Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots — Mech Pilot who refuses to Pilot Bio rigs because the skin tight flight suit is too weird
The mechanical rigs will be obsolete entirely within five years. Not trading up, now, for one of the new biomachines is a career-limiting move. Namjoo knows this.
Some days she goes down to the observation lounge, looks out over the choppy black water of Atlantica, teeming with incompatibly chiral life and cold enough to kill in minutes, and sees them: black hides, blubber-insulated, with porpoise-wedge heads streamlined back into gangly limbs, each ending with an identical foot-hand-grabber. Amphibious, for shallow-water work and the currently rare littoral jobs. A finely tailored blend of pure laboratory biology with ancestral Earth genelines, uniquely fitted to local conditions.
Their immune systems are rapacious — you never know what might get into the rigs, on these foreign worlds. And so, to make it safe for a pilot to be inside them, each bifurcates in the wombpod, and grows into two, sharply differently expressed, genetic twins: the biomech and the symbiote. The skinsuit.
The skinsuit, with its reined-in cellular hostility. Its symbiosis — not with the mech, no; with a human. A semipermanent union, grown around the pilot, fluid bonded, ever-present.
It's the most horrifically, invasively intimate thing Namjoo can imagine. For the sake of piloting a glorified construction vehicle.
Namjoo stares down the barrel of career-limiting, and takes night classes in accountancy.