Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots — Mech Pilot who takes a callsign to protect themselves from the Fae
Purple Thesis Engines drag epihumanity's carriers through Wet Space toward the end of time. Reality's substructure is wormwood-gnawed by the Fair Folk, either driveby tunneling on their long, cold trajectories as Bracewell probes seeking semiotically rich noetic spaces to voreform into new instantiations of Faery, or blind ouroboran panic-loops as they crash-dump into our physics and starve to death. Our Tin Men drop, aiming to pin emulsified abstracts to the dartboard of fixed quiddity, pilots wrestling oneiric philosophies like angels.
Wet Space is hostile. The early sorties were in bare machinery — now there's a suicide run. Capturing "their machines" proved nastily futile when we figured out they don't have machines; all the Fair Folk structures are fractally scaled-down versions of the same kind of holointelligence that makes what-fucking-ever society they have. The "mechs" we engaged with were Fair Folk — while also no more than the immune components of the B-probe's point defence, as if every one of your T-cells were as smart as a moderately clever dog, and also a full-fledged voting citizen of your home country.
We didn't reverse engineer them. We revenge engineered: captured, denatured, suborned, hollowed and puppeted them. You can't bring a sensitive near a Tin Man, because the Fair Folk very rarely truly die, screaming in endless lobotomised inaudible panic, impaled on a cold iron spar the length of a whaling ship.
Slide down into crimson womblight and a jumbled impression of consoles and acceleration straps, as real and as wrong as an illustration spat out by a picture-generating AI. Captive and vivisected, the Fae involuntarily fawns, bubbling up ersatz glamerous placations, the interface it thinks we might want of it. I brace my feet into its meat and shove my spine up against the only real machine in here, in this pilot-sized, ball-shaped cage of iron wire cables holding back flesh, tethered to the inside of the airlock: the Interface. Hooks snag at me, leafy electrodes wetly plaster to skin, needles puncture. My right eyelid tics as the feel of the drip-feed hallucinogens gathers around my tunnelling vision.
Nobody flies Wet Space cold.
The Interface winds me tighter to convey our approaching readiness to launch, the jittery full-body clench of nerves. It's not nerves. There is no fear here, not for me. With a skinful of the good drugs I can seefeel the inevitability of trajectory across the meniscus of reality, and effortlessly align with it so that the future simply sucks us along to be perfectly where we need to be.
Who are you who are you who are you whisper hindbrain voices through the bars of the cockpit, frantically scrabbling for semantic-metaphoric leverage to recontextualise me from my self-identified stance as Threat. Names have power. Names have power.
"You'll know me by my callsign," I promise, lips curling back from my teeth. "Ape-Kills-Titania."