Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots — Mech Pilot who wants what you have. Not the Machine
It's the opening night of Carter's latest gallery show, great wall-sized landscape paintings with meticulously provocative artist's statements.
All the art goes for money these days, but nobody really wants paintings from Carter. Aged twenty-four, Carter rewired the sensory passthrough on a standard mech-jacking rig to include all the sensations that they usually omit, fitted it to a quadrupedal industrial scrap-crushing mech with the big toothy front-end ingestion vortex, and made an installation audio piece of her own reaction to scrapping a series of writeoff subcompact town cars, an industrial electrical transformer, and a torn-down phone mast pylon. It was titled Sex Machine: Dentata.
People still, and always, really want more Sex Machine.
Julietta is Carter's admin assistant. She lets Carter's disappearance from her own event drag on for thirty-five minutes, then unerringly finds her in a bathroom with an Out of Order sign on the door, knuckles white on the edge of the counter, with a long line of assorted pills lined up between herself and the sink. They're arranged by colour. Julietta has no idea what they are, and Carter probably doesn't either; just that there must be enough there to be too much.
"I'm invisible," Carter says. She's staring blankly, wide-eyed, into the depths of the sink. "They all come to look at me, and nobody sees anything. I'm invisible."
With a few crisp sweeps of her hand, Julietta shoves all of the pills over the rimless edge of the sink, rattling around the drain.
"You hired me nineteen days before unveiling Sex Machine," she says, syllables as precisely cut and cool as the marble slab of the counter. "The first person you interviewed, because it got you out of doing any more. I file your taxes and I dry clean your suits for these things. I track down those out-of-production paintbrushes you like. I've driven you to hospital three times in eight years. I hold your hair when you're throwing up. I answer the phone to your mother so that somebody does. I'm the only reason you eat regularly and why your shoes match that outfit. You tried to get me to break up with your ex for you. I spend all day every day looking at you and seeing you." She curls a fist into the back of Carter's expensive party dress. "Invisible? I am your office wallpaper. You'd forget my name if it wasn't on all your correspondence that actually needs to get dealt with."
Carter opens her mouth as if to say something. Julietta gives her a mean little shake.
"You can't be trusted like this," she says ruthlessly. "Go and get in the car. I'm not doing hospital number four later."
Ten paces back, she follows Carter and Carter's reflexive armour of something that looks like hauteur as she cuts a swathe back through the gallery, a swirl of hopefuls gathering behind her, ready for Julietta to firmly deflect.
Fingers painfully tight on the wheel of Carter's beat-up pickup, Julietta lets herself glare at Carter for a minute, who fidgets, then brightly puts on her seatbelt as if she's suddenly realised what's expected of her, then wilts when it doesn't stop.
"After you recorded Dentata," Julietta says darkly, "you got out of the crusher, stared at a wall for three hours, then told me it was the only time you'd ever climaxed."
Carter flinches, closes her eyes, and leans against the window.
"And then after you broke up with Suzanne — and you were too far into trying to drink yourself to death to remember this one — you told me—"
"I thought she'd be different," Carter interrupts to quote herself, sliding down in the seat as far as the belt will let her. "Nope. Still broken."
"How even," Julietta mutters, and starts the pickup. "You'd had way too much."
"Practise." Carter rolls her face against the window's cold glass.
"And you've spent the last eight years chasing after the way you think you're broken with the stupid fucking sex mechs—"
"Profound exploration of our relationship with technology," Carter mutters.
"Bullshit," Julietta says. "You thought it worked once, I must be a broken pervert for machines, just need to find the right one. And you never went back to Dentata even once because you're scared that's not even true, it was a fluke."
Carter whines in protest, flails a weak hand ineffectually in the air as if to ward her off.
"I've been mad at you about this for five years, Carter," Julietta says. "You're not broken. How can you not join the fucking dots between feeling like none of them can actually see you and none of them getting you off?"
Carter whines again, and petulantly kicks the side of the footwell.
"Enough," Julietta tells her. "I'm throwing you under a shower when we get in, then when you're clean and dry, I'm going to break you."
"Heard it all before," Carter says. "Oh, Carter, I'll make you scream my name—"
"You haven't earned screaming my name," Julietta says. "Mad at you for five fucking years, Carter; first I break you, and then when you're ready to beg, you can beg Daddy."
Carter makes a noise like she's been punched in the stomach.
"You can say thank you, I feel very seen right now," Juliette adds.
"Jesus fuck," Carter whimpers, and Juliette reaches across to lightly squeeze her elbow.
"Not good at doing as you're told," she says, lighter but somehow even more menacing for it. "It's okay. I'll get you there."