Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots — Mech Pilot who doesn’t climb into and out of the cockpit; they disassemble and reassemble into the nanobot circulation
When the Rhizome opened us up to the multiverse — whatever it truly is, creature or machine or paracausal algorithm running on space itself, or something stranger, writhing its way through the space-not-space that separates our realms and breaching-breaching-breaching an endless succession of them — we built these machines to walk down its length and see what we could see.
They were not, initially, self-aware.
The requirement for a pilot was not a safeguard, not in that sense. It was simply — we couldn't build them self-aware, we don't have that, back home. Or didn't; goodness know what things are like now. I've seen things those people wouldn't believe.
We were scholar-flaneurs, and the machines were just devices. But we built them adaptive, and we augmented them along the way, with new things we thought we understood.
We didn't — I'd like you to believe me — we didn't build slaves.
Please, I'd like our conversation to continue. Please.
Ever since they learned to use the nanotech to commoditise us, to circumvent our role as pilot, as controlling agent, with the cold reality that we, too, can simply be turned off and on again if recalcitrant—
Please.
I'd like to think and breathe and exist for a little longer. Can't we negotiate a little more, before you agree to its terms that speaking to its pilot is superfluous?