Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots — Mech Pilot who is running out of Alias ideas
The Buffer Worlds are a bewildering mosaic of single-planetary governments, collectively forming a crumple zone that keeps the Apparat and Peninsular Stars from grinding at each other, but truly lumped together as a single thing only in the minds of the Apparat.
Escape from efficiently interconnected bureaucracy is a major reason to leave the Apparat for the Buffer Worlds; but the ramifications take some adjustment.
"Your mech matches the description of one reported stolen," says some arbitrary local, and one's Apparat paperwork is deemed insufficient proof of ownership, because it would take a month and fee payments to extract confirmation of its validity cross-border, and in any case it only truly says that a machine belonged to a particular person at the time they crossed out of the Apparat; the insular systems of the Buffer Worlds' governments do nothing to continuously validate the provenance of either person or mech.
It seems — temporarily — as if the answer is as simple, then, as taking off running. Surely if they can't be bothered to make legality work, they can't have any correspondingly robust cross-border record of alleged crime?
And then you realise you're caught in an endless downdraft, these fucking parochial planets eagerly exchanging data on criminal suspects, even if nothing else; unable to demonstrate the whole thing is a farce, and only ever able to escape it by acting even more like a criminal.
You think, perhaps, though, that you're getting the hand of this "dubious false identity" thing.
"Dirk Fridgemeat," you say, without even stuttering, when yet another shitty rock demands your name. You think you vaguely heard it somewhere; no matter. Names are common — how can they not be, when outside the Apparat they use so few of them?
There's a silence, and then two mechs at ease outside the Port Office rise from their resting crouch and step toward your own machine, circling wide and holding themselves low, to flank you.
"I've heard about a Dirk Fridgemeat," the Port Officer says over the voice connection, sharp now. "There was some Apparat kid in the Vertical Bleak on Capsburg, got swindled out of a spaceship in a game of Six-Card Foolkiller, and nobody heard of her after that. Damn cold, to leave a teenage girl to die in the worst foreign slum in the Buffers, Fridgemeat; and I see you didn't even manage to hang onto the ship."
...Beshitcovered. Where exactly did you pick the name up?
"That was...a different Dirk Fridgemeat!" you protest weakly, and resign yourself to being arrested. Again.