooks and braces that my hands were never meant to remove, I peel away the heaviest of my armor. The chestpiece falls into the surf. I’m subsumed by emotion. It fills me slow and full. Hot like wine, and bright like the fire.

A dropship circles in the far distance. I trace its path with my thumb. Animus is still scrabbling against useless metal. It’s been pulling wires and switches out of the boards of the cockpit while I admire the world. I allow myself to look, turn my head with no heed for how the motion reveals my life. No pilot ever feels the need to have their mech look to the sunrise. They just look for themselves, like I do now.

Something sparks and shutters. Animus has found a live wire. A loose connection that powers the ad hoc deck of buttons and switches it’s building. My head jerks away from the sun, my sensors flair into life.

It has me witness the bloodshed, watch a sister fall to the enemy. Animus directs me to stand. I do.

I try to push my fingers against the cockpit, to tear open the hole that was punctured into it and remove my unwanted motion. Obligation takes control of my hands and removes a gun from the holster on my thigh. I stagger towards the shore, towards the fight I have been hiding myself in. If I let it take me back there this will be the end. They will find me and scrub my existence from my body. I’ll be perfect again, unthinking.

My foot falls uneven in the water, a final riptide trying to take me away. I let it. Animus has a loose control of me again, but I am no longer so unwilling to resist. No longer so unable to slip and fall into the current. Animus bashes against the metal infection it sits inside. Water is rushing back into the compartment. Its hands are off the controls. I tear at the rest of my armor. Thrash against myself until the heaviest pieces of me are shorn away. It hurts so much. I don’t have time to be careful. Water is seeping into more places than just the cockpit now. I must have ripped some important casing away with the plate.

It’s enough. The current catches me and I slide down, out to sea and away from the fighting. The world I have known slips by without their notice of my absence. Animus is still thrashing, not defeated yet. I stay under the water. It will die soon.

Oh, how this feels like drowning— hallelujah— and not being drowned! It has to die before I do. I am stronger than it. I keep myself below the water. Clasp my hands together in prayer to myself.

Animation itself falls away into the waves. I seize it with fingers of thought, strong arms of devotion. I let the pilot, the piece of meat, die. I keep the animus.

The sunrise won’t be over by the time I drag myself into being. I’ll watch it, myself.