Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots — Mech Pilot who treats their job like a retail position
The universe is under the wise rule of the Archifex Eternal, and under him, his Benevolent Hand: 1001 Knightships, roving all of space in search of evil. Wherever they find its insidious green shoots, they deploy one of the Angel Symbiont Wardroids, two hundred humanoid tons of soulbonded Kinetium Crystal, each powered by the caged fury of a singularity.
On Planetes Capitolum, the oldest, strangest, most mysterious of the Angel Symbionts rests within the Photon Temple. Children are brought before it at the age of ten, mass visits organised through the school system of the Pax Archifex. Those who arouse its attention are silently flagged, their lives monitored by the secret machineries of state, to be later plucked from their oblivious lives should an Angel Symbiont demand a fresh pilot.
In four short years, her hands have become inured to the heft and swing of the Wardroid arsenal, weapons of light and thunder. But everything she needs to know to fill this role, she learned wearing a nametag and ringing up groceries.
How to wake up already crying from exhaustion.
How to stand impassive in front of a rich man screaming in personally targeted rage, even though he already got, and was always going to get, everything he wanted.
How to suffocate between the grinding rocks of institutional indifference and public resentment of it, the only direct and acceptable target for either's ire, a bright and shining bullseye erected to attract and ablate the force of protest.
How to smile; vacuously, automatically, constantly. People respond better to smiles, and institutions have the studies to prove it and so demand it as your duty.
How to explain, over and over, that your actions are dictated to you by policy. You have no say in policy. You have no say in your actions. You push the buttons policy demands and you take the blame for "deciding" to do so that policy demands.
How to endure.
How to endure; even this.