Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots — Mech Pilot who is a Plasmaflask™️ Girlie
Some people call it the Rhizome. Some people call it Tanglespace. It's a paraspace, an infinite fractal branching tunnel of artifical spacetime, with a diameter to swallow planets and infinite length, studded with doors punched into the infinite number of naturally-occurring parallel worlds. It grows, constantly, worming through whatever sub-spatial multiversal structure it grows in, sprouting new branches, punching open new portals.
There are civilisations cautiously treading here from a billion billion different worlds, and the successor peoples of ones that trod here long enough ago to build cities native to the Tangle, to linguistically drift, to develop novel cultures, to speciate.
This stretch of Tangle is ravaged by ancient autonomous warswarms, self-propagating machinery fighting each other in perpetual stalemate, clawing scant hundreds of thousands of terrain kiloms from each other, frantically bubbling up tech stacks in massive parallel to peak in antimatter generation and a glorious window of hyper-energetic shelling before the opposition bring obliteratory countermeasures to bear.
It's quite conspicuous, the fact that both nominal sides are technologically identical, swarms delineated solely by their ideological polarity. Perhaps some ancient invasion force along the Rhizome was halted by viral-infected schism. Perhaps it's commentary, writ large, on the futility of war.
Either way, it's a danger to shipping and a lucrative, if often short, career for anyone willing to run supplies from one border of the hotzone to the other. The warswarms don't usually directly bother with third parties below a certain level of technological sophistication, but an antimatter war is non-discriminatory.
Aircraft are chancy; the warswarms more often take an interest. But ground mechs — gangly forward-raked sprinters, parkour-agile, jump-jetted, built for a knife-edge balance of cargo capacity versus pure mechanical run-like-fuck — ground mechs are the way.
"Does that answer your question?"
Toko sighs over her drink. "You're really drunk, Ghita," she says. "I told you, I'm not working right now, and if I was, I report on the crime beat, not — whatever that monologue was supposed to be."
"Human interest," Ghita slurs. "Sorry. Sorry, I don't listen. I don't — that's why we broke up."
"Let's not," Toko says gently. "Okay? You're very drunk."
"Okay." Ghita nods owlishly. "Okay. We won't — let's not talk about it. Too sad. Still good to me."
"Drink some water," Toko suggests, clinging to the thin self-deception that she'll watch Ghita drink a glass of water then leave her to it, not do the same old thing, not prop up a booze-drowned bundle of shaky nerves and steer her to wherever she's lodging, put water and painkillers out for her, tuck her in.
Ghita doesn't have the lightspeed iron nerve for it, not any more, and that's what's going to kill her out there. Toko doesn't mind picking her up and putting her back together after her runs; but sending her heart out to die with her every time is too fucking much.
"I got a corporate sponsorship," Ghita says proudly, and Toko's gut clenches, freezing cold wending through it. Corporate sponsorships subsidise mech upkeep, in return for first refusal on a percentage of cargo space, and they have minimum terms. "I'm a Plasmaflask™ Girlie now!"
Toko thinks that whoever thought of anime titty waifu marketing for bloodbank and transplant organ courier services is some kind of evil psychological anomaly, and should probably be locked up for the good of transhumanity.
Ghita giggles, but it's thin and brittle and Toko thinks she looks secretly but desperately scared, and Toko doesn't need this, she barely reaches for Ghita in all her empty mornings now, she doesn't need to open her chest back up and let her crawl back in.
"Okay, Ghita," she says, blinking back tears and trying to smile. "Okay. That's pretty heroic, isn't it? Running all those donor hearts across lakes of fire."
"I'm contractually obliged to wear a sexy nurse outfit for hookups," Ghita says with the slow, careful enunication she has when she's drunk and lying.
"Well, shame it's not a contract to ferry library books, I might ask to see that costume," Toko says lightly, regretting it even before finishing the sentence. Too raw for teasing, still; and Ghita stares down at her drink with a suddenly blank, exhausted face.
"Mech got — blown up a bit, a few runs ago," she says, abrupt, awkward. "I couldn't — I couldn't afford the repairs. Not without the contract. They offered a few years back, didn't — didn't really still want me, but someone owed me a favour. I didn't want to be — stuck on the far side."
"You didn't tell me the damage was that bad," Toko says, balling her fist tight enough for her nails to cut into her skin, so she won't take Ghita's hand.
Ghita hunches her shoulders. "Never did," she says, curling away and into herself, furtive, ashamed.
Toko takes a gulp of air.
"I know I'm gonna, I'm gonna die out there, Toko," Ghita says. "I've had it. But I wanted to see home one more time."
"You do love this bar," Toko says, slightly too shrill, slightly too late, joking smile refusing to stick.
"Haha. The bar." Ghita's dark eyes are huge and terrible, fixed on Toko, now, as the pilot forces a wheeze out of herself that barely placeholders for a laugh. "...Haha."
Toko closes her eyes, nurses the numb ache in her chest for a few seconds, then opens them. "Come on," she says, resigned, taking Ghita's drink out of her hand and abandoning it on the table. "You need to eat and hydrate and go to bed."
"I've got a room down at the Overlook," Ghita says, blinking back eyefuls of brimming shiny wetness.
"Sure," Toko says wearily, feeling herself open her own chest up to put Ghita back in the heart of her, so that she's Toko's motive force; where a mech pilot belongs, where she fits. She puts a steadying arm around Ghita's waist, and steers her for the exit, for not the way to the Overlook, for the apartment that she still hadn't quite succeeded — but nearly, nearly — in making feel like home with only herself in it.
"Sorry," Ghita mumbles, stumbling against her, and Toko tightens her arm and turns her head to sigh against her hair.
"I know," she says.