Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots — Mech Pilot who in their moment of truth, ingesting their eepy pill, entering the nap code, and firing up the restcore
C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. Mechs, burst asunder and broken like dolls, litter nearspace, friend and foe alike. Flak swarms riddle metal with high-speed holes; pulse artillery strobes and stutters.
COME TO ME, the Machine Heart roars in her head. COME TO ME, and she reaches out, her mech lifting its hand to the supernatural light and its terrifying promise of power and prices beyond comprehension; and, finally, after all this time and all these denials, they touch, and a glimmering wall of light blots out the stars.
She is weightless in her harness, in a way that's not microgravity; more like the warm lull of water. Everything is light, with the faint, frozen, shadowy watermark of the battle, suspended in time.
CHOOSE, the Machine Heart thunders, godlike, triumphant. CHOOSE. VICTORY OR LOVE.
"Can I—" she looks into the pulsing heart of the light, eyes streaming from fatigue. "Do I have time to think about it?"
NO TIME PASSES IN THE MACHINE HEART.
She looks slowly around at the shadowy imprint of battle, at the horrific odds, at looming defeat, at the looming death of her own heart.
"LYNDA?" she says tiredly, and her mech's Tactical Intelligence chirps acknowledgement. "Cool, you're online. LYNDA, assume we have entered a spatial anomaly that allows you to run an arbitrary amount of tactical projections while negligible time passes on the current battlefield. Take two invariants: victory on the current battlefield, and Michaela lives. Find solutions."
HANG THE FUCK ON, says the Machine Heart.
"LYNDA: I haven't slept for thirty hours." She soft locks the mech's position, hand touching the Machine Heart's core, and reclines her seat. "Please supply pilot sedation to allow optimal execution of eventual strategy. Update me when I wake naturally, or wake me if we exit the space anomaly."
CHOOSE! the Machine Heart says, sounding awfully close to whining for an acausal machine god from the end of time; and LYNDA dispenses two tablets, rattling into the medical dispenser slot beside the console. She knocks them back with a sip from her helmet's hydration straw and nestles into her seat.
"Absolutely the fuck not," she says coolly.