Cohost writing prompt: Mech Pilot who is definitely only using the mind power-operated support units for combat stuff
Etta got shipped halfway across the inhabited universe in a choc-box, only to get thawed out for an embarrassed debrief that War Is Over, Lessons Have Been Learned, Never Again (No For Real This Time).
They called ‘em choc-boxes because they were boxes, and they had a shaped inner tray, its moulded recesses each nestling a hard shell with a soft centre. Of course the shells were armoured capsules with ruggedised interfaces for plugging into a cyborg chassis, and each soft centre was enough of a person to drive a cyborg chassis — brain, spinal column, and as little else as you can get away with.
There was still some vague promise, when Etta signed up, that there would be human-plan bodies just as good as your original to plug into and walk away into the sunset. Afterwards.
Hell, maybe there are. Somewhere on the far side of deconditioning and rehab, of cleanup of hazardous war debris. (Hi; she’s the hazard.)
The rehab station is an old staging post, over a planet bombed to hell. There are, for those in some frame of mind to cooperate, constructive activities, like getting involved in plantary restitutional agriculture, but they don’t even plug you into a combine harvester or anything, just make you walk around on little demilitarised human-plan feet and do piddling little pretend work with demilitarised human-plan hands, as if that’s leaving any scratch on global-scale damage.
Etta is what they’re currently calling treatment resistant. She has been AWOL in the station’s guts for twelve days, slithering through service ducts in her stupid little demilitarised human-plan body, clutching a kitbashed sidearm made from actuator coils and surge cells. It fires rivet mandrels, since they’re ferrous and lying around in their tens of thousands from the last-minute repairs before the likes of Etta were dumped here. They probably won’t even penetrate mall cop body armour.
That’s okay. Mall cop body armour doesn’t have milspec eyeshields, against marksmen like Etta.
The plan — okay, the plan is somewhat nebulous, but the station has a complement of decapod repair walkers, figures she can get herself jacked out of the stupid demilitarised tiny vulnerable human-plan body they forced her into and get into one of those.
That’s the plan. Further goals, and also details, are a work in progress.
The inmates are, of course, not permitted on the repair deck. The staff are understandably twitchy about the prospect of a bunch of mil-conditioned canheads getting their hands on industrial gear. That’s why it’s taken Etta this long to work her way in; she’s being stealthy.
She’s immensely affronted, therefore, to find she’s been beaten there; although the fact it’s one of the mini-cans defrays it, somewhat.
If the canheads are fucked up, the minicans are next level. Etta can at least hold a converation like a human, even if it’s one aggressively disinclined to oblige. The minicans can talk, but they fucking don’t.
Etta heard a rumour that by the war’s end, they were canning fourteen-year-old conscripts. It’s probably not true. Probably. But you look at the minicans and you could maybe believe it.
The minican is hauling around a stolen lunch trolley piled with stolen electronics. E-war, Etta thinks; hacked its way into the repair deck, rather than Etta’s dumbshit grunt approach. And it’s commandeered the entire deck full of decapods, obviously running the whole set of bodies at once on one organic brain, an intricate interlocking ballet of simultaneous movement.
It’s also fucking nonsense. Etta watches, for a long time, stewing, sick with resentful envy. No way she’s grabbing a body off one of the minicans; that’s the start of a brawl for sure, get her put in solitary. Can’t get back into the vents from solitary.
It’s only when she sees one of the decapods, perched on a cargo pod, wave around an empty barrel as if miming drinking, that the scene sickeningly resolves. Mimed drinking. Pallets handed around, manipulators painstakingly picking off a load that simply isn’t there. It’s a Boschean fucking imaginary tea party.
Fourteen, Etta wonders sickly, and crawls back into the vents.
