Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots — Mech Pilot who has copy + paste politics
Crashout cradles her cup of recovery tea in shaky hands, staring at the row of mechs.
She’d known. She’d known the instant she saw them. The mission wiped, she remembers that; a lot is patchy in her memory, but that’s normal after emergency cryo. The unit’s survivors scattered and ran, but her mech was coming apart at the seams; she ran out of options, set the E-beacons, cut all other systems and flash-froze herself.
When they unfroze her, she saw their mechs in the background of the deck, behind the urgent medics and the recovery pilots; they were like nothing in service. Like nothing. That’s when she knew she’d been in the freeze a long time.
She’s still working on making the actual number make sense to herself. It’s — it’s not small.
“Why the fuck,” she says to nobody in particular, “do you all have that stencilled on your mechs?”
“Well, hey,” an amiable voice behind her says. “That I can answer! No, no, don’t get up, just keep drinkin’ that awful stuff.”
“Don’t really taste it,” Crashout says.
“Yeah, you can stop drinkin’ when you start hatin’ it,” the other pilot says cheerily. “That’s how you know it’s worked!”
Not Crashout’s first rodeo; she knows that. She keeps her mouth shut, sips.
“You were wonderin’ about the unit marks?” The pilot straddles a nearby joint-grease barrel, jostling the attached gun hose. She leans over, sticks her hand out. “Toaster.”
“Crashout,” says Crashout, shaking. “Not the unit marks, unless those have changed a lot since…since my time. No, the keyboard shortcuts.”
“Keyboard shortcuts?” Toaster looks blank for a second.
“Yeah. You know. Control-C, Control-V?”
“Oh!” The pilot grins. “We should get you to talk to some folks? I had no idea what the origin of that was. It’s, y’know, it’s traditional? Political. I mean, it’s got roots in your era—” and she winces. “Aw, jeez, that’s — that’s insensitive. I’m sorry.”
“Well, y’know,” Crashout says. “It is what it is.” She resolutely doesn’t think about how long ago the rest of her unit, if any of them made it out, must have died. “How did that get to be a political flag?”
“Well, after the Little Dark Age—”
“The what now?”
“Oh, after the Devolutionists bombed the Sol system pingate—”
“They what?”
“Yeah, it took like thirty years to reestablish FTL links.”
“The Devolutionists, though?” Crashout scratches the side of her head. Itchy; good sign. Gunna be hell. “How the hell did they get to bombing anything?”
“Well, I dunno,” Toaster says, shrugging apologetically. “They call it the Little Dark Age because, like, Dark Age, yeah? No data. The Sol pingate was, like, the single point of failure for the whole network, so — chaos. We only know it was the Devolutionists because they claimed responsibility; nothing in the preserved record tells us who they actually were or what they wanted.”
“Fuck me,” Crashout says blankly.
“But we do have some records from after the Third Internecine, when political thinker and revolutionary Garytheum Blue wrote a book about his war experiences and how they changed his outlook—”
“Garytheum?”
“Aw, see, I knew it was the right period,” Toaster says, beaming.
“Yeah, I mean,” Crashout says, “he was an online video pundit — I dunno any Third Whatever. One of the dirtbags, you know? Leftwing aesthetics, at least initially, enough for plausible deniability — aiming to funnel kids n’ gullible shits to rightwing positions—”
“Whoa,” Toaster says. “We really need to get you in front of some history buffs! His book didn’t survive, but it apparently codified his revolutionary leftwing thinking — he did say war had changed him! — into the Three Principles: the sanctity of human life, human autonomy, and human authenticity—”
“Oh, see, same old fucking grift,” Crashout says wearily. “That’s a rightwing dogwhistle, right there; the authenticity bit, that’s code for fuckin’ Let’s Go Back To The Old Ways, You Know The Ones—”
“Aw, jeez,” Toaster says. “Uh. I guess he’d be mad that we lost all the context for it and later folks took him at face value?”
Crashout swigs tea. It is starting to taste awful. “If he wasn’t making a buck off it, sure,” she says sourly. “So why—”
“Well, see,” Toaster says, “at basic, the Copypastaists believe that, in the presence of sufficient material resources, people should have the freedom to back up, fork, merge, and multiply embody or flesh-free simulate their consciousness; in opposition to the fuckin’ gatekeepniks who think that it’s worthwhile to build a state apparatus just for the purpose of telling people that post-scarcity utopia isn’t for Whatever You Want, Fucko—” and then looks abashed at her own rising tone, rubs her nose with the back of her hand. “I mean,” she says. “At basic. Lots of internal contradictions inherent in the given, yeah? Sufficient resources. Post-scarcity for real, it ain’t well-distributed, and you need policy for who gets to have what when reality don’t stretch far enough, and there’s some real bitter fights over the way to decide that.”
“Copy. Paste,” Crashout says, staring at the mechs, and Toaster spreads her hands, grins, nods. “Man, politics never gets any less stupid, does it.”
“Welcome to the future; we like you already,” Toaster says.
