Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots — Mech Pilot who never takes the helmet off for pictures
There's a ceasefire, and a new treaty, and the forces get downsized. One of the new stipulations that comes down the pipe is a mandatory maximum on cerebral gelware by percentage brain volume, and just like that, Lifer quietly takes a discharge over being put on a desk.
Two years later, Megan's out, too. It's — difficult, in all the clichéd ways. I can spot the plume of a cold-gas manoeuvring thruster in a crowded debris field on optical from beyond automatic sensor resolve range, and keep a targeting laser on a moving mech at full burn until an MRM3 makes autonomous close-lock is nothing that anyone wants on their What Skills Would You Dare Offer Our Illustrious Minimum-Wage Position? web form.
Megan's sister wants her to move out west, closer, but they didn't have a whole lot in common before, and now.... So she makes noises about it that don't mean much, one way or the other, and she applies for jobs that nobody gives her, and she haunts the dockside bars — the shore leave bars — for the outside glimpses of people she understands.
Not healthy, probably.
It's another day of nothing-to-do, when she should probably be looking for jobs even harder, and she's strolling down the docklands streets instead, too early to get a drink. (Don't think about whether this'll still be too early in the day, after another six months of this shit.) Down the streets of dingy entrances, opening later, to massage parlours and strip joints; past the windows of tattoo flash. (You don't need more ink, Megan; you can't afford more ink, Megan. The civilian hiring managers don't like any glimpse of what you've already got, Megan.)
One of the nicer places — conspicuously clean, aspirational — has little photos and canned bios of the resident artists. Megan's eyes skip over the entire display, frictionless—
hang on.
She barely knows what she's doing, the door opening under her hand, sparked into action by an impression of something she barely knows she saw. The place is quiet, someone wiping down surfaces with a spray bottle and a rag —
"Lifer?" Megan demands.
The bony figure snaps round, alert, the lights gleaming off shiny black featureless face.
"Megan," says Lifer, and then, like they saw each other yesterday, "wait there. Got to show you something."
"What?"
"Awful," Lifer says, waves in the direction of a chair, then vanishes into the back.
A lanky guy with ear gauges trails out after she disappears, looking confused. "Hi," he says. "Were you interested in—"
"Lifer says she's got to show me something awful," Megan says, everything still feeling surreal.
"She talked to you?" he says, gawping, and somehow that's grounding. Feels real.
Megan shrugs.
"Hey, listen," he adds, leaning in conspiratorially, "you know her? Because all she'll tell me is that she's an escaped experimental sex robot, which sounds bullshit, and if you know her from somewhere—"
Yeah. Yeah, this is real. And definitely Lifer.
"Man, night watchman at the evil sex robot factory barely pays enough to warn the horny college creeps away from the electric fence," Megan deadpans. "You think I'd stop one if I saw it bust out and go on the lam? Hypothetically."
Lifer comes out of the back midway through, holding a battered denim messenger bag, and cuts off the guy's sputter by shoving a twenty at him. "Go down the street and get Megan coffee from the good food truck," she orders, and puts her bag on one of the counters while he unquestioningly does as he's told. "Have to see this," she adds to Megan. "Civilian reintegration shrink wanted to wean me off my face—" and she digs out a fleece drawstring pouch, and from that, a cyberwear faceplate.
"Is that—" Megan says, squinting at it. "Oh—" and Lifer matter-of-factly snaps off her face, laying it down on her bag, pale skin bared for a few seconds before she fits the shrink-mandated replacement. Megan supposes she can see the intended compromise, the lower-face cutout revealing at least one emoting part of Lifer's flesh, with fringe benefits from exposing her mouth for human socialisation activities like eating.
"Fuck, that's awful," she says. "You look like a fleshlight."
"Thank you," Lifer says. "Tell her you backed me up on that. Help drive her to nervous breakdown."
"Put your face back on," Megan complains, shading her eyes. "That's wrong."
"Hubba hubba Sorayama," the guy says, coming back with a coffee for Megan and one for himself, and a handful of change for Lifer.
"Megan will help me dispose of a body," Lifer tells him.